How to write cold emails that get responses (A 45.8% reply rate)

the average reply rate across the industry is zero to three percent so that's all the shot you're giving it and you're telling me you're gonna automate it if I'm a top rep or I want to be a top rep that tells me one I need to follow up and two I need to write my own even it's very easy to stand apart from the crowd in a world full of automation it is very very easy for you to be highlighted as being a human That's Mike Wonder account executive a lavender and he runs the three

minute sales score he says is just a mediocre access guy and an average human writer that is number anything but average in his first 90 days at lavender Mike was able to book 87 out of 103 accounts just from cordimes his email open rate is 65.3 percent is reply rate is 45.8 percent so he sent 406 emails and you got 186 rupees in this episode we are going to learn all about how Mike writes his emails what Mike does before writing emails is mindset of writing emails and is coding main Frameworks so Mike can you

tell us how did you book 87 accounts out of 103 in your first 90 days yeah I think it's always good so where do I work um and like just uh over emphasize that there's not much of a brand right Lavender is just now um a 22 person company and at the start of this month on August 1st would be 24 people and because I feel like a lot of people will see like a reply rate or they see the amount of meetings that you were booked and things like that and they immediately go to

like well you had a good brand or all these other things are not not everybody knows you Lavender is they have a we have a pretty decent presence online but um if believe it or not not everybody is online right so um there's that stuff but essentially what I would say went into it is all the preparation and work that not a lot of sellers today are willing to do um and when you look at it right like my job is not just this my job is not to be an SDR or a bdr I'm

a full cycle I eat and so I wasn't just going out there and booking you know all those meetings I was also working accounts having to take meetings all day and things like that and so it did take extra time for me to sit back and look at what went into these accounts the problems they might have been solving but at the end of the day that's what you have to do if you want to get a meeting booked with them right if you want to get a meeting booked with those accounts that you have

right I think it's 87 out of 103. some odd number like that right um I mean what really went into it was I dove into their company I knew what they did who they sold to the problems they might have had and I created a point of view and I think that's the crucial part that a lot of sellers forget about obviously so how did you segment your list actually uh did you go after like the SAS industry or what was your process yeah I did a couple of different things um talk about list building

quite a bit because I think it's the most important thing that you can do but essentially everybody says look at their customers build a list based on them and everyone's like sounds good what does that mean right and so it's like okay I looked at a customer base and I said who's having the most success with lavender but I didn't care about what you know outside of their success success metrics like how much of their reply rate go up and things like that what I cared about was what makes up that company who was the

first meeting with so when I go back into Salesforce and I look at the opportunity and where it was created what right or what title was that first meeting with was it with a sales director or a VP of sales or an Ops person right and I wrote down all the different titles that I was getting first meetings with where my company was prior to me being there and then from that point once I had a title breakdown I started to look more and more at the companies and I figured out okay what industry were

they in 50 of them were in SAS right the other 50 were in non-technology companies who more or less are really just operating off of Outlook or Gmail right Reps don't even know their reply rate or their open rate so a whole set of different things that I can talk about compared to a tech company who's probably got a full Tech stack and so once I did that I was segmented by okay are they series A B C D companies right do they have VC funding or are they PE or are they public right things

like that and from there I was able to figure out a VC company operates very differently than a PE company does right VC company VC backed companies are focused on growth they're focused on continuously just adding adding adding as fast as they can right efficiency metrics a PE company is focused on quality doing more with less I know it's a buzzword but really you don't have as many people take a good look at like Koopa Koopa just got acquired by Toma Bravo the first thing they did was slice the entire org it's not because those

people didn't know how to do their jobs but it's because as a PE firm you have to be profitable and so the number one thing on their mind is how can I be profitable and so um with that if you can't make a case about how you're going to return a quick profit right back on to to your you know to the investment they're going to make in your technology they're just not going to buy you and so that's kind of how I was segmenting my different lists and then from there I went through and

