#596 - This Cold Email Formula Gets +20% Replies (Exact Templates)

0:00Today, we are sitting down with Sam McKenna, who is a multiple-time VP of Enterprise Sales and CEO of Sam Sales Consulting. Sam is going to be breaking down the cold email formula that gets her above a 20 % positive reply rate. And this is a formula that has booked her and her team thousands of meetings with senior execs at some of the world's most prestigious companies. We literally dissected everything you need to know about sending the perfect cold emails, from the subject line to sentence by sentence by sentence, down all the way to how you can preempt your most common cold email objections.

0:35Look, cold email is really tough right now, but I promise this episode is going to help you start to crack the code of how to start reeling in the cold email replies. Already, Sam, today we are going to be walking through the perfect cold email. We've got yours on screen here. Let's start with the first thing that our prospect sees, which is the subject line. Break it down for me.

0:56Sam McKenna: If you look at anybody's inbox or if you look at your own spam folder, you're going to see what every buyer sees in their inbox. And it is one thing after another that looks generic, canned, scaled, AI'd. So we have to think about this first thing, right? We have to create a super funky subject line that makes absolutely no sense except to the person that's receiving it. So look at this one, right? We have Dave Phillips plus LinkedIn plus hashtag Sam Sales. If you were the receiver of this email, you probably know who Dave is. You perhaps work at LinkedIn before and you have no idea what Sam Sales is, but you know the rep has done some research on you.

1:32Sam McKenna: Your curiosity is piqued and you're going to open it up at least to see what's inside. So we have to start there. Otherwise, we have no shot of getting somebody to read what's in the body of the email. As I read this email, Dave Phillips, the first thing that you call out in the subject line is the brother of the prospect that you are reaching out to. Now, Alex, I know you've been doing a lot of prospecting recently. And unfortunately for you, the brothers of all of your prospects are not always posting on LinkedIn. So Sam, can you help me figure out for our good friend Alex here, or for folks who are like, hey, the siblings of my prospect aren't always posting.

2:08How can I build this for myself? How can I start to build out these show me, you know me subject lines so that I start getting 100 % email replies.

2:16Sam McKenna: Just think about it the same way. Like you would look at running a mile. It's going to take us maybe 15 or 12 minutes today. And it's probably going to take you 10 or nine or eight minutes in a couple of months from now. If you say I'm going to allot myself 15 minutes, 15 painful minutes per email that you send, and you say, I'm only going to send 30 or 40 or 50 this week. That's a good start. Look at their LinkedIn profile. There may not be anything on there. And I'll give you advice for what we do if that's the case. But look there first. Who are they? How long have they worked there? Where have they worked before?

2:47Sam McKenna: Are those logos your clients? Do you have shared connections? Did you go to the same school? Do they volunteer? Are they ASPCA devotees? Like what can we find out about them? If you can say some things and have an authentic connection, go there. The other note is let's say there's nothing on their LinkedIn profile, literally a tumbleweed going by and you're like, what do I do now? Next, go to their company page. What's going on with the organization? Are they doing sponsorships? Do they spend money with charity? Are they big advertisers of something? Do they have press releases, earnings reports, things like that that came out, things that you can attach yourself to?

3:23The format that I generally want to use is like, it doesn't need to be a full complete sentence. It doesn't need to be crazily related to what I actually sell or the problem that I need to solve. Instead, the entire goal of the subject line is to show them that you know them. And the way that you can test if you've done this right, is if the subject line wouldn't make sense to anyone else who would get it. You're also putting like your company name. And in this scenario, you say Dave Phillips, LinkedIn, and Sam Sales. Dave Phillips is the brother. LinkedIn is, I think you're talking to them about helping them with LinkedIn.

3:57And then you've got the company name. That I guess brings me now to the next piece of a great cold email, which is I now have to say something. And And so I know you're really intentional with your first sentence. Can you break down this first sentence or this first sort of chunk that you have in your cold email for folks?

