[00:00:00] Luigi Prestinenzi: Welcome. This is the Sales IQ Podcast. My name is Luigi Prestinenzi , and I'm on a mission to help salespeople be the best sales professionals they can be. Each week we will bring you a different message from thought leaders around the globe, so we can help you master the art of selling.

One of the biggest challenges of sales professional is getting the attention of our prospects in a world of content saturation. When you think about how much content our buyers can engage with today, our ability as sellers to get our prospect's attention can be very difficult, even in a world where sellers, including. An inbound lead our ability to get them on the phone to engage with them is actually really tough. Now, combine that with all the sequencing tools, the technology that is now available for sellers to engage with their prospects has changed.

The amount of emails our prospects are getting is increasing every day, but yet the data shows us the open rate is decreasing. Our ability to get them to respond is decreasing. And this week we're joined by the email guy, Will Allred. Will is the co-founder of Lavender, which is a platform that helps sales teams write better emails and writes them faster. It essentially evaluate your emails before you hit send.

And why is that important? Because look, the great thing about selling in 2021 is that we can really evaluate, this is so much data to tell us the type of emails, how long they should be subject lines, how short, like how direct we've got so much data to tell us what does a great email look like?

You know, if you're a sales professional, trying to master the art and master the craft of selling. You've gotta be looking at the data. You've got to be researching and seeing what's working and what's not. And then you've got to be sending your own emails and really evaluating what's working. And what's not because you know, today in a world, like, as I said before in a world where there's so much content.

As a sales professional, you're also a marketer in order to keep your pipeline full in order to keep an abundance of opportunities coming through, you need to be proactive and reaching out into market and running specific campaigns to your target audience, trying to engage them and get their attention.

The whole premise of cold emails, the whole premise of cold outreach of prospecting is not to sell to your prospects. It's to get their attention and start a conversation and that's what this week's episode is an incredible episode because will, has, is going to share some data with us. He's going to share some tactics that you can employ immediately to help you with your cold outreach.

Now, the other thing, if you want. If you need help with your prospecting at Sales IQ, we've actually got a program that's all about helping you create pipeline. We have sellers that are, that are achieving amazing things. We heard recently from Ellis, from DocuSign. Who's part of our program. Now we have some spots available for our next cohort. So if you're interested, hit me up on LinkedIn, send me a DM or go to www dot sales IQ global dot com (www.salesiqglobal.com). Check out the program, the Create Pipeline program, and jump on.

Because I'll tell you in 2022, the opportunity for you to create pipeline is sitting in your own hands. It's a fantastic opportunity to really upskill and learn how to really 4, 5, 6 X your pipeline, so that you never have to worry about not having enough opportunities in your pipeline. And de-risk you from hitting your target.

Welcome to the show Will.

[00:03:52] Will Allred: Hey, it's great to be here. I appreciate it.

[00:03:55] Luigi Prestinenzi: Yeah. Pretty excited about it. Your backdrop looks amazing. I don't know what part of the world you're at mate, but it's looking pretty, pretty sexy

[00:04:02] Will Allred: Down in Florida. This is my virtual [inaudible].

[00:04:06] Luigi Prestinenzi: So mate, I'm pretty excited to talk about, you know, the topic of you know, emailing, I think for, for most sellers in 2021 and moving into 2022, I think we've all been pushed into a virtual environment where emailing our prospects and using an omni-channel approach to engaging prospects and trying to bring on customers is, is a must.

Now, you know, it's not something that. Pre pandemic. We could have kind of got away with it, but now we need to really understand how to write emails that engage our audience. So I'm excited to talk about how do you do it? You know, how do you create cut-through in a really noisy marketplace, but before we talk about that topic, I would love to learn a bit more about you and your entrepreneurial journey and how you started Lavender.

[00:04:55] Will Allred: Yeah. And so I, prior to meeting my co-founder was working in consulting in Atlanta. So we were doing digital marketing strategy. So like I, I owned a lot of the execution aspects. So I had gotten super familiar with the marketing tech landscape the implementation of those tools and actually putting them into action. And so when I met my co-founder at a hackathon in Atlanta, he pitched an idea. Are you familiar with Crystal Knows Luigi?

