By Heather R. Morgan
Republished from Forbes, July 25, 2017
Bad pitches ruin good products. That much has been true since the dawn of sales and isn’t changing anytime soon. What has changed, though, is that the average salesperson can’t rely on their conversational skills alone to close a deal. They have to translate those compelling pitches into writing.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make cold emails as persuasive and engaging as possible. And while there’s enough advice out there to fill a 99-page treatise, three tactics, in particular, come up again and again: reciprocity, social proof, and scarcity.
These themes are so universal and powerful that they make up half of Dr. Robert Cialdini’s still famous book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, published in 1984. While you can apply these same techniques to any sales call or meeting today, they also are extremely effective for sending cold emails.
Let’s explore how these persuasion tactics can be applied to the world of B2B sales.
1. Reciprocity
This is the simple idea that people return favors. For instance, you buy one round of drinks and your friend buys the next.
Reciprocity in the form of advice and insights is strong currency in the sales world. It helps establish a crucial element between you and your prospects: trust.
For more advice on cold email, sales and marketing, check out the Salesfolk Blog. You can also follow me on Twitter or connect with me on LinkedIn to ask me questions.
Say you’re a shipping logistics platform, and you know hidden costs are a big pain point for commodity traders. You might offer a white paper on the topic in exchange for an email address. The prospective customer gets some actionable advice about how to avoid hidden fees, and you get their information and the chance to establish a deeper relationship. If you’re sending a cold email, you might include a link to an actionable article or another piece of content. (But avoid attaching PDFs to cold emails, though, so you’re not mistaken for a spammer.)
Offline, conferences and meetups are filled with opportunities to use reciprocity. How many times have you taken a lap around the expo hall and traded your business card for a couple free brochures? Or been the one at the booth offering advice and product demos? Sometimes, the most effective form of in-person reciprocity is to simply sit down with someone at the cocktail reception and trade ideas about your industry.
2. Social Proof
Social proof is essentially that “all your friends are doing it” mantra from grade school.
How can you translate that to sales? The best way is to start online. By putting case studies and customer testimonials on your website and in your emails, you send a clear signal to prospects: “Look at all these companies that find our products useful.”
You can also use social proof as a powerful line in a cold email. For example, saying “Company X saw a 65% increase in users” will jump out to a reader because it includes data and demonstrates a real-life example of the value the product delivers.
You can make extra noise about of your more high-profile customers to illustrate how effective your service or product can be. For example, Netflix moved its business to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud to avoid outages that hurt their business. AWS talks up this story frequently via case studies and press releases. Consider who your biggest success stories are and how they can illustrate the value your business or product provides.
3. Scarcity
For more advice on cold email, sales and marketing, check out the Salesfolk Blog. You can also follow me on Twitter or connect with me on LinkedIn to ask me questions.
Scarcity sells, whether you’re a teen clothing boutique at the mall or an enterprise software company.
The boutique, of course, can get away with a more blatant form of scarcity: “Last chance! 50% Additional Clearance!” Those of us in the B2B space have to use this tactic with a little more sophistication.
Webinars are a great example of using scarcity in business. Typically, there are a limited number of “seats” in any given webinar, and the events come packaged with an exclusive piece of content or advice you won’t get by watching the replay.
Each of those factors can also be used in cold emails. A subject line might read, “last 20 spots for exclusive sales best practices webinar.” The message itself might contain a line that says webinar attendees will get a chance to participate in a Q&A session at the end or receive a premium whitepaper.
Which of these three persuasion principles–reciprocity, scarcity, and social proof–have helped you generate the most responses from your sales emails? I’d love to find out what you’re seeing the most success with and see examples.