Ep. 373 - Special Guest: Jed Mahrle - How to write cold emails that ACTUALLY get responses

Welcome to SaaS Talks from Lead to Close, where I'll be sharing with you everything that I've learned to close leads. I went from quitting my first sales job because I was too scared to talk to strangers to becoming a VP of sales for multiple tech startups, where I built a sales team from scratch and led them to an acquisition. I'll teach you how to schedule more demos on your calendars, close at least 50% of your demos, and build a pipeline large enough so you're always hitting quota.

If you're looking to scale, then turn the volume up. All right, everybody, we have another special guest today, Jed Morley. Probably all of you have seen him around. If not, then you should.

He's the head of Adbound Sales at Milshake. He's also the author of the Practical Prospecting newsletter. If you don't follow him on LinkedIn, give him a follow. I've been following him for a while now.

And it eventually led to me wanting him to be a guest on my podcast. And it's funny. So Jed runs head of AdBond at Mailshake. I was coaching the AEs at Mailshake on their discovery demo and follow-up.

So me and Jed have something in common there as well. But the topic that we're talking about today is a common topic that you probably see everywhere right now. It's salespeople having to own their own pipeline, especially AEs and prospecting. But I mean, it's not a new thing.

What's true though is that cold emailing is very difficult. If you don't know how to like cold email, like a lot of cold emails come out very, very generic. And so prior to this episode, Jed and I spoke and we got really tactful in the conversation. I was like, you know what, let's shave that for the episode.

So we're going to go deep into how to like actually write a cold email not like the frame not only just the frameworks but like word for word how to write them and what's what's worked for him so jed happy that you're here um pass the mic over to you yeah no thanks thanks more i'm happy to be on and and discuss some tactics for cold email thanks for having me yeah so when we when we prepped before this episode i think it was like last week or the week before i was asking like what's your what's your process of cold email?

Specifically, what is a good cold email and what do you do? And you don't have to give the very detail specific, but I may push for that. We'll see. Yeah, so let's just start from the beginning.

I think to your point, it's not super hard to understand and learn about frameworks that work or good copywriting tips. You can learn that pretty quickly. I feel like the hardest part of a cold email is actually landing on a problem or landing on something that's relevant to the prospect. Not necessarily the way you write it.

Like you can use open-ended called actions and all the tips that you probably see on LinkedIn, but the hardest part is actually understanding your buyer. And so to answer your question, I feel like the best part of what makes a good cold email is how well does it relate to the buyer? And I can dive into how I do that, but I think that's the first step that we're going to talk about cold emails. And it really comes from doing things like actually interviewing your customers, reaching out to people who are maybe internally, like let's say I sell to VPs of sales.

I'll go to my VPS sales and say, Hey, what do you think about these emails? Does this speak to you? Is this the way you write? Is this your language?

Listening to customer calls, if you sell software, reading G2 crowd reviews, and trying to literally pull out the exact words that your customers are using, and using that in your emails. I think that's the most impactful thing. So it's kind of two things. It's getting crystal clear on what are the problems you solve for your buyers.

And then what is the exact language that your buyers use to describe those problems and using that in your emails and then the frameworks and the copywriting tips and you know having an email it's 100 under 125 words and all the tips and tricks you see are kind of like the uh the wrapping paper on the gift if you will is the way i see it yeah do you think that's the hardest part the knowing your buyer's problems and language you use do you think that's the hardest part it almost seems like the easiest part because for a lot of sales people they already have this data inside their crm or their gongs or whatever it is?

Do you think that this is the easiest part or the hardest part? I think it's the hardest part and it probably depends on the company as well. But I think that people have two generic of problems. They understand in general what the problem is that they solve.

For example, Mailshake, the problem we solve is pipeline. But there's a million tools that are going to say we solve the problem of pipeline. So you have to drill down deeper. And it's also about narrowing your ICP.

So if you're like, oh yeah, I just sell to sales leaders at high growth startups, that's way too broad. You're not really speaking to anybody. So it also comes from getting really specific with your ICP. Like no sales leaders, they have anywhere from two to 20 reps.

They're using this software. They've been with the org three months. They're series A. And if you get really specific and narrowed on your ICP, then you'll find even deeper problems.

