Salespeople, Please Stop Sending Terrible Prospecting Emails Like This One

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick ofbad emails from salespeople。I am sick and tired of receiving unsolicited, uncustomized, long-winded, self-promotional emails from lazy salespeople. While I could write a complete book series with a slew of bad examples, I received a particularly irritating one the other day that sent me over the edge.我对销售人员的回应只是为了告诉他这有多糟糕。

This brand new sales development rep defended himself in a back-and-forth email exchange, giving me even more reasons to be mad.

意识到我对此代表一无所获，我结束了对话，告诉他我会写一篇文章，说明为什么我发现他的方法如此烦人和无效。

Without further ado, here’s theprospecting email我收到了。（我更改了电子邮件上的名称和价值道具以保护有罪。

彼得，周末之前

Hi Peter,

接下来的几天/下周，我将通过电话与您联系，但我也想在周末之前跟进一封电子邮件。

We haven't had the pleasure of meeting but I'm reaching out to introduce myself and see if we can schedule a 15-minute conversation sometime next week.

我在一家名为Boogerpbob全站appickers的公司工作 - 我们帮助企业更好地管理他们的数字布格采摘技术，当我遇到您的网站并评估您使用的工具时，我意识到这是我们为您提供帮助的绝佳机会。

简而言之 - 我们是Booger索引解决方案：

• Eliminates the chaotic burden of hand picking boogers from your nose
• Enables access to smaller, difficult to reach boogers in order to increase successful booger extraction
• 优化您现有的Booger采摘器的ROI（减少时间并最大化ROI）

类似于您的行业的公司依靠我们成为整个Booger Picking Stack的基础，我认为Hubspot Inc.肯定也可以看到Boogerpickers的价值。

I'd love the opportunity to share this in a bit more detail and hear your feedback.

Are you available for 15 minutes sometime next week?

无法想象，关于增加Booger采摘和优化Booger桩的快速聊天将是浪费。

干杯，
Clueless Chad

PS-查看这篇有关Boogerpickers最近一轮资金和未来计划的TechCrunch文章！

当你阅读,你可能看到许多的管理信息系统takes. But just in case you’re as dense as the guy who sent it, I’ll walk you through the mistakes I saw one by one.

Don’t Trick Your Prospects into Opening Your Email

I was pissed off before I even read past the first line of the email body. After reading the subject line, “彼得，周末之前,” I opened this thinking that it was urgent or maybe even from someone who knew me. But then realized it was from a salesperson who didn’t know me at all.

这位销售人员成功地欺骗了我打开他的电子邮件。在随后的电子邮件交换中，他说它的开放率和12％的答复率是为了捍卫自己的主题行。他没有意识到他可能irritated at least 66% of his prospects通过欺骗我们打开他的电子邮件。

Don’t obscure who you are or what you want. Instead, use a subject line that’s obvious. You might even be better off having no subject line compared to one like this.

如果您要打电话，只需打电话

“我将在接下来的几天 /下周通过电话与您联系，但我也想在周末之前再跟进一封电子邮件。”

At this point, I’m already pissed off because this salesperson tricked me into opening his email. This line increased my anger. Not full-Hulk. But getting there.

If you’re going to call a prospect first, just call them. If you’re going toemail before you call, send an email. Either of these avenues is acceptable. What’s not is sending an email to warn your prospect that you’re going to call them. Just do it.

关于这一行的最糟糕的部分是，这让我不知道为什么这位销售人员正在写（或打电话给我）。他没有以任何方式将电子邮件个性化。他没有对我进行任何研究。他没有尝试建立任何类型的个人联系。

When sending an email, your first line should mention something about the prospect, not you or your cold calling plans. Something like,“恭喜您的新产品发布”或者“我看到您的一些团队成员最近在我们的网站上阅读了有关主题X的信息，”或他的情况“I noticed you’re using 12 different booger-picking technologies.”

勘探电子邮件的第一行应该始终与潜在客户有关，而与销售人员无关。

Don’t Insert Your Call to Action Before You’ve Established Value

“我们没有开会的乐趣，但是我正在伸出援手介绍自己，看看我们是否可以安排下周的某个时间进行15分钟的对话。”

My thought bubble after I read this line:“Really? Pleasure? Who the hell are you?”我特别喜欢这个销售人员在他向我介绍任何潜在价值之前如何要求15分钟。他是否认为他的前景整天坐着希望随机的陌生人会称呼他们？或者，也许他认为自己对产品的兴奋弥补了他对我或我的挑战缺乏真正的兴趣？

I don’t have any suggestions for changing this sentence to make it better. Statements like this should not be written in sales emails -- plain and simple. They’re simply extra words, which can only hinder your efforts considering that most experts recommend three to seven sentence sales emails.

Assuming he correctly punctuated his sentences, this email is 13 sentences. If I were to try to cut this email down to the ideal length, this sentence would be the first to go, especially since doing away with it would help him get to the point faster …

Suggest Only One Benefit in Your First Email (If Any)

“我在一家名为Boogerpbob全站appickers的公司工作 - 我们帮助企业更好地管理他们的数字布格采摘技术，当我遇到您的网站并评估您使用的工具时，我意识到这是我们为您提供帮助的绝佳机会。

"To be brief -- we're a booger indexing solution that, to name a few things ...”

在这一点上，销售人员开始解释他解决的问题。虽然我不喜欢在从未听说过您的潜在客户的第一封电子邮件中吐出价值主张，但我会因达到重点而值得称赞。

However, the problem is that he threw a bunch of benefits at me like spaghetti at a wall. As sales prospecting expert希瑟·R·摩根说, “Keep things short and sweet … by keep[ing] your email focused on one core idea or benefit.”

