What We Learned From Rewriting 50+ Sales Emails
Opt In | Ep. 59
What Good Looks Like, Where SDRs Can Improve, and How Leadership Can Help
If there’s one thing we learned after rewriting over 50 cold sales emails, it’s that a lot of the common mistakes we saw weren’t tied to a particular caliber of company. From the tiny tech start-up to the unicorn-funded behemoth, we saw a lot of similar issues.
Whether it was poor targeting, shaky value propositions, or a failure to stand out in the sea of cold emails in prospects’ inboxes, nearly every company (and SDR) deals with similar problems.
That’s why we helped create and produce SDRescue, a web series where we critiqued and rewrote real cold emails that SDRs were sending out to prospects. We believed that with a few tweaks, you could improve nearly any email and see an increase in engagement & reply rates.
And that’s why we sat down with Greyson Fullbright – not just because he was the SDRescue host, but because he has a strong track record of building successful cold email campaigns.
We asked him to talk about his biggest takeaways from the SDRescue series.
- What mistakes was he seeing most often?
- Where are the biggest areas of improvement for SDRs?
- How can management get involved in the process?
We cover a lot in our ~30 minutes (it was hard not to with 50+ episodes to pull from). And in classic Greyson fashion, he took the 3 takeaways and really fleshed them out into comprehensive cold email lessons.
Opt In to leveling up your cold email systems and making it a reliable source of booked meetings!
AJ & Alex’s Take
The best way to learn about this is to watch the recording (linked at the bottom of this page). AJ and Alex covered two (eh, three) of the takeaways from the conversation with Greyson, but there is plenty more in the full video.
If you’re looking for an abbreviated learning experience we’ve got you covered:
Alex
“If I get an email that says we’ve helped Amazon and Microsoft and Meta, I’m not interested because demandDrive is nothing like those companies.”
One of the biggest issues with cold email is targeting.
Targeting doesn’t necessarily mean sending emails to the right people. ICPs and personas aren’t the issues here – it’s sending a message that resonates with that persona in a way that catches their attention and gets them to actually read your email. If a prospect reads your email and thinks something along the lines of “this isn’t for me” then you’ve lost.
Attention and inbox real estate are waning. If you want to earn someone’s time, you have to make the email relevant & actionable (more on that later).
“…when you’re testing messaging, when you’re crafting these emails and sending them out, you, you need to be able to know why they’re working or why they’re not working.”
Testing & analysis is how you know an email will be relevant and actionable for a specific persona. And to properly test your emails to see what works and what doesn’t, you need an agreed-upon system.
How many emails/responses are a big enough sample size to draw significant conclusions? How do you control for timing? Which components of emails do you A/B test, and which do you leave as is?
In Greyson’s experience, not enough teams agree on or even have a system in place where they can effectively test their emails against industry standards or previous campaigns. Without it, you’ll never be certain that your metrics are a result of a specific variable or a host of other factors.
AJ
“…he described it as having a big nerd do that and be able to look at spreadsheets and figure out why a message is resonating. Is it time-based? Is it the message itself?”
Continuing the testing point, Greyson recommended (and AJ agreed) that teams look at hiring an operations professional (aka, a big nerd) to focus on aligning the anecdotal and data side of messaging.
Having someone bridge the gap between anecdotal SDR feedback and metrics-backed messaging from leadership helps create a feedback loop that incorporates both. More importantly, that ops individual can help teams test emails in a more structured fashion and go to market with the right message to the right people at the right time.
“If someone’s gonna read [your email] and take action, they have to find value. But what does that mean?”
Value is one of those ethereal terms that SDRs hear from leadership on a daily basis. They’re told that if anyone is going to read and respond to their email, it has to be valuable. But a lot of SDRs struggle with defining value in a way that allows them to write compelling emails at scale.
I really liked the way that Greyson described “value” – it’s a combination of relevant and actionable messaging.
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Relevance means that the solution is for them. It helps illuminate and/or solve a common challenge that this prospect likely faces.
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Actionable means they can envision a future state where their job is easier or more impactful because they responded to your email.
It’s a lot harder than most people think, and it’s why email reply rates are continuing to drop.
Bonus Content
“So many people use personalization now. It’s such a popular tactic that it is now the same thing as it was before when you didn’t use personalization. It all looks the same.”
Sorry to tell you this, but if your email is just personalized, it’s not going to cut through the noise like you think it will.
If you want to stand out, you have to marry personalization (an observation you can make to prove you’ve done the research) and relevance (tying that observation back to your value prop and why you reached out).
The bar has been raised.
Key Takeaways
The best way to learn about this is to watch the recording (linked at the bottom of this page). AJ and Alex covered two (eh, three) of the takeaways from the conversation with Greyson, but there is plenty more in the full video.
Having someone bridge the gap between anecdotal SDR feedback and metrics-backed messaging from leadership helps create a feedback loop that incorporates both. More importantly, that ops individual can help teams test emails in a more structured fashion and go to market with the right message to the right people at the right time.
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