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Ashwin Ramasamy · · 6 min readIf you want better B2B sales prospecting, learn the 30-3-30 rule
Our job at PipeCandy is to help customers write high-conversion sales prospecting emails – the ones that get 20 or 30 responses per 100 emails. Doing this repeatedly in our previous startups and now through PipeCandy, we figured out a rule that never fails.
The 30-3-30 rule of email prospecting for sales
Sales prospecting emails have just one goal: to get a positive actionable response. This could be a confirmation of a phone call, a demo or a visit or even an introduction to another colleague.
Here are the milestones you’ll need to get there.
The 3-second milestone
Notice people’s inbox-reading patterns – or even your own. People scan from top to bottom, not left to right. What does that mean?
People don’t read your email subjects. They scan vertically through their inboxes for hooks.
People don’t read your email subjects. They scan vertically through their inboxes for hooks. They’re looking for words that arrest their vertical movement and hook them into a left-to-right reading pattern.
Essentially, you’re looking to break a pattern. And what have you got?
3 seconds.
That’s the span of time you’ve got before the scroll position moves, vanishing your email.
You’ve heard email marketing gurus saying that subject lines are important. Now you know why – way we scan emails discourages email opens. Your prospects are reading emails much like lifeguards in the Miami beach spot trouble in the waters amidst an ocean of beachgoers.
Your prospects’ eyes look for familiar names. Yours isn’t. Then they look for words in subject lines that hook them. That’s why, for a while, we all wrote our prospect’s names on the subject lines hoping they noticed it. That’s done to death now.
What you instead need to put in there: words that perk up curiosity or create fear of missing out (FOMO). Can you plant curiosity or FOMO within 3 seconds? That’s your subject-line challenge!
This is what you’re shooting for. Photo credit: Carl,that kills people.
What not to do
Now for the 30.
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