Fatal Cold Email Mistake That’s DESTROYING Your Sales
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Nobody likes that pushy stereotypical salesperson that will do and say anything just to get their commission. And you may not feel like that's you, but if you're not booking meetings with cold emails consistently, then there's a 99% chance that people see you as the typical salesperson they don't want to have anything to do with.

Coldimo has changed. And even if you have been in this business for years, if you didn't adjust your cold email strategy, you will still look like an amateur salesperson to prospects and nobody in their right mind will want to meet with you while working for small startups and big tech companies like Salesforce. I wrote emails that booked meetings with my ideal clients predictably.

And today I'm going to go over all of the most common mistakes salespeople make. The key to booking more meetings is to understand what triggers the barrier of resistance that everyone puts up the moment they detect any salesperson and how to overcome it to book the meeting. The first thing we have to understand is this.

You do not want to trigger the sales person alarm. Okay, this is bad. This is the sales person alarm. Just pretend this is an alarm as I work through my drawing skills. And we've all felt this to some point or some degree. Imagine this. You're walking through the mall and you're having a great day, right? And you're actually specifically looking for a gift that you want to get someone. So you walk into your favorite department store and you start looking for this gift.

But you can't seem to find this specific perfume that you're looking for, for your mother or someone, right? So you go around the department store, around and around looking for this perfume and you cannot find it. Then somebody says, right, let's say Nancy here, right? She says, hello, sir.

Can I help you with something? And what do you say? Even though you've been walking around for the last 30 minutes, what do you say to poor little Nancy? You say, no, Nancy. You say, I am good. Just looking. Even though you know it's a clear lie. Now, why did you lie to Nancy here? She was trying to be nice to you. The reason why you lied is because she triggered the sales problem.

person alarm right here. And when somebody triggers the salesperson alarm, the first response is rejection is no, is get away from me. And unfortunately, the reality is that we've all been conditioned to react the same way. And there's a myriad of ways in which we do so, but we primarily do it because we've been conditioned to think that, you know, salespeople are, you know, trying to take advantage of us from watching movies or I don't know, shows. They typically

you know portray the salesperson as somebody that's manipulative manipulative and somebody that wants to force something down your throat right and because this has unfortunately become the common zeitgeist in society we have to work very very hard so that we don't trigger the sales personal alarm because if we do if we start there that makes our jobs

incredibly difficult. The unfortunate thing about this, and let's go back to our example here with Nancy, is that you have this barrier, right? Between you and

And people who you detect as the salesperson when they trigger the sales alarm. And this makes it very difficult for you to be able to communicate as adults because Nancy here didn't. Well, she wasn't trying to push anything on you. She just saw you wandering for 30 minutes. So she came up to you trying to help you.

And if you would have just listened to her, you probably would have saved a lot of time, right? And a lot of energy looking for this perfume, right? Right, but you didn't because this wall prevented the communication between the both of you. So this wall, we need to be able to not trigger it

trigger it in the first place between us and our buyers. And we need to once we don't trigger the salesperson alarm, we must also break that wall if it's existing there before we even show up. So we have our hands full, but let's cover some ground in terms of how to do this. But before we do, you have to understand how you're causing this in the first place. So let's cover what are the main ways. The first one is

the first thing you're doing is that when you're doing this in your cold outreach and that is making things about you about you about your product about you know your company

automatically this starts triggering the salesperson alarm. And we have to overcome this because the reality is that our buyers don't care about us. They don't care about our products. They don't care about our company. Only us as salespeople do. What they care about is their problems, their challenges,

their desires and what they need to do. So when we make it about us in our email, what we do, what our product is and the amazing features of it and all the awards that we won, we're doing the complete opposite of what they actually need us to do, which is to talk about them, not us. So in your emails, right, we have to

Get rid of this thing where we're making it about ourselves because it's not about us, it's about our buyers. Instead, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of our buyers and think, okay, if I was the CEO of this company, what are the main issues that I'm struggling with?

Right. And you could do research on this. You could talk to previous clients that you've closed in similar positions as the people you're trying to reach out to and understand what were their pains and problems. Then we have to understand what our solutions can help with in terms of those problems. And that's what we need to include in our email. We do not need to include anything about us, our product or solution that will simply get ignored.

Ultimately, as humans, what we care about is ourselves, whether you like it or not. So we're all selfish to some degree and your buyers are no exception to that. So we must use their selfishness, their humanity, right? They're not being bad people. They're just humans. We must use that to leverage that and get their attention. Now, the second way in which you are triggering selfishness

the salesperson alarm is by bumping emails obnoxiously. Now don't get me wrong, I have had my fair share of bumped emails in my entire career and look, I've used it. I'm not saying the occasional bump of an email if it's a really good email is a bad thing, but the issue is that a lot of people are bumping complete trash. If in one scenario you really do your research, you really work on an email that is absolute gold and you see that they didn't open it,

There's nothing wrong with bumping that email if it's a really great, amazing email that you put a lot of research into. But that's not what's happening, is it? What we're really bumping is our general templates that we really just want to get some sort of attention or reply. And that's what we're bumping again, again, and again.