[00:05:22] Luigi Prestinenzi: Yeah. I love that. Love that tool.

[00:05:24] Will Allred: Yeah. So he pitched a similar idea and the idea is what if marketers could have that same kind of insight at scale? I thought about it for about three seconds. I actually come to the event to pitch an idea that I had been cranking on. And when I heard other well we'll balance, talk about this idea, it was like, I've lived this problem. I know exactly what he's trying to get at, which is when it comes to producing content, most of it's guesswork. And so, yeah, I fell in love with the idea.

Came up to him. And I was like, you've got a brilliant plan to win this hackathon. I'm going to join your team. What do we need to go do next? And he was like, well, we need different arts and developers. So we went and got a couple, we ended up, you know, basically working nonstop. We won that, that weekend hackathon.

And we jumped into it. Full-time building a marketing technology company that was in. May of 2018. So we built that for about two years. Had some fantastic clients, groups like Gravity Blankets, Yamaha. We had stellar pipeline building up particularly around the automotive space and COVID kind of came through and wiped a lot of what we were working on out.

As we. Building though we came across some interesting trends around, you know, this data is cool, but what do I do with it? How do I take action on it? And it actually finally evolved to one customer sitting us down and saying, listen, psychology segments. But can you just take all that fancy voodoo that you did on our content and tie it back to actually what performances?

And so that was really like the birthplace of Lavender was us recognizing, okay. We can take all these content analytics and help. Create better content. So we did it with Facebook ads to get started. We applied it to an e-commerce group to Facebook ads and we doubled their return on ad spend in a week.

Basically like unsure tones, the length of the language, the complexity, all these things tied back to how much they were spending. On Facebook. And so we were like, well, here's some better ads go run them. And yeah, we were kind of off to the races. We were like super excited. COVID rolls around and, you know, pipeline is like, you know, Mercedes gives us a call and they're like, Hey, we're not investing in any sort of market spend right now whatsoever.

Like I get those calls on repeat and we're like, okay. Wow, that sucks. What do we do? I'm up in New York, we're having basically me and my co-founders are just started meeting non-stop that it's like, okay, what's our game plan? What are we, what do we think is going to be the future here? And we sort of sort of dirt long enough and we realized like people are going to have to go remote and people are going to be a part of.

And so digital communication is going to become much more important. So what are some things that we could pull together to add value into that conversation? So basically the first version of the product that we built out was, you know, insights on the person you're reaching out to. So like, almost like recently we viewed it as like called ID.

Where it's like, get a message it's like, who is this? And then the ability to actually write better content. And so what that started at for us was a letter grade, and a sense for, yeah. What about your email? It was good. And what was bad? So like it's too long or it's too complicated or it's overly formal versus informal.

We'd actually built out some interesting models around like, do do you sound more masculine versus feminine? And also like, how do you come across? We had this like, cool, like spider graph thing that like showcase, like you're peaking and like unsure tones. And like you've only got a little bit ofhappy tones and.

That product. We heard feedback that we'd never heard before with our marketing product, which was, this is really cool. I actually liked using it. So before people were just like pumped that we were giving them positive results and they were like out deal with using terrible software, whatever, if it gets good results, it gives me good results.

Now we were doing good results. Plus people loved using it. Quote unquote, it was addicting to get an a, on an email. And we were like, I don't know about y'all, but like this seems like something we should really lean into. That was my co-founder actually, I was, I was still. Partial to the idea of sticking with the marketing product.

And, you know, we talked about it and I was like, yeah, let's do it. Let's let's lean into this email use case. And you know, we, we tested out a few different ICPs things like recruiters, job seekers. Like we still offer the products for free to students and job seekers because we recognized like sending a cold email and you need a job.

Like, Hey, that's really stressful. It's really important to me. And so we want to be there to support you. But you know, we tested out all these different, like ideas. We looked at customer success, customer support features still have some customer support teams still using the product. But what we found was sales teams like loved it.

And not only did they love it, they would talk about. On LinkedIn. And so we just like leaned into that. We've been building for that sales use case ever since and yeah, over the next year or so. We've really just like hammered in on that. Yeah.

