“Email” Wasn’t The Problem; His Strategy Was…

“The phone’s not ringing.”

That’s what my client told me when he said his email campaign wasn’t working.

He’s a commercial real estate broker. He sent property notices to prospects. Each email linked to a flier and prospectus.

It wasn’t generating warm prospects and sales. So, for him, it meant “email marketing doesn’t work.”

Before I could offer any advice, I pulled up the stats on his last email.

Twenty-two people had clicked the link.

Twenty-two.

I asked him what he’d done with those 22 people.

Blank stare.

So I gave him a simple two-step plan:

1) Send a follow-up email to the clickers that invites them to tour the property.

2) Call them the next day to follow-up on the invitation.

He did it.

Five people scheduled tours.

Two made offers.

He sold the property for more than he expected.

Now he tracks every click and runs this playbook consistently:

Market broadly → Track who’s interested → Follow up with interested prospects → Follow up the follow-up

Digital marketing tools — email, social media, all of it — they haven’t changed how B2B salespeople actually close deals.

You still need the phone. You still need the face-to-face. You still need to grind through the details with a real human being.

My client was blasting emails and waiting for buyers to call him up begging to sign contracts.

When that didn’t happen, he declared email dead.

But email wasn’t the problem.

It was working perfectly — as a way to surface the interested, to separate the curious from the cold, to hand him a short list of people worth calling.

He just didn’t know what to do with what it gave him.

If your business closes deals through personal relationships — phone calls, meetings, handshakes — email isn’t going to change that. It’s not supposed to.

Email won’t close the deal. You will.

But email will tell you who’s interested.

You can’t call all 2,200 people in your database. You can call the 22 who clicked. And if you do, chances are one of those conversations ends with a sale.