Q&A Write-up: January

Conveying Status through Email

Jan 31, 2024

Q&A’s happen once a month where I answer one of the paid subscribers questions and do a write-up answering it for the entire community.

This month’s question:

How did your Mentor train you on email responses in terms of high status?

1) How often do you check

2) How long do you take to reply

3) What if a client keeps asking you service questions (when you have a service team) how and when to reply.

I feel like one of biggest distractions is the daily reaction of email and the inbox, vs proactively targeting accounts, being on the phone, etc.

Any rules or guidelines that served you well?

I’ve come to regret nearly every time I rushed to respond to an email because of mistakes that could have been avoided had I just re-read my response and took my time.

My mentor always told me “Take your time.. Don’t rush. Slow down”

Being in a rush not only creates costly mistakes, but also raises your stress levels that *will* come out during your other sales activities.

Your prospects will sense it and get turned off by it.

I was also trained to take my time to respond via email so I can maximize these 4 “levers” of Status on email:

grammar / syntax
word choice
sentiment
response times (from buyer & seller)

Bonus: Your email signature (or lack thereof) is important too. i.e job title, pictures, format / structure

All of the above elicit social signals to the prospect.

Examples

A job title that says “Sales” vs “Business Development” or “GTM”.. “Sales” can give the impression the prospect is being “hunted” vs “Business Development” which conveys “collaboration”.. or “GTM” (Go to Market) which is also quite vague. Disarming the buyer begins before you ever open your mouth.
The prospect has a positive overall sentiment.. but has very long response times and uses wishy washy language signals they probably aren’t serious but are scared to hurt your feelings. So they rather give you the “Slow No”
Neutral sentiment + quick response times = Buyer is engaged

A lot of information can be gleaned from you (and the prospect) without ever having to say it outright simply by observing.

Over time, I eventually learned:

What social signals to look for
How to identify them
How to use them to make money
and how to deal with them to preserve Frame & Status

My advice to you is to do the same.

Start paying attention to the 4 social signals above in your own sales interactions.

Identify and Analyze the social signals at play.. think how to best tackle what’s in front of you.

Then don’t be afraid to experiment with different responses so you can learn.

Use my material to help shorten your learning curve.

It will be a lot of trial and error doing it on your own but you’ll learn a ton.

Answering your 3 questions directly:

1) How often do you check

Often.. but that doesn’t mean I’d invest the time to immediately respond.

I read the emails I got almost immediately (hard not to when you have work email on your phone) but then I often moved on to more important tasks.

If you find that checking your inbox often is distracting you from doing more important tasks, then try setting a couple small time blocks on your calendar to check email.

Create some separation on your calendar for your key tasks:

Prospecting
Sales calls
Follow ups / Email

2) How long do you take to reply

A few things influence my response times:

How high a priority achieving the ideal outcome of the interaction would be for me.
If I feel the Status Gap needs realignment then that will influence my response times.
If I’m engaged in higher priority tasks (like prospecting & running sales meetings) then that will naturally affect my response times too.
The time of day and how I’m feeling. I won’t respond to an email if my head is not in the game.

Get in the habit of conveying a vibe of non-neediness to your buyers.

The prospect has priorities and so should you.

And I guarantee reading / answering your email isn’t a high priority for them.

So unless the email truly requires an urgent response from you (it probably doesn’t) then I’d take my time because you (should) have other tasks that are higher priority.

For me personally, I’d often “chew on” my potential response randomly throughout the day. But I won’t hit “send” unless I’ve had time to simulate their potential response to my potential response and assess the next move forward.

This is an energy intensive process and sometimes I won’t respond for a day or 2 because I need the energy and head space to really think about my next response. If the stakes are high, I can’t afford to f*ck up.

Chad note: It’s often easier responding to an email after you’ve ran a few sales meetings and had a few prospecting conversations. Your inhibition is lower and you care less. Especially if you had a good day.

2nd Chad note: Take advantage of times throughout the day where you’re at your most creative. You can craft your response during these times and hit “schedule send” for a later time to maximize the response time lever IYKYK

3) What if a client keeps asking you service questions (when you have a service team) how and when to reply.

You use the word “client” so are these paying customers?

If so, then why are you so involved in post-selling stuff? Do you have a customer success / account management team? They should be the ones handling service questions / requests.

Now if “client” means “prospect” then that is a different story.

If you see there’s a lot of back and forth surrounding service and the technical details of what you sell, then try saying something like:

🐲: Hi John, it seems like we didn’t address all of your questions / concerns on our last meeting. Since that’s the case, I believe the best use of time would be to coordinate another phone call and loop in our service team.

Schedule the meeting then make a request:

🐲: We’re set for [date/time].. if there are any additional questions / concerns can you take note of them and we’ll tackle everything on that call? Thanks!

The idea is to get the conversation off of email and onto a phone call so you can knock everything out in one meeting instead of going back and forth via email for days/weeks.

The second idea here is to show them you are busy and don’t have time for BS.. in a subtle & nice way of course 😉