Last count was 780 registrants for today’s Top 10 Email Habits to Keep you Selling During a Downturn- yippee! I’m ready, my Email Control What’s In & What’s Out for 2008 Hotlist is ready, our power point slides are ready, and the big question is, Are You Ready?

We’ve assembled a great team  for today’s webinar, Matt West and FelicityWohltman are the Marketing gurus at Genius and they are some of the most progressive marketing professionals you could ever meet. In order to keep pace with David Thompson, CEO of Genius they manage to stay one step ahead. Karl Dias, the Director of Sales at NetProspex will also be hosting this session. Yes, all of us from three different locations will be virtually coming together for this session. The best part is this webinar will be delivered on Adobe’s Connect tool. This is the way to go in web conferencing today.

So…… this is the place to be today from 10:30-11:30am PST and we have a healthy crowd that continues to grow. Unless something more important happens like Angelina deciding to give birth to her miracle twins, this is the place to be. So tune in, check us out, tell us what you think, agree or disagree and hold steady in a wobbly market.

It’s been 18 months and 388 blog posts since I first ventured into the blogsphere. Today, my writing life is full and my blog is my business partner, my confidante, my inspiration and my mirror. 

Why do I blog? Mainly because I love to write and communicate my thoughts, ideas and values to the world.  I like to get up close and personal with inside sales people as well as field sales, service and support teams.

Sometimes I think I’m moving very slow on a highway that is racing. Other times, I feel I’m speeding in a 25 miles per hour zone. Today I am going at exactly the right pace.

I want to dedicate this blog posting to YOU. Thanks for stopping by and reading a post or two, thanks for the time you take to read and comment, thanks for your kind words of support and most of all, thanks for being my inspiration. 

I have compiled my top 50 list of favorite blog post- here is the best of the Life in the Telebusiness Blog:

1. Setting Appointments.

2.  Get More Live Voices

3. Change up your messaging

4. Oops, when you realize you’re in the wrong place

5. When someone goes radio silent on you

6. 5 ways to set your non-negotiable time

7. The Dynamic Duo

8. Keep in shape

9. Clues we lose

10. Telestressed?

11. 8 reasons to test your phone courage

12. Email rejections

13. Changes lead to uncertainty of power

14. Listening for red flags

15. Are any No-Po’s lingering in your forecast?

16. Learning your No-Po lacks power before they do

17. Betrayed by No-Po’s?

18. I just have one more question

19. When a No-Po has to protect their turf

20. Winning coaching qualities

21. Are you avoiding being coached?

22. Sales intuition

23. The cancelled sales appointment

24. Is voice mail in or out?

25. Key words and phrases that lack influence

26. Trend talk

27. Sales training is like going into rehab

28. The first few times it’s tough and then it gets easier

29. Are salespeople happy?

30. Notes on motivation

31. Mr. Unavailable is a No-Po

32. Sales yoga

33. Tuesday conversation with a No-Po

34. You finally get the appointment, now what?

35. Let’s talk about trust

36. Different messages= different titles

37. End of quarter sales stats

38. Watch out- it’s the No-Po entourage

39. You sound busy so I’ll let you go

40. 10 tactics for engaging a gate-keeper

41. Looking for motivation in all the wrong places

42. Unavailable power

43. When was the last time you…..

44. Sales 2.0 prospecting

45. Opt-out of desperate discounting

46. The 3 C’s of social networking

47. Sales 2.0; A Report from the front lines

48. Top 7 responses impatient salespeople hate to hear

49. What’s on your wish list?

50. Why do we can people who have no power?

Last week I sent out my Inside Sales 2.0 Trend Talk eblast to my very targeted list of prospects. It was mainly to promote the upcoming Webinar titled Sales 2.0 Report from the Front Lines. The fun started a few minutes after it was sent out because I got to track who was checking me out and where they were going on my site. I noticed a few names were rising to the top as they had the most unique clicks and views. (That’s marketing talk for a good prospect).

I drafted my follow-up email and wrote Thanks for paying attention as my subject line.  They responded and we scheduled a meeting the following week to discuss our offerings and their potential needs.

The scenario I’ve just explained describes what takes place when you are selling in a Sales 2.0 environment. I’ll break it down for you:

1. It all started by the target list of email contacts I created. Thanks to Spoke,  I learned a few new email addresses and patterns to people in a large Fortune 100 company I was targeting.

2. I usually switch from Campaign Monitor to Genius in tracking their viewing habits. It helps me understand where they are going and what they are interested in.

3. Now, my follow-up efforts were prioritized based on contacting a captive audience who had reviewed my eblast.

4.  I drafted a short email follow-up thanking them for their interest and used an inviting subject line. I also requested a quick 6- minute phone meeting to demonstrate it wouldn’t be a waste of their time.

5. Once I confirmed the appointment, I went back to Spoke and built out the target company org chart, learned the chain of command and leverage more names so I don’t get stuck with the No-Po’s.

6. The day arrived for our phone appointment and it resulted in a RFP.

These days everyone is taking more responsibility for their marketing and sales efforts. They are not pointing a finger at someone else and waiting for it to happen. As a salesperson, what is your marketing contritution?