[00:10:40] Luigi Prestinenzi: So this is a pretty cool story, right? Because you, you started down one path and obviously. I don't think anybody could have prepaid for last year, what happened and that kind of really impacted your business's strategy or the direction that you were going in. Yeah. And you made a choice

[00:11:05] Will Allred: and mind you, I was the stubborn one on my co-founder was a lot braver than I was in the face of this. And he was like, listen, we need to pivot. We got to try something new. We've been working on this for 10 years. It hasn't taken off. This is our moment. Let's try it.

[00:11:18] Luigi Prestinenzi: And for that two year period were you sinking your own cash into development, or did you have, did you raise some, you know, some seed funding?

[00:11:26] Will Allred: My co-founder talks about this.

We have some angel investors who have supported us since the get-go. And one of the using his words, not mine, one of the scarier emails that we've had to say. Hey, you invested in us to build this. We're changing everything we're going after this new market. Now if a freemium email widget like that, that whole conversation, like it's that's a tough one to have, right?

It's like, yeah. Our ability to like personalize the internet to how someone thinks to an email widget, it doesn't seem nearly as big. Right. But while we've been able to prove is we focused in, on a specific enough problem that people are having, that we can actually generate some really solid outcomes and positive returns.

[00:12:12] Luigi Prestinenzi: Did you use your tool to kind of ride it, to see how should you write it?

[00:12:17] Will Allred: As a, as an internal joke we have, right. If I ever sent it over to Will or K.C. Or like vice versa, the first question, what did you use the product? What did Lavender thing? Yeah. So, yeah, we we've you know, quote unquote eaten our own dog food from the get-go.

[00:12:34] Luigi Prestinenzi: That's awesome, man. I think, and I think for, for many sellers, if anyone this is, this story is one that they could probably listen to a couple of times because that whole area of change and pivot, I think, I think for the sales industry and I've been working in this industry for a long time are kind of this my only my own, the job in the past 20 years, since I was sort of 17.

And I think you get kind of two types of, of people in our sector. Right? You've got the types that are just continuingly. Like they're always looking for ways to improve, change, adapt, pivot. And then you have the ones that kind of say, well, if it's not broken, why fix it? Or I've been doing this for a long time. Why should I think about change?

[00:13:16] Will Allred: And yeah, there's, there's a third layer that they might not be thinking about. But I look at a lot, which is we have like a free tier and a free trial of like all the premium functionality. And are certain type of sales rep probably overlaps really heavily with that one that's changing and evolving, but actually will invest in themselves regardless of what the company does. That is a huge differentiator that we've seen too.

[00:13:42] Luigi Prestinenzi: And to be honest, I'll put that in. I'll put myself into that category. My company ever paid for LinkedIn, like, you know, all the data enrichment tools that I've ever used. It was something that I paid for myself. You know, books and all that sort of stuff.

So I think you actually, right there is that, that one that'll just own their own investment, own their own journey. So we'll go back. So you've made a change that you sent an email to your, your angel investor and said, Hey, we need to change. They backed you and

[00:14:11] Will Allred: they were super supportive, which was fantastic.

[00:14:14] Luigi Prestinenzi: And you had to raise more funds to say, we need to make this.

[00:14:16] Will Allred: Yeah, we raised a few more. Yeah, we brought on investors like Scott Leese awesome advisors, not just investors into what we're doing. But yeah, everyone has been on board has been super supportive and super helpful on the way it's been. Fantastic.

[00:14:30] Luigi Prestinenzi: Yeah. That's fantastic. And so talk to us a bit about sort of the whole premise, because I think, I think, you know, the biggest challenge that sales people have today. They're sending emails and we see the data that emails have been deleted before they're being read. Right? So one of the biggest challenges that we have as sales professionals is getting the attention of our prospects.

And if we have a quota, if we're carrying a quota it doesn't matter how good our marketing team is. We're not going to have enough inbound ticket. To keep us full to actually three, four times. Yeah, get coverage in our pipeline. We have to be self-generating. Yeah. So email cadence with phone and LinkedIn, et cetera, is a critical part of, of, of any sales professionals role today.

So talk to us a bit about how Lavender helps, what what makes a good performing email that will get somebody's attention.