I was able to formulate some of that stuff for the point of view so I really like that because found that's the same approach I'm taking because you don't want to because I think when you join maybe you had a you could go after any accounts on the market and obviously here you just go back well on your list so you start with the better person and then the criteria from your customer so and I think it's something for in album that's you need to do that because if not album is going to be really

really hard because you are not contacting the the right people so uh what other criteria you are looking for so you mentioned for example if um they have a series a or series B but did you look at other criteria techno Tech stack for example other things yeah so um once I'm actually emailing that person right from that company um and when I take a good look at their Tech stack like if I if I know their Tech stack most people um actually obviously you'd be surprised a lot of sales reps don't realize or they

do realize that they don't take the time to look at it if you have a tool like clear bit or a zoom info or an Apollo or a seamless right any sort of data provider they also have data on the company's Tech Stacks right and while it might not be the most accurate you can verify why not add a below the line person like an AE or an SDR in my case and ask them hey how are you liking sales Loft right like we're currently using X it might be switching to that they have no

idea right try to get a little bit of information just to verify that they're using some of the tech that they are or it says they're using and then from there you can formulate what are the differences right and for lavender it's a little bit of a different scenario and this is why I liked it because it's not like I'm trying to replace a sales off or an Outreach or anything like that right we sit on top of it and help you make the most out of it and so I think what you have to

understand when you're trying to reach out to different companies too is like your job is to put yourself as much as you can in your prospect's mindset so when you're reaching out to you know whoever your ICP is I don't want to just keep talking about who mine is but to help the audience more whoever your ICP is right the first thing you need to ask yourself is am I approaching this with a lens of what I'm gonna get and what I need or what they need out of it in their current state you have

to think about their their Prospect the entire time if you are at all writing about what you need and what you want out of this you're already setting yourself behind think about their current state they've been just fine with what they have why do they need you what is the difference what are you going to do to actually help them because the fact that they're on your list one of the big things that we'll talk about right if we talk about mindset if you ask me is you have to remember they are on your list

but you are not under theirs so and just to finish on this building also uh that's like we said it's super important uh on my side right now I was doing this last week actually um going after the current customers we have and then to see if there is like any patterns in inside the the companies so for on myself obviously it was like few Industries but also some specific titles for example because um I'm not selling to sales people so I'm selling to their leaders and there is new titles for example that one vendor

on the market like kind of invented so they don't have like SDS or A's but they have like this kind of structure they are really more specialized um from specific growth so when you know that they use those titles for example inside the company I know that there they will be more interested to to what I'm saying so I think that's something that's super helpful so to trap on because right now we are talking about before you you start writing your emails so we are talking with biopathana and this building so you mentioned the point

of view so how do you create your point of view before reaching out to a company yeah for sure so you create a point of view as you're writing the email but you can't do that without doing your research so there's a couple of steps that you need to take and the first and the most important thing all right is I always tell people this it's my rule of thumb if you don't know 90 of the companies that are on your list on what they do who they sell to and why you're reaching out to

them your list is too long or you didn't do any research and if you fall into that bucket go back to start do not go to finish right do not click send on an email do not even write the email because you're already putting yourself behind I work with a tremendous woman called Jen Allen she is an absolute rock star and one of her things that she talks about all the time is one of her sales leaders her favorite sales leader she's ever worked with would always come into a pipeline review call and when somebody

was really excited about a deal she would stop them and say hey what do they do who do they sell to what can we do to help them and tell me a little bit about that if you can't answer those questions you didn't have a deal I think it's the same thing but I think you've gone too far at that point like if you can't answer those questions you shouldn't be reaching out to them right and so in this time and age where everybody is trying to speed up and look at efficiencies and maximizing things

with AI and trying to send as many personalized emails as they can right that has Ripple effects that a lot of sellers completely neglect and don't think about right but one of the biggest Ripple effects is you're setting an example before you ever get into their inbox that you only care about your time not their time right and so that's not kind of how you want to start that relationship and that all rolls up into your POV when you're creating a POV you're showcasing that you did your research you know what they do you're talking