4:13Sam McKenna: If you look at your inbox on your phone, right, you've got two things. You have your subject line and then you've got the first sentence. And basically all of that together is your preview text effectively. It's the preview of what's going to be in the email and what the buyer thinks you're going to say. This is, again, where I think we go wrong. But two things. we either dive right into the sales pitch and nobody wants that, right? You can see here that we dived, doved, dived right into the show me, you know me, and that's totally okay. We want to avoid diving right into the sales pitch. And we also want to avoid the classic hope this finds you doing well, right?

4:45Sam McKenna: Hope this finds you well, hope this finds you doing well in these unfortunate circumstances, whatever it is that's going on. Avoid that stuff. Instead, right? You can dive right into the show me, you know me. I love that, like getting right into it. What we're doing for the client as we're trying to get them to think, right? That psychological trick of they know something about me. They're saying we haven't been properly introduced yet. Maybe we should have. I'm going to open up this email. Like, who is this? What is this? I don't want to miss something. I think there's very common sales advice that it's like shorter emails, shorter emails, shorter emails.

5:16But I think what you're doing here is like, you can make the email as long as you want because you worked with this person's brother or you saw that they were on a Nickelodeon show. And so what you're doing is you're kind of building up the, I have done my prep for this

5:27Sam McKenna: email. We have to earn the time. We have to hook them. We have to prove value. We have to do something in that email, which requires length to say, I have something interesting to tell you. I have a way to get around the objections you're probably already thinking. And if you spend time with me, it will be time well spent. So we hit them with the perfect show me, show me, you know, me subject line. We've used our first sentence or two here to triple down on the, I prepared for this email. I know you. Today's show is brought to you by Ambition, the coaching and performance platform helping sales leaders turn metrics into action.

6:06To understand any metric, you need two things, context and trend. If your team booked 40 meetings this week, there's no way to tell if that number is good or bad because if the goal was 80, you're in trouble. If it's 20, you're crushing. That's why you need context. But trend can change things. If you averaged 80 meetings a week for the last quarter, and then you only hit 40 this week, something went wrong. Now, we built a guide with ambition on how to actually use data to coach your team without becoming a dashboard manager. It's free in the show notes. The worst discovery advice is just be curious and ask lots of questions.

6:37Look, our prospects are not showing up to sales calls to answer our questions. They're showing up to get their questions answered and to figure out how we can solve their problem. And this is what Pipedrive does. If you want to get clear, complete sales visibility, you can use Pipedrive's easy-to-use and customizable CRM that is designed to be simple from day one and stay easy-to-use as your team grows. We actually put together an entire resource hub with Pipedrive to help you get to Precedence Club, and you can get them for free in the 30-MPC Pipedrive Closers Hub. The link is in the show notes.

7:05Today's show is brought to you by Unify. Top SDRs don't work every account the same. They tier by intent, and then they work the hottest signals first. So Unify actually builds that list for you. If you just describe who you're targeting in plain English or connect to your CRM, it will literally search over 40 different sources to surface the tier one accounts automatically and then draft the outreach in your voice. So it's basically like Claude for outbound sellers. Grab our guide on how top SDRs hit quota every year in the show notes or sign up for free at unifiedgtm.com. And then the next piece, I know you have a transition sentence that takes from the, hey, I know you to the real reason for my outreach.

7:43In this scenario, you wrote, the real reason for my outreach, however, is I don't think we need to spend too much time on that transition sentence. I think you're just doing it as a way to properly cut from I know you to why I am reaching out. You talk about from here, we get into the challenge or storytelling piece of the cold email. Can you talk through the keys to success for this piece?

8:06Sam McKenna: Put yourself in the shoes of being in person, right? So you do your research. You do the rapport building. Nick and I are at a conference. We're chit-chatting. I'm doing all this. And then I finish my last sentence. I say, please give him my best. And Nick's like, I will. And then I say, leading companies like 30 Minutes Presence Club are using companies like Sam Sales to go to do sales training. The hell is happening, right? It's almost like a robot Sam just turned on and I'm giving you a pitch. It's like, we got to ease our way from this rapport building, right? Into the kind of business portion of the conversation, you have to do the same thing in an email.

