As a VP of Sales, I got a LOT of bad sales emails.
(despite my LinkedIn literally being an all-you-can-eat buffet for personalization nuggets)
The vast majority of sales emails are long, feature dumpy, buzzwordy monologues that leave me wondering... what the hell do you actually do?
There are four parts of a great cold prospecting email:
- Personalization: How do you know me?
- Problem: What problem do you solve for me?
- Solution: Why should I believe you can solve it?
- CTA: What do you want me to do?
Today, we'll turn 3 cold emails into meeting-booking masterpieces using the framework above.
These came straight from our Club Pass community in a cold email teardown that I ran a few weeks back. Let's tear 'em down.
Email #1: A smart safe to protect your cash
This product is a smart safe that automatically counts and deposits your cash so your employees aren't running around with a bag of cash at 11pm.
This is a solid, brief email that leads with a problem. But there are 2 big changes to make:
- The problem isn't triggering enough. "Cash handling is annoying" doesn't trigger the prospect or remind them of the pain that they experience every day. Really paint the picture of the crappy thing that they have to do today.
- The solution isn't clear. I know you eliminate deposit prep with smart safes, but that's like me saying "we clean up water with paper towels." If I'm in the market for paper towels, great. But why should I buy yours?
Let's make those 2 changes and let this roll:
Notice that we really made it triggering by talking about their team counting the cash, running to the bank, and depositing it... burning money to simply deposit your money.
Then from there, we described their key differentiator in just a bit more detail to make it clear that this isn't any smart safe, it literally is perfectly designed to eliminate the problem.
Email 2: A banking management solution
If a treasury team is managing $100M of cash, they usually have it spread across hundreds of bank accounts, which can be a cluster to manage. This product solves that:
There's a great personalization trigger that calls out relevant treasury hires, but the biggest change is again around the triggering problem.
We know they're losing valuable time on tasks -- but what are the tasks? Paint the moment for me when I stubbed my toe on the door and yelled $@*&!!!!!
Now, we've painted the triggering picture of treasury teams logging into hundreds of 2FA windows and hilariously throwing their phone out the window.
This allows us to spend very, very little space describing the solution while still being clear (and using a fun cheeky parentheses retort to humanize on the way out).
Email 3: An AI research agent for investment firms
An investment analyst can only cover 40 stocks max because of how much time they have to spend manually researching them -- until this tool automates half the grunt work:
This is actually a really solid problem email. The biggest thing it's missing is a so-what? Analysts spend tons of time doing grunt work, but why should a managing director care?
Here we use a tactic from Jason Bay called chunking up. We take the triggering problem for the analyst (scraping earnings reports at 2am) and chunk it up to a bigger business impact for the MD (covering fewer stocks and not being able to diversify your risk).
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That's a wrap folks!
If you're sending 100 emails and only getting 1-2 not interested replies, spend time perfecting your cold email template to 2-3x your results instead of blasting more emails.
