I can't stress enough how important following up is. Anecdote: I had a business owner send me 3 follow up emails, I was busy and I couldn't reply. When I got the third email, I was like f*k it, let's do it. Today, that email is going to make him $31,500.

A lot of peoples reaction to getting sent 3 follow up emails is to mark them as spam.

I do a ton of cold outreach, and in my experience, the difference is in the way you communicate.

In each of my follow-ups, I mention that I am reaching them because I did not hear from them the previous time, and ask them to reply one way or the other.

It communicates to them that if they just reply a 'No', I would stop,

Also, I do not persist forever. My follow ups are always 4 levels deep, and in the final mail, I make sure I tell that it's the last one and I won't send another one.

So anyone like OP who's delaying it simply because they are busy tend to reply.

Again, I am not sure if these are ideal tactics, but they seem to work for me.

This is intriguing. I don't want to reply (in b2b situations) because I feel the salesperson might try to 'use me' to get to some other key decision maker within my org. I don't want that process taking up my limited time. So, if I say no, it opens the door the more discussion, as it acknowledges I at least had some time to think about it.

Same boat here. Since sales are a big part of my job, I occasionally read them to gauge how effective they might be (if I were the target audience). I used to reply to the more well-crafted ones with a polite “thanks, not interested” but in almost every case where I engaged, it seemed to lead to an attempt to reach someone in my org who might be interested. Now I just delete them.

Interesting. I typically hit the decision maker or their boss - so when I get a no, I know there is no one else to seek.

Some people also reply with a sterner 'no, don't reply again'. To them, I do not even reply with a 'Thanks, no problem' message since I'm scared they will mark me as spam!

Perhaps it's just me, but I find those follow-up extremely annoying and if I'm getting at least one, that guarantees blocking of recipient.

We live in high turnover of information, and if I received your first email (which I did) and didn't respond, it does mean I am not interested. Sending a follow up would just spark frustration.

Again, perhaps it's just me and this approach works for most people, but it may be useful to know it does not for all.

I guess the problem here is the ambiguity of not responding -- it could mean you're not interested, but it could also mean you are too busy to reply. Without additional information, the salesman doesn't know which case it is.

From his perspective though, he doesn't lose anything by sending the follow up, and if it is the second case, may gain a sale.

There is no ambiguity in non-responding - if I am not responding, the subject is of no interest to me. That's pretty simple thing to understand.

Of course it doesn't work for non organised individuals and people who succumb under pressure.

Email providers in general, and GMail in particular, is not as sophisticated as we like to believe. There have been so many instances where people I have been talking to for several years get randomly thrown into the spam folder.

It goes without saying that some of my outreaches get thrown there too by default.

So, as the sender, I don't really know if you saw the message and didn't want it, or if you were too busy to reply, or that you did not receive my message in the first place.

There are, of course, many email tracking tools available. I do not use them though.

My own personal stats is that half my successes came from following up.

You do have to be really careful and get intent right. I don't want to sell something to someone uninterested (they're usually the bad clients that need 80% effort, 20% returns anyway).

A lot of sales people are just manipulative with this and it'll show. It comes across as impatient, pushy, or insulting.

If I know that the other person read it and is interested but evaluating other options, an email could be along the lines of, "So what do you think? I'm happy to answer any questions you have."

If it goes into a void, I'd say, "Sorry to follow up, but I'm not sure if my last email was lost in your inbox or if you've got other things on your mind. To reiterate, (brief pitch on product). I'll probably send one more follow up later for your convenience. If you're not interested, just let me know and I won't bother you."

Many people are afraid of rejection, but IMO it's a very good thing. Encourage them to say no. You know what doesn't work - wrong target market, wrong pitch, or some cases it's just not good enough. We've had situations where we were told, "It's interesting but not being able to log out of all devices is a security hole and dealbreaker." It could be a polite excuse, but it was a feature angle we didn't think of and also a hint when it's okay to try again.