about them right and so um when you're actually creating that it's basically a formula a point of view is essentially your why and your y equals context plus observation slash insight and so what we mean by that is when you're looking at a point of view and creating a point of view for our company um you might say something that sounds like this right like it sounds like hey Mike saw you were looking for Quality writers in your job description that's your research right that's the context the Insight would be this usual or problem right

would be this usually means you are focused on quality over Mass Outreach issue is it's almost impossible to track and replicate what's go what's working right have you looked into email intelligence before and then you can say PS you know it provides you real-time analytics on what's working across the team but you notice I never said my company name I never I mean I said kind of what we do I alluded to it right my PS was more of that but the entire email was a point of view the entire email was I did my

research here's exactly what I think you have going on here's what I think your problem is and here's maybe what you can look into to help solve that it is it's not worth me at least I gave you something that you can think about right most sellers would write an email that looks something like this it'd be like hey Mike working with teams focused on quality over quantity with cold email we've been able to 3x your reply rates by using AI to I don't know which provides real-time coaching for reps and right you know as

they write give your uh gives your insights into everything that's working for them and how to coach do it right all this yada yada stuff and then they'd end it with like or 30 minutes to chat what you can see is like the first email while it's not the most fun email for the seller to write because it has nothing to do with them right the second email definitely more fun you get to talk all about you you can write that one really fast uh it's like you you basically two now I couldn't even like

finish the flow of it because it just sounds unnatural for me at this point but but when you're creating your point of view that's exactly what you need to do you need to create your point of view by showcasing that you did your research from building your list right and using that formula here you give an example of that they're having a specific order so what's your go-to list for to do your research because you mentioned that to create your point of view you are doing this when you're writing the email but you mentioned a

job description here so are you looking for other things yeah so I always go sir I always go surface level and then I go deep so what I mean by that is by surface level I'm gonna look at okay here are the general things that I'm looking for when I reach out to a company I pick out those things and then I say okay they're hiring for sdrs and AES they just had a news event that they released let's just say they got 100 million in funding and their Tech stack is that they use uh

sales law I have to pick based off of those three observations which one do I want to focus on here's the thing this is the mindset thing right most sellers would say out of those three things how can I summarize that into one email that's the wrong thing that you're you're focusing on the wrong thing right and I'll get into why that is but what you need to do is pick one go deep on that write the problem write that email about that problem interesting statistic from Sam sales over at you know Sam mcconaugh show

me you know me all that good stuff they just released 75 of sales reps don't follow up after the first email 75 right here's the thing the average reply rate across the industry is zero to three percent so that's all the shot you're giving it and you're telling me you're gonna automate it if I'm a top rep or I want to be a top rep that tells me one I need to follow up and two I need to write my own emails all right like I can it's very easy to stand apart from the crowd

in a world I always like to say this in a world full of automation it is very very easy for you to be highlighted as being a human if you look at your inbox and you ask your sales leaders to look at their inboxes or anybody to look at their inboxes that's in their leadership it's disgusting it's like they get 10 20 emails a day of people who are just massaging them for outreach to tell you how bad it is I am in five different cadences right now this moment right I delete the email every

morning the market is Spam right from people trying to sell me personalized AI email Outreach they literally didn't even look at my like I mean I work in a personalized AI company I mean like helping people write better sales emails why would I purchase a personalized AI Outreach you know what I mean like it doesn't make sense and so it's just like that's how low the bar is I always like to bring that up because sellers think that the bar is so high they read all those content they see these things on social media and

they think that's what everyone's doing it's not no one's doing it that's why the bar is so low right everyone's trying to find shortcuts and hacks and all these other things but where you actually are going to get benefit is exactly what you tear into on this podcast the process the framework the why behind everything that you do because that's how you find success right and you're right because the I think it's maybe one percent of the I don't know when that was okay and cheaper we are checking sometimes his inbox to see how many