And that raises the salesperson alarm more than anything else out there. So we've actually tested bumping emails in our personal outreach strategy here at Salesman.com and it gave us a huge false positive. You see a drastically increased response rate, right?

drastically increased response rate, but our booking rate, what we care about the most, which is about booking meetings, was exactly the same. So this kind of gives you a little bit of insight into the strategy of bumping emails and the results that it can actually generate. At the end of the day, we're not trying to bully our prospects into responding to us

and booking a meeting with us, the right people will see your email if it's a good email and they will be interested in jumping on a phone call with you if it's the right time. And if it's not, they might just block you and your email bumps are really going to spam. Which in either case, you probably prevented yourself from being able to book a meeting with that person in the future when they were ready. So use these with caution and in many cases,

avoid these for the most part next let's look at that just following up uh meeting uh emails and yeah i personally love these i find these quite myself a few times and no i actually don't love them they're actually very annoying when sales people send me those and why because they are just

following up, but they're not adding any value. There's nothing really to talk about. They're just annoying me. It's like I'm in the woods and I have these birds flying around my head. You're following up for what? There's no specific reason. There's no rhyme or specific

a value that you're sharing, you're just annoying me. And I'm a salesperson too. I should be empathizing with these people, but I don't. It annoys me. So just imagine how much it annoys busy executives when you're just following up for no apparent reason. And these are especially bad because they negatively affect

are buying temperature you want to think of uh you know buying like like a temperature dial right and the higher the temperature right the more they're likely to take action when we do follow-up emails without any purpose any rhyme or reason we're not sharing any value that actually decreases the buying temperature lowers

the buying temperature and decreases the chances of all of us actually getting those deals done. So anything that's going to negatively affect the buying temperature, get rid of it. And if you have no real value to share any insights or strategies to push the deal forward and help them solve the problems, it's better to not send them at all. So what should we do instead? The first thing we have to do is become an authority in our space.

Now picture this, if Warren Buffett reached out to you and he in the email, he got your name wrong. He spelled your company's name wrong. And you know, he misspelled a bunch of words.

you will still jump on a call with them if he asked you to. And why? Because he has a lot of authority. A lot of people know, like, and trust him, and he's respected within his field. Now, I'm not saying you have to become Warren Buffett to book a meeting. You certainly don't. But what I am saying is that if we become an authority in our space and we're viewed as an expert who's known, liked, and trust, we're more likely to book meetings way easier. And becoming an authority is also a way, right, not to...

sound off this red alarm, right? We actually want to get rid of the sales person. Alarm, right? Salesperson salesperson, watch out salesperson. We want to get rid of that because that's the, that's literally the jingle that's going on in many of the executives we're reaching out to if we're doing it in the wrong way. And some of the ways in which we can build authority within our email is using social proof, letting them know who we've worked for, uh, who we've helped and even better if we have

small lines of testimonials, even if it's just one sentence of somebody describing how we've helped them in the past, that goes a long way for social proof number one, but also gives you a lot of authority in your emails. And if other people like them have trusted you in the past, that gives them one more reason to trust you as well. And if you're sending hyper-personalized emails manually, one person at a time, it's also great to be able to include your LinkedIn link.

on the email just so they can have the ability to see, click and see your LinkedIn profile, see perhaps the amount of connections you have or profile that you have built. Just them being able to see a face next to the name goes a long way to building that trust and that authority. Just be careful not to do this at scale, including links when you're sending emails at scale can get you flagged and affect your delivery, so be careful with this. One more thing you could do is try to get on podcasts.

Podcasts are incredibly powerful because anytime you see somebody on a podcast, you automatically see that person as an expert. You automatically see that person as somebody who has experience.

Authority, which is what we're trying to build. And again, we build authority, we build more trust, more trust, we book more meetings. Blogs can be another tool and our tool back to build our authority. Now blogs, you know, nowadays, not as much people view blogs, but it's still a powerful piece of media that you can use to build your authority in your space.

