How Old Skool techniques can help us with prospecting email

In the old days (before the internet came upon us). A lot of sales were done face to face.

Someone had to go out and visit the client or customer to make the sale.

That was traditional salesmanship at work.

Particularly if you were selling COLD from door to door.

You would learn pretty quickly what you had to say in order to start a conversation.

Before you had the door SLAMMED shut in your face.

You had Seconds to convince them to allow you to keep talking and hopefully ask you in.

In the same vein but much more like we have to deal with now was direct mail, where hundreds of thousands if not millions of mail pieces were sent out to try and make sales.

This, above all is closest to what we try to do today on the internet.

Though Direct mail had its own problems because as the Late great Gary Halbert gave us was the A pile B pile theory, where he said that everyone stood over their wastepaper basket and tossed anything they weren’t interested in, and the only things that were usually kept were bills, personal letters or things that looked like bills and personal letters.

Anyway, again, you had maybe a couple of seconds to convince someone to keep your mail.

Keep mind, you haven’t convinced them to open it yet.

Anyway, I digress…

Exactly the same thing has to be done if you are cold/prospect emailing.

Except instead of a few seconds or maybe one or two, you have less than a second to convince them to not click that delete button (which their mouse is hovering over anyway).

You need to say something pretty extreme but at the same time grab their interest, so it cannot be trite or rude and it definitely shouldn’t be clickbait, all of those things will later trip you up.

To break through the noise you need to get funky.

You don’t want anything like the following

“I’m sorry to bother you”

“I had this offer and thought you might be interested”

“would you be interested in”

“50% off”

None of that. That kind of thing will get your email deleted faster than an icecube melts in a volcano.

What you need is something like…

“We’ve never met (Hi, I’m John) and…”

“Would you make me a cup of coffee if I”

“What’s the hardest thing you encounter in…”

Do you see the difference, and besides, it lets the person you have sent it to know that you are a ‘real’ person and not a robot.