[00:15:31] Will Allred: Yeah. That's a very complicated email to answer a complicated question to answer about email. Even though it seems simple on the surface. So at Lavender, we, we think about how can we help someone write a better email and how can we help them get faster?

So everything that we do is through those two sort of litmus tests. Now when you're doing that, you have to think about who you're writing to what you say and how you say it along with how quickly you get all that stuff out the door. Right. You brought up an interesting tidbit about most emails are getting deleted before they're read the.

Average amount of time that someone is going to spend reading your email is 11 seconds. And within that 11 seconds, the first three, there's a huge, drop-off where they basically give it a look and then they decided to delete it. And so if you're thinking about what makes for an email, that's actually going to get bred, replied and responded to it is short.

It is simple. And it is actually written to the person that you're writing to people can sniff out a template from a model. You think about yeah. How someone's going to read through whatever you wrote in 11 seconds. They're not reading for comprehension. They are reading for categorization. And so if you use big bulky paragraphs, if you have big, long technical words or you ask for 15 minutes, all of these things lump into their brains.

Either. This is a lot of work or this is yet another bad sales email. It can be the most relevant email you've ever written. It can be fantastic, but they just see it as like it's a lot of work. Like I don't why they chose, I don't know. Or that's yeah, they use something like, Hey, do you have 15 minutes to talk about it?

And they see that before they've even read what's within the email and they immediately it. Okay. They lump you in with all of the other bad emails that they've gotten. You know, I tell folks as soon as I see them in their writing, like, okay, you just cut your chance to get a meeting and a half just like, okay, that hurts eight to see it.

You know, folks will talk to me about like you think about what the outcome of using our product is, right? You spend less time writing an email that's half as long, and it's twice as. Yup. And yeah, that's, that's really, our goal is to help speed up that process to write a simple, shorter, you know because people are getting more and more inbound than they've ever gotten and their ability to sort through that information is just diminished.

I think the latest stats I was reading it's like outbound since March of 2020 has gone up like some 120%, 150%. Whereas reply rates are down like 40%. And so our ability to actually parse through all that information has just diminished. And so we have to meet them where they are, which is, you know, the inbox is a glorified to do list and you've got to write in a way that speaks to that.

[00:18:29] Luigi Prestinenzi: So just go back, opens are up 150% and email open rate is down 40%.

[00:18:35] Will Allred: Replies are down 40%

[00:18:36] Luigi Prestinenzi: Replies are down 40%. That's amazing. And I think, you know what, that, that, that there should serve as an opportunity for sellers to really think about how they're structuring the emails. And I think, you know, when I look at your platform,it scores a whole bunch of things like questions, complexity added mobile editor, talked to us a bit about those sort of the things that it does and why sellers should really think about how they structure their emails one line versus paragraph. What does it mean?

[00:19:04] Will Allred: Yup. So mobile editor is a great one to bring up because if you write a mobile friendly, cold email versus a non-mobile friendly till million, 25 times more likely to get a positive. Yeah, the initial impression, I'm sure your phone is exactly where mine is, which is right next to your computer.

Yeah, that is where you are eight times more likely to have your initial read of an email as your first impression. And so we all know first impressions matter and you show up in their inbox with some like giant eight line wall of text. They're going to be like, nah, I forget about it. I don't want to do, I want to read, I don't want to bother with this, whereas, cause you you're them between meetings.

They're busy. They don't have time for that. Whereas if you catch them on like a very cleanly formatted, yeah. Mobile-friendly email, they'll be like, oh, let me give that a read on my laptop and they'll open it up. And it will be like line, line, line, line line, which like feels weird to send, but it's really easy for them to scan.

And so yeah, all of that just goes back to you're making it easy for them. Make it easy for them to sort through your information. One piece of advice that I always give sales reps is after they've met with someone or after they've had the initial conversation, your subject line should just start with your company.

You're, you're like shooting yourself in the foot because the way they're going through their inbox, right, is they're scanning for names. They recognize and threads. They recognize. And they're trying to pull in, like, what do I need to get done on that to-do list? And you're now in their vendor management kind of category in their brain.

You no longer cold. Right? So start with the name of your company so they can be like, oh shoot, there's Lavender. Follow up from our call. Perfect. The open it, as opposed to I was on a call with someone the other day just this morning they're showcasing the open rate for their post demo.

