When it comes to making a strong impression, nothing has more impact than how you enter and exit a room. As sales educator Jeff Hoffman explains, the same holds true for your emails.

Want to make a strong impression with your prospects? Of course you do. Well, these days that means getting one thing absolutely right — a killer email subject line and a killer close.

In this episode of Strictly Sales with Jeff Hoffman, Jeff provides a set of email sales pitch guidelines that will help you avoid some costly mistakes and send emails that get responded to now.

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Key Takeaways

“Grace — which is unfortunately a word we don’t use a lot anymore or think about anymore — is often determined by the way one enters or exits a room. That entry and that exit matters.”

— Jeff Hoffman, M. J. Hoffman and Associates

* 3 things to avoid in your subject line: FW: or RE:; questions; summarizing the entire email

* Emails have to have a clean close: Don’t include attachments or legal notes at the end of the email [5:00]

* Keep your signature simple: Only include name, company, and one phone number. No title or social media accounts [6:35]

Transcript

Announcer: This is Strictly Sales with Jeff Hoffman and CeCe Bazar. For more information go to OpenView Labs or mjhoffman.com.

CeCe: Hi again, everyone and thanks for joining us for Strictly Sales with Jeff Hoffman. We’re here to talk all about emails. Well, not all about them really. Let’s talk about the start and the stop of an email. Let’s talk about this.

 Jeff: The book ends.

CeCe: The book ends — the subject line and the signature — because I think those are two places where reps get really confused. What do I do? Where do I go? What is the right way to start and stop those emails?

Jeff: Yeah, and you know what’s important? We could argue that the middle of that sandwich is the most important part, but I’d say it’s probably not. The definition of grace — which is unfortunately a word we don’t use a lot anymore or think about anymore — in my mind has always been you’re judged. Your grace is often determined by the way one enters or exits a room. I think it’s a really good way of kind of capsizing that. That entry and that exit matters, so yeah, that subject line has some value and the way you kind of close has some value not that the middle doesn’t, but no one’s going to pick up that sandwich if it’s soggy bread. I think it’s an interesting question that comes up, so why don’t we talk about both?

Let’s start with the subject. I think we spend a little too much time worrying about it because 80 to 90 percent of the people that you send emails to are reading them on their smartphone, which is going to have a grand total of 15 characters to read. But let’s start with some things that you don’t want to do in a subject line.

CeCe: Yeah.

Jeff: Let’s not do the FW colon, RE colon, space, space colon, little things that look to make the reader think that this is some long string I’m involved with. That’s just so dishonest.

CeCe: That is why salespeople get a bad rep, right?

Jeff: Of course! And they deserve it if they’re going to do crap like that. You’re not getting points for that. These aren’t tricks. It’s about technique, so let’s not do that. I don’t want to say things like, “are you free at 3 o’clock?” I don’t need to ask questions in my subject line unless I know the person. I think that’s kind of weird too.

CeCe: Definitely.

Jeff: But then I also think about what’s the subject line’s purpose and I’d argue that it’s not to summa...