5 Ways Email is Killing Your Deal Flow

To get a deal over the line, sales reps need to stay in close contact with customers. They pitch customers, share sales collateral, and field questions and objections. Email is often the communication method of choice, but it’s not without its faults. 

Primarily relying on email to manage all your deals can get in the way of your overall deal flow and hold your team back from reaching your sales targets. In a sales environment where every deal matters, that’s just not acceptable. Consider these five ways email is killing your deal flow and what you can do about it. 

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1. It’s easy for information to fall through the cracks

The average worker receives more than 100 emails every day. With so many emails coming in, even diligent workers can inadvertently let one or two important emails fall through the cracks. Before long, those emails end up buried in the buyer’s inbox—holding up the deal. 

Now think about how many emails sales reps send and receive over the course of completing a deal. Enterprise deals, especially ones that drag on for three months or more, can easily involve 100+ emails before closing. That’s over 100 opportunities for stakeholders to lose or overlook emails that contain key information about the deal.

Most sales reps will admit that salespeople aren’t the most organized professionals out there. And you don’t want to have to rely on the organizational skills of all the stakeholders your reps communicate with, either. Why risk someone missing an important email and delaying your deal?

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2. Managing multiple stakeholders is a pain

According to Gartner, the average B2B business decision involves 11 different stakeholders. That number can reach as high as 20 stakeholders in particularly complicated deals.

Each individual stakeholder represents another person your sales rep has to coordinate with and get approvals from. Say you have 10 reps managing 10 deals. Even if each deal only has five stakeholders, that’s still dozens of emails your reps have to send and receive to close those deals. It quickly becomes chaos. 

How could anyone effectively keep track of all those emails with so many different involved parties? Reps often end up having to repeat themselves in emails, too. It’s tricky to rope in additional stakeholders at the exact right point, meaning reps have to catch them up on the information they’ve already covered with other stakeholders. 

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3. Buyers can’t easily access the right information at the right time

Throughout a typical deal flow, your customers will often need to refer back to information from earlier communications. If they have to dig through their email thinking, “Where is that case study?” or “I could swear that video was linked in this email,” that’s a problem. 

You want to make the sales process as simple and painless as possible for buyers to maximize your chances of closing deals. When a lot of the crucial information about a deal is tucked away in a variety of emails, your buyers will struggle to access the right information at the right time. They may become frustrated or even less inclined to finalize the deal. 

Emails are simply not the most effective way of sharing information with buyers so they can conveniently access it later. 

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4. It’s harder to track engagement

Buyer engagement during deals is a key metric that informs your sales strategies and forecasting. Unfortunately, relying on emails as your primary communication channel makes it difficult to accurately track engagement.  

To measure engagement over email, you can look at stats like your open rate and reply rate, but these numbers won’t give you the full picture. Lots of crucial deal activity occurs outside of emails and isn’t reflected in statistics from your email software. 

You need to know how deals are progressing in real-time. That comes down to understanding exactly what buyers are looking at and doing in your deals—information emails typically can’t give you. Buyer behavior during deals is complicated. Buyers may be very active at some stages and less active in others. With email alone, your reps won’t know how engaged their prospects really are or what they should do next. 

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5. It doesn’t separate you from the competition

Competition is as fierce as ever these days. If you want to get ahead of your competition, you need to be doing something to stand out. Not just with your products, either. Your approach to handling deals should separate you from the competition, too, and primarily using emails does not fit that bill. 

Everyone uses emails to communicate with their customers and close deals. You have the opportunity to manage deals better—more seamlessly—to give customers one more reason to choose your company over others in a congested marketplace. 

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Mutual Action Plans and digital sales rooms are the answer

So what’s the alternative? If email isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, surely there’s a better option. Enter Mutual Action Plans (MAPs) and digital sales rooms. 

Mutual action plans are documents that spell out all the next steps in a deal with key dates and milestones. They hold customers accountable and keep deals on track, from preparation to close and implementation. Traditionally, MAPs were stagnant files that supplemented—not replaced—email communications with customers.  

When put in a digital sales room, however, MAPs can do so much more. A digital sales room is a centralized, shared portal where your sales reps can collaborate with customers during deals. They can share and consolidate content, loop in stakeholders as needed, and measure buyer engagement—all from one platform. 

By using mutual action plans and digital sales rooms, you can eliminate many of the challenges of email communication during deals. Managing deals doesn’t have to be a tedious, disorganized mess. Store and organize all the information your sales reps and customers need to close deals in one place with MAPs. 

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Is there a mutual action plan software that includes digital sales rooms?

The answer is, yes! Recapped was purpose-built for this!

Recapped is a mutual action plan platform that simplifies the process of aligning sellers and buyers. It provides everything necessary to create collaborative, repeatable workspaces that can scale with your sales team and impress prospects.

Your prospects and customers will love working with you, and your competition will be confused as to what has changed.

Don’t let email kill your deal flow anymore and stand out from the competition. Start today with a free consultation: https://www.recapped.io/consultation.