Follow-up email was like sub. And I'm like, dude, because you're treating it like a cold email. It's like this like subject line is five words and it's got a question in it. It's living their first name and I'm like all you've triggered to them as you've sent them a cold. That's how they're going to categorize it.

Like Luigi. If I send you an email and it says, Luigi dash, you need to set more appointments. Question, mark. What do you think that email is?

[00:21:16] Luigi Prestinenzi: Well, I know it's, they're going to try to sell me something. They're going to try to pitch me and I'm getting a more Madam I'm getting hammered. I mean, I'd love to, and this is a session for another day, but I'd love to show you some of the emails that I'm getting, which are like that.

And then it gives me kind of, you know, this is what we do. These are the features like, and it's just a drowning, I've got one the other day. They even had their rates of things on there. Like this horrible.

[00:21:44] Will Allred: I get why the seller does this right. One. Okay. Maybe it just comes from marketing and they're just hitting send on it.

Cause they're lazy. Okay. That's one assumption. The other assumption is the rep doesn't know any better than the rep is. I need to be comprehensive so that this person on the other end. Knows what they need to respond to. And the problem with that mentality is it's very use centric and you think that they have this kind of time.

It's not there. It's not, it's not centered around the triage that they're doing within their inbox. And so instead you just have to flip that mentality and recognize. Yeah, things can happen after response too. You don't have to get it all out there. You're not going to close in one email.

[00:22:26] Luigi Prestinenzi: You know what you've just like, again, for any, any, any of my listeners, listen to this. This is, this is gold because. Where a lot of where I'm seeing a lot of sellers get wrong is they're trying to sell in that first email, when it started about the sale, it's about just firstly getting their attention and peaking their interest to want to learn more right. And the best emails that I've written.

And, and I try to get it to the top as, as, as high as I can go from a C-level perspective. They are, you know, the first line is essentially I'm trying to find something that connects me to them to reason for me reaching out, I personalize it. Right. And I give relevance. The second line is two or three outcomes that I believe they're thinking about in their role. And I think about the ICP in their buyer persona. And then the third line is the CTA, which is. Well, when can we connect to discuss, right.

[00:23:27] Will Allred: I would advise you to push instead of three things, I would just do two. Okay. This is something about the binary, right? If I say Luigi, do you want to go to Chick-fil-A and McDonald's you might be like, did I don't want a fast food, but yes.

Your only goal is to generate a response. There's something about the binary that just creates an elicits. This need to reply where it's like, oh no, I don't use either of those tools. Hey, you, in sales, after outreach actually we use outplay, right? All of a sudden, like I've gotten a reply out of the conversation.

And that's what a lot of reps don't realize is like, it's not just a cold email where that is a factor. It's all the followups. You're not, you're not trying to sell them in every single follow-up either. So like they follow up in the first email and it's like all the. Now, what are you saying to follow up, right?

Yeah. But it's even more 10 thing. And like email three, email four to like start to get into your head and be like, okay, whatever I'm saying, it's not resonating with Luigi I need to offer more information. I need to be more comprehensive so that he understands really what it is that I offer. So he can evaluate this as important or not.

And all you're doing is just diminishing your chance of getting a response across that cadence. Like I, I think about it is like, regardless of where on the cadence, your only goal is to get a reply.

[00:24:48] Luigi Prestinenzi: Yeah, it's awesome. Well, because last week I interviewed. Somebody that's wait coaching from DocuSign and he hit 180% above target last quarter. And you know, what's awesome about this. Actually, I'm going to drop this episode for you to listen to, because he was the same. He was actually a professional rugby player in the UK got injured right before COVID COVID hits.

His career is over, right? He's like, this is all I ever wanted to do. Landed a job in sales gets two weeks of training is like off you go and use your phone. He's just sequence sequencer off you go. So, and we've been training him for a while. It's just, he's just such an awesome, awesome, awesome guy. Right. Basically takes everything. We talk about digital sequence and decided to run his own cadences booking meetings with CFOs. So not just, you know, like really high level, what was interesting.

