Some time ago Hubspot's Sales tool (formerly known as "Sidekick") added the ability to schedule emails to send at a later time. The premise was that your sales activities, such as emailing, often occur later in the day, when it's not an optimal time to communicate with prospects. You want them to be in their email when you send it.
So, instead of sending right away (or saving it, then setting a reminder task in your calendar), you pick a day and time for it to go out, and schedule it at your convenience. No extra steps. Nothing falls through the cracks.
But there's one major, glaring, ugly flaw...
How can you possibly know with any amount of certainty when it's an optimal time to reach out to somebody? Hunches? Gut feelings? Certainly, there's nothing telling you this information based on hard data... So, how?... Without adding another cumbersome, time-sucking responsibility....?
As a salesperson, I have very little time to spend on ... well... anything. The fewer actions something takes, the better.
What do I spend a lot of time doing throughout the day?
Clicking my mouse, that's what.
I'm clicking buttons, websites, linkedin profiles, educational materials, phone numbers, videos, Facebook, emails, memos, pings, chats, calendar invites, whatsapps.... Many of you are also clickity clacking away all day on the CRM, spreadsheets, and other time-consuming, soul-sucking administrative clicks and tasks...
Necessary tasks... but soul-sucking nonetheless.
It's a lot of clicking and thinking.
I don't know about you, but the top performers I've known throughout my career really don't have time for any of that.
And are these tasks really necessary?
No.... actually. They're not. Not when you have a modern CRM.
Here are two ways you can leverage a modern CRM to send out KILLER sales emails.
1. Send Later
As mentioned, "send later" is a fantastic feature for being able to reach your prospects or customers in a more timely fashion. You could have the most clearly articulated email in the world that really gets your point across, but send it at the wrong time of day, and it may go in one ear and out the other... or get buried and never opened.
But that's step 1. How do you determine when exactly is a better time to email?
You get a modern CRM is what.
Check out the graphic below. This is a snapshot of an email I wrote to a client of mine in Gmail.
Today, I clicked the little click icon next to "send," and I was greeted with several delivery options... 2 more than I am used to... and they're game-changers.
So... did you see it? Did you see the insights that Hubspot Sales Pro put in front of me? Let me zoom in for you...
Without requiring any thinking from me and any more energy than simply connecting Hubspot Sales to my company's gmail, I now have insights available WHEN those insights are most important to me. They also give me one-click options.
How amazing is that data? Not only does it consider open rates, but RESPONSES!
2. Automated scheduling
Sending that email at the exact time is great for getting those important appointments. But this is where things can stall out as well and cause a lot of unnecessary heartburn - for you and the prospect.
Why?
Because aligning time on each other's calendars is a terrible and cumbersome process.
You have to go into your calendar, find ranges that work, put them into an email, and hope that A) the prospect's availability aligns somewhere in those options and B) they don't pick a time slot that disappears before they respond.
THINK of how many clicks and how much time is spent on this kind of noise!!! (I know this is something you try not to think about)
And, of course, it only gets worse when you need multiple members of your team on the call.
The "Meetings" tool in my modern CRM, Hubspot Sales, solves this problem too.
You create links that take prospects to a simpler calendaring program. You can have it set up to link to your calendar or multiple. You can create different links for different purposes. For example, we have several stages in our review process for bringing on new clients:
- The 15 minute tire-kicking call
- The 60 minute exploratory call
- The 60 minute goal setting & planning call
- The 30 - 90 minute proposal review call
- The 90 minute kick off call
Some of those require multiple people. Some only require me. And I can actually change how the tool behaves based on that and other criteria. It's a one-time set up, and it takes care of everything else.
You can also have it set up so its assigned to a team of salespeople, and in a round-robin fashion, it connects to different calendars.
This tool has saved me COUNTLESS clicks and time staring at calendars, and it's what I consider to be one of my biggest game changers. It's a simple link that exists in my email signatures. I also have the variations embedded in several saved templates.
It's SOOOO simple - and requires zero thinking.
CONCLUSION:
I know that you're hurting when it comes to data entry and general admin work. I know that it's killing you emotionally, and where it (probably) counts the most, your commissions.
Not sending that email at the right time IS a big deal.
Need help implementing the Hubspot CRM for your business? We have a guide for that:
