215: The JB Sales Team On Email Effectiveness

What's poppin' y'all, it's your man James, Say What's Sales Buckley, and this is a special episode of Make It Happen Mondays with your host, John Barrows. Big shout out to all of our partners, Sales Loft, Proposify, Rise, Vidyard, and Chili Piper. Before we kick it off, I want to highlight the LinkedIn Sales Navigator webinar that we did last week with Morgan J. Ingram and Gabe Villa-Mazar. It had the highest engagement we have ever seen to date. So visit us today at ondemand.jbarrows.com to check out the magic in LinkedIn Sales Navigator that you might have been neglecting all this time. Man, what a great webinar. Continuous learning is a need everywhere these days. You asked for it, so we delivered.

JB Sales On Demand is one of the most skilled, diverse sales training solutions on the market today. Take courses, get certified, design growth paths for yourself or for your teams. There's just no limit to the mountains of knowledge that we've packed into JB Sales for you, our audience. So come, become the best salesperson that you can be. It's all waiting for you there at ondemand.jbarrows.com. This is a special episode because several members of the JB Sales team are here with you today to discuss a little internal incident that took place last week. Let's freaking go. I am going to give it over to our fearless host, John Barrows, to set the stage for us. Let's hit it, y'all. Good afternoon, everybody.

It's John Barrows. We make it up on Monday. Hopefully you had a fantastic weekend. Mine was pretty chill. I actually didn't do shit, which I was psyched about. But I am actually pretty excited about this conversation because we're always looking for guests and interesting topics and stuff. And this time I decided to pull the whole crew together here at JB Sales and have a conversation about something that we're seeing as far as trends are concerned that has potential to significantly disrupt our own business here. And that's the email effectiveness. The effectiveness of email as a channel here. So I brought together the whole crew. We got Leslie. We got James. We got Morgan. And we got my chief growth officer, Chris Merrill, who's going to be the naysayer of the crew and came out last week.

Like, what was it? Last week at Sales. Sales laugh. Webinar with sales laugh. Webinar with sales laugh. This motherfucker says that email is trash. Literally comes out with a company that trains people how to send emails. My chief growth officer comes out and says email is fucking trash. And it's absolute junk, which obviously caused a huge stir, but it got us thinking because we have been adapting here at JB Sales. And it used to be, for those of you who know us, used to be all email. When I worked at Basho, it was the why you why you now email. And 10 years ago, that shit worked because it was so good. Because if you personalized it, it went out and there wasn't as much volume out there. But now we're definitely seeing a hit on that.

So I'm going to start with Mr. Merrill and his premise here that email is trash and see if we can't just not, A, get him fired, or B, make sure that our clients don't fire us. Oh, I was wondering why that job post went out this morning. I saw that on Google. It came up. I even remember coming off of the webinar with Lily of Sales Loft. And even on the side, she was like, did you just say that email is trash? I think I tried to backtrack a little bit, but I don't think that it really worked. And what's funny about that- All right, so justify yourself here, my friend. Well, yeah. So first of all, we are in an interesting position as an organization. I dare anyone in our organization to try to send out an email that is less than thoughtful, less than structured.

Why? Because everybody else out there that we email into is very quick to rip us apart if it is a- And this is a daily basis. Even if we were sending emails from the marketing side, clearly marketing emails, and having people come back and be like, I don't know what to say. I felt it's- I have to give you the feedback because you're out there preaching X, Y, and Z, and this breaks it down. I don't think John would be proud of this. I'm like, oh my gosh, we were held to this crazy standard that John- Like, so everything that comes out of our house has to be, if it's a text-based scripted YUI now, completely researched. So our marketing team is like, just some handcuffs on that side. So I did say email is trash.

First of all, some backstory here. I have been doing email prospecting at, I don't want to say scale to scare people, but I've been a spam cannon. I've done that. But I've done it for a good 10 years now. As John was really seeing a lot of success with the Bashel model and YUI now, we ripped it apart and tried to see if we could do it at pseudo scale and do it for some other organizations. And so we had the luxury of trading on other people's brands, reputations, and email domains and getting some learning lessons. And from that standpoint, the reason why I said email is trash. One is if you take a look and just, you know, if you want to throw, just start doing some searching about email statistic.

