Scalable email templates that feel like personalized one-on-one messages

A Secret Every Great Salesperson Needs to Know

By 6 Comments

sales secret

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Trish Bertuzzi, the President and Chief Strategist of The Bridge Group.  If you don’t already know her, Trish is a highly respected and incredibly knowledgeable inside sales expert with more than 30 years of experience as a salesperson, managing sales teams and consulting B2B companies on improving their sales strategies.  The American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (AA-ISP) has consistently named Trish one of the “Top 25 Most Influential Inside Sales Professionals” for four years in a row.

In one of my most interesting sales interviews I’ve had so far, Trish and I discuss important inside sales challenges, and what sales executives can do to proactively resolve them. Topics discussed range from product market fit issues to what most companies miss when trying to attract women to join their sales force. Join our lively conversation and see how your company can tackle major sales snafus and share successful sales strategies with proven results.

Here’s what we covered in this interview:

  • 03:59  how to entice talented women to join your salesforce and avoid the turn-off mistakes so many companies are making
  • 05:41  if you’re relying on your technology to engage customers, here’s a major shift to your thinking that will increase sales
  • 06:40  the powerful sales benefit that resonates with prospects’ emotions much deeper than simply “faster and cheaper”
  • 13:10  the secret every great inside sales rep needs to know about successful sales conversations
  • 16:20  best practices for quickly training highly successful sales teams
  • 25:37  try this method instead of spamming your prospects with emails they won’t read
  • 32:59  hoping to break into the European market?  don’t ignore these considerations or you will fail at expanding into new markets

..and more! Listen to the rest of the interview to hear other advice for ramping up your sales team and optimizing your outbound email campaigns.

For more information on Inside Sales, check out these free resources from the Bridge Group.

Books mentioned in the interview:

-The Must-React System: User’s Guide to Prospecting C-Suite Executives by Kraig Kleeman

-Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com by Aaron Ross

-Agile Selling: Get Up to Speed Quickly in Today’s Ever-Changing Sales World by Jill Konrath

Blog mentioned:  

-Inside Sales Experts

11 Things You Must Know to Succeed With Inside Sales

By 9 Comments

inside sales success

I take dozens of consultation calls for cold email critiques and inside sales consulting every week.

Although the challenges and needs of my prospective clients vary depending on the size of the organization and the stage their company is at, many of the questions I hear often repeat themselves.

I recently held a webinar about cold emails that had more than 325 questions during the Q&A session, many of which could not all be answered live. I picked 11 of the most relevant questions to respond to, based on how frequently they were asked, and how important they are to running successful outbound email campaigns.

Here are the 11 questions with my answers:

1) What’s a good cadence for sending cold emails?

I recommend sending 8 emails approximately 4 days apart, but anything between 3-7 days apart is okay. I usually avoid sending email campaigns on Mondays or any Fridays right before holiday weekends, but it depends on your audience (test everything and see what works for you!). If your inside sales team is also cold calling or sending messages with Linkedin InMail, Tweets, or other forms of communication, you might want to vary that a bit, but generally 4 days apart is an effective cadence.

2) Why should I send every prospect 8 emails and not just a few?

After sending millions of cold emails in the last decade, I can say with confidence (and data) that about 1/3 of your total responses will come from emails 5-8. So if you’re only sending 4 emails (or less) you’re losing out on at least 1/3 of your potential leads. Sending 8 emails allows you to be persistent while also testing a variety of value propositions mixed with different emotional appeals to see what resonates best with your prospects.

3) How can I send a prospect 8 emails without it sounding too spammy?

Every message you send should add unique value to your prospects. Messages start feeling obnoxious and spammy really fast when you start repeating the same redundant message over and over. Sending one email followed by 7 more emails that all say “Hey, I’m following up” isn’t doing you or your prospects any favors.

Each of the cold emails I write for myself and clients focuses on a unique idea or benefit. Before you start writing a single email, you should brainstorm and make a list of your product/services’ benefits, as well as your prospects’ priorities and pain points. This helps you plan your email campaign and avoid redundancy.

