Here’s Why Your Sales Emails and LinkedIn Messages Aren’t Working

Your sales emails and LinkedIn messages suck.

They’re annoying.

They make me want to mark you as spam, not talk to you.

You probably think it’s a numbers game.

And you’re right: as long as you think it’s a numbers game, that gives you an excuse to suck at it, and your numbers will be super low.

And if you treat everyone you email or message the same, and if you don’t get interested in how to get a better response from people:

• Your numbers will continue to suck.
• You will give yourself and your company a bad name.
• You will feel like you’re doing something positive by taking action, but you’re actually having a negative effect.

If you have a PR department or branding people that are trying to give your company a good image, they probably hate that you’re giving your company a bad image with these spammy emails.

If you’re a salesperson, you may think marketing is stupid. That’s just something that lame, introverted, nerdy people do, right?

That attitude shows in spammy emails, because they lack any marketing sense at all.

The first thing a marketer does is give a crap about the audience.

“Hmm, what does the recipient care about?”

This is clearly not your concern when you write spammy emails and InMails.

All you care about is getting a phone call or demo scheduled.

That’s what YOU want.

BUT the prospects you’re writing don’t care what YOU want.

Prospects care about what THEY want.

You aren’t helping them care by writing in a compelling way.

And that’s why they’re marking you as spam and ignoring you.

They’re saying bad things about your company and your entire profession sucking and you don’t even know it.

They wish you cared, because they probably have problems you could solve.

But they aren’t understanding that you could really help, because you aren’t talking to them in a compelling way.

You only care about your numbers and your numbers game, and you’re not communicating well.

You would still do cold calls if they worked. But they don’t work. Do YOU like robocalls? Probably not. They don’t work.

Neither does this spammy, selfish email approach.

Stop bothering people, and start caring about them, and you’ll get a better response.

If this did penetrate your skull at all, then what you need to do next is read 5 or 10 books on copywriting.

Copywriting is the more than 90 year old marketing discipline of figuring out how to write in a way that get people to take action- actions like saying yes to a phone call or demo.

Your emails are copywriting, whether you realize it or not.

It’s just that you are not a trained copywriter, so your emails suck.

Get some training.

You will learn some fundamental mindset shifts.

You will learn to think about your writing from the reader’s perspective.

And people will start responding.

You will get more appointments and sales.

And fewer people will think you suck.

Do it.

Oh, and if you’re not a spammy salesperson, but you agree with this article, share it with those annoying salespeople that bother you. Send it to the next salesperson who spams you via email or LinkedIn. It just might help them out- and prevent the next victim from getting spammed, too!

UPDATE: Some readers asked me, “So which copywriting books do you recommend?”

I first studied copywriting 14 years ago, so I’m sure there are a lot of great new copywriting books beyond what I read… If I were starting now I would go to amazon, search for copywriting, and check out the reviews. The ones I recall liking the most were Scientific Advertising, Confessions of an Advertising Man, Tested Advertising Methods, Words That Sell, Phrases That Sell. Some of those are older (like 1930’s or 1960’s or 1980’s older) so you may need to ignore or update some of their phrases.

But my best source these days for continuing to learn copywriting is applying my own system, plus the feedback I get from the advertising and landing page metrics.

This blog post describes some of the copywriting principles I’ve developed…

and this is a mega blog post of copywriting formulas you might find helpful.