8:43Sam McKenna: We don't do that. So one of the key things you can do as simple as it is, right, is use a little EQ and then transition. You can say something just like this. The real reason for my outreach is the, while I could talk about this all day, what I'd really like to discuss with you is XYZ transition away, right? So there's a nice segue into what we're talking about instead of just this blunt dropping it into their lap of, would you like to buy my stuff? You know, when I was in a band in high school, we had the girlfriend test, which is we think this song is good. Let's play it for our girlfriends.

9:13If they, I didn't have a girlfriend, but my, my bandmates did let's play it for our girlfriends. And if they like it, we know it's actually good. And I think this passes a similar test where if I got referred by a friend of mine to say, Hey, I think my buddy actually, and this has happened to me. I think my buddy actually might want to talk to you. Would I send a generic F-shaped three line? Absolutely not. I would not send that. I would invest some time to say, hey, Mike said his friend runs the biggest law firm in the Hudson Valley. Let me spend some time on this. This passes that test. And that's kind of like how I know that I've invested the appropriate amount of time to really break through this like weird sales fuzz that we all have on our emails.

9:56Sam McKenna: We have to know what was the name of your band? If you are an avid user of the site band camp and you're watching this and you want to listen to some where's the ulysses tracks go for it this is amazing whenever you want to score a meeting with alex now you know exactly what to put in your subject line and now nick knows how to show me you know me you and you know at the company retreat this year i'm pumped it's phenomenal maybe we'll even find you a girlfriend although i think your wife would be upset about that one alex yeah i don't know how that's gonna fly speaking of that let's talk about the part of the email where you sort of start to pitch.

10:30So could you talk about what you're doing in this real reason for my outreach, other piece of this email here? Because this is where you really start to sell in the traditional sense.

10:41Sam McKenna: If you just read this real quick, right? I'm going to painfully read this to you guys, but real reason for my outreach is like many modern sales teams, I suspect your organization has LinkedIn sales navigator licenses. That's a fair assumption. Almost everybody does. There's a good chance utilization is low. I'm going to point out something that they probably already know or that they deal with every single day. Next thing, as reps often don't understand much of its value, the platform is often ignored. Not only is it a waste of tech spend, but it means your team's missing easy leads. They don't know how to capitalize on the most powerful prospecting tool they have at their disposal.

11:13Sam McKenna: And then just empty space. If your top of the funnel numbers are hurting, this is an easy fix. I want to let you know, I understand your current challenge, your current predicament, and then I can solve this for you. The key here too, is like, I'm not trying to help with adoption. I'm like, nobody's going to be like, wow, this is going to move the needle and get our LinkedIn, you know, to be adopted. Nobody cares about that. What they care about is demand generation, top of the funnel, net new leads, et cetera. Now we can probably solve 13 or 15 or 16 other things, but I have to start with the first thing.

11:44Sam McKenna: I just sell them on the meeting. Yeah. So you have mentioned a couple of times in this conversation that you're anticipating objections, even in the email, how are you doing that? Like, where is that happening in this email? Can you point us to some of those spots? Say your value proposition, say the challenge that you're going to help them solve. And then just think, what do people normally say as an objection? If I say you likely have a customer success manager at LinkedIn that can help you, here's the part that they're missing. Here's why their teams have us train their CSMs on how to use Navigator.

12:17Sam McKenna: Wait, what? Right? Like the people that are training us hire you to train them. Why shouldn't we just hire you to train us? That's a great point. That's what I want to get them to think about, right? Last thing here on this email, Sam, I know you are extremely intentional about the close of the email. And can you talk to me about how you end this email and why it is so dang important? We want to make this as broad as we can. We want to solicit for entrance. And the one thing that you will never catch me doing, there's not a black and white issue, but if you're going to sell the Sam Sales way, it's that you're not going to include a calendar link in your outbound emails.