What's interesting is all the email statistics and good reports that we're seeing out there are, most of them are 2018, 2019. We do have some good 2020 ones. Very few are coming in on 2021. Why that's important is obviously we've had such crazy changes to how we communicate, the workforce, just everything going on through the pandemic that I still question, even that we have relevant data out there. I think HubSpot had a couple of good data points a couple of weeks ago. I'll share some of those in the show notes as well. What we're seeing is just for Q1 alone this year, we are seeing, and this is across both mid-market and enterprise, email volume absolutely is up, even past benchmark. So year over year up, reply rates are in the shitter.

They are, you know, they're arcing down. And that scale, that separation looks like it's in, and that's obviously just a nice little chart that I can point to. Does that tell me that email's trash? No. Here's where I'm coming from. The waterfall of the effectiveness of email as I see it. We spend so much time architecting the perfect body of an email, the call to action, the tone, the research. There are so many other things working against you before you even get started. And so my basic understanding of how that waterfall works is it first starts with deliverability. As a sales rep, an individual contributor, you very, it's unlikely that you have say or control or even understand what the reputation of your email is.

It just so happens that the average deliverability is still only in like 75 to 80%. That means before you even send that email, before you even put the energy into writing it, you only have, you're losing 20% effectiveness right off the top. And that comes from the domain of your email. It has to do with the 20 other reps sitting next to you and what are they doing to the domain and the reputation. It has to do with the IT and just the compliance of the domain. So there's technical reasons and it's getting harder and harder for the email providers and the edge devices and security to do their job. Every day they're stepping up the controls. And this isn't just, are you part of a blacklist or a spam list or what is the reputation score?

Or is Jay Barrows a known good domain? It actually has to do too with the senders themselves. So just isolating Google, Google will tell on itself. The email servers and the services will tell on itself. So if Google sees that, you know, you're sending out some even 20%, you know, the same DNA of an email message to 100 people and 10 of those in bulks of 10 that go to each company, those firewalls are going to notice that. They're going to pattern recognize. Google is going to say, Hey, we got to watch ourself sending to ourself here. And you find yourself maybe not in spam, but in less than, less than hitting the inbox. That's into like secondary placement. So it really, the first thing that you're battling is the reputation of your domain in the setup, knowing and accepting that you're starting at a 20 or 25% loss right off the bat.

Much less if you are a smaller organization that doesn't have the IT controls. It's certainly possible that you have a horrible reputation and you're not even hitting the inbox. So that's the first one. The second one down really has to do with the data. And I would say that we all know the lies we tell ourselves about where we get our data and some is purchased. I know that, you know, obviously looking at a zoom, a lead IQ. Um, and for the most part, uh, I found that they have amazing data sets. Uh, the problem that we're seeing right now is, is you, you could call it healthy, a healthy, you know, data would be, you know, 90% accurate on the email side. We're coming off of a huge change to our workforce over the last year or so.

It's not probable that even the zooms, the, all these other data companies with all the turnover and churn, the likelihood now think of how many people were displaced or changed jobs through this pandemic. There's no way that they backfilled all of that data that fast. So we are seeing that the, uh, the, the valid data contacts are a lot lower. So now we take that 20 to 25%, you now throw onto top of it, uh, data that is a little less than we had access to a few years ago. Um, you're going to find that you're now maybe in 30, maybe you're starting 30% at a loss and I'm sure they're going to get there. And, you know, like the, the, the data in the ML and AI they're using to validate before we use them.

Um, but I do think that we're starting when we start email, we're starting somewhere in that 30% loss, uh, down from that is just the pure volume that we're putting into everybody's inbox. I mean, I think we all know, um, and have created our own workarounds of, of how you treat your inbox. I, I switched over to inbox zero recently and that takes time just parsing out the other box, going through and trying to read through what is valid, which it, which isn't. I mean, I will say a lot of the inboxes, um, uh, someone like a superhuman, the, the, these organizations that are putting out products that have really smart inboxes are great, but just a pure volume alone. So what that forces us to do is we're not giving the mind attention.

