Coffee Break: How to prospect through e-mail

Posted on January 25, 2008 by Karl Goldfield.
Categories: Coffee break, Discovery.

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I joined a site called Sales Gravy a couple of weeks ago. I was referred to it by a friend in the consulting business, and he got me connected with the owner. It seems cool, and honestly I have not had the time to start networking the site for contacts. I really want to leverage this site to continue building my brand as a Sales Mentor and Coach. Eventually, I plan to market my services to Start Ups that need their sales strategy developed and source the tools for execution.

I received this message in my inbox yesterday.

Karl,

I want to invite you to join our new business networking site for Sales Professionals. We just launched it this week and it’s already growing fast. Its invite only, but you can get in with the following code:

www.accountmaven.com
Invite code: ________

Look forward to seeing you on the site, PS: if you can blog about it that would be totally cool.

Mark ___________

This person not only got me to join their group, and I have to admit at first glance it looks like a fantastic idea, but as you can see, the kindly asked me to blog about the site and here I am doing it. The reason I am blogging about it is simple. This is an example of how a non intrusive, properly placed e-mail can trigger someone to act. I am a sales coach, any network that tailors itself to sales professionals is of interest to me. Indeed, this e-mail got me on their site, but the reason is that they did their homework. The person looked me up, saw that I was a networker, and a blogger, touched to those points without mentioning anything directly, then sent me a non intrusive message.

Now, before you go assuming I sign up for every social network I can, I assure you I do not. Ecadamy, Notch Up?, and all the other new networks have not had the honor of my presence. MySpace and Facebook get no attention from me whatsoever. Only Plaxo and LinkedIn get my traffic, so to position this network as a business network for sales professionals, hits me in the sweet spot.

How can you go after your target audience with simple questions that trigger them to act?

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1 comment.

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Colin

Comment on January 26th, 2008.

Karl

I look forward to being invited to the secret society!

You mention the non intrusive approach and the email got you to act… a good sales technique. These guys are also following another good approach and that

is the invite only. Google did this when they launched their email. I recently came across another one…Xobni…. So they are following good practice.

I’ve not had my invite yet so I can’t say what the site is like, but I would not be surprised if part of the site with the words ‘beta’ on it. I’m not

sure who started this, but Skype certainly used these four letters to their advantage. LinkedIn are using them on their new home page and I think I saw

them on Basecamp. One of the main guys who started Skype once explained to me the importance of those letters… you launch your product, make sure ‘beta’

is prominent and so everyone knows this is pre-launch code… and your users forgive any sins for any problems that arise with the code… because it’s beta

code and not full code!… brilliant… takes the heat off and keeps the users using.

However, back to the AccountMaven concept… it could work. The idea is right but need to know more and would be very interested to see it working. It is

something I already do for my clients… put them in touch with each other to share experience with their common customers… however this is a completely

manual process and very small scale… actually minute scale. The big issue is sharing with competitors and the question for me would be how much effort a

sales guy would be prepared to put in to using the site… will be interesting to see.

I am pleased to see such a site and I really hope it works because it’s going to help prove a theory of mine… the sales systems of the future are user

owned and driven… the user owns the information and will decide when and who to share it with… the current sales systems, such as CRM, are silos of

information within corporate boundaries for the benefit of the guys at the top at the expense of the guys at the bottom… the field sales guys… and so

they don’t work properly. However, when you own the information and that information helps you do your job, then they will work… and being able to share

that information across different boundaries, then things become very interesting… this technique can be summed up in one word… Collaboration… and it’s the future.