How to write great sales emails?- Will Allred

It's your Saturday morning and you're in the midst of your honey to do list trying to get things done and someone's like, hey, check out this really cool software that has nothing to do with what's going on in my life right now. I've now got to translate all these things that you do back to my problems and try to figure out, is that something that I want to do? Most buyers aren't going to take that time. Come on. The key thing for folks to understand is your email is actually not being read for comprehension. It's being read for categorization. The average amount of time that somebody's reading your email, about 11 seconds. And so you know, most emails are not written for an 11 second reading time. They're written for a minute to two minutes. At the start of the pandemic that actually worked fine. You could write a 250 word email and your chance of response really wouldn't drop off compared to if you wrote a 50 word email. That's changed. And we've actually seen it in the data where like basically month over month that like length of email gets shorter and shorter, the ones that get positive replies. And so now like the upper limit is like 100 to 100 kilo, where if you're starting to go past 30 second reading time, we see reply rates drop off and it's just like over and over again. We continue to see shorters winning and it's because there's so much traffic going out, there's so many people trying to sort through their inbox and if you make it easy on them, they tend to reward you. We're trying to take these linguistic trends, these trends in how you write and just tie them back to what's driving success for your business. As you use our product, it actually learns how you write, but it also learns how your customers like to be written too. And so your scoring starts to adjust and it starts to fluctuate. Say you're using a tool like a salesloft or an outreach. We can actually plug it on the backside and supercharge that out of the get go. It takes about 100 emails for us to start to get a sense for your writing style. But we're finding over and over that we can double response rate pretty much on average. It's not how you were trained in school to write. You were trained in school to be comprehensive. You were trained in school to explain. You're also rewarded for using more complicated language. Academia raises up the intellectual bar for what you should be putting out there, it should be mentally stimulating for the professor to read through. And I get that. But in cold email, it doesn't work. In fact, it does the opposite. And it's because of this triage that it's the case. It's because they're spending 11 seconds trying to categorize it. And if they see the big words, if they see the request for 15 or 30 minutes, they quickly snap and they go, oh, this is yet another sales email. I hope this finds you well. You know, like, lean into this, like, more for formal language, because you're reaching out to an executive or a decision maker and you're like, I'm just an sdr, right? Like, I should be trying to speak to the good graces or try to get their attention by building credibility with these big words. And it's very counterintuitive, but you need to talk to them like they're a peer. It's a very much so peer to peer conversation that requires a level of discomfort when you're first getting started because it's not comfortable being like, hey, imagine you're struggling with the following thing. We could help you with our solution. Is that something that sounds of interest? So you haven't been trained. First set of questions that I would ask you is, have you talked internally? Have you Talked to other SDRs? Have you talked to the AES, and have you talked to customer success? And the questions that I'd be asking them are, what's the typical status quo that our buyer is dealing with when they meet us? What are the problems that they're facing and how do we solve it? Come on.