Quarantine is often worse than spam because the intended recipient has no idea that the e-mail exists.

It’s always fascinating to see how previous experiences such as jobs and careers benefit you in unexpected ways.

So, I was quite pleased that my seemingly unrelated tech industry past was able to meaningfully contribute to being the Chief Sales Officer for Jeb Blount’s international training company, Sales Gravy.

My previous industry was selling IT Network Infrastructure, and it dealt heavily with network security.

E-mail was one of the most challenging attack vectors to secure, so many manufacturers of e-mail security products have very complex and over-correcting rules that frequently send legitimate e-mails into quarantine.

Quarantine is often worse than spam because the intended recipient has no idea that the e-mail exists.

At Sales Gravy, we teach that there are three fundamental things you MUST do to make e-mails an effective part of prospecting.

Your e-mail must:

• Get delivered.
• Get opened.
• Convert.

This article focuses on the first step: Your e-mail must get delivered.

The tie between my past and present showed up while teaching a class of tech-savvy sales folks as we were discussing how to leverage e-mail to supplement prospecting efforts.

There was trepidation in the room towards the idea of using plain e-mail instead of calling or just using social media, but I was able to navigate some of their technical concerns.

Here are five reasons e-mail filtering/security systems or savvy e-mail users will send e-mails to their death:

1. Your email uses links or URLs that direct the recipient to the wrong website or try to get them to access a third-party site that is separate from the email sender’s domain.

   Want to send a link? Great idea, but you may need to curate and nest those links within blogs or articles on your own company’s domain. Check out https://salesgravy.com/sales-articles/ for an example of how content is curated and nested so that the domain name stays the same as your e-mail domain. All articles and posts there keep the salesgravy.com domain which would match our @salesgravy.com e-mail address domain.

2. Your email asks for personal information like a social security number, bank account information, or credit card numbers.

   This one is easy.  Don’t do this….and if you get one of these yourself, delete it. No legitimate company will ever ask you this over e-mail.

3. Behavioral analysis has determined that when most people find an unexpected email in their inbox from a person, vendor, or company that they rarely or never deal with, they delete it – especially when they’re super busy.

   Jeb’s frameworks within Fanatical Prospecting teach us how to overcome the odds. Short, relevant subject lines. Familiarity. Multi-touch pursuit plans. There are ways to deal with this if we use proven frameworks.

4. The e-mail has typos, poor grammar, or incorrect information.

   I think you could agree that a good company won’t send dumb e-mails. I’m a grammar and spelling fanatic. I spend time reviewing important e-mails for spelling and grammar errors before they go out. I often let important e-mails sit in my draft folder for a few hours and then re-read them. Not only will this help get through filters, but it also helps establish that you are an articulate professional.

5. Your email address that they reply to is different from the address that actually sent the e-mail – even if it is close to the actual email address.

   From the perspective of security filtering appliances, this is another common sign of a phishing email. Phishing attacks often use this approach because it’s effective. But since you – I think I can safely assume – are NOT designing phishing attacks, how does this apply to prospecting efforts?

   Well, if you’re using your regular e-mail client to send e-mails, then it likely doesn’t – just make sure your reply-to address matches the sending e-mail address. However, if you’re using some type of CRM, marketing automation, prospecting application, etc. then you need to use best practices to avoid setting off filters; see your administrative guides for those.