personal Gmail he was receiving it was maybe one percent of them the rest of us or automation so sales off did a did a study across their entire customer base and they found that four out of every 100 emails were personalized four well that's how low the bar is right out of those four emails they got 1200 percent more replies than all the other emails that were not automated and lavender or that we're automated right and then in lavender when we typically ingest the team's data you'd be surprisingly shocked I have I can't tell you

how many teams I think automation's the key and then they ingest their data and they get less than a one percent reply rate when their manual emails are getting like an eight to nine percent reply rate it's like the answer is right in front of your face but we're so consumed with this number we're so consumed with reaching out to as many people as possible it's like we think that everyone is waiting to buy our solution and that as soon as we reach out to them they're just waiting for it no no one's no one's

waiting and if they are they're probably coming inbound right like they're probably coming in about or you've you brought up a relevant pain and then they're now looking at it but remember not everybody is on the market for your solution so why are you rushing to get in front of everybody because look I'll tell you right now one metric that a lot of sales teams are going to be starting to pay attention to over the last year year and a half that nobody's thought about is the cost of burning all those leads what's the cost

behind sending 400 000 emails a month outside of you just getting locked on Google I mean how many domains have you ran how many how many people have you just they see your domain and they attribute that to spam now right it's a massive problem and I think it's going to be something that a lot of people start to look into one from the bank experience I saw receiving a really but that is following the framework yourself it makes the difference because I remember with a specific companion sent one email and the they both and

then two months later about fight was a cheap paper for this one specifically but basically it was the Outreach was just one email and because I it was really focusing on the problems there they were facing and it worked so not a because we were talking about what you are looking for um when you write your emails um let's talk about subject lines what do you think about subject lines and what's your process yeah there's a big misconception about subject lines across the entire industry and I see this all the the matter of the fact

is your subject line is not meant to stand up your subject line right if you have like emojis in there punctuation all these other things that just screams this is a sales email if that person doesn't want to read it they don't want to read it um there's two different ways to do this and the data actually shows it if you have a really long subject line in the sense of like it's very specific like say for instance somebody saw that I was a marine and they were also a marine and um you know they

ended up like literally deploying in the same place that I was deployed and they saw that like they put a subject line and said deployed together in 2017 Africa right I would be like oh okay that caught my attention I know that that was a human right all this other stuff even if their sales email is like it's an actual sales email and it's relevant in the end of like PS can't believe we never write ran to each other I was part of this Battalion or whatever that would be okay that got my attention like

I at least opened it right that was a example of a super personalized one but that's very often rare when it comes to the case I would say it's a one percent the other 99 of the time you should be writing two to three words subject lines right quick and quick out it should go right under the surface and it should not trigger what we call as the mental spam filter so if you think about a mental spam filter we were just talking about how automated Outreach is and how buyers just delete things right most

emails are deleted within three seconds of being looked at that means they're not opening it they're just looking at the subject line of the preview text and they're like spam spam delete delete right all these different things well here's kind of what they're doing they're triaging the Inbox and so what a buyer does is they're like okay here's an internal email here's a vendor email that I need to pay attention to here's a sales email and then here's the emails that I actually need to work on because they're an internal one right and all those

sales emails get deleted everything else makes it to the end of the inbox you need to write an email that they can't mentally triage so quickly so that at the end of the day it's still in their inbox and then what happens is you're now a tribute to your first line which brings us into subject lines tied directly to your intro text and so when you talk about intro text of an email it's critical to not give the what give it away that you are trying to sell them something and didn't do research right lead

with observations most emails will lead with like hey Mike I hope this finds you well or hey Mike happy Tuesday hey Mike I know you're not expecting this but it's not a cold call right like it's a code email I can literally see it it's it's like you just have to show up and say hey Mike I saw this or saw you were working on this you know noticed you were having this right like lead with an observation give me a reason to want to open that email and see what you have to say and

