B2B Cold Sales Email Template — The Dialogue Company

Keeping up the pace this week, the RevBoss team picked The Dialogue Company’s email up from SalesyEmail.com to critique.  The length of the email along with the disregard of a few basic sales rules provided more than enough content for the team to play around with.

We’re sure you get tons of emails like this daily.  Send a few over to us at SalesyEmail.com.

The Email

September 04, 2014
From: SDR
To: SalesyEmail
Subject: Wellness Marketing: Targeting heart health consumers

Hi SalesyEmail,

Could %BRAND% benefit by having a network of healthcare professionals hand-deliver your marketing materials to new heart patients managing their condition and actively seeking information on health solution brands?

The Cardiac Directions Program reaches these individuals precisely when they are becoming educated about needed consumption changes, including for newly-relevant healthcare products.  It’s an ideal context and timeframe when they’ll be receptive to your message, and your brand will benefit from the added credibility of your materials being hand-delivered to patients by their healthcare professional.

Cardiac Directions provides turnkey access to 1,100 hospital-based cardiac rehab personnel and related healthcare professionals who will interact with 250,000 new heart patients in 2015.  Several media delivery options are available including: print advertising, product sampling, brand literature, couponing and healthcare professional communications. The vehicle is distributed within an ideal forum to promote your brand’s health benefits, break through clutter and pre-empt your competition.

A 1-page summary of this early-intervention educational program is available here:

www.adialogue.com/cardiac_directions_media_kit.php

I’d be happy to schedule a brief web meeting with you to review the brand-building benefits that Cardiac Directions can provide. Simply reply to this message or give me a call.

Best regards,

SDR

The Dialogue Company, Inc.

About Us – Since 1993 Cardiac Directions has provided efficient means for brands to intercept consumers who are actively pursuing improvement to their health and well-being.  The program distributes brand–focused advertising & marketing materials to newly-diagnosed heart and stroke patients who are enrolled in cardiac rehabilitation classes or who are visiting their physician.

The Dialogue Company, Inc. • 106 Straube Center Blvd. • Pennington, NJ  08534

FEEDBACK

Paul

• “It’s an ideal context and timeframe when they’ll be receptive to your message” -Lets just start with the fact that I think the tone is extremely vulturous, cold, and in bad taste.

Eric

• Not a fan of this subject line — very obvious that it is a marketing email. Also — probably not a good idea to include the word “marketing” in the subject line of a marketing email.
• Very clumsy intro — skipped right to the ask without any context.
• Asking the prospect to do the work by calling you is bad form.

Kelsey

• The subject line reads more like the title of a newspaper article opposed to the subject of an outbound email — I would automatically categorize this as spam in my inbox.
• This is a bad opener — aside from being a run-on sentence, it’s a little confusing. I read it 3+ times before I could really digest what it meant.
• Re: the link to the “early-intervention educational program” -I hope they didn’t actually do this like it’s shown in the message…the word “here” should be a link to the actual link. This looks sloppy.

Julia

• The intro is too long.  It sounds like an infomercial. “But wait… There’s MORE!”

Kelly

• First off this is way too long, its not clear what the ask is and within the first sentence the prospect has the opportunity to say no and stop reading.
• Seems like the third and second paragraphs should flip around…it is way too much info but at least I have some more context and why it may be relevant to me.
• Should be a stronger call to action–give some options on date and time that might work, not just “call me sometime”

REVISED / REWRITTEN EMAIL

Subject:  Question about content delivery @ %%Brand%%

Hi SalesyEmail,

Happy Monday! It’s SDR with The Dialogue Company.  We help brands like %%Brand%% intercept consumers who are actively pursuing improvement to their health and well-being.  Our Cardiac Directions program provides access to 1,100 hospital-based cardiac rehab personnel and healthcare professionals who will interact with 250,000 new heart and stroke patients in 2015.

Not too sure if this falls on your plate, but I’d love to have a 10 minute chat with you or someone from your team about having our network of professionals hand-deliver product samples or literature on behalf of %%Brand%% at a time when it matters most to the patients.

Hope to talk soon,

SDR

Digging a little deeper:

One of the more prevalent themes that the RevBoss team encounters when critiquing the emails that our friends send to SalesyEmail.com is overall length.  What we find is that a lot of times, the SDR has difficulty breaking away from the traditional “Salesy Email” format.  It makes sense that you would want to capitalize on having captured the attention of your target prospect.  What doesn’t make sense is throwing everything you know about your company at the prospect and hoping that they are still interested in having a phone call after you’ve given them everything they could possibly need from you.  There’s typically a line (a fine one) between sharing too much information and sharing just enough to generate curiosity.  This was definitely an idea that the team felt The Dialogue Company struggled with a bit.

Perhaps even more problematic than over-sharing is the fact that within the first few sentences, the SDR created a situation where they had already given the prospect the opportunity to say “No”.  This completely disregards one of the most basic of rules within sales – “Never ask a closed-ended question”.  We feel pretty confident in saying that this probably ended many potential conversations before they even had a chance to begin.

While there was no shortage of information in the email, the message read like an article.  Julia from the team even mentioned that it sounded like an infomercial; proof that the email lacked a clear direction.

With the rewritten email, we wanted to keep it purposely concise and focus on clearly stating who The Dialogue Company and Cardiac Directions were, their network, how they distribute the information to patients, and how/why this could be helpful to the prospect.  Doing this in such a manner that it is easily and quickly digested by the prospect is imperative to creating genuine interest and further conversation.

One major flaw that we often notice while reviewing these emails is the SDR not properly “closing” the email.  This SDR in particular actually asks the prospect to do more work by replying to the email (which should go without stating), or asking the prospect to call HIM.  I’d have to say that aside from this simply being a big “no-no”, its just bad manners to ask someone for their time and then to ask them to call you.  🙂