4) Why is it important to use an email tool when doing “cold emails” that utilizes mail merge instead of sending through something like Mailchimp, Marketo or Aweber?

Your cold email campaigns won’t be successful if they don’t look like they’re a one-on-one conversation. Mass emails immediately signal to your prospects that you didn’t take the time to send them a thoughtful message, which doesn’t incentivize them to make an effort to respond and schedule a call with you.

Tools like Mailchimp, Marketo, Aweber, and others are meant for used for sending mass marketing emails to people who already opted into your list, and therefore those individuals will be more familiar with you and interested in your business. If they sign up for your newsletter or webinar, they expect you will send them emails with valuable information, and so it doesn’t matter as much that these emails look mass.

The recipients of your cold email don’t know you and don’t care about your business, so they won’t take the time to respond to an email that looks like it was sent to 100,000 people. Sending mass emails with tools like Mailchimp make your email headers look mass (“sent from mailchimp.com”), whereas sending mass emails through a mail merge still resembles a personal email request. Mail merges will always inbox better (assuming you have your mail server configured correctly and that your domain hasn’t been blacklisted for spamming) and get more opens/responses than mass marketing emails.

5) What’s the best way to start a cold email?

You only have a few seconds to grab someone’s attention, so your first sentence needs to hook your prospects in immediately. The best cold emails usually start with compelling sentences that capture the prospect’s emotions, or intriguing questions that start thoughtful conversations.

EXAMPLE 1: “I have an idea that could potentially 3x {!Company}’s qualified leads that worked well for Box.”

EXAMPLE 2: “How are you generating qualified leads for {!Company}? Is your current response rate for cold email campaigns above or below 5%?”

6) Should I include URLs to click on in my cold email?

Be careful about including URLs in your cold emails, especially early on in the sequence. While links to great guidebooks and videos might help educate your prospects on your business, they often deter them from responding to your email because they feel like they already have everything they need from that collateral.

You also need to be careful about heavily relying on links to deliver the “meaty information” to your audience. Your prospects will never click your links if you don’t have persuasive calls to action to entice them to click on those links. If you leave all the meat of your pitch inside a piece of collateral, but neglect include something alluring in the email copy, that collateral will never be seen.  

7) Should my cold emails have HTML or only be plain text?

Plain text! There should be absolutely no HTML or design in your cold emails. Cold emails are supposed to feel like individual one-on-one requests sent from a human, which means NO HTML/design! Just simple plain text like you would send to one of your friends or colleagues in a normal email.

Don’t do it!!!

8) How can I prevent or reduce the risk of being “blacklisted” as a spammer?

Make sure you are sending cold emails to a very targeted list of qualified potential buyers. You should only be reaching out to people that you genuinely think you can add value to. The “throwing spaghetti on the wall and hoping it sticks” approach of spamming 10,000+ unqualified leads is almost a sure way to get your domain blacklisted. Building a great list doesn’t happen magically. It takes time and money, but if you aren’t willing to do this you shouldn’t be sending cold emails. Also, make sure your cold emails actually add value to your prospects and aren’t just obnoxious/self-serving.

9) What’s the difference between B2B and B2C emails?

B2B emails usually go out to a much smaller and more targeted audience. With B2C emails, you generally don’t have much information about the individual, unless you have spent a lot of time and money on generating a list. With the exception of Nigerian scammers, B2C emails rarely look or feel like personal one-on-one requests.

While B2B emails are rarely thought of as fun or sexy, you need to remember that you’re still emailing living and breathing human beings, and so your copy should be enticing. When sending B2B emails, you have the advantage of being able to collect and leverage extensive data on your prospects (first name, company name, location, industry, etc) so make sure to leverage these fields in your cold emails. Generally the more you personalize your emails to feel like highly relevant one-on-one requests, the more responses you will get.

10) Why shouldn’t I open a cold email with “Dear Sir or Madam”?

Using excessively formal language like “Dear Sir” doesn’t sound natural or human. When you see that type of language you generally assume that you’ve just received an email from a mass marketer or someone who’s first language probably isn’t English.

