Deb Calvert

Deb Calvert is the President at People First Productivity Solutions. She conducts research with buyers and field coaching with sellers. Deb analyzes and coaches for different phrasing of emails that will be more likely to get buyers’ attention, interest and action.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Deb’s success

Knowing who you’re talking to and making it personal (No generic templates without customization!)

Result if you follow the steps in Deb’s session

Get more opens on the email, more time spent with the email, and more responses to the email

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

So the formula, the one that will help you to work through that is E equals O. And the E stands for efforts. The O stands for opportunity.

You’re going to manage your time, this applies for everything in sales, but certainly how much you put into your cold email. How much effort you make, should depend, should be proportionate to the opportunity that’s in front of you.

If this is a big opportunity, perhaps the prospects that could make a big difference for you. You’ll spend more time and put more effort into doing some research using some of the tactics I’ll talk about to be more personalized.

And if it’s not a large opportunity, you’ll still make it personal. But we’ll have some shortcuts to make that very efficient and effective, perhaps not as effective as when you put the full time and effort behind it.

Alright, so E equals O. I really like that. Is there a specific, you know, time or amount of effort that you can quantify that is, you know, optimum to make sure that you’re maximizing that opportunity?

Absolutely. This will depend somewhat on your industry, on your volume of an outreach that you’re doing, how many cold emails you intend to do. But I’ve gotten pretty good at it in 30 seconds, I can put together enough information to personalize an email, I can gather that quickly.

So this does not have to be intensely time consuming, when it is consuming a lot of time and I sit down with somebody who’s concerned about their time, what I find is that they’re experiencing some call reluctance. And they’re using the research phase, the effort that they’re putting into it as actually a procrastination tactic to not sit down and write the email and just do it.

So you’ve got to balance that, you won’t get to 30 seconds right away. That’s because I have done a lot of this. But I really don’t think there’s a need to spend more than 90 seconds or a couple minutes gathering information. That’s it.

All right. So gathering information, researching your prospects and personalize it. Do you want to give us some tips on how to go about that?

You bet. So, three tips. Let me let me just give you three. There are standard ones that, and I think throughout the summit, your other tips about using LinkedIn and other places that are typical places to go and do research.

One of the things I like best to do is, if I know I’m going to be researching a particular
industry or group of accounts, or I’m going to be going deep within us a specific company, I like to set Google Alert, put in the person’s name, put in the company name, put in the search terms that are most relevant to what you’re going to be selling.

And then watch the news. And when there’s a breaking news event that’s relevant to that company or individual, and you get the Google Alert. That’s the easiest way to personalize Plus, you look pretty smart, because you’re right on top of something that’s breaking.