Sales Empathy: Optimizing Emails for Buyer Priorities

Two weeks ago, we talked about why your email subject lines don’t matter anymore, given the fact that we ALL have email inboxes which have a preview of the first ten or so words. It’s that preview that gets the open, not your subject line.

When I was a CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) or a Senior Vice President of Sales, I received 100-150 emails per day. I looked at the preview to decide whether an email was there to help me, or to sell me. What helps me? My priorities are always about people. If we take care of the people, they’ll take care of the numbers. And when the numbers are taken care of, so are the people.

An Executive’s Work Priorities

So, let’s think about my priorities from a work perspective. Here are the people priorities, in order of what was important to me:

1. My team
2. Our customers
3. Our prospects
4. My boss
5. My internal peers
6. Our board
7. My external peers
8. Candidates
9. Former co-workers
10. Investors
11. Partners
12. Current vendors
13. Known potential vendors
14. Unknown potential vendors
15. Everyone else

So, when you’re cold calling or cold emailing me, you are essentially #14 on the list. How do you move up? Make your email about helping me help those at the top of the list.

When you are #14, and your call or email starts with “I wanted” or your needs, guess what? Your email is there to help #14, so it earns a “delete”.