Practical Cold Emailing tips for Entrepreneurs

Cold emailing is one of the powerful tools in an Entrepreneur’s arsenal. If used well, it can do wonders for a startup. You can use it for sales, getting deals, getting investments, getting mentors and many more. But the fact is most often cold emails get ignored. If your approach is incorrect, you may rarely get a reply from the recipient. 

In this post, I would like to share some tips to make your cold emails more appealing. This shall surely help you get more replies to your cold emails.



1. Personalize and Customize

The most important element of any cold mail is personalization. People won’t even bother to read any email from an unknown person let alone reply to it, unless it is relevant to them. You can make your emails relevant to the recipient by personalizing your email. 

Remember, sending cold emails is different from a mass email campaign. Since cold emails are sent to a limited set of people, you should be able to do a bit of research about your prospect before sending them a cold email. 

You may look out for publicly available information on company websites, their social media profiles in Linkedin or Facebook, any newspaper articles, etc. In your email, you may cite such instances such as you liked reading their article on Linkedin or liked reading their thoughts on media publications, etc. This will help you warm up your prospect.


2. Keep it short, quick and easy to read

When you are sending your first cold mail, ensure to keep it short and concise. Avoid sending any detailed business proposals in the mail content when you are just trying to initiate the conversation. A short and to the point content is faster to read and act. The easier it is for the reader to understand and act, the faster you tend to get replies.


3. Talk about solving a business pain point

If you are selling to a B2B client, then everyone’s goal is to solve some or the other business challenges in their organization. Instead of selling the features of your product you will be required to talk about solving a business pain point being faced by your prospect. This will generate more interest and will help you improve your reply rate.


4. Don’t sell anything in the mail 

Many beginners tend to make mistakes by trying to sell their products within the first cold email itself. This approach is bound to just worsen your brand image and you may never get a response. The purpose of a cold email is to get a meeting or an appointment with the prospect. The best approach is to ask for a short discovery call to begin with. The first discovery call will give you enough information to decide whether it is a qualified lead worth pursuing further or not.


5. Avoid describing product features

As I wrote earlier, avoid describing your product features in your first cold email. This is because, in the beginning, even you will not be aware of your lead having any real requirement for your products or services. Additionally, you should avoid pushing any unsolicited information to the lead such as product features and specifications without gauging the level of interest from the leads.


6. Avoid sounding like a template

Many beginners tend to make the mistake of using cold email templates available on the internet. While it is not wrong to use templates, often they send the same email contents to the prospects without modifying as per their context. While you may feel confident with that, the fact is people can smell templates because those are so common. People want to hear from People instead of Machines. So you must bring out your personal tone in your emails. This shall help build a connection and a relationship to initiate a conversation. 


7. Follow up till you get a reply.

Success in sales lies in timely tracking and follow-ups. Many research suggests that salespersons tend to get replies after the 8th follow-up. You may not need to wait till the 8th one if you do a timely follow-up. It is highly likely to get a reply in your 3rd or 4th email. So always ensure to follow up with your prospects. Ideally, you should follow up within 2-3 days otherwise the prospect may forget.


Hope you found these tips useful. If you are interested in trying out CRM software for Cold Emails and Lead tracking, Do check out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM. It’s Free!

How to manage Remote Sales teams?

 Since the start of the Covid19 pandemic, a majority of workers have moved to remote work. This has equally impacted sales teams in both positive as well as negative ways. On one side, the workforce is able to save more time for families which was earlier spent on travel. At the same time, organizations feel they miss the benefits of working with a co-located team such as more collaboration, more knowledge sharing, healthy competition as well as team relationships.

Moreover, sales teams tend to be more impacted with this since a majority of sales used to be face-to-face sales and while working with co-workers, they used to get trained on various sales techniques while watching their peers do the same.

Like it or not, Industry analysts predict that remote work culture is here to stay for longer than we would have imagined. In this post, let us explore the ways you can manage your remote sales teams better.

Remote workers

1. Well Defined Sales Process

When the sales teams are co-located, teams can easily align themselves with the process their peers follow for sales. But when it comes to remote teams, salespeople rarely get to watch their peers throughout the day to learn the best practices. As a sales manager, the best you can do is to define a well structured sales process for your team so that team can follow them as a guidebook. This way you can avoid unnecessary experimentations by every team member to reinvent the same wheel.


2. Make SMART goals specific to remote selling context

Remote selling differs from the way sales happen in co-located teams or face to face selling. So you may be required to redefine your sales goals for remote sales context by assessing your past sales data. Try to make SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound) goals for your team as per the remote sales context. This will ensure the team can quickly align themselves on the same.


3. Make team aware of goals and commitments

Remote teams get very less chance to meet the sales leaders of the organization. This may bring in the risk of working in silos where the team is not having a clear and common understanding of the organizational goals and commitments. It is the duty of the sales leaders to constantly communicate their business objectives, short term and long term goals. Keeping everyone on the same page and reinforcing it with constant communication helps everyone aligned to common goals and timelines.


4. Invest in remote tools for effective sales and team collaboration

While working remotely, a team may require a set of tools which can help them collaborate in real time as well as engage in remote sales. Some of the tools may include online messenger for your organization, VoIP telephony, video meeting tools like Zoom, Google Meet, etc. 

In addition to these, the sales team shall require a CRM software so that the team can collaborate together on multiple leads, deals, sales tasks, etc. If you are yet to adopt a CRM software for your business, feel free to check out our cloud based CRM software which is built for startups and small businesses.


5. Monitor sales reports & metrics

In order to gauge the performance of your team, it is necessary to regularly track your sales reports and metrics. This helps you step in at the right time and help out your team members exactly at the time when they need some help closing a deal. 

You can track the same via an excel sheet or if you have a notable team size, it is recommended to use a cloud CRM which can generate real time reports for you without you having to manually extract data, clean it up and create dashboards in excel sheets over and over again.


6. Organize remote social gatherings for team building and connect

The real missing element in remote teams is the social connect and the relationship which they have with their peers. Organizing online social gatherings periodically helps build the connection and relationship among the co-workers. Nobody likes to be working in a factory around machines. They like it when they find humans with whom they connect, share and learn from them.


7. Take every opportunity to celebrate, appreciate and motivate

To keep up the momentum, you should make use of every opportunity to celebrate small milestones, appreciate the performers to drive innovation as well as motivate your team to keep up the same momentum. Sales is largely motivation driven. Do every bit to keep the team’s motivation level high.


8. Train, Give feedback and Mentor

During the course, many new members shall join the team who may be new to your way of working. Support them with good training, give constant feedback and mentor them towards success. This way you shall build a successful team work culture for long term growth and success.


By the way if you are yet to try our CRM software, feel free to try out 

ToolsonCloud Sales CRM, It’s Free.