A Sales Email that Gets Attention

Garth Moulton is the VP of Community and Co-founder of Jigsaw. His blog, Garth's World, is funny and offers up some great sales advice he's learned over the years. In this post he details an email conversation between a sales rep and Jim Fowler, Jigsaw's CEO. Read their correspondence and you'll see proof that a carefully crafted email message can reap big rewards!

From: [Search marketing sales guy]
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 12:57 PM
To: Jim Fowler
Subject: Short bullet point email

Jim,

I talked to one of your guys at Ad:Tech. I love your service.

Your Google search advertising leaves much to be desired. Here's why:

• You're paying too much per click (by 21% to 39%)
• Your ads are buried below your competition (screenshot enclosed)
• You're missing many of the latest optimization techniques

If you're open to a new progressive search marketing agency, when can we talk?

[First name and signature file]

From: Jim Fowler
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 1:15 PM
To: Sales Guy, Jigsaw Marketing Folks
Subject: RE: Short bullet point email

[Sales guy],


I'm thinking about using your email as a model for how to communicate with me. Way to listen and get my attention at the same time. Please forward this to your boss and tell him I suggest you get a raise. I've also cc'd our VP of Global Sales/BizDev, as we're always looking for great sales people.

The person who has complete budget and responsibility for SEM/SEO is [Jigsaw marketing director] (she's on Jigsaw). I've cc'd her here.

Note: we are coming off a nasty experience with [your competitor]. [our director] will likely be gun shy.

Best of luck.

Fowler

From: Jim Fowler
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 1:50 PM
To: Biz Dev; Sales (All); Marketing; Garth Moulton
Subject: FW: Short bullet point email

Team,

This is one of the best examples of a sales outreach email I've ever seen:

• He read and listened to my contact preferences/instructions
• Used the fact that he read the instructions to get my attention
• VERY crisp communication throughout the email - no extra blah, blah, blah.
• He complimented Jigsaw, which is like complimenting my kid. Makes me feel good.
• The bullet points have numbers (yes, they're probably BS, but who cares - got my attention)
• Attached an actual real-life example of what we can do to improve
• Provided a call to action at the end
• Notice the response I gave him. I provided extremely valuable data - something that will happen to you too, if you do it right like [sales guy].

REALLY impressive. I would be very pleased to see the quality of our outbound 1to1 emails from our sales team be of this quality. Please make it happen!

Fowler

Read more from Garth at his blog, http://www.jigsawsblog.com