The worst sales email I ever received

Sales is hard. There, I said it. You have to have eternal optimism, patience, persistence, a thick skin and (ideally) a range of skills from personal organisation, relationship building and presentation to negotiation and commercial writing. Oh, and maths.

But the first skill you need is to know how to NOT TURN OFF YOUR PROSPECTS. Yes, I’m shouting.

If your first contact is with a phone call, don’t lie to get through to me.

If it’s by email, you have so many more opportunities to get me to discard your contact. A couple of weeks ago I received the worst sales email I’d ever seen. Actually, it was the last in a series of emails from the same guy, but this one took the biscuit (details changed to protect the guilty):

Hi {First Name},

I figured I will try you one last time. We’ve helped 100’s of customers just like you using CrapCart to increase their overall revenue from 5% to 40%. To show you what kind of return on investment you can achieve with SuperThing, we have created this tool: BluSkyIdeas – ROI Calculator.

Do you have 5 minutes for a phone call?

Best,

Homer

Let’s analyse this:

Firstly, my first name is not {First Name}. Buying lists of contacts is fair enough, but at least test your template.

“I figured I will try you one last time” – I don’t care what you “figured”. You also just told me if I ignore you again, you’ll go away. Victory!

“We’ve helped 100’s of customers just like you using CrapCart” – we’re not using CrapCart. Actually, a few seconds on our web site would tell anyone there’s no online shop at all. DO SOME RESEARCH! Oh, and “100’s” shouldn’t have an apostrophe.

“…increase their overall revenue from 5% to 40%” – 5% to 40% of what? This is meaningless. Message: “I don’t understand what I’m talking about”. I assume he meant conversion rates from visitors to buyers, but that’s not “overall revenue”.

Then he mentions “SuperThing”, his product. At no point does he tell me what it is, or what it does. Not “SuperThing, a plugin for CrapCart” – I have to guess. And the tool he linked to was just some demo slides.

Although this was the end of a 3-email campaign, he’d previously sent me lots of mails, the first of which I’d replied to saying we didn’t use CrapCart. I sent him this reply:

{greeting} {first name},

{non-committal comment} {time period}

I suspect your {mailmerge platform} failed.

{never going to be a customer name}

{signature}

He replied with a grudging apology, I reiterated why we weren’t interested. Hopefully he won’t waste my time or his.