And so I guess to answer your question, I think finding the problems is the harder one. And the reason why is because people think they already know their problems, but they actually haven't drilled down deep enough uh if that makes sense yeah so i mean if there's a salesperson that just joined a company now let's call it a series a whatever it is um the first thing that you and then part of the job is to prospect you'd recommend obviously for them if they're whoever they're i speak to their their leader whoever that is and ask them like who's your buyer persona and then second thing would be to like reach you to crowd and captera reviews and find out the language that customers are using and then listen to gong recordings or assuming they're using gong obviously um and then and then interview existing customers and then interview people internally is there anything outside of that that they should be doing to better understand the buyer's problem no that's that's most of it that's what i would do and if you join and you ask about your icp you ask your sales leader hey what's our icp and you hear a generic answer you know you need to drill in deeper, right?

Or if you ask your sales leaders, what are the top three problems we solve for ICP? And you hear things like we help them save time or we help them increase close rates or whatever it is you sell And it something generic like that You need to drill down deeper and figure out what is that true problem that the buyer would describe How do you know if you drilled down enough And that's a common question, even with cold emailing and even discovering, how do I know I've done enough digging?

That's a really good question. I don't know if I know the answer, but I guess one way to describe it is like, do you ever get emails from agencies that are like, we're going to help you book 50 more meetings a month or whatever? it's like everybody wants to book more meetings if you're a sales leader of course you want more pipeline but it's kind of like the how right like it's it's how are you going to do that and you have to have an understanding i guess to answer your question if you drill down deep left you have to understand like where people are typically at right like um how are they getting it done right now and understanding like most of my buyers are getting because everybody can get the problems can can do the job without you right and so you have to have a clear understanding of exactly how they're getting it done, in my opinion, to then talk about the problem, if that makes sense.

I think that's- It does. Yeah. It's interesting because I think for anyone listening, what helped me was when I was the VP of sales, and I do this now with my clients, but for every company, it doesn't matter what industry you're in, SaaS, non-SaaS, et cetera, there's always what I call a buying scenario. And that is essentially the unique use case that your buyer persona is in.

So for example, you're the head of outbound sales at Mailshake and you may be evaluating software, but your use case is you're either evaluating software for the first time. You're like brand new to software or you're actually using a competitor and now you're looking to migrate out. And so now you're evaluating software, but you're coming from a competitor. So the buyer persona in a, I'm coming from a competitor versus I'm looking at this for the first time as a very different problem and use case than the other.

And so knowing, I think if you're going to do cold outbound, you should definitely silo or I can't think of the word now, but it's a segment. Oh, segment your audience based on their buying scenario. Are you going to email somebody, cold email somebody that's using the competitor or they're not using anything at all because the language changes? But anyways.

Okay, cool. So understanding your buyer problem and the language to use is step one. So you've had success, obviously, in getting responses from your cold emails. Now, I think it helps when someone hears about your company, like Mailshake.

People know who Mailshake is. Or if you're cold emailing from at a gong.io domain, people are like, oh, I've heard of gong. Yeah, I'll pay attention.

It's a lot harder when nobody's heard of you. Or if you're maybe selling a service, not a SaaS product. and I think that's the challenge for a lot of folks. Talking about like the actual email itself, what's worked for you to get a response?

Like what language did you use in your emails? So we really don't even mention Mailshake. I mean, of course you see it in the domain and whatnot. And I would say still like most of our market isn't familiar with us, but the actual language, like the way I guess we break it down is like the first line is the relevance line.

So every email we write has three lines. first line is usually one sentence. It's relevance. Why am I reaching out?

Second line is our value prop. Third line is our call to action. So in that first line, we're usually mentioned, like we don't spend a whole lot of time personalizing. We're usually looking for some sort of relevance trigger.

And so for us, it's pretty, I guess it's relatively simple because we sell to sales leaders and it's a product for sales reps. So we might call it out. We might look on sales navigator to see exactly how many SDRs and AEs. And we might open with, Hey, you know, more, it looks like you've got, you know, five A's, a few SDRs, you know, do they ever run into problems where emails land in spam?

Or do they ever struggle with low reply rates on cold email? So just kind of like mentioning the problem. So we'll use a relevance trigger like, hey, notice you just joined the company. See you guys using the software.

