Hot in the Streets: The One-Sentence Sales Email
One of the best parts of LinkedIn is getting a tactical glimpse into how people in your network are running their organizations. Collin Cadmus is the VP of Sales at Aircall, who had an interesting sales hypothesis: less is more. With most decision makers running from meeting-to-meeting for most of their day, it is both selfish and unrealistic to expect somebody to read a 3-paragraph sales pitch…followed by 5 bullets, 2 whitepapers, and a case study.
With 966 likes and 250 comments as of the time of this writing, this idea has clearly resonated within the Inside Sales community. Let’s take a look at the famous email to try and uncover why it has seemed to resonate:
5 Reasons Why I like it:
- Short Title. “Quick Question” is pretty played out, but it gets results for a reason: it’s mobile-friendly and peaks the natural curiosity we have as humans
- He spoke to her like a human being. Most sales emails use overly formal grammar that looks like it came out of an Edgar Allen Poe novel. You don’t talk like that to your best friend, so you shouldn’t talk like that your prospects either.
- It focuses on them. Too many sales emails are all “ME ME ME”. Buy MY product. Check out MY solution. Meet with ME to talk about ME. Nobody particular cares about YOUR product, they care about THEIR day-to-day. The one sentence email does a great job shining light on a critical piece of technology which bugs the crap out of many sales leaders: their phone system.
- Mobile friendly. How often do you look at your computer inbox vs your phone inbox? Something short and sweet fits well with the reduced attention span of the mobile environment
- It lets the prospect breath. I fully believe that all too often we beat our prospects over the head with information. When the prospect is interested in learning more about your product, they’re going to do their own research into you, as clearly happened above. You don’t know the exact part of their phone system the prospect was having trouble with, so allowing them to do their own research and allowing them to ask a question important to them allows the rep to focus on what is truly important to the prospect. The best way to accomplish this: get a better signature.
Note: to see how my own one-sentence sales email worked, check this out!