One of the hardest parts of sales is understanding what’s happening in your sales pipeline. This challenge impacts every aspect of managing your sales process–how you prioritize, how you engage, and how you forecast. Consequently, any little tips or intel we can generate on where our prospects are in the buying process, the better.

Here’s one I came across the other day from one of Blue Sky Factory’s email marketing experts, Christopher Penn.

Here’s a short excerpt:

Last week I explored the idea that email is just as effective a sales tool as it is a marketing tool, if not more so. This week, let’s look at an idea from sales and how your email can play a powerful role in building more business.

One of the most effective ways to build business is to work with the prospects who are most ready to do business with you. Generally speaking, people who call or email you are far more ready to buy than someone engaged in an activity that has nothing to do with what you sell. Sometimes, however, people will start down an activity and forget what they were going to do along the way or decide to come back later and never do. That’s where a prospect recovery system is useful.

A prospect recovery system relies on basic click tracking to determine intent and readiness to buy by asking prospects where they are in their buying process. Virtually every email marketing system out there lets you track what’s clicked on in a message. By creating simple 1-click actions for subscribers to perform, you can determine intent with a minimum amount of effort on the part of your subscribers. Here’s how.

I want you to go to Chris’ blog post, on email marketing to sales opportunities to get the tip for two reasons:

1. It’s a great idea and he has some excellent data to support it in his post
2. You probably should read more of their stuff–email marketing is key to improving sales

Did you like learning more about how you can use email marketing to improve your sales results? If so, you’ll want to join the Better Closer newsletter there are some similar tips coming this month, exclusively to those members.