Sales Experts Reveal 3 Ways to Tailor Your Emails to Your Prospects

Email cadencing software is growing more and more prominent. How do I know? Because each day my inbox is inundated with more sales emails. The trouble is, very few of the sales emails I get are personalized. Reps are clearly just using set-and-forget email cadence software, throwing bad emails against the wall and seeing what sticks.

If you want to have the slightest chance of getting prospects to respond to your emails with any degree of regularity, it’s critical to spend a little bit of time personalizing those sales emails. As a basic rule, the more valuable the lead, the more effort you should spend on personalization.

So which aspects of your messages should be tailored to your prospects? We asked several sales leaders to name the three most important things that you need to know about prospects prior to reaching out in order to successfully personalize sales messages. Here’s what they listed:

“The 3 most important things to know about a prospect before calling them are…

1. What is the role of the individual that you are speaking with?
2. Who are the prospect’s competitors? If you have helped companies with similar attributes in the past, it’s easy to suggest relevant solutions.
3. Is the prospect an analyst or decision maker?”

John Kosturos
CRO, RingLead

“1. Their decision-making capacity in their organization.

Are they a decision-maker, a key decision-maker or THE decision-maker? How much clout do they actually have when it comes to making buying decisions? And are their goals and pain points in line with those of the rest of the company?

The closer you can get to uncovering the interpersonal dynamics and realpolitik at your prospect’s level of the organization, the fewer rabbit holes you’ll fall into.

2. What they do best and take the most pride in as a professional.

Look, no one wants to admit to brown-nosing or flattering during cold calls. But I’ll tell you right now, if a marketing automation sales rep got me on the phone and spent the next 30-60 seconds after his introduction telling me how great Ambition’s content is and why, 10 out of 10 times, he’d hear a much more open, welcoming response from yours truly. Not to mention a greater willingness to hear his pitch.

When you can discover what your prospect does best and takes the most pride in professionally, you can up your odds of taking the conversation to the next level. There’s just one caveat: you should come off as genuine.

3. Current customers/champions of yours that your prospect is most likely to recognize, respect and have a relationship with – based on industry/profession.”

-Jeremy Boudinet
Director of Marketing, Ambition

“The first half of a good sales call should be spent understanding:

1. the prospect’s business
2. their role/responsibilities
3. what they are trying to achieve

With that information you can educate them on their options and position your product as part of the solution.”

-Dan Murphy
VP Business Development, Import.io

For more sales personalization tips from expert sales leaders, check out our free eBook 21 B2B Sales Personalization Tips that Will Triple Your Engagement Rates!