It’s early morning, I’m clearing email. Somehow, I feel like I’ve accomplished a huge amount, wiping out dozens of prospecting emails in 5 minutes. Every once in a while, I pause for 15 seconds at one. Today, I had about 4 emails starting the same way: “I Dave, I’m wondering if you saw the email I sent last week……” It goes on with the original email attached. Sometimes, these are ridiculous–people following up on their follow up, following up on their follow up.
I wonder, “What do they think they are accomplishing?”
If I didn’t see the original email, that means I’m probably not seeing this email. That is, I never got it, or it went into my SPAM filter. The end result is the same, I never saw it and if you are sending the follow up to the same email, I won’t see the follow up. So why are these people doing it.
Alternatively, I did see the email and didn’t care! So I trash it, never responding.
When, I get the follow up, I wonder, “If I didn’t care last week, what makes them think I care this week, or next, or the next?”
Whatever they sent, wasn’t interesting to me, so why send it again? Why not try something different? Perhaps an email on a different capability or benefit or different case study.
Even the famous “Sam-I-Am” of Dr. Suess’ Green Eggs And Ham understood this basic piece of marketing or catching people’s interest. When his hapless customer didn’t respond to “Do you like Green Eggs and Ham,” he changed it up-asking if they would be good on a train, plane, bus—you get my point.
What these incessant follow ups demonstrate is, some one’s lazy and just doesn’t care! Some sales or marketing person doesn’t want to take the time to find out what I might be interested in. All they do is send me the same thing over and over, producing the same result–but making me more firm about my lack of interest in them and their company.
If someone doesn’t respond to your original outreach, why try the same thing over and over? Why not change things up?
What’s best about this approach is that – if your first email was terrible – you have a chance to make a great impression this new time. They’ll never remember!
Start over!
Blank Slate!
Never “follow up” – Start anew! Offer a new and valuable piece of information. Offer a new personality. Be awesome this time!
Love ’em UP!
The Irreverent Sales Girl
Dianna–great ideas, alternatively you build a story, not just repeat the same thing over and over.
David – Don’t take it too personally – you’re possibly nothing more than a number…a simple touch point in a CRM by a salesman at a huge company just trying to hit their metrics for the week so that their boss will not bother them. And that’s the problem with CRM’s, dashboards and the likes – F1000 companies care more about hitting their quantity of activity #’s than they do about the quality of their communications. After all, that salesman is probably just a number as well…rolled up into dashboard after dashboard until all the CEO sees is a red light or a green light.
– I know…I was once “that salesman”.
Justin, no offense taken, in fact you are onto what the real issue is. We are really nothing more than pawns in a giant numbers game. It’s interesting Stu Heinecke just wrote a book, How To Get A Meeting With Anyone. He describes approaches that are very targeted, researched and focused, where he gets 100% response rates. He only does a small number of these a year, but has very high responses and the respondents are very interested and engaged.
Contrast this with sales people who send out 100K emails, hoping for a 1% open, and hoping a 10th of a percent of those respond —resulting in 1 response for every 100K emails.
This is pure insanity. As you mention, it’s largely a management and leadership problem–they aren’t thinking things through very well, so they waste lots of time, money, “equity” chasing hopeless junk.
I read through this and it really made me think about how others interact with me and how my own behavior when it comes to working with e-mail can be my own undo-ing. It compelled me to write my own blog post about this subject. http://martycaise.com/e-mail-reach-e-mail-response-e-mail-aggravation/
Thanks Marty, I’m flattered the article stimulated your post. Great article!