Elementary school taught us that you start a letter with “Dear” and other formal rules, but this isn’t how people communicate in email in 2015. Unless you’re emailing the queen of England, keep your emails more informal and conversational. As a general rule, try to use first and second person (“you” and “I”) instead of third person (“they”). It sounds more natural and will warm up your prospects better.

11) How can I make my Calls to Action stronger and get more responses?

Your Calls to Action should always have an incentive for your prospects to respond. You need to entice them with value if you want to get a response. That benefit shouldn’t require buying your product either, but something they will immediately receive because they have a call with you. Your prospects’ time is valuable, so you need to convince them that you won’t waste it. (And asking your prospects for a “demo” is not exciting, unless you are selling the Oculus Rift!)

A great call to action could be: “When do you have 20 minutes so I can give you a few strategies for doubling your qualified leads?”

For more tips about inside sales best practices and creating laser-focused cold emails, check out the Salesfolk Cold Email Mastery Course. (The first lesson is free and has actionable advice as well as real examples to help you write better cold emails that people will actually respond to.)

3 Copywriting Secrets For Enticing Customers

By 2 Comments

Does your copy capture your prospects’ attention?  Do you know to the difference between writing for a blog and writing web page copy?

These costly writing mistakes will cause your  readers to totally ignore or quickly click out of your copy.

So how do you transform your writing from bland to laser-targeted content that sparkles?

Join me as I interview copywriter extraordinaire Henneke Duistermaat, writing instructor and CEO of Enchanting Marketing, as we discuss some of the inside secrets of copywriting.

Henneke Duistermaat is an “irreverent copywriter and marketer” on a mission to “stamp out gobbledygook” in writing.  She’s written two (5-star rated) books on writing and blogging, and has been an influence in the way I write.

Covered in this interview:

  • 00:30  how to write engaging headlines that will increase conversions
  • 02:36  why different kinds of content requires different writing styles
  • 06:54  where to find specific ideas for enticing your prospects
  • 09:45  a best practice for visualizing your audience as you write (this is an often-skipped step that will make a BIG difference in your writing)
  • 22:27  an important editing secret that makes the difference between whether your copy is gold or garbage
  • 23:27  best practices for final edits
  • 30:50  my three ingredients for delicious and enticing copy
  • ..and more! Watch it!


Books Mentioned in this Video:

Examples of Sparkling Copy:

  1. J Peterman
  2. ManCrates
  3. Apple
  4. Dropbox
  5. Evernote

For more copywriting advice for improving your cold emails, check out Copywriting Secrets for Crafting Seductive Cold Emails.

Why InsightSquared’s Emails Aren’t Very Insightful

By Leave a Comment

How much time do you spend thinking about following up with your sales prospects?

Do you take the time to create thoughtful and unique responses to reach back out to your prospects, or do you just mindlessly send them canned garbage?

Most follow up emails are awful, and belong in the trash.

When talking to prospective clients and giving sales advice, I’ve noticed that salespeople often start off strong with their first email, but quickly flatline after the first or second email.

However, our own cold email campaigns actually tend to see almost as many responses in touch points 5-8 as the first 4 emails of our sequence.

So what’s the difference between most follow up email sequences and mine?

Why are mine getting 2-3x more responses than theirs?

I have a theory about what’s happening.

All salespeople have heard the classic “lesson of persistence,” and will usually send follow up emails, which is a great start. However, most sales guys/girls focus all their efforts on their first-touch email, but treat the rest of the touches in their sequence as an afterthought, with no new ideas or angles.

Too many follow up emails look like clones of each other. And I don’t just mean that sales people are all using the same crummy follow up templates; the emails in their own sequences are so repetitive that each of their touches actually look the same too.

That’s because everyone is copy and pasting the same crappy canned templates that someone wrote decades ago, before we had so many countless sales tools at our fingertips.

Persistence is important, but hammering your prospects over the head with the same obnoxious, “Hey, I’m following up” message won’t win you any deals, and becomes really annoying pretty fast.

