Your Email Integrity Is Showing
Why your approach to cold sales emails may be ruining your chances of closing deals.
Maybe I hit a breaking point or maybe in my never ending attempts to generate focus and deep work, the volume of sales emails just reached a critical mass for me to notice it.
Today I want to cover a little bit about the terrible techniques I’ve been seeing in my inbox by otherwise probably really hard working sales people. I have seen first hand how hard it is to sell. The hours, the quotas, the awful leads, the terribly disrespectful customers. So know that what comes next isn’t discounting that. But what I’ve concluded is that at the heart of good sales is mutual empathy. To get there, good sales people work hard to build rapport, trust, and ultimately make it rain.
The problem shows up when you begin that entire relationship in the worst possible way. Deception. So let’s dig in…the top sales email techniques that, at least in my world, will get you blocked, reported, and confined to the bottomless pit of despair that is my junk folder.
5 of the Greatest Hits (in no order)
1 - Write your very first email to a new lead with “Re:…” in the subject line.
This one is cheeky. It hopes that in the chaos of the inbox a “Re:” will trigger a Pavlovian response to look at the email. I’m on to it. Immediately to the pit!
2 - Subject: Are you the right person?
When you start writing that email, you already know the answer don’t you? Especially because you’re loading up the same subject for the thousands of other messages going out in that campaign. This one goes well with it’s close cousin #3 below
3 - Body of the message has some sort of “I’ve tried to reach you but…”
I tend to find these also may have a slightly insulting tone to them. Like the person is saying “Look, I’m really getting bothered by the fact you won’t engage with me or my crap product so you could at least have the decency to tell me to ‘unsubscribe’” Often this beauty won’t have any unsubscribe link in the message. No worries, to the pit for permanent unsubscribe! You’ll just never know.
4 - The fake out “Any thoughts” message that contains a fake previous message in the body.
There are a few variations of this one. But a recent one had just the “Any Thoughts” in it followed by a tricked up message made to look like a previously quoted message. So yeah, I have a few thoughts. None of them begin with a reply to you, and none of them conclude with you selling me anything. Junk Folder…Send it!
5 - Body of message tells me the reasons I haven’t paid attention to your email.
Another cheeky one. The presumption that you know how my day flows or what I’m up to. Much less the specific reason that is keeping me from your message being #1 on my task list. The odd thing is that these lists never include the actual reasons: Your email is spam, I didn’t want it, and/or your product is…crap. Take the highway until you get to the exit for Junkville, take that exit, and keep driving until you’re out of gas in the middle of nowhere. You’ll know when you get there.
Honorable Mentions
Here are a few extras I had to include - some using LinkedIn as the spam vector.
1 - You want this free thing?
So this is a really old appeal. I get it and probably people do want that cool Yeti mug, or FitBit, or whatever. But again, if you have to bribe me via email, is the product really that good? This one is especially saucy when it also includes a claim so false it makes you laugh. Also seen - follow up emails making sure you really don’t want the free thing from the first one. Select all -> Mark as Junk.
2 - Using LinkedIn messaging
This one has two versions:
Version 1 - “I saw you pop up in my network and figured we should connect” - Would you randomly walk around a mall and say that to someone “Hey, I see we’re in the same hallway at the mall (the coincidence of that is mind boggling), would you like to give me your email and phone number so I can call you later about selling you something?” If the answer is “NO”…then don’t do this on LinkedIn either.
Version 2 - Using InMail for the sole purpose of selling.
So this one I’ll own a little. You have to have InMail turned on for this to be allowed. But I don’t think the premise of InMail was to have an open door to spam messages. Goes to show what I know!
Conclusions…
I get it. Competition for attention is ridiculous. The desperation in the emails themselves tell you everything you need to know. But really the fundamentals are simple. Don’t begin a relationship that requires trust by way of deception. Don’t we have enough of that on Bumble and Tinder already?