Email volume is rapidly growing and according to a Carlson Marketing 2006 Whitepaper, it’s about 2.4 trillion messages per year in the US. So how do we stand out?

Our Webinar today, Got My Email; Measuring Response in a Noisy Market presented by TeleSmart and Genius will address that.

We will meet the next generation email sales pioneers who will share their secrets for getting response in this crowded space. Ask us for our Email Control: What’s Out and What’s In 2007 article.

There are tons of Webinars out there on email marketing or email etiquette but not much is geared toward salespeople. Finally, thre’s a 2-part series designed for salespeople with an appropriate title, Emails that Close Deals.

Designing this topic has been fun. It’s always good working with my Genius buddies and very cool partnering with Sam Parker, co-founder and publisher of MaxPitch Media and JustSell. These guys are super smart, hip and know how to publish excellent content for salespeople. They clearly take over where Selling Power falls behind.

Sam and I will talk, dialogue, agree, disagree, advise and ultimately give our expert thoughts on the 12 essentials of taking email control. We have things to give away such as my Dynamic Duo-Vmail and Email tips and JustSell’s Writing a Better Email; The Definitive Guide for Those Who Sell.

Next month I plan on participating in some Webinars on Email Marketing, one of my very favorite topics. Stay tuned, I’ll be sending out more information on this. Here’s a great article titled Think Your Emails Don’t Work? Think Again in AllBusiness.com. I especially like the Words to Avoid That Can Be Flagged as Spam. Here they are:

Marketing, Market, Free, Bonus, Click, Click here, Advertising, Advertise, Ads, Sales, Sell, Selling, Shop, Shopping, Package, Buy, Purchase, Mortgage, Finance, Refinance, Free Trial.

I’m taking a creative non-fiction writing class these days while writing my book proposal. It’s helping a lot as I’m being so much more selective with my word choices. These days, the fewer words the better.

Let’s talk about email subject headings. Think seconds, think BlackBerry and think fewer words. With spam on the rise, it takes us about 1/100th of a second to glance at an email. These are some that work and some that don’t when prospecting:

What doesn’t work: Although you might spend time crafting a great email, you forget to get creative on the subject heading, here’s what I’ve seen many times before:

Introduction: Who introduced whom? Where should I file this in my Outlook inbox

Follow-up or Voicemail follow-up: What are you following up about?

Demo Appointment: What are you presenting? When is the appointment?

Expiration: What is expiring? When?

What works: I have discovered one magic formula is to combine the names of your company and your prospect’s and throw an action verb in the middle:

ABC and TeleSmart: When you combine both companies together, it’s easier to get filed in the inbox.

ABC and TeleSmart–Appointment Request for February 18th: This tells the story in the subject heading.

Getting on your radar in 2007: Good idea to send this at the end of the year or beginning of the new year.

Where’s Tom?: This is taken from the Where’s Waldo book series. I have used this only when I know the prospect, we’ve established a rapport and they aren’t getting back to me.

Send us your best subject heading and we’ll mention you on this blog.

If you are using email as a prospecting vehicle, you are probably receiving a lot of rejection emails. That’s good. Is there a response etiquette for getting rejected from a prospect via email? These rejection emails can come in the form of something very short and also more detail. Here’s some I’ve received so far this year when prospecting for training opportunities:

1. Not interested

2. Hi Josiane,  I believe we will be holding off for the moment.

We don’t have any current needs that require external suppliers for training and we work closely with IBM corporate to leverage training first for consistency and to reduce cost. I am happy to review information about your company and their services if you can direct me to your website link. If necessary, I will contact you to schedule a meeting. Thanks for contacting me and I will let Jim know that we connected via e-mail.

4. FYI, we will not be doing any sales skills or management development with outside vendors/consultants this year … budget constraints in FY’07.

5. We’ve decided to hold off until 2007 on this purchase.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s great to get these because rejections are objections disguised as questions. The minute you receive an email like this, pick up the phone. You are still fresh in their mind and it’s the perfect forum to start a dialogue. Remember, they are probably cleaning out their email inbox and just sending these out so they are usually in one place where they can be reached. Earn more time from this email and open up an opportunity for the future. Lastly, remember the people saying no are not always the ones who can say yes.

When you are making new introductions, don’t just count on your phone and voice mail efforts. If you are keeping track of outbound call metrics, you must also keep an eye on outbound emails. The phone can no longer stand alone. Email is necessary to back up your prospecting efforts.  So how does it work? Theses two should be synchonized to work within seconds of each other. That means, it doesn’t make sense to leave a voice mail in the morning introducing yourself and send a follow-up email at the end of the day. The response rate increases when the two work together at the same time.

The good news is they both have similar attributes and challenges, such as:

Tone: We can write and speak with so many different tones- whether it’s confident, authoritative, direct, tentative, conversational, formal, enthusiastic, trustworthy, intelligent, professional, inviting, or interesting.

Word Choice: Are the words organized, weak, overused, abused, techno babble, visual, strong? Is the manner of writing and speaking concise, succinct and articule?

Pacing: Usually we measure this when we speak as talking too fast, too slow, or steady.

Organization: What is the clear call or writing objective? How are you setting expectations with your speech or your email?

Since these two complement each other so well, invest time in making them look like they match and putting your vocal and visual stamp on your messaging.