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Episode Transcript
Rick Kranz (00:03): So, have you seen the reports that HubSpot has been publishing? They've been aggregating data from 70,000 companies that are on their platform. And they've been sharing that data to show what are the trends in sales and marketing during this COVID-19 epidemic? And they've benchmarked it against prior data from before the lockdown, and now the data during the lockdown. And if you've looked at it, your head may explode, like, "What does this mean?" But I'm going to go into it and explain it to you, like what you should be doing now, based on this information.
Rick Kranz (00:39): So, here's some interesting tidbits from this data. There's been a 60% jump in sales emails but a 30% drop in the response rates on those sales emails. Now, that kind of makes sense, who wants to get sales emails anyway? And especially in this environment, I'm getting a sales email, there's been a 30% drop. But, here's what doesn't make sense, there's been a 25% jump in marketing email sends, from these 70,000 companies. And there's been a 20% increase in the open rates. What! People are opening more of the marketing emails. Okay. So go back to those sales emails.
Rick Kranz (01:23):Why are the sales emails getting a much lower response rate, a 30% drop in response rate and the marketing emails are getting a 20% increase in response rate? Well, it probably is to do, and we don't know this for sure, but I'm going to guess that sales is jumping on the bandwagon and saying, how do I reach as many people as possible in this situation? And so they're just shotgunning sales emails out and they're crappy. So they're sending out these emails and they're just bringing down the overall response rate. While marketing is still doing what marketing does and they're crafting useful and helpful information and sending it out and so those are getting opened. Okay. So what does that mean? I'll tell you what that means and what you should be doing in a couple of minutes.
Rick Kranz (02:11):Let me share another piece of data with you. Another piece of interesting information is that website traffic has been up 24% in all categories and all industries with the exception of travel, which has been down. That makes sense, right? People are home, what are they going to do? They're going in and browsing the internet, web traffic is going to be up. But then also chat, live chat and chat bot interactions on websites has gone up 26%. So people are doing more than just browsing the internet. They're actually interested. They're actually shopping, throughout there shopping.
Rick Kranz (02:44):So what is this data telling us? Well with regards to sales emails, enlist, marketing's help in designing your emails. You want professionally written emails, that it could be more educational and less promotional. Also, try doing some video emails. These tend to get opened and responded to at a much higher rate than your plain old sales email. Another thing is keep a good balance. Salespeople have gone off balance. Prior to the COVID-19, there was a good balance of phone calls and emails. Now we've seen less phone calls and more emails, but I can tell you from my experience with my clients, is that even during these times phone calls are working well, we're able to set appointments with prospects using phone calls.
Rick Kranz (03:32):So get back to phone calling and keep a good balance there. Regards to marketing, this is a great time to be writing good marketing content and email form, and getting it out to your customers and prospects and just staying in touch with them. And as long as it's educational, you will start to see good open rates. It's important to stay in touch. You want to stay top of mind because eventually, hopefully we will get back to normal at some point. Now with regarding to website visits, get some form of live chat or automated chat bots on your website to help assist the sales team. People are interacting with these and they're looking for instant answers.
Rick Kranz (04:12):And the final piece of the puzzle is to implement some kind of sales enablement into your sales process. We're going to be running free live workshops, either weekly or biweekly. You can sign up here for the latest one coming up. And they're all about sales, building a pipeline, growing a pipeline in these times and you know, what can we do and how can we move forward? Also, if you'd like this type of video, we're going to be doing these weekly, just sign up here and you'll get them into your inbox every week and it's going to be giving free tips out and just trying to help everybody get back on track. Thanks for watching.
