The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

If you're looking to grow your business, prospecting is a crucial part of the process, as it allows companies to identify potential customers and clients and generate new business opportunities. However, many companies make mistakes when prospecting that can hurt their chances of success.

Let's talk about some of the most common mistakes companies make when it comes to prospecting and how to avoid them.

Email continues to be a very effective way to engage with prospects and clients. However, consider these facts (Source).

• In 2022 there were over 330 billion emails sent and received per day.
• That number is expected to be almost 350 billion per day in 2023
• The average person sends and receives 121 business-related emails per day. Remember, that’s an average. That amount can easily be doubled for an executive-level decision-maker.
• Just because an email is sent doesn’t mean it’s opened and read. The average open rate for businesses across all industries is just 18%.

Recently, I've had a few run-ins with bad email etiquette. Not just in a quick email thread from a co-worker (I'll admit, my email etiquette gets sloppy in this arena), but I've received emails from salespeople attempting to get me (the marketing manager) to subscribe to their software, utilize their platform, or allocate some of my budget to their product, and all had major email etiquette issues, misspelled my name, or included verbiage that clearly showed me we aren't on the same wavelength. I also received an email from a potential candidate for a freelance writer that included major grammatical mistakes... WHAT!?