We're not giving the brain space to each email. Even if it's a microsecond, it's getting more diluted every single day based on the volume that we're actually getting. And so, uh, because of that, our brain is starting to do, uh, pattern recognition. So we all know that when you look at through your inbox, you don't even have to read the emails anymore. You can read the subject line and your brain just tells you, no, I'm not into it. You can look at an email, the physical structure, looking on your phone, looking on your desktop, how, you know, like, is this HTML versus text? What is highlighted? Can I see a bunch of calls to action? Oh, you know, this is a promotion. This is, you know, this is just a straight up, like we're in a cadence.

Um, and what we end up doing is not even reading through them. We let our brain tell us what's worth reading as we go through. So I have a feeling a lot of us are putting into archive or deleted, um, before it's even like we we've processed it. Um, the last piece is, uh, having to do with, and my going back to email is trash. Um, this whole concept of, uh, the syndication of the things that work. And what's one, when I say that, uh, I'm going to point to Morgan. Morgan has, uh, been dropping this tip having to do with the, uh, less than greater than symbol in the subject line and getting, we're getting a lot of feedback that people are using. It's been around for a minute. Um, Morgan's highlighted it, uh, Morgan's famous people.

He said it to a lot of people. So guess what? Everybody's using it now. And so now that everybody uses it, now you pattern recognize this is associated with the SAS space that they're, you know, obviously this is a cold email coming in. And so to that point, it is the things work until we all talk about them working and guess what? Then they don't work. And so there's a need for that, you know, kind of dynamic, uh, adjustments as we go through here. And so when I say email is trash, I have a lot of respect for email. The channel's not going away. I just feel as though, uh, now more than ever, it has a lot of pressure against it. And this is not, we, this is not binary. It's not email or not.

We have five or six, you know, there's a hundred other mediums, five or other, five or six other mediums that people are working on and experimenting with. And really just bringing the science to of, of, of seeing, can we get the results we're used to seeing on email while we figure out the right things to be doing? So with that said, I still maintain for me and my group of what we're using, uh, email serves its purpose. I don't look to it with the effectiveness and expect a high, the high expectation I've had in the past of the results using email and much respect to, to John and to Jeff Hoffman in the YUI now, I think as a messaging structure, it works put into the cold email. I just think there's a lot of like just external controls that are really, uh, beating the shit out of it.

So with that said, email to me has enough challenges where it merits one, having conversations about what is working right now. And right now is like week to week. I say this to James all the time. Like I reserve the right to that. Anything I say is only valid for like seven days because everything moves so fast in this. So I always say in my opinion, right now, my opinion right now, uh, email is having challenges. You have to be very thoughtful of your approach. How are you using it? And really looking at the substitutes for email of growing those out to see if you can find the effectiveness, hoping that these type of conversations right now that we're going to have and kind of go round robin and try to pull out some tips and tricks and not be negative about poor email, but see what we can find about what is actually working.

So, um, I still expect to get banged on for everyone that's ever gotten an email from me to rip it apart, but you're fired by the way. Um, so, but, but I want to actually put the, uh, I'm going to put a caveat to all this. First of all, it's all going to depend on who you're selling to, what market and all that other stuff. So we're going to get a lot of that. But second of all, I'm going to, I want to lean on Morgan first here because guess what we heard, I don't know, two, three, two, three years ago, Morgan, what phone was trashed, right? Cold call sucks because the numbers suck. Nobody's picking up anymore, any of that stuff. And, and so, you know, and, and I could even, I could personally say social sucks because I get eight trillion things.

Like I can't even stay up to date on one scroll on any feed that I have right now. So my social feeds right now, as a leader in an organization and as an executive, like the likelihood of you hitting me on one channel, like on a social channel and hitting me on the right time. I mean, I get a hundred in-mails a week and that's, that's just in-mails. So I'm going to lean on, I'm going to hand it over to Morgan. I'd love to get everybody's thoughts. Obviously this is an open dialogue. So feel free to jump in at any point in time. But Morgan, you saw a phone. I mean, obviously social has been huge for you and all that other stuff, but what are your thoughts on email right now as a medium and what are you using it for?

