🤔 Asking questions with GIFs

In this example cold sales email, Ahmed is selling recruitment software and Sophie is a Director of HR at a medium size SAAS company.

From: Ahmed <ahmed@sample.com>

To: Sophie <sophie@sample.com>

Subject: Protecting KPIs as ACME smashes growth, again

Hey Sophie 👋,

Just noticed through LinkedIn that the ACME team is growing, again! That's another ~34% quarter over quarter, right? I'd say the HR team must be proud 🎉

I work with a lot of HR managers and most of them tell me that as they begin to scale up, their systems can often hold them down.

Why: ⁠
Hiring, candidate feedback, onboarding - all of them spread through multiple tools - hitting KPIs gets more and more difficult.

I help HR teams centralise their function and save a ton of time/money through integrated software (no more sheets, emails, job postings, docs split across the org).

We might be able to help your team, too.

Open Chat: ⁠
Is it worth us spending 20 mins to learn about some of the strategies Danielle and her team at 'ACME 2' used to manage this phase of growth?

Ahmed 👋

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Cold sales emails generally get ignored by prospects, especially when they are walls of text. But Ahmed's email above is hard to ignore!

When Sophie opens the email, she can't miss Ahmed holding the card asking her a direct question. His curious pose is great here: he has a little think, a look at the question on the card, then gestures to Sophie - what does she think?

This GIF is a great hook. If Sophie resonates with the question that Ahmed has asked, she'll read the rest of the email and she’s far more likely to warmly respond.

I don’t ask questions lightly. It’s important for people to know I’ve taken the time to learn about their business and made the effort to ask them something thoughtful

Ahmed Dafalla

Here’s an example of Will sending an email to a cold prospect. Dan is a sales manager looking after a large team, some of whom use video for outbound.

From: Will <will@vidu.io>

To: Dan <dan@sample.com>

Subject: Leaving money on the table with video

Hey Dan,

I noticed a few reps on your team sharing their video prospecting wins on LinkedIn 👏

A lot of sales leaders tell me that it can be tricky to motivate and empower reps to create video content - day in, day out - especially when their click rates are so inconsistent (not enough people seem to be watching).

If I could help your team regain 90% of the video time and boost responses by +30%, would you be interested in brainstorming a few ideas together?

Will 👋

Reply

Forward

When Dan opens this email, he’s going to immediately notice Will asking a question about the performance of video in sales outreach, something that his team speaks about on LinkedIn.

The curious pose works well here: Will looks at the card, considers the question, and then gestures towards Dan suggesting that he’d like to know what Dan thinks.

And it’s a good question. It’s very likely that the reason Dan’s other reps aren’t posting about their wins, is because they’re not getting any…

Uncovering this pain increases the likelihood that the rest of this message will be read.

The GIF demonstrates research about Dan’s reps, an understanding of what he cares about, and authentically asks a question that improves the chances of a warm response.

The curious pose is one of my all time favourites.

Versatile and playful, I find myself using it at all stages of outreach when I want to learn more from a prospect.

William Holden