“Writing cold email copy from scratch is one of the most difficult things that we can do as salespeople. Oftentimes I get asked, what should the email say? ” – Jason Bay in today’s Tip 137
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Jason Bay on LinkedIn
Blissful Prospecting
Grammarly
Hemmingway
132: Don’t Treat Every Prospect Equally – Jason Bay
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today I’ve got another killer tip, really a whole set of micro tips for you from Jason Bay of Blissful Prospecting. Let’s just get right into this:
Jason Bay: Writing cold email copy from scratch is one of the most difficult things that we can do as salespeople. Oftentimes I get asked, what should the email say? What should I include? How long should it be? Should I share a testimonial or a case study? And what I wanted to do is quickly share with you something we came up with called the REPLY Method so that you can remove the mystery from writing an effective cold email and also have a process that you can use to make sure that the emails you’re sending are going to get a response. So let’s start with “R”. The R stands for “Results”. So the biggest thing you’ve got to think about is the prospect needs to go from, how does this apply to me, to these results look interesting. So where do you really need to make sure to focus on this is in your value prop. And you need to share a specific result that is related to a business goal that the prospect would care about. So helping people increase their productivity is not a business goal. Increasing revenue is increasing or decreasing, excuse me, ramp time with sales reps, that’s a business call. So make sure you’re focused on the right result and one that the prospect you’re reaching out to will care about. Number two is Empathy. So the “E” stands for “Empathy” and essentially what you want to do here, and what I see missing from most prospecting messaging, especially in emails, is no commentary on what the challenges or fears that the prospect might be experiencing. If you don’t talk about the challenges somewhere in your email sequence, the prospect is not going to know how exactly you can help them or what problem that you can help them overcome. So you need the prospect to go from, you don’t understand me or our business to a, “you’re really speaking my language.” The “P” stands for “Personalization”. What you need to make sure of at the bare minimum is that the first two sentences of a cold email sequence and that very first email are personalized and what you want to make sure is that this is something that’s actually contextual. So don’t make it completely unrelated to what you provide in your product or service, but you need to do enough there to make sure the prospect knows it’s not clearly a mass email. So sure that you did your homework. If you’re not personalizing beyond the first name and company name, the chances of getting a response go down dramatically. The “L” stands for “Laser focus”. So a couple of little quick tips here. When you’re writing an email, you want to make sure that it’s less than three to five sentences and also less than 120 words. So there’s a couple of things that are recommended here. There are two tools. One is called Grammarly and the other is called Hemingway App and they’re both free tools. You can use those to word check, spell check and then also to help you write a more concise email as well so you can plug them right into those tools. I highly recommend checking that out. Another little hack here is that send yourself an email and take a look at it on your phone and if you have to scroll on your phone to read it, it’s too long. Lastly, the “Y” stands for “You”. So quick rule of thumb here is in one of the big mistakes that I see people make when they prospect is they talk about I and we a lot. I’d like to meet with you, I’d love to meet with you, we can help you with this. You’re going to have to use a certain amount of that but I want to recommend is cutting out the word “I” completely if you can and the “you” and your ratio to “I” on “we” ratio needs to be one to one or greater. So in other words, you should be saying “you” and “your” more times than you’re saying “I” and “we”, your challenges, your goals, your fears in this area, whatever it is, make sure that you use you in your, all right. That’s the REPLY Method. This is a process, like I said, that you can use as a checklist for your cold emails and that you can use this as a step by step process when you’re writing emails from scratch.
Scott Ingram: Jason just shared another great tip last week in Episode 132 where he talked about not treating all of your prospects equally. Do yourself a favor and connect with Jason on LinkedIn and check out some of the other cold email and other content he’s posting there. As usual, we’ve got links to everything set up for you at DailySales.Tips/137. You’ll find links to Jason’s LinkedIn profile, to Blissful Prospecting as well as to Grammarly and Hemmingway.
Then come back tomorrow for the latest from Jeff Bajorek.