When I tell people that I run Knuckleball Comedy and we perform for kids and run fun team building workshops for businesses and entertain at work holiday parties, I always receive the same response - oh so you do comedy all day, that must be so fun!
Not exactly. I am a comedian and part of my job is to go to businesses and run really fun corporate team building and professional development programs for their employees. And we’ve run some amazing performances at kids’ birthday parties and public libraries and street festivals from anywhere from 15 to 300 kids. But the majority of the time I am in my office, writing emails, taking phone calls, marketing and selling.
As any business owner knows, in order to have a business, you need to sell. Of course it goes without saying you need a good product or service to sell. But no entrepreneur can have success if they weren’t the number one salesperson at the beginning. So that’s what I do for a lot of my day, I sell.
(Participants laughing at a recent Knuckleball Comedy Professional Development Workshop at Illinois State University)
Some clients come from finding us on google, or linkedin, or facebook. Some find us from word of mouth and others don’t find us at all but rather we find them. If you’ve ever sent a sales email before, you know that people on the other side of that email are really good at not responding.
No one likes receiving a sales email, even when the email is selling something they actually want or need. As a salesperson, it’s our job to break through the noise and first convince the prospect to open the email, then convince them to read it, and then to actually respond.
Even if you follow every rule for subject lines and body, it’s still difficult to have success with sales emails. It ranges depending on the industry, but most studies say that only about 20% of sales emails are even opened.
According to a Boomerang study, prospects say “no” four times before they say “yes.” As someone who spends a lot of their day selling, I can say this feels fairly accurate. You don’t want to be annoying but you have to be persistent. It’s so rare that a prospect responds after just one email. It happens, but it’s rare. You need to send two, three, four, five, maybe even six emails before you can safely say, this prospect at this time is not interested.
So having sent thousands of sales emails in my almost six years of running my business, I’ve learned a few things. If someone were to start in sales or start selling for their own business, this is what I would tell them.
It’s not going to be easy. Don’t give up and don’t stop emailing a potential prospect unless they’ve specifically said they aren’t interested. This means email them four to seven times and if you don’t receive a response then stop wasting your time. But you can then email again in six months because you never know when something has changed.
Use the breakup email template below (or some other one that works super well) and you’ll receive so many replies from prospects who you thought were surely done for.
Below is the breakup email template that I use. I will say that I did not come up with this on my own. I found this template some place on the internet a few years ago. And I’ve been using it since and I think its effectiveness is truly remarkable.
Some studies suggest that a good breakup email can yield a 33% response rate which is incredible because everyone you’ve sent this to hasn’t responded to your last three to five emails. I would say 33% feels a little low from my experience. I feel like when I send out my breakup emails, I am just sitting back and waiting for the responses to come through.
Of course some of them say we’re not interested. But some say, hold on, I’m not NOT interested. Let’s talk. And every time I receive responses to the breakup email, I am no longer surprised, but I find it astonishing how eager they are to respond to this specific email after letting all of my previous ones fly by without a sniff.
I don’t know enough about human psychology to know why this works. But there is something about having this opportunity stripped away forever that makes people want to respond. Because they don’t want the opportunity you are offering them to be gone forever, they just weren’t ready or didn’t know how to respond before. But now you put the pressure on them and say either respond now or I’m gone.
The breakup email below also works well for me because it does have a little humor. And when you run a comedy company like I do, it’s always good for your selling and marketing to be on brand with your company.
Take a look below and I encourage you to start using this template!
Happy selling.
Subjec Line: Should I stay or should I go?
Hi {{ contact.firstname }},
I’ve tried to reach you a few times to go over how we can incorporate our {{Product/Service} into your {{Company/Event}}, but haven’t heard back which tells me one of three things:
1) You’re all set with {this type of product/service}} and I should stop bothering you.
2) You’re still interested but haven’t had the time to get back to me yet.
3) You’ve fallen and can’t get up and in that case let me know and I’ll call someone to help you ….
Please let me know which one as I’m starting to worry!
Regards,
{{Signature}}
If you want to work with Knuckleball Comedy for your next corporate gathering, check out the page on our site HERE. Feel free to respond to my first email and no need to wait for the breakup.