Your last touch point is important as the first cold email you send, so if you’re going to bother sending multiple cold emails, put some thought into every email you send out.

Please don’t be the guy/girl who sends incessant and repetitive cold emails that add zero value and no ideas, or you will probably become the victim of our next cold email critique.

The last few weeks my Marketing Manager Haley has been getting hounded by emails from InsightSquared. We like InsightSquared. We even love their blog and regularly are excited to see their new content, but their follow up emails could use some work.

You guessed it: InsightSquared is the victim of this week’s cold email critique.

Cold Email Mistake #1: Sending the Wrong Message to the Wrong Person

Haley got this email from InsightSquared:

Subject: Wednesday Lunch

Hi Haley,

Have any plans for lunch on Wednesday?

If not I’d love to show you a live demo of InsightSquared – the fastest to implement and most user-friendly BI tool on the market. You’ll have a chance to discuss your sales process with one of our Salesforce.com experts and see how InsightSquared addresses the limitations of native SF reporting.

If lunch doesn’t suit happy to arrange another time. It would be great to get your feedback on the tool and your thoughts on how InsightSquared might help your team.

Let me know a time that works and I’ll fire over an invite.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend and hopefully we’ll chat during the week.

Best,

The first problem with this cold email is that Haley’s not managing a sales team, so she’s not the ideal buyer persona for this product. Since she has no use for this product, they will probably never get a response from her, no matter how well their email’s written (although better writing might at least get them a friendly response).

When it comes to cold email campaigns, you need to think about quality over quantity.

Successful cold email campaigns target the right people with the right message.

Too many companies are tempted by the convenience of buying a cheap list of hundreds or even thousands of names, but sending emails to a list of random names is like trying to pin the tail on the donkey while blindfolded. Sure, you might get lucky and hit the target, but chances are you’ll just waste your turn swinging your arms about in the air.
Cold Email Sequence Pro Tip #1: Before you hit the send button, take the time to build a solid list of qualified leads.

Think about the people you’re targeting. Who’s your ideal buyer persona? Who can benefit the most from your product? What industry do these folks work in? What types of priorities do they have? What problems do they face on a daily basis and how can your product help solve those problems? The more you know about your ideal buyer persona, the more effective your cold email messages will be.

Cold Email Mistake #2: Asking for Too Much Too Soon

Cold emails are meant to be the start of a conversation with your prospects. Don’t feel the pressure to go for the big ask right off the bat. Asking for a demo before you’ve explained anything about your product is a huge turn off, like taking your pants off at the restaurant during our first date.

Remember, your prospects don’t know you, and probably haven’t even heard of your company before, so don’t get too greedy too fast. Take the time to develop a relationship before you ask them to invest their time and money with you. Giving your prospects the impression that you’re only in it for the quick sale will make your prospects run for the door to hit delete faster than those naked baby photos your mom is always posting online.

Once you’ve lost your prospects, it’s nearly impossible to win them back, so make sure you get it right the first time.

Cold Email Sequence Pro Tip #2: Your prospect want to feel like you understand them and their businesses. Instead of pushing for a demo or a sale in the first email, try engaging your prospects with a thought-provoking question that show you’re interested in their daily work.

Example: “How are you predicting {!Company}’s sales numbers for Q3?” or “I’m curious, do you feel {!Company}’s business intelligence tools user friendly, or are they clunky and overwhelming?”

These types of questions are more human and less salesy. Your prospects are more likely to respond when they can tell you’re taking a more genuine interest in their business.

Cold Email Mistake #3: No Clear Benefit Or Focus

Good Evening,

Haven’t heard back so wanted to see if we’re still on for tomorrow?

No worries if not – I usually try to escape for lunch myself! – but again happy to schedule another time that suits to connect. I’m conscious you may not be looking to evaluate tools at the moment but really just hoping to introduce InsightSquared and see if there is role we could play for your team down the road.

Let me know what suits.

Thanks,

The problem with this follow up email is that it’s completely void of any useful information.

