A simple question with a seemingly simple answer… Email Marketing is for the Marketing Department, not the Sales Team!
Well yes, except for a couple of details…
1) In many small businesses, there is no Marketing Department
2) In the course of communicating with leads, prospects and customers, sales people probably send out the vast majority of the emails sent by their company.
So, like it or not, your sales people are the primary purveyors of email messages to your customers.
It seems to me that this is one area where sales automation and CRM systems miss the boat. If you really want to make sales people more efficient and effective then automate the repetitive tasks and make it easy for them to document the status of a given lead or opportunity.
All day every day, sales people send the same sorts of emails to multiple prospects and customers:
1) Lead follow up – Thank you for your interest, please click here for more info, etc.
2) Post presentation follow up – Summarize client needs, your businesses value proposition and next steps
3) Customer follow up – How are things? Feedback on the product/service? Future needs?
Sure, the details of each may be personalized but, most of them are exactly the same.
Then there are the coordination emails… “I’d like to schedule a meeting/phone call…”
And most importantly there are the emails that include an attached proposal or contract.
In all these cases, does it really make sense to leave it up to the sales person to write each one from scratch? Of course not. Sales people are not necessarily great at writing and certainly can be prone to grammar errors, etc.
But, more to the point, there are certain messages that you know your prospects and customers need to hear about your company. There’s also the age old marketing principal that a prospect must see/hear a message several times before they remember it.
Of course, the point here is that sales people ARE really a big part of your email marketing strategy. Even if your company is already doing a great job of email marketing, then those emails are seen by customers side by side with what is sent out by your sales team.
Does it make sense to use your CRM solution to give your sales team email templates they can quickly grab, edit a sentence or two and send out to a given prospect? You bet! This will save your sales team time and ensure their emails are professional and include the messages the business wants to emphasize.
Does it make sense to create on-going campaigns for leads, prospects and customers that send a series of timed emails out in a pre-planned sequence? Yes. However, this is where things typically get complicated. Most online CRM systems, such as Salesforce.com, can’t do this and that means marketing would need to extract leads and prospects from the CRM, move them into the Email Marketing solution of choice and execute the campaign.
Should CRM and Email Marketing vendors find ways to put this capability directly in the hands of sales people?
In any size business, putting the power to broadcast messages out to hundreds of customers in the hands of sales people could be scary. In a small business, lack of marketing staff makes the decision either make it easy for sales people to do it or don’t do it at all.
In 2011, can you afford to leave it to sales people to define your marketing messages for you?