It looks like you're hiring some sort of trigger and then ask a question about a problem that we solve for that buyer persona. So that's what the relevance trigger looks like. The second line is the value prop. We just kind of give a hint as to how we solved that problem, but we don't really explain why, or we don't explain like in full detail because we want to use that to get them to take a meeting with us.

So we might mention something like have a process that involves boosting your reputation with Gmail and Outlook, as well as some AI messaging that have helped, you know, sales org see a 7% plus reply rate on cold email. And then the call to action, this is something we've been doing to get a lot more responses. It actually doubled our response rate from our previous call to action is mind if I just share a one minute video to explain how. And we're not creating custom videos.

We have one canned video that just explains briefly the most impactful part of our demo. And we send them that video. And then we follow up a couple of days later to try to book a meeting or we catch them on the phone after they've responded. And so again, it's like a relevance.

It's a quick value prop, not fully explaining how we solve the problem, but kind of giving them a piece of it. And then a little bit of social proof and then want to see a one minute video. That's kind of in a nutshell what our emails look like. so if you're if you're not customizing each email because it's more relevant based less personalization based how many emails are you generally sending um so like the sd it's different for me but for our sdr team it's anywhere from 100 to 200 a day um and most of the like half of them are like those first emails where they're doing like that maybe a little bit of personalization on the relevance but a lot of them are automated maybe like follow-up emails yeah and how many you said not for the SDR, but what about for you?

Are you sending out like one-off emails that are more personalized? I do. Yeah. Probably like 50 emails a day.

That's solid. All right. So relevance, value prop, CTA. I feel like I'm looking, you know, I look at my, my like LinkedIn DMs and my cold emails that I receive.

And I feel like a lot of them have this like relevancy value prop. It has that framework. So how do you stick out? Is it just like a numbers game at that point?

No, that is a good question. How do you stick out I guess part of it has been like packaging like trying to offer insights has been one of the biggest thing right And so we not trying to say like do you want to take a demo Part of what Mailshake solves, for example, is email deliverability. So email is going to spam. And so I think one of the biggest things, me as a sales leader, when I get prospected, what drives me to take meetings is I want to hear what other outbound sales leaders are doing with limited resources at smaller startups.

Because I'm a smaller startup, I have limited resources. I want to hear what other people are doing to build pipeline, right? And so I kind of take that same approach when we're targeting RICP, which is sales leaders. And we'll just mention things like, hey, did you know, on average, 30 to 40% of SDR emails go to spam?

I can share a few resources to help fix this. Would you be able to learn more? And so what we're trying to do there, to answer your question, how we stand out, is we're not just trying to pitch, pitch, pitch, talk about how we can help. We're just trying to, I guess, offer insights up front and then take the long-term approach of then going for the meeting after we've offered some sort of value up front.

So taking the conversations we're already having with prospects just like them and then using what's been impactful to them to provide value up front. P.S. If you're still listening to this and you want to get better at discovery, demos, closing, and everything in between like multi-threading, negotiation, closing, then check out FDTC University, my on-demand sales training.

The best part, students join in a few times every month for live sales coaching with me. So you're not alone. You're not just going through a course. You actually have a coach that helps you along the way.

So if you feel like you're leaving money on the table and you want to level up your sales game, then check out the link to join FDTC University in the description below or visit demo to close.com. And so is that part of your first email that that that like insightful email or your is that part of a follow up? That's usually the follow up.

Right. So like the second email after the first one we described might be like, I still like just simple one sentence bumps like I open to learning more and more. and that's pretty much it. And then usually it's that third email or the next threaded email where we'll do that kind of value bump.

And it's kind of like just trying to provide resources to get them to kind of open up and give us a reply. Interesting. So if someone were to like, all right, they're looking at their cold emails. Most of it has been sort of like this, like I said, relevant value problem, but the CTA was more to like thoughts, want to learn more.

It's less of what you were saying of, Hey, mind if I share that video with you? It's a very different call to action. And so you're saying to flip it on its head. So if someone's sending a cold email, Hey, I noticed that some observation, you've just joined this company as a CRO, whatever it is.