12:52Sam McKenna: Now, this is a source of great debate between this and me not making cold calls. I think people want to throw me off of a ledge. But here's the thing about the calendar link, right? You think, one, it's a little bit presumptive. You're presumptuous. You're going to go and give them this link and you're going to be like, you're welcome that now you can schedule time with me and I'll let you do the work. You tell me when you're free and I will figure out a way to make it work. And the final thing I would say is like, think again about this. All of these examples, put them in real life, right? So you go to a bar, you walk up to somebody and you're like, hi, you're super cute.

13:24Sam McKenna: We should go on a date. And the person's like, oh my God, you're super cute too. We should also go on a date. I agree with you. And then you say, here's my calendar link for you to book that date in with me. It's the weirdest, most awkward thing. We would never do that in real life. So why do we do it in sales, right? Just say. This is why I did not have a girlfriend in high school. It's because I was doing that and it was not. As an 11 year old, as a 17 year old, you have to seize this. None of that. none of that. Had you known? Had I been in your life sooner, Alex? There we go. Sam is now offering dating coach services for the Alex Murphys of the world.

13:58Good luck. So today's show is brought to you by Proposify, the proposal management software designed to make every deal a closed deal. When you send a proposal to a prospect, include a video of yourself walking through the proposal because it's going to be shared with stakeholders beyond just your champion. You want to make it easy for those other people to digest and you want to be able to control the narrative with your presentation. And bonus, Proposify data shows that when buyers watch the video, it increases your chances of winning by over 3x. So do not let your proposals become a disappointing plot twist.

14:26Get our proposal success guide free in the show notes.

14:34Today's show is brought to you by Align, the AI deal workspace that helps sales teams close complex deals. So here's a tip about multi-threading. There are stakeholders in your deals that you don't even know exist, like the VP of Finance, who's viewed your champion's recap twice this week, but no one actually introduced you. That is the type of person who's beacon around your deal and might sneak up to kill the deal at the finish line, and Align's AI surfaces it before it's too late so you can multi-thread to them. We built a full multi-threading playbook powered by Align. It's free in the show notes.

15:04Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy-to-use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question, which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C, which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, PipeDrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes. And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub.

15:35There's a link in the show notes. Sam, this is a freaking badass email. And I think it's going to help Alex book more meetings. I think it's going to help folks watching and listening book more meetings. It might even help folks who are looking for a significant other in their life. But my guess is there are times that you send this world-class email and you don't always hear back. And I want to understand for you, you just shared cold calling is not part of your team's outbound approach. I'd like to understand what the follow-up looks like to this email.

16:00Sam McKenna: Here's the piece of advice I would give you. Work Monday through Wednesday, write your show me, you know, me emails, save them in drafts, and then send them on Thursday and Friday because the follow-up after this, right? Number one, we're going to send our second email on a Saturday or a Sunday. So let's call it about 43, 44 hours after email one has gone out. So if you're sending email one on Thursday morning, that means you're carry the two sending out Saturday morning, right? If you send it on Friday, send it out Sunday night. Executives on average work almost seven hours every single weekend.

16:30Sam McKenna: It's a joyous life, right but answering emails prepping for things sending our sunday emails like we do it all so if you think about that email one that you worked so hard to craft and then send email to and it has no new information in it it is literally like hey alex wanted to quickly pop in and see if you'd read my below email i'd still be grateful for appreciative of the chance to chat with you as you have availability thanks sam what you're doing is jogging that person's memory don't forget i sent you this really really awesome email and then you're just saying did you read it in a very polite, very human, very casual way.

17:03Sam McKenna: What you'll find is on email too, especially by sending it on the weekends as they're less distracted. They're not working with a bunch of other Slack messages and things like that. They're still going and they'll probably respond. Third step, send another email on Wednesday. This is educational and it also has no ask at the bottom. So I try to educate them on another value proposition that's related to what I said, right? Challenge we can solve, getting them around that and then closing it out, no ask. On Friday, so now we've had a full week, send them a connection request on LinkedIn. And that connection request, number one, has context in it.

