3 Tips For Sales Prospecting Emails
Posted by
Chris Lang on Thu, Dec 16, 2023 @ 03:22 PM
Hello Mr. Lang,
I’m writing you today to talk about xyz company and what we do to help sales directors increase their………DELETE.
I get so many emails everyday that I delete by the end of the first sentence because they sound like they were written by a person with no soul. It is as if some giant brain held in a glass case in a marketing office pushes out a paragraph every week and that paragraph gets put into outlook and sent through cyberspace to 40,000 people at once. It’s amazing to me that anyone makes a sale off of them. Here are a couple of things to eliminate/try that may get you an increased open and respond rate on your emails.
- Leave out the 9 syllable words: Don’t challenge your reader to get through the email. Some people like to crow bar cheesy industry terms and big words into sentences just to make it sound like they know what they are talking about. In my opinion, it has a reverse effect. I end up reading through the email until I get to the word that I don’t understand and then I get angry at myself for having the reading skills of an ape. I’ll teach you to confuse me with your big words I say as I press the “mark as spam” tab. Say exactly what you mean in simple terms. Here is who I am, here is why I sent you this email and here is what I hope to get out of it.
- Keep it tight! When it comes to sales, one well positioned line is a lot better than 4 paragraphs worth of info dump. I think a lot of people in the inside role think that the detailed, nitty gritty in the email is what wins the heart of the reader. They think they have one whole page to convince the prospect to call them and they get in as many company facts as possible in that page. I think that I have one or two lines to do the same. Much like the giant useless word factor, I think that overly detailed emails have the exact opposite effect of what you are trying to achieve. First off, I don’t want read a thesis on your company. Your prospects, who are limited on time and often reading the email on a handheld are the same way. Keep your emails short and to the point. It may look rude to you when you type it, but it is courteous to the reader as they can skip having to scour your email to get the meat out of it. If the reader does somehow get through a long email with all the info about your company, why would they respond to you? They already have all the information they think they need. Show them a preview, not the whole movie.
- Do not be a kiss up. There is a line in between showing respect and groveling. If the content of your email isn’t strong enough to stand on its own, don’t send it. Telling your prospect that you know how busy they are and how much work they have to do isn’t going to get you past the guard into a sales call. If anything, showing them that they are so important, more important than you in fact, sets you up for an awful sales effort should the prospect respond. There is nothing worse than running through a sales cycle with a prospect that thinks they can bully you around because they are higher on the food chain than you. You want to sell as a peer, not as a desperate sales person.
My personal opinion is to write as you would speak and be as direct as possible. If you want to meet with someone to see if there is a fit, then politely ask them that. Tell them who you are, why you are emailing and what your intensions are. Don’t beat around the bush, don’t impress the prospect with big words and don’t tell the prospect how awesome they are just to get a lead. I know there is a lot of research to effective email writing, but I think sometimes it’s a lot of over kill. I’ll take the simple “here is who I am, why I am calling, can we talk about it?” approach every time.