Opening your inbox first thing in the morning is like opening a pandoras box of To-Dos from your 5 year old. Important – to them. Your inbox also has rabbit holes that waste time and of course, cold outreach emails that can turn a foul mood to a surly mood faster than a cat running through hell wearing kerosine britches.
I don’t open my inbox until I have accomplished three activities.
- Coffee. It is an activity when you are your own barista. 2 to3 cups.
- Input. Read or listen to a book or podcast that promotes thinking. Hence, no social media or news apps.
- Output. Usually writing, rewriting, or creating something for my business, not a client, e.g. this blog.
Email is useful for most of us. But it can be like a blackhole to our productivity and effectiveness. Even with diligence, email is full agendas from other people, and often people you don’t know. Cold emails!
I conducted an experiment last week. I counted the number of cold outreach emails I received. I counted the number of cold emails deleted without reading past the subject line. I also counted the number of cold emails engaged. This experiment did not include my personal email account.
I manage my own inbox. It is not open all day. I batch email 5 to 7 times a day; down from 10 in the past. The time frame I gather the data was from a Sunday morning to a Saturday evening.
Total Cold Outreach emails received – 287.
Deleted Cold Outreach emails without reading past the subject line – 211
Read full email and followed the call to action – 1. Yep, one. This was not a scientific quantitative study by any measure. Yet, my ample gut tells me that it was a typical week. A holiday was not part of the week. Valentine’s Day would have skewed the numbers.
My purpose is to elevate the sales profession. Prospecting is part of what salespeople do that is cringy and just plain awful. You can argue that some of the 287 emails were not pure sales outreach, fine. Some were really bad marketing. If you use cold outreach to prospect, keep reading.
I am not going to share the crappy emails. I deleted them, and I don’t want to embarrass anyone. You can see them in your inbox. The irony is the email’s subject was the title of their eBook. I downloaded and read it. The title was “How to Write Cold Emails That Don’t Get Deleted.”
Use the link to grab the eBook from REEL Axis. I don’t have an affiliation with the company. The value that they provided could benefit everyone’s inbox, and elevate the salespeople. The eBook provides 9 tips, and examples of execute the tip.
There are two tips that resonated with me. 1) Write attention grabbing subject lines. 2) Provide value to the reader BEFORE you ask for something. This is critical because the cold prospect has no idea who you are, so you must create credibility. This requires some creativity and humanization of AI. I am not going to poo poo AI. It is a tool in the toolbox. Let’s be clear – you can’t use a hammer to fix everything!
I want to add to the eBook’s message, and go a bit deeper. The reason those two ideas resonated with me is important for you to understand. The words landed with what was going on in my brain.
Your sales messaging, must enter into the conversation your prospect is already having-with themselves. When you can tap into the conversation because you understand their fears and desires, it is magic. The story matters. The words matter a lot.
My podcast, Sales and Cigars, has several episodes with my friend Matt Anderson. We discuss this concept reaching into the mind of your prospects in several episodes including this one. The critical idea is to know the words your prospects use to describe their fears and desires. My desire is to help business owners and sales professionals. I believe in making deposits of value with my prospects before an ask. The eBook added value and that landed with me. I also happened to be thinking about crappy cold emails.
The psychology around messaging is deep and wide. A good source of information is the podcast episode above. Another, is Matt’s Book – First Fix Your Message. Matt’s book is THE marketing manual for a business owner to understand the important concepts that create great messaging. Once you understand the ideas, you think about your products from the prospect’s point of view – not yours. It also helps you help your marketing professionals. Matt and I have a semi-secret project in the final stages that will fix your messaging for your sales team!
