English 'Torygraph' Broadsheet Tips

Well, serendipity is a wonderful thing.  There I was in my spare time, googling for some stuff on ‘peak limiting’ (it’s a music production thang) and amazingly I came across a wealth of sales intel from a bloke called Mike Southon, writing in Britain’s best-selling daily quality newspaper (the Telegraph, who’s business columnist Jeff Randall I’ve blogged about before as I’m quite a fan).

I’ve already read a few of the several pages he’s been awarded.  As you can imagine, regular national press coverage on selling is something I warmly welcome.  One interesting piece read so far is on his so-called “magic email“.  There are several recommendations on the web for this kind of intro.  He reckons he gets an impressive response of around 1 in 6¼ agreeing to a short meeting. You can easily read the detail for yourself, but it’s worth highlighting a summary:

Line 1 – something you notice/know about their company

Lines 2&3 – elevator pitch extolling passionately about what you do

Line 4 – proof of the above claims

Line 5 – close (what you propose or want to achieve)

and subject line: something compelling, his example is the weakest explanation of his recipe, but you’ll get the idea; “The Best Quality Widget-Sharpening Service in the South West”

I wondered too whether I could adapt the 25 words approach I blogged about before?!

One reason why I like this kind of thing is ‘cos I’ve been toying with solutions for this conundrum myself lately, and here’s part of a mail that earned me a first meeting recently, of which I think Mike would be pleased, although re-reading it now I know could cull a few words and make it flow better for next time:

“My purpose is to speak with you so that we can arrange a 20 minute meeting to determine how our breakthrough service can make your sales team even more effective by helping your sales initiatives. This is I’m sure not a definitive list, but should give ideas from my initial research for you:

• Continued growth and maintaining a value-for-money portfolio
• Dedicated account management to hopefully increase our share of customer spend
• Keeping focus of what the sales team should be selling given vast array of products“

And financial proof followed.  The email response (from the MD) was “call my PA to arrange a meeting”.  Yum.