How To Write An Email To A Resistant Prospect

In this tutorial, Bill Caskey, author of Email It — A Seller’s Guide To Emails That Work, discusses one of the most stressful emails a salesperson needs to write.

Maybe you’ve had a prospect who suddenly begins to resist your offer. Bill walks through the exact words you should use in that email.

You can learn more tips on how to write emails to a prospect or your client at: http://emailitsellersguide.com/

Video Transcript:

Hi. Bill Caskey here from Caskey One. A few months ago, my business partners and I decided to write a book on emailing strategies. We get all these questions about, “Well, what do I say to a customer who’s wavering or how do I handle a resistant prospect?” and a lot of it comes down to, “What do I put in an email?” Of course we always believe that face to face or personal one-on-one conversations or by phone are better than emails but sometimes you have to use email to get to a person or prospect or a client.

So in this video I want to share with you little bits of background on the topic of how to write an email to a resistant prospect and this is included in our book Email It: A Seller’s Guide to Writing Effective Emails and it’s really number nine and we talked about it here from the standpoint of, “How do you craft these emails?” I’m going to give you this and then at the end, we’re going to give you some other rules of modern emailing.

I think sometimes what we do when we write an email is we operate from a stance of, “I need something,” and if you watch the trailer, if you go to www.EmailItSellersGuide.com, there’s a movie trailer there where I talk about a lot of times when we write these emails, we’re writing it from a sense of desperation or anxiety or, “What do I need to say to get the prospect to say something?” When you’re operating from that standpoint, I don’t think you’re going to be able to craft a very good email.

So in this case where you’ve got a resistant prospect, maybe you’re feeling like things were going well for a while and now they’re not, I want to give you a template of how to write that email.

Number one, I want you to review. The first paragraph should be a very quick review and in this case, we’ve got something simple. Like, “When I left our meeting the other day, I felt that you had some resistance to moving forward with the project. It may have been my imagination but I’ve learned to trust my instincts.” So the first paragraph is a review of where you are now and what has happened.

The second paragraph is a reveal. You want to reveal something about you. In this case, I say, “I also know that sometimes I become very passionate about what I do and I get so eager to jump in, I get ahead of myself; and that is what I feel might have happened here.” So in this paragraph, you’re just giving them a sense of yourself and you’re revealing maybe even a slight character flaw. So be humble about this. Have some humility and reveal that.

The third paragraph is the recommendation and this is where you put out your proposal. Based on that, I recommend that we have a meeting where we talk about A, B and C. I’m available at these times, A, B and C. I look forward to your response.

You don’t want to make these way too long but a short paragraph about the review, the reveal and the recommend I think will get you a lot more response and we’ve been hearing from customers who have bought Email It and who have used some of these 20 verbatims and they get very good response from these. They get answered very quickly. So hope you enjoyed it. Now I want you to stay tuned for a few rules about modern emailing that we think will help you as you craft your emails for sales or business development. Thanks.