Well, first off, you created a new concept of a number, a trillion. So we have that as Chris, as Chris is Googling, a trillion. Yeah. Right. I don't want a trillion emails. I'll tell you that right now. So my bad validation to Chris's point, but a disastrously large number that's from urban dictionary. See, it is a word. So, so email from my context, I think it's, it's great if you're using it in tandem with something else. So I'll give you an example. So we just talked about the phone. I've been talking to a lot of clients and reps lately and they're saying, yeah, like 70% of the meetings I get are from phone. And also they're telling me the only way I can get in front of executives is because of the phone, right?

Because John, if I asked you how many cold calls you get, you're going to be like, not a lot. And if I asked you, Chris, how many cold calls you get, you're probably going to be like, I don't probably get a lot. Now we could even say the data has something to do with that. Cool. But most people are unwilling to pick up the phone, but people are very willing to blast out a cadence because that's very easy to do. So I would say email where I see a lot of success is I will send the email. However, I'm not banking on the email to get the conversion. However, I know that the email will get converted when I do leave a voicemail and tell them, hey, I'm going to send you an email. Because one of the things that we've realized with different clients is that if you leave a voicemail and say, hey, call me back, you ain't going to get a callback.

I'm going to tell you right now, zero to five is probably how many callbacks you've gotten in your career, right? And if you get double digits, you need to go to the lottery. You're just a lucky person. You come here and train at JB Sales because I don't know what the fuck you're doing. Exactly. So what I would say is, and this answer to your question, John, is if I'm using email where I'm going to see responses, I leave a voicemail and tell them, hey, there's really no need to call me back. But I am going to send you an email in the next five minutes. Here is, and this is the key. I say, here is the subject line of that email if you're interested. So at least I'm prompting them to take action and I can get a response there.

And otherwise, I haven't seen a ton of engagement with email, and you have to use those other channels to get the responses. And that actually brings up a good point. It might not be the one that'll get through, but my experience is it's almost always the way they come back to you. So for instance, if I leave you a voicemail, even if I left my, I'm the same page as you, Morgan, I'll leave a voicemail and I'll say, hey, it's, you know, 2.35 on Wednesday afternoon. I just sent you this email. Subject line is this, you know, could you just email me back? Let me know if you're interested. Sometimes I won't even leave my phone number, right? But if I do, the likelihood of them calling me, I actually don't want them to call me back because I'll have a fucking heart attack if somebody actually does.

I do the whole, oh, hold on, somebody's in my office. Let me put you on hold for a second and I fire up Salesforce and I'm like, who the fuck is this person? Like, oh, Bill, how's it going? Good to talk to you, right? So, but it's the same thing. And Morgan, early days when you were doing, when it was just you and me doing the sales set and we got all these inbounds, I would be, I get, I used to get all the inbounds. And the first thing that I would do is go into Salesforce and say, what's going on with this? And nine times out of 10, the inbounds, I'd see all the activity that you were doing, emails and social and phone and all that other stuff tracked. And then all of a sudden they would email us as an inbound and it wouldn't be the person that you were targeting, right?

But I almost, there's no way that you can tell me that all that work you did to lay that groundwork didn't drive somebody to say, hey, go. And then they were, they then communicate with us the way they want to. And because email is such a safe medium, there's no immediate response necessary. There's no, I can then be craft out. Hey, Morgan, I'd like to talk to you about this. And when do you, when are you afraid of schedule versus calling me back or hit me back on social that'll probably get lost. Right. So I still think, oddly enough, that email is the preferred way to get back to people. I just think we have to be so omni-channel right now and we can't rely on the email being the one thing.

And the whole preface to this is, I mean, the YUI now email, I mean, Jeff Hoffman, Basho at the day, now MJ Hoffman. I mean, this shit worked so well. It was insane 10 years ago. I mean, if you spent 15, 20, 30 minutes writing an email, you were getting a 15, 20, 30% response rate because it was, it was, it was that good, but that was that one email. And then I noticed five or six years ago, the pretty steep decline because all these cadence tools are coming out. And so now, yes, that email is still good. Yes. Personalization is still important, but to Chris's point, the format of the YUI now email, it looks like an F, right? And it's the top part is about them. And it starts with, I was researching and I saw this, Hey, the reason that prompted me to reach out to you is because of this three named clients and then call to action.