17:35Sam McKenna: And the script that I would give you is something like this. My name might look familiar as I've sent you a few emails. I'd be grateful for, appreciative of, one of the two, by the way, the chance to chat with you. If you're ever up for a chance about how Sam Sales can help XYZ, please let me know. That's it. When you send that on a Friday, it's probably going to be on the weekend, something like that, that they accept if they do. and they're either going to accept and say nothing or they're going to accept and say, thanks, period. And you're going to say, the hell do I do with that question mark?

18:04Sam McKenna: And what you do with it is you respond. But here's the kicker. When you respond, your little chat box is in a minimized window on their screen. It's flashing blue. They literally hear the Jaws music because they know that you're coming for them with the pitch slap. That's with a P, pitch slap. You're coming for them with that. They open it up. And instead of you pitching, you're like, hi, just wanted to say thanks for connecting, looking forward to staying in touch. If they wanted a meeting, they would have told you. There is zero reason for you to try to badger them into it. You go back and continue to send your emails over there, right?

18:39Sam McKenna: And hopefully at some point you break them with your incredibly well-written content and they take a meeting. But just a little different thing to do there in the next steps. For folks that want to learn more about you or Sam Sales or reach out to your team about getting their org helped with all the wonderful things you do. Where can folks learn more about you? Come say hi on LinkedIn, of course, on our website, samsalesconsulting.com. We have a pretty funny newsletter that goes out twice a week and is path for the actionable content. Our YouTube channel is pretty lit. Can I say that? It's pretty lit.

19:08Sam McKenna: You can say pitch slap. You can give Alex dating advice. Free reign on the show. But come hang out. Tons and tons of free content, 99 % of of which is free, like I said. And then if you really want to shortcut your path to success, go to our playbooks section of our website. And we have, I think, almost a dozen of them that will really, really get you to accelerate your results. So thanks. Come say hi. Amazing. Sam, thank you for joining us. Everybody stick around for a 60-second recap coming up soon. Folks, in this episode, we broke down the perfect Cole email. But as you know, you're not going to be sending just one email in isolation.

19:46The best salespeople know how to structure their outbound sequences to hit on the right mix of channels, touch points, and spacing in between messages. And we literally broke down what we call the perfect cold outbound sequence, where we give you the mix of calls to emails to social touches, how many to do, how long to wait in between each, and what to say for literally every single step. And the best news of all is it's free. You can grab it in the description of this episode, so go get it. Start booking more outbound meetings, and we will see you next week on 30MPC.

20:23Today's show is brought to you by Fullenrich, which compiles 20-plus premium data vendors in one place to dramatically improve your call connect rate. When you're cold calling, you have to make sure you're not showing up as spam-likely on your prospect's end. And one way to do this is to stop calling bad numbers over and over again. Mark your disconnected or fax lines or wrong numbers so you know not to dial them again. Or even better, make sure your data provider only gives you verified numbers to start with. We partnered with Fullenrich on a guide of nine ways to improve your call connect rate.

20:50Get it for free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Unify. Top SDRs don't work every account the same. They tier by intent, and then they work the hottest signals first. So Unify actually builds that list for you. If you just describe who you're targeting in plain English or connect your CRM, it will literally search over 40 different sources to surface the tier one accounts automatically and then draft the outreach in your voice. So it's basically like Claude for outbound sellers. Grab our guide on how top SDRs hit quota every year in the show notes or sign up for free at UnifiedGTM.com.

21:22Today's show is brought to you by Mutiny, the AI agent that helps you personalize your buyer's experience and beat the competition. The best sellers connect the dots between what they learn in discovery and everything else they share with their prospect. Every demo you show and every piece of content you share, you need to explicitly tie back to, I'm presenting this to you because you said X. Now, this applies to business cases, proposals, and more. And we partnered with Mutiny on the three magic sales templates to help you move your deals without needing your marketing team's help. Grab it in the show notes.