B2B Sales Development Email Review- Elastic.io

Elastic.io’s email found it’s way to SalesyEmail.com and provided a few opportunities for RevBoss to give a bit of constructive criticism this week.

Send us your Salesy Emails and check out a few of the others on the site!

The Email

September 10, 2014

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: SDR
Date: Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 1:00 PM
Subject: Re: Easy integration of RevBoss app with other SaaS apps
To: SalesyEmail

Hi SalesyEmail,

It seems that you are pretty resistant to my follow-ups! I really think that there is a good business fit between us, so let me know if I should continue to bother you (and eventually make a discussion happen) or go to hell (please don’t send me there).  🙂

In my last email, I wrote:

Hey SalesyEmail,

Please accept my apology to “bother you again”, but I think that you’re a perfect fit for my company. I haven’t heard from you, so please let me know if you got my message, I’d really appreciate it.

In my last email, I wrote:

Hi SalesyEmail,

My name is SDR from elastic.io. I found SalesyEmail on angel.co and decided to shoot you an email because I think our companies make a great match.

What we bring to the table is easy way to connect applications to any cloud application you want. You can integrate any cloud service with your application by embedding our widget into your application code.

My assumption is that we could help you save time and perhaps some money on the way too, so how about we touch base and dig into the details?

Regards,


SDR
www.elastic.io

Feedback

Eric

  • Good idea following up on the original thread. We use this strategy quite a bit — it works well.
  • Go to hell? That escalated quickly…
  • I like the intro sentence — says who you are, how you found me, and why I should care.
  • “You can integrate any cloud service with your application by embedding our widget into your application code.”  This is a really broad value statement — I’m not really sure what it means.

Kelsey

  • The “What we bring to the table” paragraph is confusing and seems to be the only time in the entire email thread where the SDR offers a value prop — I would at the least reiterate why I think the company is a good fit in follow-ups.
  • The last sentence in the very first email isn’t worded well and therefore doesn’t leave a good impression on me as the last thing that I read.

Kelly

  • Prospect needs to have a more direct call to action. “Let’s chat %date&time%.”
  • The overall tone is extremely aggressive and a major turnoff

Paul

  • I get the overall “humor” here…I really do, but this could easily turn a prospect off.

Revised/Rewritten Email

Subject:  Quick question about SalesyEmail’s cloud integration…

Hi SalesyEmail,

My name is SDR from Elastic.io. – an Integration Platform that provides a framework and an interactive toolset to easily connect your application to other cloud apps with the highest level of security.  I found SalesyEmail on angel.co and though I’d reach out.

Not too sure how much of this falls on your plate, but let me know if you or someone from your team is available next week for a quick chat about how Elastic.io might help enhance your workflow.

Hope to talk soon!

SDR

Digging a little deeper

After the RevBoss team took a look at this week’s email from Elastic.io, we decided to only rewrite the original email, given the format and how different it was from our previous posts.  The format isn’t unfamiliar, though.  Actually, it’s an idea that RevBoss uses often.  The thought behind this is that reminding the prospect of messages that you’ve sent over not only puts all of your information in one place in the event that your original messages were “lost” in their inbox, but it also gives you the opportunity to be a bit more succinct in your follow ups…another way to gently “nudge” the prospect without having to necessarily give your whole spiel again.

We also noticed that the SDR did a really good job with stating who they were, how they found the prospect, and why they should even continue reading the email.

With those two things sort of setting them on the right track, we quickly saw that the rest of the thread did quite a bit to derail it.  While we generally encourage adding a little creativity to the emails in an attempt to sound more personal, it’s important to be able to recognize the fine line between being humorous and being annoying/offensive.  This is probably the last thing you’d want to do when asking someone for their time; which brings us to the final point.  We think that the SDR should make it a habit of directly asking for a meeting (particularly in the later emails).  Giving them a couple of times that you’re available and asking which might work best for them gives the prospect something that they can immediately check against their calendars – an overall good practice.