It’s every sales reps dream to have a first call with a prospect and instead of a discovery call, the buyer on the other line wants to purchase RIGHT NOW. Most sales emails try to make this happen by selling in the first email to a cold prospect so by the time it makes it to the rep, the buyer is ready to close the deal.

The thinking behind this is if you write a long, highly detailed email that covers all the features and potential use cases, it will make it harder for prospects to self-disqualify and will touch on one of their pain points, prompting them to want to buy. The reality is that this method doesn’t work and here’s why:

The email is TOO DAMN LONG.

It’s 2018, most people read their emails on their phone. If you write a long-winded, detailed, and highly technical email to a prospect that makes them scroll, they will read the first few sentences and give up. All that hard work you put in to making sure every single feature was written about in detail was for nothing and instead, you pushed the prospect away before you even had a chance to talk to them. Shorter, more concise emails are easier to read, easier to understand, and easier to relay the message to other people who might be a part of the decision making process.

It sounds more like a marketing robot than an actual person

Marketing emails are a one-sided conversation filled with information, but not meant to open up dialogue. We get them in our inboxes all the time advertising sales or new products, but no one ever responds to a marketing email expecting a human to respond. Sales emails are not marketing emails. Sales emails should be a conversation; the beginning of a potential relationship. When you give all the information up front, you don’t come off as human and it sends a signal to the prospect that the email was automated (which is usually correct, but not the impression you want to give off) and it turns them off to both you, the company, and whatever solution you might be offering. Plus if they mistake your sales email for a marketing email, your chances of a reply back will drop significantly.

It also makes it obvious that you don’t understand their pain points or their industry if you’re offering every potential solution for any possible problem they might have. This SCREAMS laziness and inexperience to your prospect.

If you already sold in the email, then why do they need to talk to you?

If you have covered every possible pain point, every feature, and every use case in your intro email to a prospect, why would they need to talk to you? There’s nothing further to discuss and they’ve already made up their mind to go around you to book a demo online, or have decided there’s no use for a discovery call since you didn’t actually know (or care) what their pain points or use case is. Sales calls are supposed to open the conversation, not close it.

It’s all about you

The prospect wants to feel special, or at least heard, in their business interactions. Sales emails that give all the details up front tend to be heavily focused on themselves and what they offer and what services they provide, and less on the prospect, their pain points, and how you want to help. If your prospect doesn’t go away at the end of the email thinking “they really want to help me out”, then you’re doing it wrong.

How changing your approach makes a difference

I recently had a client who was using the “selling through intro email” approach. After 2 weeks of testing their copy and getting no results. Their open rate was decent, but the reply rate was suffering. We tweaked the messaging to be shorter, more concise, more focused on the prospect, and focused only on the use case most relevant to their prospect’s industry and the pain point that would resonate the most. The result was an increase in reply rates and meetings, a more positive response overall, and feedback from those who were not interested that allowed the client further learning.