And as best-selling sales and marketing author David Meerman Scott would say, this guy needs aGobbledygook仪表。Why? This salesperson includes a lot of vague words that are overused by marketers and salespeople. At best, most prospects read phrases like“optimize ROI”和“减少时间”和ignore them. At worst, they think,“bullsh*t,”然后将您混入超额销售商的桶中。

最后，如果您要说“简短，”简洁的。但是，也许，也许根本不要说。只是简短。

Realize That Your Prospects Don’t Care What You’d Love to Do

“我希望有机会更详细地分享这一点，并听到您的反馈。”

我关心的最后一件事是这位销售人员想做的。总的来说，我不太在乎哪些垃圾邮件，欺骗，超卖和浪费我的时间愿意做的陌生人会喜欢做。

This line should also be cut from the email. Any statement starting with“我想要 ... ”should be transformed into a question like“你对……吗？”

不要在第一封电子邮件中要求打个电话

“下周某个时候您可以使用15分钟吗？

"Can't imagine a quick chat about increasing booger picking and optimizing your booger pile would be a waste.”

The rep might not be able to imagine himself wasting my time, but I can. After all, he’s already wasted my time and pissed me off with this email. Something tells me he wouldn’t“totally redeem himself”在通电话。

Lately, I’ve been advising salespeople to stop asking to schedule a call in their first email, especially if they don’t know whether the prospect is in the market for a product or service like theirs. I realize this bucks traditional sales prospecting wisdom. However, I’m seeing that buyers are reaching a frustration point with these types of cold emails. It seems (not so surprisingly) that the last thing a busy executive wants to do these days is to get on the phone and hear a pitch. They can go to a website and read the pitch much more quickly -- anytime, anywhere, and in their underwear if they want.

But because salespeople are sometimes getting high single and low double digit response rates (in this case, 12%, according to “Chad”), most companies are okay with the collateral damage that results from a cold email campaign. Missing the mark 90% of the time -- even though it pisses prospects off and tarnishes the company’s reputation -- seems to be an acceptable prospecting casualty rate. But I don’t get it. While those types of numbers might be the status quo in prospecting, they would indicate failure in any other game. Why do we accept this collateral damage?

These low response rates indicate that it’s probably too forward to ask for time on the phone. Instead, focus on simply getting a response. Do this by asking a conversation-starting question to determine their priorities. Something like,“Do you ever get frustrated by X?”或者“这对您来说是个问题吗？”

That said, I do think it makes sense for salespeople to offer to do a phone call at some point, but I’d recommend offering it as a follow up to an email response. After all, communicating via phone could be the prospect’s preference. But, the offer should sound something like,“I am available to get on a call with you at [day and time] if you believe it makes sense to explore how I can help”instead of“Do you have 15 minutes to get on the phone?”

Resist Tooting Your Own Horn

"Cheers,
Clueless Chad

“ PS-查看最近有关Boogerpickers最近一轮资金和未来计划的TechCrunch文章！”

角脚PR的有趣选择。任何好的销售人员都应该知道，他们公司的资金并不能验证潜在客户所拥有的东西。bob全站app

通常，销售人员应避免在第一封电子邮件中谈论自己或公司。不要自己的喇叭。至get responses to your sales emails, demonstrate your expertise by doing your research, customizing your approach, making a very educated guess about one way (and only one way) you could provide value, and ask a question to see if this benefit syncs with their priorities.

Reach Out to the Right Contact

这封邮件无疑是坏的,但我还没有电动汽车en gotten to the worst part yet. The worst part is that I’m not the person managing “booger picking” for HubSpot. If this guy did a very small amount of research by looking at the size of the company and my title on LinkedIn, he would have realized that I probably don’t evenknow管理Booger在Hubspot进行选择的家伙。

In the subsequent email exchange, the salesperson admitted to sending the same exact email to a bunch of people at HubSpot, since he didn’t take the time to determine who the correct contact was. Don’t be this lazy.

If you are going to knowingly email people who aren’t the right contact, at least take Aaron Ross’s decade-old advice and use his“你是正确的联系吗？”电子邮件模板。请小心 - 虽然有时间和一个方法可以使用这种方法，但如果您可以在LinkedIn上找到正确的联系人，请不要使用它。在过去的十年中，LinkedIn走了很长一段路，宝贝。

这种情况的更好的勘探电子邮件模板

Taking into account all of the advice above, here’s an email template that this salesperson could have used to successfully get a response from me. (Since I don’t really understand exactly what his company does -- despite his efforts to fill me in -- I’m taking some liberties by assuming that the wrong booger picking technology negatively impacts lead generation.)

丢失网站的潜在客户是由于效率低下的Booger挑选吗？

Hey Pete,

我阅读了您有关潜在客户生成的令人印象深刻的文章，并与我们的销售副总裁分享了这一文章。我希望我们的营销团队能为我们创造潜在客户。

I know your team is world-class in this area, but I’m wondering whether you’ve ever looked at the negative impact too many booger picking technologies have on your lead generation funnel? From looking at the way your booger picking technologies are deployed on HubSpot.com, we estimate you’re losing 3% of your leads.

Could this be a problem for you and your team?

问候，
Clued-In Chad

Tired of getting bad sales emails? Forward them to slimysales@hubspot.com andHubSpot Academy will invite them to sales training。