And a cool ninja trick that you can start implementing is that if you have been on podcasts, if you have been on blogs, then you can literally include in your email that, you know, without flexing too much, but you can include that in your email. You've been featured in certain blogs, certain podcasts, speaking about a very specific topic, which is relevant to your prospects, problems and challenges that they're facing. And that builds your authority as well. Next, we have to nail the right message first.

the right person and the right timing. This is huge when it comes to cold email. This is what I call the trifecta, the holy trifecta of email. When we are able to nail the right message, the right person, the right time, right? We're able to nail those three, something magical happens here. And then it becomes really easy to book meetings and close deals. Now, when it comes to the right message, it's all about sending a message which truly targets

the prospects problems, pains, and desires to get their attention. And if we hit the nail on the head with this, this is going to trigger that, you know, powerful curiosity loop that we always talk about. And it's one is going to make them want to learn more.

Next, it has to be the right person. Many times in sales, we're sending emails to people that can't even make a buying decision. So many times we're being wasteful with the people that we reach out to. We have to make sure that the person is above the buying line. And we also have to make sure that the person

is responsible for the type of problems that our solution solves. Next and lastly is the market. And this is the hardest part, honestly, is timing the market. Now, it's hard to time the market, but we have to do the best we can, according to our hypotheses of when is the best time to reach out. Maybe it's based on some research we did and we knew that this was a good time to reach out. Or maybe there's a trigger event in the market that we can leverage to send our email just at the right time. But when we nail all three,

That's where the magic happens. Next thing is that we must become a consultant. Now, this can be a bit tricky because there's a right balance that we have to establish. So let's look at that. You see, there's two polar extremes that we can head into in this spectrum, right?

We have, first of all, the friend zone. This often happens in sales when we're having too much random conversations, right? Maybe we get stuck in rapport building a little bit too much. We get stuck in our warmups too much. And then we become sort of like a buddy, you know, 15 minutes into the phone call, we're still talking about our golfing session or something random like that. And a little bit of this can be powerful, but too much of this puts you in the friend zone. And look, you don't want to be in the friend zone because that just makes you waste a lot

of time. In the other spectrum, we have the person that is a little bit too aggressive and that's always pitching, always, always pushing, pushing, pushing things forward. And that becomes too much to handle. And then you become, you sound again, that salesperson alarm goes off and then people just want to run away from you.

Typically, when we send our cold emails and we're getting ghosted, it might be because we're probably doing too much. So we want to stay away from both extremes and we want to focus on the right balance between the two. And we're not the friend. We're not the shark. We are the consultative friend.

conversational person that wants to connect but also wants to solve the problems. And in our cold emails, when we're able to come across as the consultant, that's when meetings get booked. The consultant is primarily focused on the prospect's problems, right? Not our products, not our solutions, not our awards. They're primarily focused on the prospect's problems and then the prospect's desires, okay?

desires here. Then their goal, right? We have problem here and we have desire here. Their goal is to grab the prospect by the hand and literally problem solve with them, right? And help them navigate from their problems to their desires and the fulfillment of those desires, the solving of those problems so they don't have the pain that they have right here,

That's a person everybody wants to work with, a person who's literally going to grab you by the hand, understand all your problems, and is going to literally walk with you step by step trying to solve them. Who wouldn't want to work with that person? Who wouldn't want to book a meeting with that person? I certainly would. So the more consultative we can be here, the more success we will have overall.

So we've talked about some powerful concepts, but let's ground it in real life examples so you can start applying this today. Okay, so let's look at this email right here. Hi, Kendall. Nice, Kendall. Kendall is great, right? Using their first name as always, you know, standard stuff. And then we go right into it and it says, we help CEOs not miss their revenue targets by increasing their sales efficiency through sales training.

So let's break this down a little bit. CEOs were directly working with CEOs, which Kendall in this case, she's the CEO. Then we're helping them solve a specific problems, which is not missing. This is very important. Not missing their revenue targets. In this case, that's the problem we're trying to help them solve. Okay.

Then here we're going to go into the how we are going to solve that problem by increasing their sales efficiency. And then the method, the methodology, how we're doing it, we're doing it through sales training. Then we go straight into some good old social proof, right? It goes right here and it goes, our clients like ADX and AMAC.

right? Social proof. See a 27% increase in sales revenue while reducing operational costs by 18% on average. So look, we help you solve this specific problem and we specifically work with CEOs and we do it through this way, which we don't talk a lot about what we do and how we do it. We just give them a little snippet. Then we go into the social proof and we give some tangible data of how we've done it. So

We just don't say that we've done it. We share data. So 27% increase in sales revenue and 18% operational cost reduction on average. Then we go into a nice soft

interest-based CTA here. And we say interested in exploring if we can help you as well. Data shows that interest-based CTAs outside of the sales cycle tend to generate better responses. Then we end here with some gratitude and then your name and boom. Make sure you use this email literally this week. Start trying it out. Your own version of it, of course, don't just copy and paste this. And if you apply the things that we talked about today, you will book more meetings.

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