Another main way to reach out to prospects in the initial contact sales process step is to send cold emails. In this video, we will explain how to use more of a conversation-based selling approach to your cold email messages.

 

Product Selling Cold Emails

Before we talk about how to sell the conversation in our cold email messages, let’s start by looking at what most salespeople do, which is sending product selling cold email messages. These emails all look the same and usually follow this outline and structure:

Hello Prospect,

This is who I am and the company I am with.

This is what I sell and how it works.

Do you need what I sell? Are you interested in what I sell?

Can I schedule a meeting to talk with you about what I sell?

While that might sound like a logical email to send if you are trying to sell a product, the problem with that approach is that the prospect is most likely not in buying mode for what you sell at the exact time they receive your cold email. That means there is likely to be a mismatch between what you are reaching out to talk to them about and where they are mentally at in that exact moment. This mismatch greatly increases the odds of your email being instantly deleted with little reading or consideration.

The product selling approach for cold email messages is only effective for emailing prospects who are actively looking at buying the product being sold. Those prospects might read the email and be responsive. But all other prospects will react that the email does not apply to them because they are not needing and buying the product the salesperson is selling.

 

Selling the Conversation in Cold Emails

We can completely improve all of those dynamics by simply changing the approach in our cold emails from selling the product and shift more toward selling the conversation. This shift can completely change what you say in your cold email messages because if you are not selling the product, you do not need to outline and explain the product or service you sell in your cold emails.

You may read that and think, “If I don’t talk about my product in my cold emails, what am I going to talk about?” To answer that, we can go back to the sales message and building blocks we created in the last video when we discussed how to sell the conversation when cold calling. When you create your sales message, you will create many different building blocks, including value points, pain points, pain questions, and more. Actually, one of the building blocks is product details, which is the content that is used for the typical product selling cold email messages.

What we can do is create a cold email message for each building block, and that would allow us to create a series of cold emails like this:

  • Email 1: A value points email that share the improvements we can deliver
  • Email 2: A pain points email that explains the problems we can help solve
  • Email 3: A customer example email that shares an example of another customer we helped
  • Email 4: An email that shares some of the questions we would like to ask
  • Email 5: An email that shares details of the product or service we sell

Hopefully, you can see how this series of cold emails can help you to shift from selling the product and focus more on selling the conversation.