It looks like that. And the pattern recognition. Now I'm taking the words research out of my emails because everybody uses the word research. I'm K I'm taking the phrase. This prompted me to reach out to you because everybody's using that 15 minutes. Everybody's using that. So I think as long as we don't sit here and say that email is the be all end all, and this is my job. I mean, that's marketing all day long as a sales professional, leveraging the different channels and becoming omnipresent. And I know James, you're fantastic at kind of connecting the dots here. It's all about this positive impression game here. So what are you seeing James with all the work that you're doing on this space?

Yeah. So I think the message of the email matters at this point. It's changed so much as far as what the purpose of the email needs to be. Whereas two years ago, you can look at 80, 90% of the emails that were outbound and automated or not. And the ask was, let me get 15 minutes. Let me get 30 minutes. And people were just deciding whether or not that was worth that time. But I think the purpose now has become much more, Hey, we're doing this thing and this is completely relevant to you. And I feel like you would be a great fit to attend to this thing or, Hey, I read this article and your vertical, your industry, this is very relevant to that. So I want you to look at this part of the article.

Let's have a conversation about this. Are you free Wednesday at four from a sales perspective, the purpose of the email is what's changed. I, I kind of, and I hate to, I really hate to like back Chris on his original premise, but I've got data. A lot of open spots, spots after this. Fill it out, check it out. Apply at jbarrows.com for your resume. Send it, send it there. John will get it directly. I sent, we had a January 8th webinar and I had a follow-up where I was a hundred percent transparent. My, first of all, everything that you guys talk about, I did the opposite. I sent an email with a video on my first touch for this follow-up. We're all the time. We're like, don't do this. I do it.

And the video was literally like, you're in a cadence and you're going to get four more emails after this. So that is what you can expect moving forward. If you stay in this cadence, overwhelmingly people stayed in the cadence. That's 55% open rate. That's a pretty high open rate. Really good. Yeah. Right. 74% click through rate. Like that's ridiculous. Like of everything that got delivered and then, or wait, let me back up. Sorry. I screwed that up. Open rate was 74%. The click rate was 17%. Still high, right? Super high. But the reply rate was 1.2%. Through the whole cadence, 1% on the first one. Now we'll say I made 15 sales. Yeah. I had 19 potential sales of those 15 closed. So we can look at that data and say, depending on what we're sending is, is what's going to get the engagement.

I think we used to ask for time and engagement is what we need now. And that's what I'm saying. And I think we got to make a very clear distinction here because I'm going to lean on Leslie right now with all the prospecting activity she's doing as a brand new, and hopefully Leslie, I don't have to fire you too. No, I'm just kidding. I'm here. I got you. Morgan, you and I are the only ones left. Fuck. Here we go. Bye. No, but James, what you're talking about there, to me, a lot of that is a marketing function, right? They signed up for the event. They were familiar with us, right? So therefore it's like, oh, okay, well, I'm getting from something from JB sales. So fuck it. I'll open it up. That's why like given a video, look, if the company has had any engagement with you at all, I think you should send a video, but it's when the company hasn't, when it's a pure cold, I've never talked to this.

I just think it's weird when you send a first email being with a video being like, what's up, dude? Because nobody's going to click on that link, you know, because of the firewalls. And to Chris's point, the deliverability might be even worse if you do that. So Leslie, with all the work you're doing now as relatively new to JB sales, where are you seeing the most success and how is, how are you with what we train, right? Because that's, I mean, we're training email, but how have you used email? Because you've got a lot of discovery calls coming up this week. Like where are they coming from and what is, what is LinkedIn, I'm sorry, what is email specifically have to do with it? I think it's been really interesting because I've been surprised by how it goes back.