He said, I'm getting the, getting the most response between touch 14 and 18. So a lot the fourth thing. Right. The fourth to fifth, cause he's also doing an omni-channel and he's bringing triggers so further triggers into the third or fourth to say, you know, if he's thinking to himself, okay. If the first or second trigger wasn't a hundred percent, what else could it be?

And he's getting engagement and he's getting people saying really, sorry, I didn't respond to it. He's making sure. Right. And we're going to do it. It was just awesome to hear him talk. And he actually said something really unique, which I loved was he said, if they're not responding, it doesn't necessarily mean they don't want to talk to me.

It just might mean they haven't got to the message first. And if they're not responding to me, there's a high chance. They're not responding to my competitor. So if I keep going and wait for that valid, no. My competitor's going to stop. Right? So he's really got this awesome growth mindset about him, but just going back to you, what you were, what you were saying before I say that it'll actually get them, you know, and you can see there a sequence because then they in outlook, it clusters in 1, 2, 3, 4, there's usually four days between there's been no phone call or anything in between their LinkedIn and not viewing my profile.

I get the emails and. And then sometimes not even threading them. So I can't look like lucky, you know outlook is sort of clustering him and they're just repeating the same thing. And then they're going into the fourth emails. Like if you're not the person in your organization, talk about this. I'm on, but I haven't seen any value in the first three emails.

Why would I then send you to somebody else, in my organization?

[00:27:28] Will Allred: But in you, you brought up Justin earlier who's been an awesome advisor for us. Yeah. A lot of his thinking has permeated into how we've started to do outbound. So historically we haven't had the touch, a phone or an email cadence because frankly we get a lot of inbound more than we can probably handle.

And so, as we're now, just now touching outbound. We've built out a very simple cadence. The key to it is we've done a lot of segmentation upfront so that we can get away with scaling a lot of this personalization, but working with our advisor, Christina FENSA, we've built out, paid for touch sequence that books a 12 and a half percent.

All we do is send four emails over like a 10 day stretch. And it's very simple. It's, here's a cold email. You're probably dealing with one find problems. You've got a solution for it. Worth the chat. Second one is it's a value add follow-up. So instead of like a bumper or anything's particularly particular it's yeah.

Hey, do you follow. Sales, hacker. They just had an awesome blog that they published. The VP of sales and segment is using templates in a very unique way. They're not actually templates they're frameworks. It correlated to this increase in outreach given you manage a pretty sizable sales team.

I thought you'd find it interesting by the way, worth a chat about what I sent you an email about. 30 now is just like a deeper dive on the first one. It's almost like a clarification, but just kind of saying the same thing in a different way. Then the fourth and it makes me cringe, but damn it, it works is a breakup email says Louie G must have.

I appreciate it a few times now to no response. My timing must be off. Yeah, I think the, the last line is like, if I'm wrong and you still want to chat about improving email quality you know, shoot me a note back, but to get a breakup email that early, it creates this interesting pattern. Yeah. W yeah, so many response that, that email in the cadence gets the most replies and the response is, Hey, meant to reply, just been busy let's catch up next week.

On repeat and like, I credit Christina for the brilliance because I don't have time to build out all these things, but

[00:29:45] Luigi Prestinenzi: yeah, that's a pretty awesome. It's funny on the breakup email, I just built one for a client and I put, you know, Millhouse throwing a Frisbee from the Simpsons to himself and he just run, like, it's going to be lonely here and that's been getting some really good results for them.

Like just getting a bit of calming, but just, okay. So going back to that, right. So. It's four step email. And again, for my listeners, I just want to know like omni-channel, you've got to be leveraging the phone and other channels as part of your outreach. Obviously what Lavender are doing

[00:30:16] Will Allred: We're a four person team. We don't have the ability to go Omni channel. So we had to get really good at writing good emails. That said, yeah, obviously as we scale up, we'll go on each channel. We'll do all those things. Yeah, we'll probably. Use a lot of the same mentality. Think about what we're going to do. I think about it.

Cadence design, like a hit glass to sprint. Yeah. I'm putting you through four emails and I'm like, you're out, you're out of. What I'll do is I'll recycle you back in 62 days later, and enough time for your spam filters to forget about me and enough time for obviously you to forget about me. And then I come back with a new reason to reach out.