And then as the relevance part, are you posing a question as part of the relevance or are you stating an observation? Like I speak to CROs all the time. They tell me blank. What is part of that relevance?

Is it just that trigger or like what's attached to that? Yeah. So with the relevance, we'll tie that in how we help, right? So like if we're messaging a new sales leader, like, hey, so I just joined XYZ company last month.

Typically new SDR leaders are digging into the app on messaging. Have you considered, you know, again, part of what our solution does is we'll like scan your emails for words that are going to make you end up in spam, for example. So we'll say like, have you considered looking at the spam words in your emails to boost open reply rates. Have a list of, you know, like there's this list that HubSpot put out of like 300 something spam words.

And so like the call to action will be like, I have a list from HubSpot if you want to check it out to make sure that none of your emails have words that are going to put your reps in spam. And so to answer your question, yeah, we'll say we'll lead with relevance. Then we'll say typically folks who are also experiencing that same thing, they're new to our role, they're hiring, whatever, are doing XYZ or are struggling with XYZ. Does that sound familiar?

So it's kind of like open-ended. We're not like assuming it, but we're just saying, hey, does this sound familiar? Are you using lavender to write your emails at all? Like to help with the emails?

I'm not. I'm a fan of lavender. Yeah. I'm actually not.

It's no hate on lavender. I just, I haven't downloaded it. I don't know. Yeah.

It's because it talks about like, you know, one of the things that you should keep your emails very short, but I actually cold emailed. This was an actual strategy that I did. And I remember we last spoke, you were talking about using LinkedIn to just like ping the prospect, letting them know that you send them a cold email. And so I sent out a cold email to a CRO, newly CRO, I mean, existing CRO, but new to a company.

And I messaged him like, like, hey, I, you know, I took a look at your website, whatever it was, I went through like the journey of the prospect. And I saw 12 red flags that could be affecting your sales, whatever it was. And I just like, dumped all my observations. So it was very unorthodox according to Lavender or according to every other email where it wasn't short.

It was actually extremely long, that email, but very specific to their use case based on my experience. And I'm like, by the way, if you're interested, you know, if you're, by the way, my company does this. If you're open to it, I'm happy to chat about it. That was, there was no call to action, really.

It was, it was more of like a, hey, by the way, this is what I do. If you're interested, let me know. That was what it was. And she actually responded back.

She's like, wow, do you do this for all your occult emails? Because if you do, this is a fantastic strategy. Yeah. And she opened up and long story short, we got an appointment.

But what triggered that initial response from the email was me. So I sent the email, no response. I went on LinkedIn that same day, connected with a little note, hey, sent you a cold email with a subject line blank. That's it.

That was my connection request. And I think that triggered her to open up the email. How do you use LinkedIn when you're cold emailing? When do you use it?

When do you pull the lever there. Yeah, no, I think you have to use it too, especially like the higher up you go, but like CROs, like their inboxes are flooded. And so first of all, in our sequences, anytime we're sending an email, there's always a LinkedIn message or a phone call happening at basically the exact same time It always happening within minutes of each other because we want them to get those notifications back to back And so we typically send we been A testing with sending a blank connection request because we seen that you know you get a higher acceptance rate versus sending that kind of call to action we talked about earlier in that first note.

So it might be like, hey, more, just sent you an email. You know, mind if I send a one minute video on an unconventional method you can use to boost reply rates. So we'll like, we'll use that same strategy of saying, hey, mind if I send a one minute video to, you know, solve X problem. and that's usually like our initial message we'll follow up with voice notes kind of say the same sort of thing like hey more talking to other sales leaders just like you a lot of them are struggling with whatever it is i have some resources i can send so we keep it pretty casual and we mix it up with voice notes messages um but the whole thing is we're just trying to offer insights and say been sending you emails at xyz email address or this is the subject line and it's always happening at the same time we send an email so they get those notifications back to back I love that the call to action is not to get something on the calendar.

It's more so like asking permission if you can send them more value. I love that that's the call to action. yeah yeah we've been getting so much more responses because the truth is not everybody's in the like awareness right of the buy stage and i feel like when you're cold emailing those are the people you're going to pick up you're going to pick up that three percent or whatever they call it that are in the buyers or they're in the market and if you open it up by saying can i just provide more information can i send a video maybe you'll get access to that like 20 that's you know maybe they don't know if they have a problem or not and that's what you have to do because otherwise i feel like the only way to really convert people who are not aware at all or the best way is really cold calling because you can have a live conversation.

