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Are your sales prospecting emails not converting to meetings? Is the ding of the  prospect’s ‘Delete’ button ringing in your ears? If so, then you may need to take the “I” test when reviewing your outbound email scripts…bet you have too many. Unless you are a well-known authority in your sector, the prospects you’re interrupting don’t care what YOU think or what YOU want. Put the outreach in their terms and try not to use the personal pronoun “I” as it’s very self-serving.

So many sales emails open with:

  • I saw your profile on LinkedIn…
  • I’ve been researching your company….
  • I believe you’re a good fit….

Make it about them, not about you! See the email below. It’s not horrible, but it could use some tightening up.

email

An option to rewrite is:

Jeff,

You recently downloaded some of our materials about financial reporting earlier today. If that’s a general topic of interest, you’ll want to learn how to get meaningful visual reports from your QuickBooks data. Company X provides painless, on-demand financial reports and dashboards to help you.

******

Try some of these sales prospecting email opening lines instead:

  1. As a member of [Group on LinkedIn], you most certainly are dealing with…
  2. Your name surfaced in researching [insert industry trend] and a conversation would be greatly appreciated…
  3. As a leader in [your organization] you must have dozens of inquiries….
  4. You and your peers are facing similar issues in the market….

Eliminate the overuse of “I” and you may get a look.

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The Sales Quant

About The Sales Quant

A champion of B2B sales and marketing alignment and brand audience development, Jeff is passionate about leveraging content, technology and data to enable challenger organizations to accelerate sales and realize extraordinary growth. As the CEO of Madison, Michigan and Market, and the Publisher of SalesQuants, Jeff is a resource to both Sales Executives and CMOs because he understands the dynamics of their relationship.