LinkedIn is a fantastic way to get a hold of somebody. The challenge is you just have to get them to accept a connection request, but on the flip side of that, getting a hold of somebody via email, there's no real gatekeeper keeping you from that. Your phone is essentially the notification center for your computer.
And so, it's where you are eight times more likely to have your first impression when you email somebody. (upbeat music) The worst email outreach blunders I see typically have one of the following things going wrong. They are poorly formatted.
They are too long. Cliches, things like, "I hope this finds you well. " So when you think about the formatting of those paragraphs and how it all lays out, you have to think about the white space that you provide.
If you're in Gmail and you start to see there's like three, four lines of text within your editor it's probably a bad sign. You can always send it to yourself on your mobile phone and just give it a look to make sure it looks like you want it to. The other thing to do is read it out loud.
You'll start to see interesting issues within the writing, where it just doesn't necessarily come out cleanly. And that'll give you some opportunities to come in and edit. The last step that I always encourage is run a quick eye scan test.
Read through it as though you are the recipient on the other end. Clean up the text. Look for things like commas, unnecessary words that we typically put into our phrasing and our words.
If your eyes get stuck at any place or you stop absorbing information, your prospect will too. And so you can come back through those specific areas and see if you can clarify that writing. Some things that I've found to be particularly helpful when you find an area where your eyes just kind of glaze over it, add a word like surprise to your message.
If I say, "Our customers were surprised to find out they were missing out on two times the amount of positive response," that word surprise reengages the reader while they're scanning through it so they'll actually absorb more of that information. Some other things that I see folks do wrong when it comes to cold outreach. Cliches, things like, "Just wanted to follow-up.
" "Bumping this to the top of your inbox. " "Do you have 20 minutes to chat? " And then, oh, my favorite, "Here's my calendar link to book at your convenience," in a cold email.
Those things are basically giant red flags that your prospect picks up on because when they're going through and they're reading email, they're actually not reading email. The average amount of time that they spend reading your message is around 11 seconds. They're basically trying to answer the question of what is this?
When I'm writing a cold email, everything's framed around them. It's something you observe, a challenge that you think they might be having, and that's when you can start to bring into the conversation, "Here's what we've done to solve that problem before. Does that sound interesting?
" But what I see sellers do is they'll say, "Hey, would you be interested in learning more about how we help sellers 2X their positive response rate? " And that extra bit, you're muddying what you want with what you do. And you're much more likely to book a meeting by asking if a meeting is of interest than saying do you have 30 minutes to discuss this next week?
And it's because of that 30-minute sort of mental spam filter that that doesn't work as well. The other reason, it's a lot harder for me to go out of my inbox flow, go over to my calendar, see if that time works, come back, and then respond to you. We figured out that we just need to ask, "Is this a challenge for you?
" "Hey, is this interesting? " And then, just make a simple ask. When somebody shows they've taken the time to understand your current scenario, showcase that they've got to brain behind the person on the other end, the person is much more likely to want to engage.
Subject lines can tip off the reader entirely to this being a terrible email before they've even opened it. Think about if I email you, and I say something like, "Let's connect," as a subject line. No one really says that in their subject line.
Instead, I should use something like "Sales copy" or "Subject line", where it's super boring, super descriptive but also short. And the reason you want a short subject line is because you want to maximize the amount of preview text space that the reader can see. The preview text is the first few lines of your email that they'll see within their inbox before they even open it.
And so if you start with that observation within your writing, that observable truth, they'll actually know that you wrote a message for them, and you can baseline yourself against a 50% open rate and you'll stick to it every time. When you're thinking about how to test and how to improve, it's really important that you focus on both, but you test them independently. Once I find a good subject line that maximizes my open rate, then I'm going to go and focus on how I describe that observation, and I'll start to test and iterate on that.
(bright music) If somebody asks a question back about your product, after they respond to your cold email, and they're like, "Oh, that's interesting, how does it do that? ", record a video and send it to 'em. It's like the easiest thing you could do.
I don't need to jump on the phone with every single person. If you can use video to help provide visual example to provide a lot of the concreteness that is lacking when it comes to our writing it, it's such an effective tool for that. I'll just record a video and I'll say, "Hey, here's what we're doing.
Here's exactly, you know what I heard and based on what I heard, here's where you could be clicking within the product. Just showing is typically better than telling. When you record that video, make sure you stare into the camera so it looks like you're looking at them on the other end.
I see a lot of folks try to like write out a script and they're reading it, or they look at themselves in the camera while they're talking, and you can kind of see that in action. The last piece of advice I'd give when it comes to video within your prospecting is it needs to have that that context written around it, which explains what's within the video and why you put it together. And so you go back to that original observation.
You explain what it made you believe about their business, about their problems, their challenges, and then, "Hey, I recorded a video to show you how our product can help. " That is going to be super compelling. I think a lot of sellers fall into the trap of treating follow-up like a marketing funnel, where they send a long series of outreaches over a long stretch of time, spacing those things out.
Where my belief is our outbound, our outreach, since it's based off of a particular observation and a reason for being there, it should be more like a sprint, almost like a HIIT exercise. Where over a short window of time, within a 30-day window, maybe even within a 15-day window, you're having a short series of outreaches that are very focused and very pointed on that particular reason that you're having a conversation with them. What happens at the end of one of those is you let the prospect breathe.
You give it time until you either have a new reason to reach out, or you can lean on your marketing department who are running those marathons to run almost like a mini sprint on top of it. Where I could reach out two months later, and say, "Did you see the event that marketing put on? I thought you'd find it really interesting given some X, Y, Z reason.
" And then just point them back to the original resource. You can typically find something. If you're not finding something, you're probably not doing your job as far as educating yourself about your buyer and your market.
There's plenty of stuff that doesn't have to be from you. One of my favorite emails is to showcase somebody else's work. We have an email template where I actually point to the VP of Sales at Segment who wrote a blog post for Outreach.
And I say, "Hey, do you follow Outreach's blog? They brought in the VP of Sales at Segment to talk about how they scaled their company to a $3. 2 billion acquisition.
" There's these interesting pieces of info outside of what you and what your company are doing that you can sprinkle in across the the course of a year. It's not me just going in and trying to sell, it's me trying to be helpful. Who cares if it comes from a competitor?
Sometimes what you'll get as a response is, "Hey, aren't they a competitor? " In which case, you can say, "It's really valuable research that they've put out there, and I'm happy to share it. " Your job is to try to help the end prospect accomplish what it is that they are trying to accomplish.
(gentle music) The most important thing when you're prospecting is to make it about them and not yourself. The more you can make it about their problem, that's where you're going to find the most success. Even the best emails don't get responses sometimes, and that's okay too.
But yeah, at the end of the day, you just got to hit send. (laughs) Otherwise, you'll never know if it was a good email or not.
