Your email subject lines? They don’t matter.

I’m not a prospecting expert, however, I do know how an exec looks at their inbox.

As a guest on a recent edition of the “Daily Sales Tip” podcast, here was a quick, three minute tip on empathizing with the executive inbox (audio or video). (Here’s THE LINK to the 3-minute podcast episode)

To sum it up, here’s a way to think about it:

• As you move up in your career, you receive more emails. As a CRO, I was receiving 100-150 per day. So, the higher in an org you’re prospecting into, the more emails they’re already receiving.
• As an exec, I had to check and be responsive to email – from customers, peers, investors, board members. So, the inbox was scanned many times per day for “Is this email here to help me, or is it here to sell me?”
• The subject line isn’t what gets looked at. It’s the preview – those first ten words of the email body we can all see in gmail, Outlook, our phone, etc. Are you optimizing for those?

If you want to build trust through email, and stand out from the white noise of a piled-high inbox, make it personalized, there to help, and evident of that in the first ten words.

Step one, no more “I” or “we”.