Learn the Emotional Relevance framework for cold emails that actually get responses. Connect to buyer pain, show you understand their situation, paint the after-state, and back it up with proof. The video walks through a real email, shows what's missing, then tests it against competitors and CEO credibility.
I have sent and received thousands of cold emails in my career and I have a pretty good idea now for what converts. Before we go into it though, I need to set a foundation that it's impossible to have effective messaging without first understanding your prospect's priorities. Make sure you nail that piece. Understand who you sell to, what they care about, how you help them. However, it's common to have really bad messaging even if you have that understanding. This framework I'm going to teach you today is to help you optimize messaging once you have that required foundational knowledge of your prospects and your value proposition. This framework is also channel agnostic. It's applicable for cold email, cold calls, inmails, or any other verbal or written outreach. Every aspect here should apply to any outreach that you're doing. I call my messaging framework Emotional Relevance. I coined this term after I received an email that completely changed my perspective on personalization, because I had taught for years that emails had to be personalized. But the problem is AI driven sales automation tools have made it easier than ever to be personalized, which means it no longer stands out. Like My inbox today is full of personalized emails, references to Zelda from my stupid jokes on LinkedIn, my previous employer, my current employer, my hobbies. Literally anything and everything that the Internet can surface about me is included in these ultimately ignored emails. I'm at the point where you could literally write my biography, attach it to your cold email, and you still might not get a response if it's not relevant. Okay, honestly, I would respond if you wrote my biography, but I'm not gonna guarantee a medium. But here is the email that changed my perspective. The best managers are never surprised, but now that most of us are remote, it's getting harder to stay on top of our metrics. You shouldn't need to refresh 40 browser tabs every 30 minutes just to stay up to date on how your team is performing. What if you could close those tabs and get alerted on your phone When a metric needs your attention, nothing falls through the cracks. No more tabs, spreadsheets, and surprises. Now let's break down why this was so effective. First, the best managers are never surprised. This opener evokes an emotional response. Yeah, I aspire to be a best manager. And yeah, I hate being surprised. So now you have my attention. Cold email, which is gonna be a much better opener than hey, I saw you liked Jen Allen Knuth's post about LinkedIn. Which by the way, I would never, never do that. But now that most of us are Remote it's getting harder on top of our metrics. This is an effective sentence because one it's timely. My team is transitioning to remote work and then it was relevant. They are understanding that I need to know key metrics as a part of my job. The next piece you shouldn't need to refresh 40 browser tabs every 30 minutes just to stay up to date on how your team is performing. I couldn't have written a more accurate sentence to describe my current and painful state even if I had tried. Now I want to reiterate how critical this is. I, the sender of the email, understood how I was spending my time, what I was trying to accomplish, and why it was a problem. That is the idea you want to aim for when thinking about personalization and relevance. Then what if you could close those tabs and get alerted on your phone When a metric needs your attention, nothing falls through the cracks. No more tabs, spreadsheets and surprises. So this the seller. After describing my very painful current state, they then propose an ideal afters date which is compelling. The only point this email really missed on is proof. I didn't see any evidence that they could actually help me in the way that they are claiming. And by the way, after looking at this vendor, we didn't end up moving forward because they couldn't pull it off. So maybe they didn't have any proof to share. Still though, this is a nearly in my mind, perfect constructed email that shows most of the emotional relevance framework. First, we drive emotion by connecting to the buyer's aspirations and concerns. Then we're showing that we understand how they currently spend their time to solve their problems. Next, it clearly shows a proposed after state that's attractive. We're not leaving them wondering, okay, but what do you actually do? And then the piece that was missing that you need to add is evidence that you can actually back up your claims. Now, if you're newer to sales, this framework alone is more than enough to get you significantly improved results in prospecting. But if you're more experienced, let's layer on a couple more checks to ensure that your messaging is as close to perfect as possible. The first one is around specificity. I call this the competitors test. It's extremely simple. Can you find the exact same value proposition you used on your email on your competitor's website? Or another way to look at it is could one of your competitors send the exact same email you sent, but just swap in their company name for yours if you can? It's too generic. I get tons of emails promising me increased revenue, increased rep productivity, improved forecast accuracy. The reason I don't respond isn't because I don't care about those things. It's because saying hey, we help companies increase revenue doesn't answer three key questions for me. How are you different? Why does it matter? And how can you prove it? Leading with value isn't enough to get attention anymore. Instead, you should lead with differentiated and defensible value. The next test is the I'll call it the CEO test. We asked the CEO of one of my former companies what type of cold outreach that earned his attention, and he gets an absolute massive amount. And here's what he said stands out for him. Number one outreach that proves you understand his problems, which should be similar to what you heard in the first part of this video. 2 Evidence you work with someone that he trusts, either internal to the company or external and then three specific and relevant proof points. So when reviewing your messaging to run these checks, ask what problem does this seem to solve? And will my prospect even care? Who do we work with that my buyer might know and respect? That's harder to get, but it stands out more. And then finally, does this proof point does our customer story actually match the problem that they care about? If you can answer these favorably, you are on the right track. It's shocking how much bad messaging I still see. If you apply what you learned in this video, I'm quite confident that you'll stand out and have a much higher conversion rate through your cold outreach.
