B2B Cold Email Template Review — Disruptiv

We’ve been collecting example sales prospect email templates for a while now at SalesyEmail.com.  (Complete a quick form if you’ve received a salesy email you’d like to contribute!)

We had the idea to begin working through the backlog to critique and improve the emails that we’ve received thus far.  Enjoy!
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A colleague forwarded us the following email that he received from a company called Disruptiv.  We’ve removed names and other identifying information to protect the innocent.  🙂

The Email

Date: February 10, 2015 at 4:11:38 PM EST
Subject: SDR via LinkedIn Network
From: SDR
To: SalesyEmail

Hi SalesyEmail,

I read your profile and wanted to reach out. I’m SDR @ Disruptiv. We’ve built an advanced social analytics engine called Platform 6° that leverages LinkedIn to drive effective end-to-end lead generation campaigns.

Platform 6° uses advanced analytics to accurately identify and build 360-degree views of all your target customers across any vertical market. It automatically creates real-time contact databases of C-level, senior leadership and key decision makers.

Developing an effective sales strategy is a very simple equation. Activity = Opportunities  and Opportunities = Sales. Our end-to-end campaigns drive your sales activity to a hyper-level and consistently generate more than 60+ targeted sales engagements per month.

The end result, your sales team spends more time talking with key decision makers and closing targeted opportunities rather than spending a majority of their time prospecting.

I’d love to schedule a time to connect and share some of the phenomenal campaign results we’ve been able to achieve for our clients within your vertical market. Please, let me know a couple of dates and times that work for you.

Looking forward to the conversation.

Best Regards,

SDR

The Feedback

Here is the $.02 from the RevBoss team:

Kelsey

• I really like the intro hook re: reading the profile on LinkedIn…though I’m sure he/she didn’t actually look at the profile.
• Overall, the message is impersonal.  Nothing suggests that they’ve done any research to qualify this company as a good fit for their product.  Very one-sided in the sense that they’re sharing lots of product details and not talking about their product is applicable to {{company}}.
• The copy is waaaay too long.
• The close was a little presumptuous.  Instead of asking the prospect for a time, we recommend proposing times — makes it easier for the recipient to say “yes”.

Paul

• Nothing suggests any desire to learn anything about their current process / how things are working.
• Perhaps a few too many sentences on the “how and why”?  Gives a prospect a great deal of what they could instead share in a call.  This decreases the need / likelihood / urgency for a follow up convo.
• Saying that you’d love to schedule a time to talk more about yourself vs framing the conversation about the prospect is a mistake.

Kelly

• Too much jargon!  If a sales strategy is so easy, why do I need this company to help me?
• The “end result” paragraph is great — it should have been the focus of the message because it is about a problem.
• I think this is an effective, but misleading subject line. Spoofing LinkedIn doesn’t seem like a sustainable approach and it might irritate some recipients.

Danny

• Too many features — no idea if any of this stuff even matters to the prospect.  If this is an intro e-mail, the laundry list of features makes it way to easy to say “No”.
• The value prop is too broad.  It would have been nice if the SDR tried to tie some of these great points to the prospect and then propose an opportunity to dig if any of this stuff is worthwhile for them.

Barnaby

• The intro is good — whether or not it is actually true!  It could be better by including working history to create rapport and to indicate that they actually took time to review their profile.  A little flattery wouldn’t hurt…
• I would change the call to action slightly — adding options for a time makes the ask less aggressive and more empathetic to the prospect, e.g. “when’s a good time to talk?” or “when do you have 5 or 10 minutes to discuss X”