[00:30:55] Luigi Prestinenzi: This is interesting. Right? And obviously you're using a sequencing tool for that. Yeah.

[00:30:59] Will Allred: We are. Yes. Yeah.

[00:31:00] Luigi Prestinenzi: What sequencing tool do you use?

[00:31:01] Will Allred: So I'm not at liberty to say, but it's one of our partners.

[00:31:06] Luigi Prestinenzi: Okay, cool. Yeah, because obviously we'll be obviously a big fan of like, you know, the outreaches, the sales lofts, and Lin lists local in lists of losing them list a lot.

Just because of the simplicity of the platform. But I think, you know, one of the things that I've learned through this journey that I've been on over the past couple of years of sending cold emails is always that person that thought I had to really, you know, make it sound serious, make it sound smart, make myself sound smart, right?

Lots of information. And the minute I had that epiphany, but I completely changed the structure of my emails short, straight to the point minimize the, kind of the CTA, just so you know, I found like reply rates, click rates just went through the roof. And I know, I know that you know, click rates and open rates are.

The main metrics we should be looking at. Right. I think if we're in sales, we need to see what, how many of those lead to some form of, of booking. Yeah. Because we need conversations. So and you know, obviously your, your platform looks at the complexity of how to how to reduce the complexity of the email, right.

At a fourth to seventh grade reading level. Talk to us about why. The complexity of the email needs to be. At that fourth to seventh grade reading level.

[00:32:27] Will Allred: Yeah. It's a, it's a great thing to call out. Think about, you think about that inbox tree. As I mentioned earlier, that you get all this down, you're trying to sort through it.

Most emails, literally 70% plus are written at or beyond a 10th grade reading level. So you've got sales reps, as you described, trying to sound smart, sound like the smartest person on their inbox. Sound like I know everything that I'm talking about. You need to be using this. It is complex, super cool, but also easy to use and like integrate into blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Like, yeah, all of this extra stuff that doesn't actually matter. The reason simple emails, when does. If you write, if you take your email from a 10th grade reading level, down to a fifth grade reading level, reply rates, positive reply rates go up 31%. So it's like, why, why are you bothering with anything else?

Take all the comments and just like cut them from your writing. Like try to write an email that I found them. Try to write an email that takes less, it's less than 75 for it's just like put these like barriers on yourself when you're writing. You'll start to recognize how much stuff you take out of your writing and how much more you focus on.

Hey, Luigi. I imagine your dealing with the following thing, based on an observation, we've got a simple solution that fixes that want to talk about it, right? It's observation based off of that observation. Implication of a type of problem that they might be facing. And then, yeah, what you do to solve it, followed up with an interested based CTA.

It's pretty simple.

[00:34:07] Luigi Prestinenzi: And do you use like any copywriting frameworks, like the ADA framework or is your, is your system kind of looking at any of those copyright framework when it's scoring the email?

[00:34:18] Will Allred: We've talked no it. But today it actually doesn't, no. It's, it's based strictly on just a lot of these psychology metrics of, yeah, really.

It comes down to what's known as cognitive load. So like how much information the human brain can process at any given time. Probably like three to seven things. So like, if you're thinking about that, it's like, you just gotta simplify it out in your email because you're definitely not one of those three to seven.

And so you're meeting in a place where you've got very limited functioning brain capacity. It doesn't matter if you're a chapter, a PhD, rocket scientist, or now chess champion or. Yeah, and entry-level STR it doesn't matter. You're getting the know,

[00:34:56] Luigi Prestinenzi: and I think that's where, you know, you mentioned Crystal Knows earlier and I've been a big fan of disc for, for a long, long time. The platinum rule, you know, treat others the way they want to be treated from Dr. Tony Lewis. Andrew is a great book.

And he's, you know, one of the key people around disk in the world and. One of the things that I loved about that is, you know, me, whenever I see an email that comes in my inbox and it's fucking massive, even if it's from a customer or, or somebody who I work with my mind just blows up.

Right. Because I, I struggle to really read it. It's just, it's too much information. Right. And so, you know, first and foremost, I think I, I love the fact that. No you're talking about, we've got to reduce the complexity within an email because especially on mobile, if it just massive long, it's going to disengage.

