Cold Emailing CEOs: The Survival Guide in Seven Key Points
A well-written E-mail to the right person can lead to fantastic opportunities. This is why the right people get a lot of E-mails. Everyone wants a slice of their success, their time and their money, and getting seen above the shouting crowd of beggars is not an easy feat.
1) Get to the point:
There are a couple of things working against you when you email a busy executive. First being, they’re BUSY executives. This means they don’t have a lot of time to read through introductory emails from people they don’t know. That is why your email should always be SHORT AND TO THE POINT. You are much more likely to get a response if they don’t have to scroll before hitting reply.
2) Keep the Focus; what is the point?
The point of your email is not a sale. The point of your email is a solution for them. It’s completely acceptable that solving their problem just so happens to be a sale for you; however the C-level on the other end of your e-mail is focused on doing their job. The point is to help them.
3) Attitude is everything: Adopt the proper tone.
Your email should not read like an advert. As was mentioned before, the CEO on the other end of your email is focused on getting a job done. Your message should jibe with their efforts to do their job more effectively, efficiently or frugally. Imagine you’ve met this individual casually at a business conference and are speaking in the hall after a seminar. Chances are you’re not going to tell them, “But wait! There’s More!”
4) Segment, Segment, Segment:
By now, your message is super focused. Your audience should be as well. You should have your specific solution geared toward this individual by sector, by industry, company size, down to employees and annual sales. You’ll likely want a canned message for multiple segments, offering ONE solution to each segment, as you are keeping your solution simple and straight forward.
5) Un-Can Your Canned Messages.
This is where you give your C-Level Contacts the A-List Treatment. You have tailored the message to be short and to the point – and have made sure that it is tailored to their company through segmentation. What you now have is a canned message. But CEOs do not have time for canned messages. Very few people do, quite honesty, and very few will respond to those kinds of emails, even to reject your offer.
If you want to open the lines of communication, this individual needs to feel as though you truly care about them. This is your opportunity to make this person feel important. It needs to be apparent that you did not just copy and paste this email to 5 or 5,000 people and simple replace the “To” field. There is no one size fits all, magic piece of copy that will work in this case. You will want to do your research and find a way to connect to this person as an INDIVIDUAL and not as a sales opportunity.
6) Research is Easy:
Lucky for you, researching individuals is easier than ever. Most everyone has a social profile somewhere where you can glean information. Perhaps you notice you are both fans of the same soccer team. Perhaps you’ll discover that you are both members of rotary clubs. There may be an article in an online newspaper from some kind of accomplishment this person has had, or you discover you have a mutual friend on Facebook or LinkedIn.
7) The Golden Rule:
After following all of these steps, imagine that someone has sent this message to you while you are extremely busy and thinking of 20 different items on your to-do list. How does the message make you feel? Would you read it to the end?
