You’ve got a great idea for a prospect. What’s the best way to communicate it?

Photo by Jeanette Dietl

I know. You’re crazy busy.

Between prospecting, internal paperwork, make-goods, and that new initiative corporate just dumped on you, there aren’t enough hours in the day.

So when you’ve got something big to propose to a client, email looks awfully tempting.

You could meet in person with them. But that means getting in the car, driving across town, and cooling your heels in the reception room before you get 15-20 minutes to explain the whole thing.

The other option: email. Attach the Powerpoint to the message, press “Send”, and call them later to make sure they got it. Email’s fast, it’s easy, and you don’t have to pay for gas or parking.

Think twice before you hit “Send.”

A study by Professors Mahdi Roghanizad (Western University) and Vanessa K. Bohns (Cornell) found that an in-person appeal was 34 times as persuasive as an email.

The researchers instructed 45 participants to each ask 10 people to complete a brief survey. There were 450 requests in all.

One group made the request by email, and the other group made the “ask” face-to-face. They used identical scripts.

Both groups were asked to predict in advance how successful they’d be. Both groups expected to persuade about half their prospects to complete the task.

The Results

The “face to face” group had a 71.5% “close” rate. 

The emailers were…let’s just say overestimated their abilities when they made their predictions. In real life they persuaded only 2.1% of their prospects to complete the task. 

To review:

“Face to face” persuaded seven out of ten. Email converted less than one. 

As Vanessa Bohns put it in Harvard Business Review, 

You need to ask six people in person to equal the power of a 200-recipient email blast.

It’s interesting that the emailers expected to do much better. Bohns has this explanation:

Why do people think of email as being equally effective when it is so clearly not? In our studies, participants were highly attuned to their own trustworthiness and the legitimacy of the action they were asking others to take when they sent their emails. Anchored on this information, they failed to anticipate what the recipients of their emails were likely to see: an untrustworthy email asking them to click on a suspicious link.

Indeed, when we replicated our results in a second study we found the nonverbal cues requesters conveyed during a face-to-face interaction made all the difference in how people viewed the legitimacy of their requests, but requesters were oblivious to this fact.

Other reasons email may be less effective:

• Those who read it may not read it closely. Busy clients may glance at the screen while multitasking, misinterpreting or completely missing important points you tried to convey.
• Your personality is missing. Text on the page can never convey the thought, enthusiasm and passion you put into your proposal.
• It’s easily ignored. Prospects get dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of emails every day. It’s easy for them to scroll past yours or delete it without reading it.

There may be times in-person just won’t work — not enough time, lack of client availability, or distance.

In those cases, you can try be “face-to-face” through the power of online video. 

• You can present your proposal online with a service like Zoom. With a webcam and a little bit of practice, you can let your client see your face and hear your voice…and have some control over the way they consume the content. 
• Record a screencast of your presentation, upload it to YouTube, and email them a link. This is less effective than a “live” web presentation because you lose the ability to have a real-time conversation. But it does transmit some of your enthusiasm and personality.One way to make this a bit more effective is to call the client on the phone after sending the email. Tell them you just want to make sure the link is working properly, and ask them to click on it while you’re on the phone. This way, you know they at least watched the beginning.
• Use video email to cut through the email clutter and deliver your message with your face and your voice. There are several paid video email services out there — I am partial to BombBomb.

All three of these options will give you better results than a text-only email. 

But if you can carve out the time and have the access, nothing beats the persuasive power of an in-person conversation. The one thing your prospect can’t ignore is a human body in their office — your body. 

If you need to persuade… really persuade…a face-to-face presentation beats email 34 to 1. 

Get your fingers off the keyboard and your butt behind the wheel.

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