So I've tried a few different things, um, mixing social phone and email. And I think that that omnipresent is so important because they're not as familiar with my name as, you know, say any of you on the call. So they're not, they're not associating that with anything. So if I can show up wherever they are all the time and just be in their inbox at the right time, hopefully in all channels, um, that's kind of been my, my most recent goal is omnipresent with the purpose of connecting with them wherever they want to be the most. I have been getting most replies on my social, but most of them have been pushing me to, Hey, email me. And that was so surprising to me because I'm like, but I have been emailing me, emailing you, but you're replying on social to go back to email.

So really interesting. And I have actually started asking like, Hey, just curious. Um, and I've heard from quite a few C level folks that they are deleting email off their phone after COVID because family time has been more important to them and they've been spending a ton of time, um, on their email. So they put time aside on the weekends to go to their computer, to check their work email versus social media. They're keeping on their phone. That makes a lot of sense. And they're like, I'm checking my LinkedIn because I got a notification, but I deleted my work email off my phone. I've heard that four or five times in the last two weeks, which I thought was really interesting. I have. Sorry, go ahead.

So what I was going to say is, uh, I'm going. So, um. I'm fired anyway. To that point though, about when you're on social and you start a conversation, I'm shocked how many people then are like, okay, now let's go back to the business channel. This is work. Yeah, exactly. No, what's weird. So I'll, I'll just put my lens on here and maybe this is a generational thing. Maybe this is old school, new school stuff. I do say that, you know, when the, when, you know, millennials and Gen Z take over the decision makers, like the forties and the fifties, I think the oldest millennial right now is 39 years old. I saw that this morning, like the oldest. Yeah. It's 39 years old. And so once millennials really move into their forties, mid forties and become the decision makers, I think phone is going to have a serious problem.

I really do. But this just kind of reinforces that like for me, I'll get an email and, and then I'll, and I'll kind of be like, all right, this is kind of interesting. Or somebody who wants to schedule a meeting with me, even if it's not, uh, you know, somebody as a prospect, right? Just somebody wants to pick my brain about something, whatever. I'll be like, all right, cool. Do me a favor. Send me an email. So it hits my inbox and we'll coordinate from there. Because for some weird reason, like me putting my chili, and this is just straight how I work and, and I'm not saying this is everybody, but this is just a mind into it is that inmail is something I check a couple of times a week at this point.

So if it's important, I don't want it in an inmail because it's just not something I'm, I'm, I live in, I live in email, right? And so for you to, you'll get my attention on social, but then I'm almost always, and I don't even put my chili piper link in there, which would be the easy thing to do. I would skip a step, right? But you know, the reason I don't do that is because if I put a chili piper link into my inmail to you, for you to schedule a meeting and then you schedule a meeting, I now need to, the first thing that I do is I look in Salesforce and say, who is this person? And I'll be like, oh, I don't, because, you know, usually it's a day later or something like that. They might not get right.

So a day later, I'm like, who is this person? Oh, it's not in Salesforce. Wait a minute. Where's, let me check their email address. Let me go through my inbox and delete it and sent items. Oh, this must've been social. Let me pop on. Oh, there it is. And now let me take this person's name. Let me put them into Salesforce and do that process. So for me, I'm like, yep, sounds good. Hit me at, send me an email to john at jbarrows.com and we'll coordinate from there because that's where I live my life. So I have, it's just like phone telling you, hey, go take a look at my email, go take a look at my inmail, go take a look at my video and get back to me that way. It's almost the same on any other social, on any other channel.

Cause it's like, look, don't call me back. I actually do not want you to call me back, right? I want you to email me back. I want you to hit me back here on social or something because otherwise social gets lost. So I, I just kind of put that on as the psychology behind somebody like me, who's a, you know, Chris, you're a millennial wrapped in a Gen Xer's body, right? A chubby baby boomer's body. But you know what I mean? Like, but I'm definitely a Gen Xer and I, I liked the old, I like the email. I'm a zero inbox guy without signing up for zero inbox because that's how I live my life. And so there's some perspective on driving. The channel is still valid, but it's maybe a different way to use it.

