Category: Sales

Over the past few years email tracking has become huge in sales & marketing.
While marketers have used it via their Marketing Automation systems for almost a decade, millions of sales reps have been using it directly in Gmail/Outlook. Inside sales/SDR tools also include this feature.

After all, everyone wants to know if their email was read, how many times it was read, etc. so that you can actively serve those prospects/clients.

Life was good till the hackers showed up and the email providers (Microsoft, Google, Anti-spam services) decided to do more to protect clients. Here are 4 reasons why should stop tracking emails.

1 – It’s sending your emails to the spam folder.

Every trackable email includes invisible pixels or trackable URLs which directly increase the spam score of an email. I’ll explain the technical details in another post but if your email contains these long, funny URLs from a domain (the tracking service) different from your company domain, your spam score just went.

2 – The big one – it’s screwing up your metrics

Here’s the big one – an increasing number of false positives. More and more email protection services (software that scans an email before it reaches your Inbox) load these tracking pixels before the message is delivered to the recipient. So the sender might think the message was opened but it wasn’t opened by a human – it was the email service that “opened” it.

3 – It’s going to get worse

A new capability in Microsoft Office 365 (which has >70% enterprise market share) “clicks” on the links in an email message to test if it is an unsafe URL before the message is delivered. This artificially inflates click metrics. Marketing campaigns look like they are performing very well and SDRs might think prospects are very engaged but the reality might be very different.

4 – Just in case you do care about GDPR

Now there’s one more thing (email interaction data) to worry about and make sure your email tracking provider has a way for you to be compliant.

 

A quick test that you can run on your own if you use an email automation (marketing automation or inside sales automation tool) to see if your metrics are getting impacted is to test the timestamps on emails sent and clicks coming from the same target company. If you see several people from the same domain “click” on your emails at exactly the same time, most likely it was their email protection service and not real humans. And if

 

So what to do if you want to measure engagement without link tracking?

Use Google Analytics. That’s what we do as we’ve found that to be the most reliable way. I’ll explain in another post how we do it.

Email tracking is not free, it comes at a steep cost – either by sending your messages to spam or mis-reporting and giving you a false sense of email engagement.

 

The one person that every Sales & Marketing leader cares about is the CEO.
Every project and initiative is started with the goal of getting concrete results that are worth sharing with the CEO to show how it impacted business.

A recent Harvard study identified 4 things that set successful CEOs apart.

If you want to please your CEO or want him/her to recognize your work, you should think and act like your CEO. Here are two things worth learning:

Super CEOs act with speed.
They make decisions because they know that the cost of doing nothing might exceed the cost of failure. Sales & Marketing leaders should act swiftly because the pace of business and market change is astounding. Every quarter lost in internal meetings and pondering has a cost. If your new projects could have grown business even by 0.5%, that’s a significant number.

Super CEOs act with skinny data.
They don’t act simply on intuitions but they don’t wait for 7 quarters either.
The cost of getting the most-perfect dataset about sales, marketing and customers is not worth it. In many cases, it might even be unattainable before retirement. The technical term I use for this data is Minimum Viable Dataset. It was an inspiration from something we use heavily in the world of Startups & Product Development called Minimum Viable Product.

Growth-minded leaders exhibit hunger for what they can change this fiscal year and are willing to act differently based on data even if it’s a mid-flight correction. The changing landscape in every industry will render fixed, 12-month plans ineffective (and it’s happening all around us).

The ‘Invisible Pipeline’ video led to a very pertinent question from Cedrick @ Microsoft — “how do you more effectively document these opps without prematurely bringing unnecessary attention to them?”.

Before answering the question, a small detour.

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There are three issues at stake here –

1) Time commitment (aka waste)

The time/energy spent in documenting the IP (Invisible Pipeline) activity. IP is usually 4x-6x of what will one day enter the visible pipeline (VP). There’s simply no time to document so much when only a fifth might become real.

2) Extra pressure to close

The risk of premature attention from management and the attendant pressure to fast-forward certain deals when not much is known about them.

3) Uncertainty

In most CRMs, you can’t even enter an opp without picking a close date. What most sellers do in real life when confronted with uncertainty around close date/value is they put the lead/opp in the IP instead of the VP. (I did that during most of my sales career too).

From management’s viewpoint the issues at stake are –

1. Are sellers doing enough prospecting to fill the future pipeline or are they just focused on closing deals already in the pipeline?
2. Are sellers working hard on what’s in the pipeline and how are they spreading energy across all the opps/accounts that matter?

Since most field sellers are not usually in the same office location as the manager, the space-time gap between the two sides is significant. This gap is less acute for inside sales teams but pretty significant for field sales teams.

Underlying all this is the fact that everyone including the CEO has a boss, and Sales Management needs to show their VPs if revenue goals will be attained or not.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — END DETOUR — — — — — — — — — — — —

I recommend breaking the problem into two parts which then help with metrics and measurement as well.

1 — Separate prospecting (lead gen) from Nurturing

It’s extremely important to prospect (contact new accounts or new people at existing accounts). A simple (numeric) metric can measure and report this for both sides. We use what we call an NNP (net-new prospecting) indicatorthat answers how much NNP is happening every week/month.

I truly believe that if management can see that enough prospecting is happening it reduces their Valium consumption. CRMs are too cumbersome to enter/measure this so automation is the key.

2 — Decouple progress at accounts with active opps vs those that don’t have an official one yet

This is already happening everywhere (hence, the term IP) so the challenge to address is how to document/report this without extra work and inviting scrutiny. A metric that autonomously captures and reflects account engagement independent of an opp in CRM addresses this. In its simplest form the most important question is how deeply (and if) you are engaged?

Framing progress in terms of Engagement instead of the traditional opp lens in CRM is the trick. Read more about the framing effect here. Since CRMs aren’t set-up to view the world this way and management needs something tangible beyond just talking, it has been a headache for both sides. It doesn’t have to be that way and there already are companies that are solving the problem with this pragmatic mindset.

Conclusion

IP (Invisible Pipeline) is big and significant. Sellers need help with the IP but can only share it if it doesn’t create more work and scrutiny. Simple metrics like the above can be measured automatically without any manual labor. These metrics can offer both sides (+ Marketing) something meaningful to work on/with. As many of my friends and former colleagues know, I left Microsoft to work on solving some of this with SalesTing 🙂

Great sales leaders understand that the goal is helping sellers exceed quota in a predictable manner. It’s better to acknowledge the existence of the IP, agree to some automatic, painless metrics and focus energy on real progress instead of asking for the un-achievable (and unreasonable) task of having everything entered as an opp in CRM.