As a leader in a marketing oriented firm, I get a whole lot of cold email.

I’ve talked about this before, but it’s worth highlighting again today.

Pete posted an article yesterday that (among other things) included the titular advice, “Stop pitching over email.”

Too many salespeople prematurely pitch over email. They describe the features and benefits of their products and services, what they do and how they do it. As should be evident by the low response rate these types of emails get, their pitch is falling on deaf ears.

So that’s the problem…

But what should you, salesperson, do instead? It ain’t that difficult folks. Caputa goes on in his article to say:

What should you do instead? Determine whether a prospect has a need before pitching anything.

Is there a better way to determine need?

So you may have decided that email isn’t the best way to start, and be asking if this means you should be diagnosing pain on the first phone call…

Well, hold the phone partner…

I have personally spent this week with some really smart people in the sales profession.

One of them, had something like this to say about the first step of the sales process: “The only objective when you first connect with a prospect (in this context; inbound or outbound) is to establish a real and meaningful connection with that person. If you can’t do that, it isn’t worth pitching anything.”