The speaker (Adam Kay) argues that effective multi-threading in sales means creating single, tailored lines of communication to each stakeholder rather than mass emails. You should identify 3–4 functional groups and multiple power levels within them (executives, managers, end users), map what problem you solve for each, and send role-specific, mobile-friendly meeting recaps (3 bullets) that focus on "what's in it for me." Avoid mass emailing because it diffuses responsibility.
Chapters
Foreign. So this is going to sound counterintuitive, but the key to being multi threaded, the best way to multi thread is being single threaded with everyone. Here's what I mean by that. What Multi threading is not. Multi threading is not mass emailing. Everyone involved in a deal, okay? It is multiple single lines of communication with everyone who influence is a deal with everyone who influences the deal. Why? Couple of reasons for that. Number one, mass emailing is just bad practice because here's what our brain does. When we see six to 10 people or three or four people on an email, everybody thinks, oh, someone else will take care of that. So they don't think they need to respond or do anything else with it. So whether you're multi threading or not, mass emailing is a bad idea. Okay? But for multi threading we need single lines of communication because another brain science thing is in sales, it's always about what's in it for me. Okay? That's why it's important to single thread. Let's break that down a little bit more. Okay? So ideally we are multi threading into three or four different groups or functions and they may not all directly benefit from our product, but they're all going to be affected by it. And here's a real life example of that. And my first SaaS job, I sold HR tech to school districts. And who I had to multi thread into was first HR and also finance because HR did not have much power or much money in school districts and so we absolutely had to have finances buy in for it to go anywhere. I also had to buy a multi thread into it because it needed to understand the setup, the integrations, how other systems are going to be impacted. And if we sell into any kind of tech, it is almost always involved. So that should be a familiar one. Okay, but if we're not in tech, I have a coaching client who sells restaurant equipment. Who he has to multi thread into are managers and operations executives. So they are the ones that are getting the efficiency gains from the equipment that he's selling. He has to multithread into finance because they have to agree that that business case makes sense. And also he has to multithread into the HR department because HR is frequently brought in on these deals because HR handles work comp claims and the restaurant equipment he sells is safer and it lowers the number of work comp claims and therefore the HR department benefits as well. So fewer work comp claims means the HR people, HR staff, can spend their time achieving their goals for the year. Okay. And so they are frequently brought in as part of the buying committee as well. Because remember, if we have three, three VPs, the VP of HR, VP Finance, VP Operations, going to a CFO saying, hey, we want to make this multi million dollar equipment purchase. My client closes deals at a much higher rate. Okay, it might also be sub department. So if we're selling a very specific thing. So if we're selling marketing tech, there's probably not much need for me to multi thread outside of marketing depending on the org. But within marketing, I likely need to multi thread into the CMO and demand gen marketing ops. So again, three to four different departments, or it could be three or four different subgroups. We also need to be going into multiple levels, multiple power levels in each of those groups or departments. Okay, so it is absolutely not just executives who influence deals. Every executive has a manager or a director that she leans on to get things done. And every manager has a rock star on their team who gets brought into evaluations. And this rock star is going to be the end user. And their role in the evaluation is to speak to how a purchase of this thing would affect the team's day to day. Okay, so here's, so here's loosely what these three power levels care about. And we'll go more into this in the next section. But executives care about does this fit in with how we accomplish our initiatives, how we reach our goals, and especially how we lower risk as an organization? Okay, managers, real simple. Managers care. Does this help my team? And end users care about, does this help me? Does this make my day to day life easier or harder? So when we think about multi threading into all of the folks, this whole web of folks that influence a deal, it becomes pretty obvious that the problem that we solve for each of them is different. And we need to be careful with this. So because if we send an executive an email on how our product will help one individual team's performance or how it's going to help the end user in their day to day, we're going to lose that executive if we message an end user about how we help their organization decrease risk and increase their market share, it's not that relevant, like they might like it, but they're going to be most interested in how it helps them. They each care about what's in it for me. So we have to individually message them. So if you take one thing from this section, no mass emails, just don't do it. So let's talk through a couple of examples. Okay, so if we are Doing a meeting recap for a cfo. It's going to sound like this. So, Anna, I met with your ops team today about the risk in your CRM data. We're going to quantify impact to revenue growth when we meet again. We're going to talk about your specific roi. Also going to be covered on that meeting. And you should have the meeting invite and I'll let you know what happens afterwards. Okay? So notice what we mentioned here. We mentioned things like risk, quantifying impact, specific ROI. These are the things that CFOs care about. If we do a meeting recap for a director, it sounds like this, okay? Met with your ops team about the state of your CRM data. What we're going to show is the size of your team's opportunity when we meet again. And we're going to quantify the specific revenue growth possibilities and impact to your team's pipeline. We're not talking about the whole company right now. We're talking about the manager or director. Right? That's what we mentioned. We mentioned that their team's opportunity, their team's pipeline, not the whole company, not risk, just what's relevant to them because that's what managers and directors care about. That is why we should not be messaging all our multi threadies on the same email. Okay? Different roles equals different problem solved. That's why we don't put everybody. That's one of the many reasons we don't put everybody on the same email. Okay? So let's make this real. From my teaching background, I can tell you that if you don't practice this, if you don't put this in place, if you don't apply this to your own life, if you just listen to this, it's not going to have much of an impact. If you want the full impact, you need to actually apply it to your deals. Right? So for this exercise, I'm going to write out all of the contacts that we could multi thread in a deal. Okay? And then we're going to do, then we're going to write out what problems are we solving for each of those Personas, okay? So it has to be relevant to that specific Persona. Don't sleep on this. Don't just mentally think about it. Write it down. All the brain science says if you write it down, it's going to be cemented in your brain. So write this all out. Okay? Now we're going to go a level deeper. Okay? So application is one level, is one way that we assimilate knowledge. And again, as a teacher synthesis, doing something different, making this into something new for ourselves is how we really deeply learn information. So second layer of this exercise is we're going to write a recap email that is three bullets long and fits on the cell phone so that they don't have to scroll. So there's tools out there that we can use to help with this that'll show us what it looks like on a mobile device and that'll help us. We can use tools that have AI to help us write better emails. But we want to do is write an ECAP recap email that is no more than three bullets long. That's remember the examples we just showed you. That's what was modeled no more than three bullets fits on a cell phone. And here's why. 80% of folks are going to read email on their cell phone. That's going to be the way that they see our messages. Make it easy for them. This is another value add. Don't make them scroll. That is adding to their work. Friction reduction in all things in sales should be our motto. Okay? And we, when we make it easy for them to read our email, don't underestimate the power of that.