I interned at an organization which was interested in purchasing a million dollars worth of oscilloscopes. Tektronix sent out two reps and I was in the room watching them chat with my boss. My boss basically just asked them about the different features of the scopes and their compatibility with our existing systems. So to your point, it's exactly true: the scopes sell themselves, it's just a matter of explaining how a particular model fits the needs of the customer and contrasting it with the competitor offerings.

And your story also demonstrates the power of marketing and of a company's or product's reputation. Frequently one has already decided to buy from a company before calling Sales to discuss the products, so of course the job of Sales is now much simpler. When I bought my last car I had already decided to buy from a particular brand, all the dealership had to do was point me to the selection they had in stock.

> Selling is just convincing the other person that you have the (best) solution to their problems and that it's cheaper than dealing with the problem.

In a lot of cases selling involves convincing someone that they have a problem that needs solving. That's the more difficult part because the easiest (and cheapest) option is always just to not buy anything.

These are good points. Also don’t obsess with learning the “dance”, what is useful first is knowing how a sale cycle works and what is expected at each step, so it shows you are a professional that has seen others.

If you know a bit of the formalism then just showing you are competent and have a solution to solve the customer problem is enough to start making deals. The rest is optimization.

I was on the fence about putting the "dance" part in because I think a lot of people would try too hard and get it wrong.

But the most common newbie mistake is to, as a mentor put it, prostitute your product. They simply shove it into everyone's faces as loudly as possible. This works at a bazaar, but not in many places.

It's also a faux pas to wear a suit when approaching companies whose formal wear is a t-shirt. You don't have to find all the unwritten rules but just be aware of them.

> Keep it short: A pitch is like a joke. The longer it is, the less impact it has. Cut out as many syllables as you can.

Uh, are you into standup comedy? One-liners aren’t the be-all-end-all.

And seriously, institutional sales cycles at the 7-figure level often take months not minutes.

> they just wanted to know that you understood the oscilloscopes and weren't bullshitting them.

In the IT industry, I feel like absolutely, 100% everyone must know that 98% of computers a giant company buys should be MacBook Airs, and yet Lenovo employees wake up every day telling people they should buy some crappy laptops. There are possibly 20 well-funded startups bullshitting people that they should use a database other than Postgres.

The present of sales is Wirecutter, not "sales cycles." Most people are making mediocre, derivative crap, how could they possibly not be bullshitting you?

If you're making something fucking shitty, just don't fucking sell it at all, and move on. Wait until it's the best, or do something else.

It can be hard to understand why the best product for you personally might not be the best product for someone else. A good salesman understands the need first, then the solution.

By contrast your assertion that a Macbook Air is the best option 98% of the time (for giant companies no less) seems unlikely at best, and an incompetent sales person at worst.

I am not a Macbook user myself (for various reasons) so I won't delve into why giant-Corp may prefer Windows, but suffice to say that when you are adding thousands of machines to an existing environment, issues like Active Directory, User Training, custom software compatibility, job risk (to the purchaser) are front of mind.

For example say you're the guy who just dropped tens of millions on 1000 of these new Macs, because they are sooo much nicer, and then reports come in about keyboards not working. Let's just say your firing may be a lesson to the next buyer...

On the Postgres thing, this is one of my favourite example of sales: https://docs.fauna.com/fauna/current/comparisons/compare-fau...

It's by a former Twitter engineer. I have no idea if he's bullshitting me but he's a lot smarter at this topic than I am so I'm inclined to believe it.

It's a new thing. I generally don't have the time for new things, especially something like a database with a learning curve. But this is one of the things that caught my eye. I don't really remember how it did, but it's good sales work.

You don’t spend these months pitching, in fact the cycle only start because the initial pitch was effective.

> Keep it short: A pitch is like a joke. The longer it is, the less impact it has

I see you're never read Nate the Snake: https://natethesnake.com

Yeah, gonna be honest, I'm not going to read that :p

Do it sometime when you're free. Its worth it. I had it bookmarked for quite a while before I read it because it seemed so long.