Ryan Dohrn answers Ray from Denver on writing shorter sales emails. Use three-word subject lines and three-sentence bodies, skip the pleasantries, and break your message into 4-5 touchpoints instead of one long email. Shorter emails get higher response rates.
Hey friends, how's your sales week going? Ryan Dohrn here, your global sales coach, answering your listener questions sent into ryan@ryandohrn.com. D-O-H-R-N. All right, next question, here we go. Ray from Denver. I love Denver. I am having issues writing short and simple emails. Every time I send a sample to my boss, they say the email is way too long. What should I do? So, Ray, this is a super common problem, and this is where it stems from. You can blame your mom or your granny, or, you know, somebody told you that you only have one chance to make a first impression. That's what's going on. You're thinking that you have to be thorough. You're thinking that you have to, you know, have every I dotted, every T crossed. Everything needs to be well thought out. And this is what I've observed. Sure, we want you to be complete. We want you to sound smart, but that whole rule of 3 and 3, 3 words in the subject line, 3 sentences in the email. I just basically look at an email and I eliminate anything that really doesn't make sense or anything that's just common pleasantries. Let me give you an example. A very good friend of mine, an incredibly smart businesswoman, said to me, Ryan, I hate it when people write, hi Jill, I hope you're doing well. Okay, she said to me, Ryan, they don't know me, they don't care about my health. Get rid of that. So any of those type of pleasantries, um, I would just, I would just eliminate from those emails. The second piece is look at what you can do to shorten things up. Be choppy in how you write. Nobody's looking at it unless you have bad grammar, bad punctuation, bad spelling. No one's gonna look at that and go, oh, it seems like a little bit of a choppy sentence. Normally it's like, hey, get to the point. And then the third thing is recognize you don't need to put everything in one email. It's okay. More than likely you're gonna prospect people over the course or course of four or five occurrences: voicemails, emails, text messages, LinkedIn messages. It's okay. Take your total message and chop it into four or five parts. It is okay. Just remember, shorter emails according to every email expert, shorter emails almost always get you a good response. So Ray out in Denver, good luck shortening them down. I know I used to write. War and Peace. I'm telling you, and I'm better at it now than I've ever been before. And I'm getting more responses now, Ray, than I've ever gotten before as well. Hey, Ray, everybody, don't forget, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it. And they're not. We're not crazy. Well, we're the chosen few. We found careers that'll feed our families for a lifetime. More on what I can do to help you speak at your sales conference or whatever over at ryandohrn.com. D-O-H-R-N. ryandohrn.com. We'll see you next time.
