Tuesday, October 02, 2007

 

Selling Software and Email Collaboration Patterns

I noticed a pattern in how vendor sales folks collaborate and wanted to provide them with some advice on better ways to interact with folks in large enterprises...



Many vendor sales folks have yet to acknowledge the simple fact that attempting to call instead of email is one of the most inefficient usages of time. I don't know of a single enterprise where my peers aren't always in meetings. The vast majority of folks higher up the foodchain don't spend a lot of time at our desks unless we specifically schedule time for ourselves to do so. You may have noticed though that lots of us carry Crackberries and are addicted to staying current on our email as much as possible. I am curious at some level, why vendors still continue to use the phone when they have a better chance of connecting via email?

Likewise, the corporate environment with its savage desire to save money has pursued India outsourcing and other things that make the work day longer. This of course translates into folks carrying their laptops home with them where they may read emails during their long commute or while at the dinner table. Wouldn't vendor sales folks prefer to know that they can have an email interaction potentially the same night over not getting their calls returned during the day due to schedule contention?

Another tool that vendor sales folks can use is Microsoft Outlook. If we are scheduled to talk and you compose the information in an email but I am a couple of days behind in reading them, then I might miss the call because I didn't read it yet. However, if you send an Outlook calendar invite, I don't have to read it because I can have rules that automatically accept / reject based on conflicts. Even if I haven't read the email, Outlook will show the calendar event whenever I view it.

If you want to really be successful in terms of receiving a reply, please don't send attachments and prefer links instead.
In the past I have talked about always being in Mail Jail which our mailbox fills up and we cannot read/respond to email in a timely manner and your action will either result in an immediate delete so that folks can get below the quota to respond to others or it is moved to a folder that is visited only once in a blue moon...






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