alien to follow up on what you're mentioning here so because in your framework you said you have your observation and then you start sharing it was an Insight or the the change or the problem yeah so it's observation Plus Insight slash okay so how do you how do you type your observation to the insights and problems so what's your process with it yeah I think everything tells a story if you look at a if you um so I'll go all the way back to when I first got into sales I got into sales out of

the military and I had never wrote a sales email before um Jack Ryan he's the guy who kind of just gave me gave me a shot at you know being in sales he worked over at lavender or at sastro for quite some time um and he was like look I think you do great at this let's just give it a shot and I wrote the first email that I ever wrote and it was like a 64 in lavender it was the worst you know I've ever seen it's like three paragraphs was it was awful um

and I deleted it all and I was like there's got to be a better way right how can I write a better email and I thought about it in reality you're just telling a story you're telling a story about what you saw what that means and where the where their Better World could be and so um I think if you follow the plotline of a short story it all just flows together and it ties your reader in and it makes them want to finish the email a major majority of people who actually read the full

email will reply to you right the odds the problem is they don't read the full email and so how you can tie things in is like for your observation we mentioned in that last one that I gave the example was like hey I saw you were hiring for you know Quality quality writing people you know soccer hiring sales people who quality right your next line should tie into why that matters right so that's your observation so what's the Insight from that typically that means you are focused on this so like I now I know you

aren't it's not just the fact that you're hiring for Quality writers right I did the Beyond surface level research to look at the job description but now I also know what your mindset is that means you've Pro you're probably focused on quality Outreach over Mass Outreach so now they understand I get them I get their priorities a little bit then I tie that into what the problem is so what now the next line has to lead to what is the problem with what I just said so if you're focused on quality Outreach what's that problem

well if you think about it if you and me are both on the same team and I have a 48 reply rate and you have a 38 reply rate but we both email one-off emails our boss would not be able to say hey this is what you need to do because it's working there's no way for them to find out right they would have to go through every email see the differences it's going to be completely different because they're all one-off emails like you need AI to be able to tell you and surface those insights

and so that's kind of what led me into have you checked out email intelligence before because I know for a fact that if a sales leader is focused on quality Outreach they have no way of tracking that and helping coach that you said you talk about that earlier sometimes you can't find really specific things about your cons so what's your balance between creativity and following your framework it just depends on who I'm reaching out to I think if I'm reaching out to a c-suite executive I like to be a little bit more creative than if

I'm reaching out to somebody who's like a decision maker or um and what I mean by a decision maker is like typically even if you book a meeting with the cro or CMO they're going to bring in their team because they hardly make decisions without their team right they need their team on board and so I always call like the true decision makers everybody's focused on getting to the c-suite but what I'm focused on is getting the love and you know appreciation from those the core decision makers are really those directors and DPS and so

I think if I'm emailing to the c-speed I'm going to be a little bit more creative and fun because they they just read a lot of dry stuff all the time like for instance say you're emailing um I don't know uh somebody uh CEO of or let's call it um large Lars over at snowflake right he spoke at faster last year and I also spoke at zaster and so say I was going to email him I might try to put a subject line of hey we you know met in the speaker room speaker room at

zaster or something like that and then I would probably talk about how you know you know hey I appreciated your talk this is kind of what you were focused on here's kind of what I gave right and why I think our worlds could Clash together and like just try to get that initial interest in the sense of not trying to book a meeting but I'm trying to see if there is some clash between our two worlds and so we are talking also about your framework and context observation insight and then Prime do you use other