Okay. So I think that we can all agree that Chris has some really strong points about deliverability, the team's activities and the uncontrollable pieces around email that seemed to plague sellers left and right, especially since this mass exodus that took place in 2020, when COVID-19 hit the scene, that incident changed everything about our selling environment. This is getting pretty heated. We all remember the cold calling is dead conversation that surfaced over and over in the past decade or so. Let me tell you what we're working on before anybody else gets fired from JBSales today. Tell me what you want to learn about. I need to hear from you. So send me your stories at jamesatjbarrows.com to be highlighted on next week's show.

Today, we want to give a huge JBSales team shout out to my man, Daryl Bassett, who's now the business development director at Every Action. He used his sales skills that he got from JBSales On Demand and filling the funnel to land his dream job there. He set a new record for success in his career overall, all because he invested in himself. Way to go, Daryl. Keep going, buddy. Am I right? This is amazing to see these types of wins happening. Becoming a member at JBSales On Demand is a continuous learning experience where you can hone your skills and develop all of them because they all matter. For example, know your persona. And if you're leaning back in your chair right now thinking, what does he mean when he says persona, then you need to dive into the new course given to you by Ashley Early.

Her persona masterclass is now available at ondemand.jbarrows.com. Let's throw it back to John and the rest of us there to see who else is going to get canned before this week is out. John, I got to ask. I believe that everybody, no matter what level you're at, starts your day and comes back from lunch in the same way. We scan our inbox from top to bottom and we're looking for two things. Shit from people I don't know that I'm not expecting gets a checkbox and shit that is clearly automated and I don't even need to open it to realize that gets a checkbox. And then we roll up to the top and we hit the trash can and the stuff that's left is the stuff we actually want to read. I'm a firm believer that that's how most people start.

Do you do the same thing? I'm a zero inbox. So I start at the bottom and I move up and I leave stuff in there that I want. So I almost use it as my filing system. So I actually, everything that's actually in my inbox is shit that I know I have to do or respond to in some way, shape or form. I don't use folders anymore on InMail because I never look at the fucking folders. I literally am like, oh, if it's in a folder, I'll see you later. And you would always go over on space and I would have to go free it up. But zero inbox. So I'll go in and I'll open up that one. I'll be like, all right, I'll get to that later. I'll flag it, right? Flag, flag, flag. And then I'll get through all the unopened ones and then I'll go and prioritize the ones that I need to get back to and go from there.

But yeah, every day I, at the beginning of every day, I started at the bottom and I moved my way up. After lunch, I actually just move up from the unreads because I've already done the other ones. And at the end of the day, I try to finish what I haven't finished and then leave myself a clean inbox for the morning. I would say, John, you're an interesting cat because I know that you read every email because you forward a lot of the stuff over to me that I would consider less than. And I think that's amazing. I mean, given your station kind of like of how many people in the access and, you know, from a buying. 250 emails a day. And so I always find it amazing that I know that by the next day, if even I email you or if someone that you kick back to me, I'm like, wow, if he's sending me that, he's reading through every single one of them.

So that goes against, you know, my email is trash thing. Here you have it. Here you have somebody that has buying power. You know, like all you need to do is get John's attention. I probably just fucked you in terms of volume. You're going to get. But I've seen that before. Yeah, I've seen there's a I don't want to do that to other people that aren't in our ecosystem, but there are a few others. And I have to keep that in mind when I'm saying this, that they I think they do. So if if written properly, the proper construct, I think that there are still buyers. That's a key point. I was going to go ahead, Morgan. I got a point on that, too. That's a really key point. Writing it properly. It actually brings up to what James talked about earlier is like the reason for the email is you really have to pay attention to what are the first three to five words of that email and the subject.

Because because if like what I tell people in training, I'm like every single email you write, you should always think they're reading it on the phone, even if they aren't agreed. Because if you think about the reading on a laptop, then you're going to make it way too long. You're going to say stuff you don't need to say. So the key here is always the lead with value and not with fluff. If if I see an email that says hope all is well, delete. If I see hope you're staying safe, delete like it's just going to get deleted because I know it's going to be automated and it's not something I care about. Checkbox emails. Yeah, that's all it is. Like and so I think it's important to figure out your first three to five words stand out.