But with email, I can just ignore it if I don't think it's relevant. And so it's hard to convert the people who aren't aware of your problem or in that buyer stage. For the audience that don't know what Jed was referring to by the 3%, so I forgot the name of it, but there was sort of like this funnel, this pyramid shaped where it shows where a majority of buyers are at in terms of their buying intention. And only 3% of that entire funnel is buyers that have a buying intent And then the rest of them are just, they're not even aware.

They're not even, they're just sort of like, you know, as if you're going to amazon.com to buy something and then you decide to buy something else. Like you're not in a buying state and it's harder, you know, sales reps are trying to catch the 3%, which makes it extremely, extremely hard. What Jed is saying is by making your call to action more value-based where, hey, do you mind if I share these insights?

You're not only speaking to the 3%, but you're also speaking to the rest of the 90 plus percent of buyers that will eventually have interest. What did I want to say? It was something that I... Oh man, I blanked out.

That's what happens when you have Corona, you got brain fog. Holy crap. Yeah. So that's the call.

Interesting. Do you cold call at all? Yeah, I do. I haven't cold call as much as I used to just because it's easier to send emails.

you know what I mean? There's a bunch of other things we're responsible for on the AE side as well. I try to cold call, at least have one block with the SDR team two times a week. And it's the same thing.

We're sending emails, we're calling. The way we do it though, is like I said, we're doing pretty high volume of emails. So the SDRs are doing 100 to 200. We're really just funneling through and calling the people that are opening three plus times, clicking on emails and focusing on the people that are engaging with our emails the most.

What's your take on folks that are doing a ton of research before sending out an email? They're not sending 100 to 200, they're sending maybe 5 to 10 a day. I think it can work. In your case, that's a perfect example.

For us, our ACV is a bit smaller. We're not going after larger mid-market or enterprise. and so it's a little bit more of a volume game right now especially because we're still a newer Apple on sales team and there's a there's a larger territory and so our strategy is a little bit more volume because we feel like we have our messaging figured out to an extent and we kind of know who our ICP is so we know who we want to reach um but I think for more like I think it really just depends on the companies what I'm trying to say right obviously like if you're at a larger company where you have a select number of accounts you can't necessarily take that high volume approach because I absolutely think that you're going to get higher conversion rates if you spend more time researching.

It's just you have to weigh that versus just reaching more people if you have the opportunity to. But I do think, I mean, to your point, though, I think I look at the cold emails that I get and the ones that I respond to, a couple of things. The ones I respond to are the ones that have an email, the type that you send out where they're like, hey, more, check out your YouTube channel or check out your website. I found like 10 things that I think you can improve in mind if I share that with you.

I'm like, oh, yeah, free, free, free advice. Yeah, I'll take it. And I always say yes to that. The downside is the follow-up to that.

Their insight pretty much sucks. But that's one thing that I respond to emails. And the other things that I respond to emails is the relevancy and the timing of it. I may say, like, yeah, that's relevant, but not the right time.

And I may respond back, like, hey, not right now. The more personalization, I don't necessarily - I may not bite on that. I mean, it helps, but I think relevancy is more important, in my opinion. I just pay attention to what works for me.

We're about at time. And I like to keep these under 30 minutes or less. Anything you want to leave the audience with? And if not, you can plug yourself in.

No, I mean, I said the biggest thing is try all those call to actions, right? Again, you're going to have to work a little bit harder to get the meeting. You're going to have to work on your follow-up game. You're probably going to have to call people once they respond and say, yes, send that information or send that video.

But you will get higher conversions. you will get more replies. You'll get more conversations with prospects, which is what it's all about. So definitely try that out.

And yeah, check out the practical prospecting newsletter. It's free. I share stuff like this all the time. Yeah, I'll drop the link there in the description.

Thanks, man. Yeah, thanks more. Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you found this relevant or practical at all, then please share this episode.

Until next time, I'm your host, Moore Asuleen. Bye.