Struggling to craft effective sales messages?
Response rate pretty low? In this new series, we break down real-life LinkedIn and e-mail sales messages I receive on my own personal accounts. We'll talk about what they did right and tips on where they could improve, to help you on your journey of selling your own products or services with effective sales messages.
Use Case 1: Have I Seen Spam Before?
What Molly did right
1. The length is perfect. Molly's second message clocks in at 73 words. Sales e-mails between 50-125 words can have a response rate as high as 50%. The same logic applies to a LinkedIn sales pitch. Shorter is better. It’s already kind of annoying to get a sales pitch in your LinkedIn DM’s so you want to err on the side of brevity.
2. She nails her company description. I have a clear understanding right away if this is something relevant to what I do.
3. She got the right person. You can tell she actually looked at my LinkedIn profile. Props to Molly for understanding her audience.
4. While I never condone sending a message attached to your connection request, she does, and her reasoning for sending me a connection request seems plausible.
Where Molly Could Improve
1. After reading Selling to the C-Suite Executives, you know that you absolutely do not follow a connection with an immediate sales pitch. Molly didn’t even wait a full hour before hitting me with a request to schedule a “discovery call.”
2. Don’t ever use the term "discovery call." How frikin' boring does that sound? It sounds like something nobody wants to be a part of if they had literally anything else to do.
My suggestion is to replace the term "discovery call" with something like "consultation." At least then I know if I spend time with you I might learn something.
3. Referring back to point 1, make an attempt at a genuine connection first. Slow drip relevant content I might find useful over a few weeks. I would have been much more likely to respond to this message if it were more along the lines of
“Hey Jeremiah, have you ever seen 'spam' show up on your phone when someone is calling? If this is happening to your company it could be impacting your connection rates. I have this free whitepaper with some data on this topic and some things you can do to mitigate showing up as spam when you reach out to clients. I think you’ll find it informative, especially page 2 where it gets into how many opportunities on average companies are losing out on. Thanks for connecting.”
Final grade:
At the end of the day some of the needed improvements caused me not to respond to this message.
Overall, I give this sales DM a C-.
Now take these tips and get to prospecting.
Good luck and God Bless.
