Account Managers Sales Emails – Using Soft Skills if you Want Managers and Directors to Confide in YOU

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If your clients don’t confide in you… How can you upsell or retain a client? Maybe an email can help build relationships too?

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Yes, there are ways to do this… and it’s important for a few reasons:

1. If you are seen as just support, then a customer will only contact you if they can’t figure something out. This means they may even have a work-around while using your product, so not using the product in the best way, and this is taking your product one foot out-of-the-door.

2. A customer signs up to a relationship as well, not just a transaction. If at the pre-sign up stage, you have a company contact that was all over you in terms of time and attention, and then disappears, then; that’s not a relationship. You can guess what happens when your customer meets a genuine friend…

3. If you only contact your customer when you have a new product/service/programme and so on… they will see you as only interested in taking an order. Now you maybe thinking, “Hang on a minute Jason, I do a bit of consultative selling and SPIN before asking for the order, so I’m not just contacting to take an order only.” Yes, I’m in the sales team, I understand this argument, and really, I’d say take the other side as the customer to understand this one. Here’s my considered thought on this… if you had a little chat when a customers not heard from you for many weeks and then ask for an order, it’s really a bit like when an old family member contacts you out of the blue, has a ten minute chat, and asks for a loan (like in the Hollywood movies). How does that feel?

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If they trust you, they confide in you

Regular contact in the right way will take every ounce of your sales skills and emotional intelligence (EI), but it will pay off in terms of rewards, enjoyment of working with your customer, and job satisfaction.

We can use the following example of problem solving and understanding the predicament a customer can face in a sales email. Who knows where this could lead to in the following example in terms of software licence sales, training, new introductions, and so on…

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Hello ABCDEFG,

It’s been six whole weeks since your installation and Excel training, and I hope you’ve had some time to become familiar with some areas of the software programme.

Today I wanted to get in contact, because even after six weeks, there’s always another function I can introduce you to which can save you time, such as how to carry out a filter of the data or freeze the top row as you scroll down your Excel sheet. Or you may want something else and not sure what the function is called yet.

We all learn software at different speeds, mainly due to the needs of the business. I’m fully aware of this, and want to ensure any questions or things you want to do that have come to light recently, can be answered by me.

Also, I’m not sure if your colleagues are ready yet to learn the software system. So how about we discuss your learnings, other areas where the software can help you, and potentially how we can help your team make an improvement on the way they are working to process their data analysis quicker at a future date, now you understand the software better?

If you are interested in your fifteen minute review of Excel and how we can potentially help the team in the future, please kindly advise when you have a time for me to get in contact.

Thanks,

Jason, Your contact at Great Company Software

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As you can gather, a few emails that displays you have the emotional intelligence to understand from a users point of view, where they are in adapting to your product and service, will allow different software users to an opportunity to contact you, and confide in your further.

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Phone messages Vs Sales emails

Yes, you can leave phone messages if you can’t reach your customer, but I’ve found it’s very hard to deliver a long phone message with the same exact tone and style over and over again, if you’ve ever tried this in sales jobs daily. However, on the flip side, I still do use phone messages all the time, and point them to look out for an email too, as these can be standardised, and carry out a longer better version of the message that I’m here for the customer.

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Does this give you ideas for your ideas pot on building relationships with your customers? Great> See you in the next session.

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