Frameworks in your cold emails yeah I do um I think that's like the framework primarily that works the best when it comes to creating a point of view but I think there's other stuff too right like when you're creating when you're writing follow-ups you don't really it just depends right it just depends on what the context is who the company is how much information I have on them all those different things sometimes the best email is what we call them the mouse trap which is observation question right it'd be something like saw your hiring for

um for Quality email writers have you checked out email intelligence two lines two sentences super simple right that's a quick follow-up nice and easy but on follow-ups we mentioned earlier that 75 of sellers don't follow up you know what's embarrassing the 25 of sellers who do follow up are doing it completely wrong and why that is is because when I mentioned before I have three observations which one am I going to pick most sellers would say all of them right that's why they don't follow up but when you are following up most of those are

hey Mike did you get the chance to look at my last email did you see this or hey just want to bump this back up right things like that like no I'm not going to go back and check it if I didn't see the first one you're just telling me I shouldn't pay attention to it but what you should be doing is I gave you three different things what I say it was Tech Saca uses sales Loft hiring and then I said funding or something like that as an example so if I wrote my first

email about um the hiring portion my second email would probably be about the tech stack but you see what I did was I wrote a really relevant and personalized email the first time and then I followed up with another relevant and personalized email based off the research that I did that stands out wavelengths above what everybody else is doing because that shows not only did I do my research I've continuously cared about them I can't tell you how many people I've sent three or four emails to they don't reply to me for like a month

month and a half they'll literally see my emails later on and be like hey Mike I've been meaning to get back to you these were great I shared them with my sales team can we please take a call and with me you have to understand it's really hard all right I work in an AI email company so my emails are pretty much our demo if I write a bad email they're not gonna think the product works you know what I mean so it's like you're under a lot of stipulations so I always laugh when people

are like well you work for an AI company it must be easy it's like ah not really because if you write an email somebody doesn't like it they pretty much worry you off you know and we're almost at the end of the period so I have two more questions for you foreign what will be your top one particular tip my number one tip would be create your point of view get off of templates and move to Frameworks create a point of view the number one problem with reps is they think that speed can't be achieved

when they're personalizing that's a lie it's actually false it's a false narrative that's been put out there I do not have any templates the only thing I use are Frameworks lavender tracks my writing time takes me less than four minutes to write every email that I write completely personalized with research right thing is the reason why I can do that is because I follow a framework so when I'm using a framework I get faster and faster and faster at filling that out in my head based off of one or two observations and I'm getting smarter

and smarter about the problems my industry is facing because I'm still going through the motions of getting researched what do you consider as the most common mistake that sales reps make when it comes to coding mailing and how can they avoid it just pitching your product right the most common mistake we kind of talked about it right but I won't even say like it's not having the point of view the most common mistake is writing an email thinking that you need to inform your prospect the last thing that your prospect wants is for you to

go in and teach them by your solution and I talk to people who sell technical stuff all the time all day and they're like well Mike our solution is groundbreaking it's technical it's brand new it's you know nobody understands it and I'm like if that was the case you wouldn't be a company you wouldn't have you know customers if nobody understood it right what you need to do is they understand the problem you made your company off of a problem that people are having so stop educating people about the solution you have and start educating

them about the problem you solve for yeah for the mistake I think also if I like you mentioned the point of view but also the selection of the account because like you mentioned earlier um you know that they don't know what you are selling because they are trying to sell you a solution to write emails the idea and do these results and formula so that's one of the major one uh forces up so Mike um thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show today so before we end the episode do

you have anything else we want to share with the listeners no I just think um keep working hard don't don't give up remember like I said 25 of people are actually following up so the bar is already really low I think in this world where people always feel like they know everything it's important to understand that nobody does like I said I I call myself a mediocre sales guy because I am I think we're all mediocre at everything we do um and I think the day that you think that you're the expert in something is

the day that you fail and so keep learning keep trying to move on and learn from others and never stop giving because giving is what ultimately um gives you the get well Mike thank you so much for for your time and five everyone listening I see you on the next episode thanks for watching the video hope you find those tips helpful and that they are going to help you with your cold emails and here's another video that you can watch right now to improve your cold emails thanks for watching bye foreign