Sales Prospecting Perspectives

If you don’t utilize email as a weapon during your sales prospecting efforts, then in my opinion you’re putting yourself at a distinct disadvantage. Hey, I’m open to the wide variety of styles and strategies we can throw at getting a target contact on the phone, but if we’re honest with ourselves how many calls have you received back from an initial cold call? As I’ve mentioned on many occasions, you need to leverage both phone and email to greatly increase the chance of any kind of response.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s also assume you know how to craft an email that is informative but also gets to the point (no more than a 1 minute read by the way). What’s the next step? Well maybe it’s just a matter of taking a step back. What about your email subject line?

I find we often forget the importance of a decent subject line. While email is critically important it doesn’t mean much if you can’t get them to open it. The problem is most of us don’t take the time to strategize on the simple task of crafting an interesting email subject line. Listen, the odds are stacked against us. 90% of the time we aren’t going to get a response on our first attempt. Using creative subject lines has helped my team to increase the lack of response we generally have all grown to accept far too easily.

Here are a few examples that have elicited a solid response from our first attempt emailing a prospect:

1. Checking in- Craig w/ AG Salesworks- Simple and to the point. This would be best described as our old standby since it tends to get a strong response.
2. Referral Help- You can’t assume the first person we’re reaching out is your most appropriate contact. Most of us need to dig around to find the decision maker. This should help you get there.
3. Meeting Request; Craig w/ AG Salesworks- Hey, our goal at the end of the day is to set up a meeting. Just put it out there.
4. Quick Question- Get to the point. We’re not here to waste anyone’s time and this subject sums that up rather nicely.
5. RE: 5 Minute meeting request- It may be a little sneaky, but it can’t hurt to make it look like you’re following up on a previous discussion. Oh, and you want them to know you are only going to monopolize a few minutes of their time.
6. Following up- Craig w/ AG Salesworks- If you’re following any kind of call process, which you should be, sending an email immediately after a voicemail is a must. Here’s a good sample subject line that gets us response after that voicemail is left.

I guess you’ll notice that simplicity is the theme here. From what I’ve seen overcomplicating a subject line seems to guarantee that your first attempt will be deleted once it lands in a prospect’s inbox. There is only so much that you can jam into that little box at the top of your email… keeping it creative and simple is the key.