Yeah. People get disengaged. And some of the stats that you're talking about, a huge,

[00:35:48] Will Allred: There's a couple of things with DISC. Now I mentioned, we spent two years building out site powered tech, right. And so disc is fantastic at telling you. The other person is likely to communicate, but it doesn't necessarily tell you how they like to be communicated with.

Yeah. If you think about personality at the psychology community really leans on, what's known as ocean. So it's a five factor personality model disc is made up of two of those five. So you're looking at someone's agreeableness score. So how likely they are to be more people oriented versus task oriented, and then the level of extroversion that.

It's only two out of the five, how they actually process and internalize information is driven largely by how conscientious they are. Are they hardworking? Are they more open to new ideas? So openness is another one and then how neurotic they are. And it it's a almost thinking of it as like a volatility index, as far as like how people respond to.

And so if you looked at like, say my crystal news score, I haven't looked at in a while, but I know I was looking at one time and it had me down as this like hard driving, like driver personality or something like that. I'm like, bang me. And the reason is because yeah, as an entrepreneur, I do a lot of work.

I'm under a lot of stress. And so that's how I communicate when I'm trying to get shit done. Right. And so it picks up on that, but it's not how I like to communicate. Yeah. And so it's just something to be mindful of. What's what I love about a tool like, like a crystal, like this personality Sci-Tech is it, it opens you up to be more aware to how you were coming across and that is so impacted.

And that is what is now coming out of the gate with Lavender is people are like, oh, I actually have a sense of awareness for how I'm coming across to the other person. They think I'm going to this, they're going to read this and think that I'm unsure, they're going to read this and think I'm overly aggressive or I'm coming across as desperate, say follow-up email.

All of those things like bring awareness. It's a matter now. It's like, what are you doing? How do you respond to that? And so that that's some stuff that we've been building for.

[00:37:57] Luigi Prestinenzi: Okay. Awesome. We'll make mate. I think this has been, this has been an incredible episode. I think I've got a page of notes, man.

So I've kind of written some notes around some of the stats I'm going to, I'm going to go back, listen to it, send it to my clients because I think it validates a lot of the work that I've been doing with them from, you know, from the cold email stuff. I think it's awesome. And chronic case. Cause I get a lot of, I get a lot of pushback.

I'm like, well, well maybe it's too, it's too short. You know?

[00:38:21] Will Allred: I paid you how much to write that few words. And you're like, no, trust me. It's a lot harder than to get to that short amount of words.

[00:38:29] Luigi Prestinenzi: It actually is like, I did it yesterday. I wrote an email. I'm like, man, it's fucking too long. Right.

And then my colleagues, like, what do you mean is too long? I said, man, it's just, it's too, too long. Or it's too complicated. This section here. I usually, if I get to that point, I'll put it away. I'll come back to a later

[00:38:44] Will Allred: One of the best ways to look at your email is to skim it and just see where your eyes get stuck and be like, I'm not going to read it.

I'm going to just skim through it and see where my eyes like either like naturally reflex backwards upstream, or like, I just kinda like stop absorbing information to usually like in a group of longer words, it's usually in a long sentence, it's usually in a bigger paragraph. It's usually where it happens.

Yeah. Those are your like signals where it's like, I need to break that up some and shorten these ideas down.

[00:39:19] Luigi Prestinenzi: Yeah. Awesome. Well, we'll wait just before we finish up. What's the best place for our community for our listeners to, to engage and connect with you?

[00:39:27] Will Allred: LinkedIn probably that or shoot me an email.

[00:39:31] Luigi Prestinenzi: We're going to do a couple of things. To sort of bring Lavender to our community. So we'll, we'll definitely put the show notes to where we can connect our listeners to with, and please we're going to do a webinar with will around this stuff. It's going to be awesome. And we'll try to find a way so that you can get access to this incredible platform.

I'm looking at it right now. This does it. There's a Chrome extension. It's pretty simple to use and it'll give you some incredible insight and scores on, on how you should be writing emails. So Will, mate, I just want to say thanks for, you know, helping them, the contribution you're making and donating your time to our community.

I think sellers need more people like you helping us be the best we can be, man. So I just want to say thanks.

[00:40:13] Will Allred: Yeah, I appreciate your time Luigi, this was great.