GDPR is a legal regulation by the EU, designed to better protect the citizens personal data. It is not designed to kill all sales and marketing related activities, but there are some adjustments that need to be made, in order to be fully compliant. And since the fines for not being compliant are hefty, it will be better to safe than sorry and take any precaution necessary.
We at Qualifier.ai therefore urge all of our users (and non-users for that matter) to read the following guide closely, in order to be safe from repercussions while still being able to increase sales and crush your goals.
Legitimate Interest
There are six different acceptable reasons for processing data under GDPR, where the one relevant for outbound sales is Legitimate Interest. This is - to keep it simple - that the offer being presented to the prospect has to be relevant to them, in order for you to process the data. So it is important to explain in the beginning of the email why your particular offering would be suited for the prospect. In our emails, for example, we open with this (assuming that the recipients name is John and is the head of sales at Facebook):
I saw that you were running the sales team at Facebook and figured that this could be of interest for you. We've built a product that automates prospecting and could help you increase the number of leads contacted while keeping the quality high.
With Qualifier.ai, you will always be able to see the next upcoming 50 prospects that the system is about to reach out to. So make sure to go through that list, and if you see a prospect that you don’t want to contact - make sure to remove them from the list in order to ensure that the prospects receiving your emails, all will have legitimate interest to hear your pitch.
What to include in an email
There are a few new things that you need to add in the body and/or signature of your email under GDPR, in order to be fully compliant.
Who are you?
You should add your office address, your name and email address and which company you are representing. We recommend that you have this in your signature. You can set up your signature in profile settings.
Privacy Policy
One other crucial thing to add, is to link to your companies privacy policy. If you don’t have one, make sure to get one ASAP. For reference, you can read our privacy policy here. However, please make sure with your team what your specific privacy policy is, and link it. This is not a one-size-fits-all thing, all companies will have different privacy policies.
We can not stress enough how important it is to have a link for the privacy policy in place. This can be in the signature, or in the body of the email, but it has to be there in order for everything to be compliant.
Ability to opt out
It’s important for the prospects to being able to opt out, but do you have to add an unsubscribe link? Actually, you don’t! As long as the prospect gets the chance to respond and say that they are not interested in your service (and that you then remove them from your database) that’s all it takes. A phrase such as “Do you think this could be of interest of you?” or “are you the right person to talk about this with?” and then add “if not, feel free to hit reply to this email and let me know that you’d like to opt out, and I will do so right away”.
As soon as a prospect answers in Qualifier, the system notes that and opts them out from future emails from the senders’ company automatically.
If you prefer to actually provide an opt-out link, you can do that via Qualifier.ai as well. All you have to do is to add the following line of code to the template or signature, and we’ll take care of the rest.
<a href="[opt-out-url]">click here to opt out</a>
This will allow your prospects to opt out to all Qualifier.ai clients. You can also, of course, add your own companies’ opt-out link if you already have one in place.
Conclusion
GDPR is great thing for sales people, and will help reduce the “spam” tactics sometimes employed. It might seem like a lot of work to be compliant, but the truth is that with a few tweaks to your current process, you can be sure to be fully compliant, both if you use Qualifier.ai and if you don’t.
Qualifier.ai will always be GDPR compliant, so you can always be completely safe using us. It is hard for smaller companies to have the resources to get into these new legislations, so just let us deal with that headache while you do what you do best: sell.
If you have any other questions, feel free to reach out at [email protected].