I have no idea who’s reaching out to me, what the company he represents does, or what product he’s pitching me. I don’t have time to scroll through previous messages in order to piece together his message.

Don’t assume that your prospects will automatically know who you are, or make the effort to find out. Even if it’s the last email in your sequence, it might be the first time your prospects are paying attention to your message. Each email in your campaign needs to give your prospects a clear idea of who you are and how your business can help them. Your prospects aren’t going to respond unless they can see a clear benefit.

Just because it’s a follow up email, doesn’t mean that you don’t need to offer some type of value. Don’t rely on the lame and outdated “maybe you didn’t get my last email” approach. Instead, treat each email as it’s own unique message, adding new and interesting information.

Cold Email Sequence Pro Tip #3: Instead of listing out all your product’s features in bullet points, choose one benefit per email to focus your message on.

Example: ”I have a time-saving hack that could dramatically reduce the time you’re spending each week on {!Company}’s Salesforce reports used by companies like [Client A] or [Client B].”

If your value proposition is strong enough, there’s no need for long-winded lists of features or distracting graphics. All you need is a simple sentence that tells your prospects exactly how you can help improve their businesses.

Cold Email Mistake #4) Leaving Your Prospects with a Weak Impression

Heather,

Haven’t heard back so I imagine it’s best to hold off getting in touch for now – perhaps lunch was a bit forward !

Anyway enjoy your weekend and best of luck closing out the month/quarter.

Please reach out if you have any questions or would like to revisit this in July.

Best,

Your Call To Action is the last impression you will leave on your prospects.. If your CTA is weak or non existent, your prospects won’t see a reason they should respond.

This CTA is ineffective because doesn’t give me a reason to respond. How can I have questions when you haven’t told me anything about your product?

Simply asking for a demo or a phone call without giving anything in return doesn’t excite me. Your prospects will respond only when incentivize them to do so..

Cold Email Campaign Pro Tip #4: Strong CTAs move prospects to act by enticing them with something they desire or scaring them with something they fear.Make it worth it for them by clearly spelling out what they can gain in exchange by investing their time with you.

Example: {!First}, when do you have 10 minutes to talk? In exchange for your time, I’ll show you an easy way that you can pull pipeline revenue forecasts from {!Company}’s Salesforce.”

How to Send A Follow Up Cold Email That Doesn’t Suck

So now that you know what NOT to do in your followups, you’re probably wondering, “How do I write a cold email that rocks?”

I don’t have a magic answer to this because this really depends on your previous emails, which buyer personas you’re targeting, and what your value propositions are. However, I will say that your follow up email should have similar style and structure to your first email.

It needs to add value.

Focus on one idea/benefit.

Keep it short.

Write like a non-spammy human.

And be interesting.

If you’re stuck trying to think of what to write, go back to the drawing board and make a list of all your benefits, and what matters to your prospects. Each of your benefits or their pain points can be the roots of an idea for another cold email.

Here’s an example of one of our follow up emails we wrote for Ambition:

—

SUBJECT: how competitive is {!Company}’s sales team?

Hi {!First},

What are you doing to ensure {!Company}’s sales team maintains its competitive edge quarter over quarter?

We’ve helped companies like [Client A] and [Client B] increase and maintain their sales team’s numbers by implementing incentives across their sales funnel, and I believe the same concept could work for {!Company}.

When do you have time for me to share this quick idea with you?

Thanks,

If you’d like to hear more advice about how to write your follow up emails (and cold emails and general), register for My next webinar on Wednesday June 24 at 10am PDT with the brilliant and entertaining Lincoln Murphy. I’ll share a centuries old trick that will help you create cold email template that will knock your prospects’ socks off every time.

We’re also launching our new cold email guide next week on the same day, Copywriting Secrets for Seductive Cold Emails, so stay posted for more cold email advice and goat memes.

Until then, happy emailing!

Be a goat, not a sheep!

We always strive to create captivating copy that is unique, actionable and adds value to prospects’ lives.

Want help with your cold emails? Request a call: