#482 - We Analyzed 85 Million Cold Emails: This is How You GUARANTEE Replies | Sell Playbook

So we just finished breaking down Data on over 85 million cold emails in partnership with Gong to figure out what's actually working in cold email today. And we found out a couple things that the top 10% of salespeople are doing pretty differently than most reps. And today we're going to be breaking down all of the best practices that the data revealed.

So we're going to break down the data backed cold email formula from our new course called the Reply Method for Double Digit Replies. My name's Jason Bay. I run a company called Outbound Squad. We've trained some of the top sales teams in the world including Shopify, Zoom, Gong and a whole lot others.

And if you haven't met me, I'm Nick Siegelski. I'm one of the founders of 30 Minutes to President's Club where every single week we interview top 1% reps to try to figure out the different techniques and best practices that they're using to make it to the top of the leaderboard. And so today we're going to be covering a couple different things. One, we're going to be talking about how long your cold emails should be. Two, we're going to be getting into best practices for the type of language that you should be using. Your cold emails, there are some magic words that freaking tank your replies and then there's also some magic words or types of words that actually dramatically increase your replies. So we'll talk about best practices for language. We're also going to be getting into best practices for personalization. We're going to answer the question of is it actually worth your time to personalize your cold emails? And if the answer to that is yes, we will take you through the best and worst types of personalization and then we will end this thing the way that you end your cold emails with CTAs. We got some data on the top performing types of CTAs and we will rank cold email CTAs worst to best. And I was really surprised by this one, Jason, because interest based CTAs, which if you go on LinkedIn, everyone beats their chest about those, myself included for a number of years. Those are actually not the top performing cold email CTAs.

So there's a lot of data that we're going to dig through and stick around to the end because we're going to give you a framework called the Reply Method that will help you get double digit replies. If you're listening to this on the podcast, I recommend you check it out on YouTube by the way it's a little bit more visual. That way you'll be able to see a lot of the emails that we're breaking down. So without further ado, let's dig in, man.

Hi, Jason. So let's start this one with cold email length. What the data showed is shorter emails generally perform better. The recommendation is to keep your cold emails under 100 words and between three and four sentences. The whole goal here is to make them short, punchy, and skimmable.

I don't know about you, I wasn't necessarily surprised by that data, but what it did make me think of is three or four sentences. Not a lot of sentences, dude. Like, it's got to be super punchy. So the psychology behind this is really around cognitive load. So if you think about, you know, when you go on a Netflix, I don't know what it recommends for you, but for us, it's a lot of those, like, dating reality shows.

It's a lot of Love island in my household.

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So they reduce the cognitive load by suggesting things that they think you will like, making it easier for you to find something and spend time in the app. Same rules apply here. You gotta reduce the cognitive load of figuring out who the heck you are, are you credible? What do you want me to do? And is this something that I wanna take action on?

One note on this is I've helped a lot of salespeople recently with their cold emails and prep for this course. And a lot of times folks will clutter their cold emails with things that are well meaning but actually distract from the main point. Like, I had a buddy the other day, he had an email, and like, he had two sentences of like, part of the reason I'm Reaching out is we want to establish a long term relationship with your business. And I'm like, that's awesome, that's great. Tell them that in person. That's not going to make or break whether or not they respond to your cold email. Ash, when I was prospecting Jason, I used to like include, oh, and by the way, the implementation, we don't charge for your data migration and I promise it's a lot faster than other ones. And like that was a nice to have and that was a differentiator in our sales process. But in a cold email it actually put more thinking work on them. And so the whole goal here is like you hit them with the problem, you tell them, you solve that problem, you ask them if they want to meet, if they have that problem and want to make it go away and they feel like you're even remotely credible to. That's all that you need in a cold email. And that's part of why that shorter is better. So I rudely interrupted you earlier. You were going to go through an example, I think.

No, totally. It's the micro commitment. They're not going to give you their credit card number when they reply to your cold email. So what you're looking at here is an email. Honestly, Nick, I've seen worse emails. This email is actually not that bad. When you look at the content of the email, sure, the content's incredibly personalized. Like this rep. Vishal wrote this email and it's an HR solution that he's selling. I mean, what if your team didn't have to screen 6700 resumes? I noticed that your company added 27 people last quarter. Congratulations. I mean it's like, it's very detailed. It's talking about the problems. It's not like, you know, doing a big pitch of the solution. But none of that matters because it's a freaking novel, dude.

I see this and I'm like, you're putting work on my plate. And I'm like, yeah, I'm losing the forest through the trees. The trees are like, if I count this as a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9, like there's nine or ten chunks of sentences. And I'm like, ah. My work recently has been spilling into the weekends and anything I can do to get crap off my play, I am. And it's causing me to say no to more and more and more things as our company grows. And so if I see this, I'm like, do I want to actually take the time to figure out what's going on here? Or would I like 20 extra minutes with my puppy this weekend? And I'm going to choose the puppy.

And now you guys, you heard it. This is why Nick doesn't return it in my phone calls. What is a shorter version of that email look like? And by the way, you don't have to do this manually. ChatGPT A bunch of the LLMs, like they can all help you, like really shorten this stuff down. But look at this email. It's 50 words, four sentences long. The subject line instead of what if your team didn't have to screen 6750 resumes? It's 27 new employees. Say you just hired 27 heads last quarter. That's a lot of interviews. Reason, right? Problem. Most teams waste hours screening before they even talk to someone. Good recruiting teams at where we're dropping some social proof Figma rippling user help to surface the top 5% of applicants. Instantly worth seeing what this looks like for one of your open roles. It's the same information, just incredibly condensed down. It's very conversational and I can skim that. The average person reads about 250 words per minute, right? So if it's 50 words, do the math on that. That's about 12 seconds, right? That's about the amount of time statistically that someone would spend reading an email, which is actually about eight seconds. So you're giving the person a chance to consume most of the content in that email and that's exactly what you want.

That's really good. So, okay, now that we've talked about the length of the emails, let's talk about the words and the types of language that do and don't work in a cold email. So the biggest takeaway that I had when I was looking at this data is that sort of pitch telling your customer what you do, what you are, how you help, how you work. It tanks your reply rate. Looking at this, some of the big no nos are buzzwords. If you're using things like optimize or streamline or accelerate or single source of truth, like that's just going to crush your responses. And I think part of the reason for this is you see a lot of cold emails, Jason. Like every single rep talks about optimizing and streamlining and accelerating, etc. And while those things might be true, like whatever you sell, I used to sell a billing solution to law firms. I promise you, Jason, we optimized a lot of law firms billing processes. We did, we streamlined them too and also had a single source of truth to be able to see how the bills were doing. But the problem is every other rep who is selling things from HR solutions to in office snack delivery talked about optimizing and streamlining. And so you end up getting lost in the noise of every other solicitor, telemarketer, cold emailer out there. And your customer is not able to actually understand what optimizing that process means for them. And so I think cutting that is really good. Another thing, this one really surprised me because of how hot AI is right now. Using the word AI in your cold emails had one of the biggest decreases on your cold email reply rate. Part of the reason for this one is if you are talking about how your solution has AI, that inherently means you are talking about your solution and what the data showed. I'm going to spoil this is like the more you talk about their problems and their priorities, the higher your response rate. If you're talking about how you have AI in your solution, that means you're not talking about their problems as much, you're talking about yourself more. AI is just a mechanism to solve the problem that they have. And so if you have it, great, but you shouldn't be talking about it ad nauseam in your cold emails. ROI language is also another killer of cold email response rates. And this one made a lot of sense to me because something we've been talking about a lot in our sales process here at 30mpc is that people buy emotionally and then they justify logically. And so in our sale, we have to get them bought in emotionally before we show ROI language. Like when we're selling our sponsorships, we're not leading with roi, even though that matters to the marketing leaders we're selling to. We're starting by getting them bought in on the emotional piece of the sale and then at the end they're justifying with, hey, here's what other folks have seen ROI wise. And so leading with that in a cold email, like it's just stagnant, stale, and it feels like work where I'm like calculating the ROI of a solution. Lucian, I didn't even ask to hear about. So all of that stuff is going to hurt your response rate.

The thing that surprised me the most actually was the AI piece. I knew that talking about, you know, buzzwords was bad platform I knew was bad roi. No, you're kind of generally not supposed to do that. The AI AI, I didn't know it would decrease reply rates by 36%. That's significant. And the thing with AI, I think that's super important right now is, and this is with any feature. I was just sort of working with a new client. They sell construction software and they have like AI tools that help them sell deals and do like automated estimating and all of that kind of really cool stuff that I didn't have when I was running a house painting business back in the day.

Yeah.

And it's like you can't talk about AI estimating. You got to talk about how it helps you from losing deals to your competitors. Because that is the emotional thing that every contractor hates is doing a bid, competing against four other painters or roofers or whatever it might be and then losing. That sucks. Get them sold on that idea first. So the keys to great cold outbound, and this is kind of a line I think you, you said to me, and it really stuck out, was this idea of we have to sell them on what they are already sold on. And you know what people are already sold on their day to day, what their priorities are. And the number one problems getting in the way of those priorities. We try to shift the buyer's priorities and say, you know what, you're over in your world over here. Come into my world, dude. It's really freaking awesome. You should care a lot about this. That doesn't work when you do outbound. We have to start in their world and we have to give them priority based language. We have to show them it's for them, it's for their industry, it's connected to something that they care about. When you give your solution first and you don't give context through that problem, it's just going to be a complete mess. It's the same. I met my wife on Tinder, Sarah. It's no different than just the first message saying, here's my stats, dude, here's my credit score. Here's like, you know, it's like, yeah, is that stuff important at the end of the day? Yeah, maybe. Maybe someone wants to know they're not getting married to someone that has multiple six figures of debt. Maybe they're going to inherit, but you don't need to get open with that. You know what I'm saying? So it's like we do these things in sales that you just would never do in your everyday life. So this is to me, one of those really obvious things when you step back out of sales. Of course you shouldn't just talk all about yourself the very first time that you meet someone.

I mean, I'm thinking about the thing that you said earlier about tying your outbound and your messaging to their current priorities. And I'm going to be honest, like, this is one of the biggest mistakes that I made when I was selling time entry software to law firms. We were selling, ironically, an AI time entry system that would like, automatically track how the attorney spent their day and create a timesheet for them. Which attorneys are like, a lot of them have to manually, unlike an Excel sheet, keep track of, oh, I spent 15 minutes here and 15 minutes here and 15 minutes here so they can bill their clients. And it sucks. They literally have to account for every moment of their day. And this tool took over all of that away for them. And my prospecting was always like, hey, here's a different way to do time entry. This is going to be amazing. And no law firm wanted to go through that change of changing time entry systems. And so I basically had to catch a law firm who had an initiative of, yeah, we already hate our system. We're going to get rid of it because it has bugs or it's not working or something. There weren't enough of those law firms for me to hit my quota. What I should have done was I should have figured out what are the other initiatives, what are the other priorities that these law firms have and how does an AI time entry solution tie into that? So, like, where we started to see success was when we found a law firm that had like a big well being initiative. And we knew attorneys like having to account for every minute that actually really hurt their mental health. And so when we could tie into priorities like that, it was just like, oh, they're already bought in on that. This just supports that goal. And so hopefully that's helpful for some folks listening here. Like, that was a huge mistake that I made in my outbound back in the the day.

I think there's just a great overall sales lesson there and that there's power in numbers. You want to sell to the thing that a lot of people care about at that company, especially the executive team.

Yeah.

So if we take a look at an email, this is loosely based off of a customer that I work with that sells into clinical operations.

Yeah.

So they sell to companies that run these studies. They need to get them their products to market faster. And if they can get rid of a lot of the manual work, it helps get that product to market faster, which is the number one thing they care about. So the email is subject line Phase 2 pancreatic cancer study. So it's literally the study that they just got approved. Hey, Bailey, saw that you just got FDA approval to proceed with the FAPI clinical trial problem statement. Clinical Ops leaders tell us they want to enable the recruitment of upcoming trials, but spreadsheets and double data entry across multiple systems causes delays. I think what's really important to point out in that problem statement is it doesn't just say spreadsheets really suck and it's really labor intensive. It talks about the impact. The delays is really the big thing that they care about. Value and social proof well Tromix and Mid Rhythms so I'm leveraging social proof to similar customers used our help to shorten startup timelines from 12 weeks to four weeks to get their product to market faster. Can I share how this could be helpful for you at Sophie and I think the thing that's really important there is it didn't say here's how they saved $165,000 on their studies. It's like they took it from what normally takes 12 weeks to four weeks.

I really like the subject line. It's clearly about them. Phase 2 pancreatic cancer study. Like they had just launched this study or something. I'm not super familiar with the space. It's really hard not to open that email when that's something that they literally did. I found those are the best subject lines that I've sent are ones when it's tied to a physical action that that company or person took in the real world. So yeah, that actually ties us to our next piece, Jason, which is about personalization and answering the question of is personalization actually worth their time or is it just something that sales managers want reps to do to, I don't know, appease them? The answer is hell yes, it is 100% worth your time to be personalizing because the data showed when you personalize, it has 5x the reply rate over not personalizing your emails. That said, not all types of personalization are created equal. One of the things that we wanted to answer when we were building this cold email course with the data with Gong was what types of personalization resonate the best with executives. So what we did was we looked at the impact of a couple different types of personalization and what it did for response rates with director plus executives. So this data is not for like if you're reaching out to ICs or if you're reaching out to managers. These are for folks that are at or above the line. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go best to worst in terms of the different types of personalization and I'LL share some color around each. So let's start with the first one which was the best, best type of personalization, which is activity based personalization. This is like calling out if they were a closed lost deal or they downloaded content on your website or they joined a partner webinar or they were at a conference or trade show that you were also at. This one had a 24% response rate. Literally one in four cold emails gets a response when you use activity based personalization. And I'm going to be honest, like, this one is kind of cheating because it's literally related to like, oh, you were a closed lost op six months ago, do you want to talk now? Or hey, I saw you're also going to this conference. Do you want to meet when we're there? And so I feel like this one is like, it's a little bit skewed because it's so related to an action that they took. But honestly, like, it's good to know how much better this performs. So if you can tie your personalization to something they actually did, it is well and above. Number two, which is company based personalization. This one had a 9% response rate. And what this is is when you're personalizing relative to something that the company did. So an example of this would be if I were prospecting to a law firm and I was calling out the fact that they had just opened a new office versus individual based personalization. Hey Jason, I saw that you went to ucla, for example. Actually I think you're an Oregon State mistake, guys. So please don't see that here.

Or like with this, if, if I, if I could add to this, the other piece too is the. I was so like excited to see this data too because it's what I always recommend.

Yeah.

Where it's like the, as an executive, you were closer to the business problems and the business outcomes. Therefore you would care more about stuff that's related to the business. But I think what's important here to mention too, as you're going through this is like stacking these works really well too. So if you did activity based and let's say you're reaching out to content downloads people that attended a webinar.

Yeah.

You could use similar messaging across all of them. Hey, saw you attended the 30 MPC webinar with Jason on cold email. That's like, okay, if you take it to the next level. And like the reason I was reaching out is I noticed you're hiring a bunch of SDRs right now. Yeah, right. Like, if you can take it to that level and stack them. That's where you're going to get like 20, 30 plus percent reply rates.

Yeah.

So just think about how you can kind of use some of these together. And then the last thing I would mention is this is sort of the opposite finding of ICs and managers. So if you sell something where you do want to get conversations with managers, a lot of those technical products that people sell, it's good to start with managers. They actually care about the exact opposite. They do care more about individual based stuff.

I'm also thinking about this from the perspective of reps who like, there's only so much time in the day for you to be spending personalizing stuff. And two sort of workflow things that should save time to allow you to personalize more and get more responses. One, the company versus individual finding one was so awesome. Because what you can do now is let me go back to that example from earlier of if I'm personalizing based off of law firm, just open an office in Tacoma. I can reuse that personalization with the managing partner of the law firm, the CFO of the law firm, the CEO of the law firm. And so one point of personalization actually is better than finding three distinct points of personalization for each of those executives. That is a huge time saver. The other piece about the stacking, dude, I'm going to be honest. Three years ago, if you had been like, Nick, you should be stacking multiple types of personalization, I'd be like, yeah, sounds nice. I don't have time for that. Jason, you showed me some AI prompts where you basically feed it all of the different triggers that are your best types of personalization. Like you showed me that one with pretending to prospect lausd and it pulled in like three or four different data points and it was a killer cold email. Folks, in the show notes, we're going to put a bunch of those AI prompts that Jason shared with me. That dude, it blew my mind. It was the first time I was actually bought in on AI messaging. So first one was activity based, that was 24%. The next one was company based, that was 9%. From there it's individual based. So that's calling out something specific to them. That one had a 6% response rate, which actually is tied with the next one, which is industry level personalization. That one also had a 6% response rate. I don't know if you have any commentary on that because I liked that one also. It felt very reusable.

It's this idea that segmentation can beat personalization. And I think it's easy to confuse the two. So let's say that you sell an EdTech product product and you're reaching out. You know, we've been using Tacoma and Seattle as an example. If you're reaching out to like Washington schools or if you're reaching out to schools within the Seattle school district, like look for ways where you can put in some of this layered like localization almost or categories maybe or sub niches, you know. So if you sell to CPG brands and let's say you help them with ecom or something like that, I mean like you could say instead of reaching out to all supplement companies, you could focus on fitness supplement companies, you could focus on energy drinks.

Right?

You could focus on all kinds of niches and you reach out to people within the same pockets, you can speak to them the same without having to customize everything. So I think personalization does not necessarily equal customization. You have to do by hand every time.

If it can feel the closer to home that it feels, the more your prospect is like, oh, this is meant for me. So different layers of this. Like layer one is I reach out and I say hey, we're working with a bunch of law firms. Layer two is hey, we're working with a bunch of personal injury law firms. So now it's like a sub type of law firm. Layer three would be we're working with personal injury law firms in Reno. Layer four would be like we're we're working with personal injury law firms in Reno with more than 50 attorneys or who recently acquired another law firm. The more that I can start to weave that stuff in and you were showing me you can use AI to like hyper tailor it based off of that niche. Basically what you do when you're prospecting is you pull segmented lists and you can target so much better with them.

So here's an example of an email that uses company based personalization. This is an old client of mine that sold an automated welding solution that was both hardware and software as a service to some of the largest manufacturers out there. Their subject line, one word, lowercase welders. It's the number one thing that everyone has in there. My 90 plus percent open rate. Hey Luke, saw you're hiring MIG welders and looks like there's a lot of manual rework and touch up in your hitch welds. So that was something specific that they saw their hiring. They went on the website and saw that they have a lot of these hitches that they built. Lack of skilled welders. It's tough recruiting these days in the current marketplace can create production bottlenecks. Hitch manufacturers like Curt Social Proof use our help to overcome the welder shortage and produce consistent, high quality welds using automation. Interested in seeing how?

So the first line that Sawyer hiring MIG welders and it looks like there's a lot of manual rework and touch up in your hitch welds. That's the piece that they customized in the email. Pretty much everything else was part of a template, correct?

Correct.

That's great because that's not so hard to replicate. Like I can still blast out those at a pretty high volume, but that just, it feels super close to home.

So let's talk about cold email CTAs and which ones perform best. I think the key idea here and we sort of came to this realization when we were recording this course together. We're like, dude, how you end emails is actually maybe more important than how you begin them. And there's this thinking that when we prospect, especially when we send cold emails, that we want the prospect's time. But it's, it's actually the worst thing to ask for. Yeah, it is the worst thing to ask for. Like your reply rates go down by 44% when you ask for a meeting.

It's bonkers.

It's freaking insane, man. So there's four different types of CTAs. I want to run through the different types of CTAs and kind of the data. The first type of CTA is, you know, the meeting cta. It's asking for time. When you say things like can I get 15 minutes of your time? Are you free to meet tomorrow? Does 2pm work for you this Friday? That's going to reduce reply rates by 44%. Second type of CTA is asking for problems or using open ended questions. So if you think about the cognitive load theory that we talked about before, when I ask you if you have a problem and do so with an open ended question, which open ended questions are great in cold calls by the way? And they're great in discovery conversations, but who's going to take the time to write out a long response to a stranger, right? Minus 29% in the reply rates. Now where it starts to get interesting is if we do interest based CTAs. So an example of this would be worth a quick conversation, worth a chat, worth a look, does this sound interesting, etc. 7% increase in reply rates. It's almost Statistically, like irrelevant. It's almost like doesn't even make a difference. So the last type of CTA outperforms all of the CTAs. It's the offer based CTA. You're going to increase reply rates by 28% with offer based CTAs. So an offer based CTA is essentially giving them value in exchange for their time. Okay, a lot of people are asking for time. We're going to give you something valuable, not just in demo of our product. We're going to give you some insight.

Right.

So at the end of your email, the CTA might sound something like interested in benchmarking company a against competitor A. Want a quick intro to Nick? Right? Want to try it out? Doesn't cost anything. I'm offering to give some insight to share a benchmark or report. Maybe it's an audit that I'm doing. I'm offering to give them something in return for their time.

We do this when we're prospecting for sponsorships at 30 minutes to President's Club where our CTAs on our cold emails are like, hey, we actually put together a couple different ideas. Would you like us to share them with you? And that does so much better than, hey, are you open to learning more about a sponsorship? And I think the reason for all of this is if you think about things from the buyer's perspective, which it's strange, like a lot of salespeople don't do that. Even though that is literally the definition of empathy for a lot of buyers. Like, dude, meeting the salespeople is a total waste of their time. If you're, if you're listening to this or watching this, you're probably one of the few, like, great salespeople out there. Most buyers have a really, really negative experience and perception of what it means to meet with a salesperson. The Rain group did a study and it was something like 58% of buyers felt like meeting with a salesperson wasn't actually worth their time. And so you're battling this stigma of, oh, you're just a lowly salesperson and you have to find a way to overcome that. You might want their time, they want value. And so what you need to do is orient around what the buyer wants and say and think, okay, what could I give to this person? What value could this person get from meeting with me regardless of whether or not they end up buying my product? Or if, if you want to take this even more extreme, what reason might they choose to meet with me even if they're like not even that interested in the product. Now, I'm not saying we want to book meetings with totally unqualified buyers, but if you're a good salesperson, you know that if you can get a conversation, a live conversation with your ideal buyer, you can find a way to turn that into an opportunity. And if not, you'll impress them enough that you can say, great, who else do you know that I should be talking to? But so you make these offers as a way to say, hey, I have something that I think you want. Would you like it? Because we got to talk. So you were teaching me, Jason, like there's a bunch of different types of offers that we can give. They're almost like three different levels. You've got your easy ones that you can like literally just put into all of your cadences. You've got your medium ones that might take a little more work and then you've got your hard ones that you might use for your dream accounts.

Yeah. So I'll share what those types are and then we'll give you a quick example. So the easy one is what I call pitching the blind date. So let's say that I'm an sdr. Nick, you're my account executive. You've spent eight years selling blind date.

Isn't that supposed to be your like credit score goes in the cold email.

Right, Exactly. Credit score, body fat percentage, all of that. Your bmi, maybe even, oh, I'm in trouble now. So you're going to position who the buyer will meet with. So hype up that ae. If you're an sdr, hype up the sales engineer. A lot of reps that sell it, like I'll use EdTech as an example. Again, a lot of them are like previous teachers. Like, that's a really great thing to hype up in the email. So you want to show them that meeting with you is going to be a good time, it's going to be a good hang, they're going to get something valuable from it. You're a credible expert or the person you're sending the meeting with. Number two is medium. So this one's a little bit tougher. It's a one to many offer. You're really relying on your company to have some good collateral for you. So this is a high quality insight, like a competitive benchmark, Industry research, et cetera. An example, I worked with a company that sold to E comm businesses. They worked with a third party to mystery shop like hundreds of these businesses and everything from like response time to Chat their hours, et cetera and they would lead with that as a way to benchmark against your competitors. It was really cool and very provocative. Lastly, hard one to one offers. This is you offering something that's very custom tailored, a resource that's specifically for them. So this is kind of what you guys do. Nick, at 30 MPC it sounds like, hey, we put together some ideas for you if want us to send it. If you sell something that you can see on their website or you do a cart audit, if you're selling e comm stuff, it's showing them that I put in some customized personalized effort for this and I'll send it over to you. It could be offering to do a custom audit of sorts as well. So if you sell cybersecurity, this works pretty well for, for some of our clients too. I think the big thing there is that this is more effort. This is, this is reserve this for enterprise type clients.

The other thing that I would note is so we're using that hard version at 30 minutes to President's club. I'll be honest, Jason, when we reach out to prospective sponsors, it's not like I have a list of here's 57 different campaign ideas that we had. We're usually like we're not reaching out to someone if we don't think they're going to be a good fit. And couldn't come up with a couple ideas after taking, I don't know, ten minutes of thought. And so it's not like I'm spending 10 minutes thinking through the ideas and then sending an email. I'm like, could I come up with some great ideas? Let me send an outbound message. And then if they respond, I'm like, let me put a couple things together. So it's not exactly a bait. I wouldn't call it a bait and switch. But it's not like you're doing all of this work up front and then hoping they respond to your cold email. If you can easily spin up something valuable once they've responded, I think that is still fair and ethical in my humble opinion. Let's actually look at an example, one here of an email that uses a one to many offer. So this is sort of same client I think that you worked with that does the cancer study is helping accelerate those things. So this one subject line is phase 2 pancreatic cancer study. So same study, same subject line. Hi Frank. Saw that you just got FDA approval to proceed with the FAPI clinical trial. Okay. There's the reason clinical ops leaders tell Us. Okay, this is the same problem that we had before. Now we've got an offer here. So this is different than this previous one and it says we ran a benchmarking analysis with a few of your peers like Ultromix and Med Rhythms to find average study start times, dropout rates and insights on how they shorten build times. Interested in seeing how you stack up. So this is awesome because I'm like, great. Even if I'm not totally interested in the spreadsheet thing, I'm going to at least respond and be like, yeah, I am interested in seeing that. Well, now you can share that benchmarking study. And if they're below any of the benchmarks, you have an awesome reason to be like, hey, we can help with that benchmark. And you've already started the conversation and you've led with value. Shocker. I hear that all the time. And a lot of people don't know what that means. When we started Dirty mpc, it always be like, what the hell does that mean to sell value? That is selling value. You were saying here is something helpful for you regardless of if you buy from me. But it's a mechanism to start a conversation with your buyer.

Let's give them the simple email framework that's going to get double digit replies. I call it the reply method. We've trained over 10,000 reps with this, several hundred teams. This works. It's very, very effective. So there's a couple of different components of it. Subject line, it's got to be boring and short. All of the data supports five words or less in the subject line. No pitching, no buzzwords, no AI, none of that kind of shit. Boring. Subject line, Hi, first name. And then the first line is going to be the reason. So this is where I want to show the prospect. I did my homework, I'm reaching out to you on purpose. This is the line that should scream, this is for you and no one else. Second's the problem. The problem is where I sort of answer this question of why change, right? What is the thing that I can speak to here that's not some ROI claim, nothing like that. Something that really articulates their current state and a problem they might be experiencing. Third line is value and social proof. I don't think that we share this stat specifically, but social proof does increase reply rates by 44%. So I need to pick a logo or two if I can, that we work with that's similar. And then I need to articulate here, here's how a peer solved this problem or here's what you can do, here's the outcome that we can get you, et cetera. And then last but not least, my CPU cta. I need to tell them specifically that if this resonates, here's what they should do. Interest based is okay, that yes or no interest based question or ideally you're making an offer of sorts and then you sign off with your name killer.

So let's take a look at one last email that that ties that full reply method together. So subject line here is curriculum map rollout. Hi Pat, here's the reason saw LAUSD is rolling out updated curriculum maps with learning targets and tiered assessments. So that's why we're reaching out. But here's the problem. Next line is the problem. It's tough to know which classrooms are on track without real time data and support often comes too late. So there's a problem. Here's the value and social proof piece. Seattle Public uses daily classroom insights to flag instructional gaps early and coach teachers before those gaps widen. Cta, can I show you how they're doing it? Jason? Oh, Jason sent this one. That must be why it's pretty good. It didn't come from Armand. That's an awesome email. So we go with the reason, the problem, the value in social proof and then that CTA there. Jason, we hit on a lot in this episode. Let's recap this thing and round it out. So to start, we covered a bunch of different data points around things like length, language personalization and interest length. You want to keep your cold emails short, between 50 and 100 words, three to four sentences only. Following that reply method that Jason just took us through the language. The words that you use in your cold email should be light on pitch and product talk and instead they should lean on priorities, problems and social proof. You want to be selling them on what they're already sold on their known or inferred priorities based upon what you know about that space. When it comes to personalization, there were two that were king. We've got our activity based personalization and we have our company based personalization. And Jason, you shared that if we stack those, they do even better. And then we also talked about this was a huge one. Don't ask for interest, quit your interest based cta. Make offers instead. You've got your easy, your medium and your hard level offers. Find a way to weave those into your sequences and you will see your response rates go up.

And then we cover the reply method. That was one boring short subject line. Two I Need a strong reason that shows them I'm reaching out to you on purpose. It's something about them that they could not mistake for someone else. Third is the problem. I need to agitate a bit and talk about something that is not ideal in their day to day social proof and value. Here's who we help, here's an outcome that we help them experience. And then our CTAs like we talked about interest based CTAs offers and I need to keep all of that under 75 words. If you liked what we shared today, we have a lot of free shit that we put together for you. One, there's a cold email data report. This is 85 million plus cold email data points that gong in partnership with outbound squad and 30 NPC that we sourced and put together for you, we put together JBA's ultimate cold email sequence. So if you're wondering how this all comes together, how many emails should I send in what order, etc. That's got that for you. The get the Meeting pack. I can't believe we're giving all this away for free. It's 20 plus cold emails and we're giving away offers.

These are one to many offers.

I'm like shit. This took a long time to put together the get the Meeting pack. It's got 20 plus cold email templates in there. These are my favorite for like hey, you want to invite a prospect to a webinar, to a conference, to a VIP dinner, you want to share a case? I mean there's just so many great email templates in there.

I wish I had a new rep.

I know dude. And then last but not least, ChatGPT prompts that help you write emails in about half the time. So every email that we showed you today started in ChatGPT. We had to make little edits and get it to the finishing line. But if you're wanting to know how to send enterprise grade cold emails that'll get responses and use ChatGPT to help you do it, make sure to check that out.

So I want to, I want to try my hand at this like offer thing. Jason. So tell me how I do here. So folks, if you liked what you got in this episode, we went in way more depth on this stuff with our cold email course where we pulled everything around like subject line data to formatting data, to a ton of different ways that you can upgrade your cold emails and get it to work. Because honestly, right now with all of the changes in just like deliverability and in AI and emails and, like, there's more and more spam blockers out there and buyers are becoming more resistant. Like, cold email is kind of feast or famine. I know a lot of reps who used to repeat repeatedly, deliver a couple meetings a week who, like, they're sending hundreds of emails and they're not even getting a response. And so if you liked what you got today, I have an offer for you, which is in the description or show notes of this episode. We've got a coupon code where you can save some money on the cold email course. Go check it out. I think there's a way for you to also get a free preview that should be in the show notes as well. Thanks for joining us today. And we'll see you on the next episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. Awesome.

Thank you.