Had a chat with a random guy at a truck stop that totally flipped my view on cold emails

I'm sitting at a Love's in Oklahoma City waiting out a storm, and this guy next to me is sending cold emails on his laptop. He hit me with 'most founders overthink the first line, just say what you actually want and stop pretending.' He was right. I'd been writing these long windup intro paragraphs that nobody read. What's the dumbest thing you realized you were doing wrong for months before someone called you out on it?

2 comments

2 Comments

thomas10510d ago

I read something similar in a sales blog a while back that basically said the same thing, your first line should be a problem you know they have, not some fancy intro. I was guilty of writing stuff like "I hope this email finds you well" for way too long, thinking it made me sound professional. Turns out nobody cares if I hope their day is going good, they just want to know why I'm reaching out. The guy at the truck stop was probably a sales veteran, because that's the kind of straight talk you only learn after sending a thousand emails. I bet he's closed more deals than most people with their long winded paragraphs.

angelac6310d ago

The hardest lesson for me was realizing my cold emails were about me, not them. I spent weeks crafting these clever hooks about my background or my product's features, but nobody cares until they see how you solve their specific problem. Once I switched to opening with their pain point - like 'your onboarding emails have a 40% dropoff rate' - my reply rate doubled. What kind of data points do you use to make your first line hit home?