Yeah. And make it about them. Right. So that's the whole thing. We can follow the ADA formula attention. That's a subject line interest. That's the first sentence. And that's got to be about me because the only thing I give a shit about is me. I mean, not really, but ultimately that's what people care about. Right. So if you start with I want to introduce myself to you, I don't care if you start with we're the leading provider of I don't give a shit. You got to start with me. But to the point that Morgan's making about the the you know, what you write is so critical is, you know, Kevin Dorsey and I have this conversation quite a bit and it came up last week as well with somebody else where the odd thing about authenticity being something that stands out these days.

It's almost this weird reverse psychology piece where because everything is pattern recognized because everything is follows a similar format and there is so much spam and shit in our inboxes. When something is personalized, when something when somebody does take some time and put some effort into reading a quote or sending some it's almost like just that alone stands out. So, but we got to get to the point where they're going to read that personalization part, which is why that first sentence, because again, if you if you look at, you know, to Morgan's point, every single email is being read on this. I used to think the subject line was the most important because if you didn't open the subject line, who gives a shit about the rest of it.

But now those first 10 words, those first 10 words are as important as the subject line, because again, I know how I work 250 emails a day when I was training and I was flying all over the place. What would happen was right in like during a break when we have a bio break or something like that, unless people were coming up and talking to me, the first thing I do is I grab my phone and I would just scroll and I would look for any reason to delete you, you know, and the way and just again, the way your brain works is I don't know this person. What's the subject line? I don't know. I don't love that subject line. You might not get past that because it might be a totally shitty subject line. But if you do get past that, I'm still looking on the same part of my screen that shows those first 10 words.

And if those first 10 words are bubbling this one at the top, I, you know, I hope you're doing well. I don't even email. I don't even open it. I delete it without even thinking about it. And so I think we're, we're, we're talking about how at this point, every little piece of an email matters, every little piece of your con your contact strategy matters to Leslie's point. Like she lays the groundwork. I genuinely think right now that if sales reps aren't taking this mini marketer mentality, you're going to lose. It's like you have to lay, I mean, Chris, talk about the, you know, what happened with Kelly and invite. I mean, again, I know this is a little bit of a marketing function, but do you have the response rates where it came for these round tables that we're doing and we did pure emails.

And then we added some social, I asked both Kevin and Kelly to go back and just get me a story, um, about what happened here. And, um, you guys are nailing it. I actually, I'm keeping some notes here so we can, um, uh, give everybody just the tips that are coming out of here. And that ground cover mini marketer, um, we, we've, we proved this week where, uh, we're running some round tables where we have, uh, just, uh, everyone knows we do these like two, 2000 person webinars on a weekly basis. But what we also do is we host, uh, just small groups of, uh, uh, uh, sales leaders and executives with, uh, John. And we have to do some pretty significant, you know, one-to-one personalized outreach and, um, we can't always trade on John's name.

So, you know, we have myself and Kelly doing the outreach and we were coming up pretty damn flat. Um, obviously selling into an executive asking for the most valuable thing, which is time. Uh, as soon as we started to lay ground cover first, where we would follow, we would comment and provide value back on what they're posting in a short period of time. It's almost that blitzkrieg. So we would request a follow, no ask, maybe just some who we are, like great to join your network, insert one of Morgan's, you know, smart ways of handling LinkedIn. Um, and then for three to, what did I say? Um, Leslie, three touches, three touches on social, um, in a very short period of time, like days where you are commenting, you are clicking.

So they see your name popping up. Uh, we started doing that, then hitting them again on email and then trying on LinkedIn on, on, uh, direct messaging. And the results were like, like we, we basically shut down cold email with this building. And what we saw was like the high five moment. We're like, I was getting the calls at 11 o'clock at night. Like, Oh shit. Like five for five for the last ones with the ground cover, the mini marketer concept, John, that ground cover piece. I could not, that's like, to me, um, this is all the way down to your first week as an SDR. This is something to embrace. Like it's, it really is. You can wait for your marketing team to lay that ground cover for you, or you can go out and lay it yourself.

And to be honest with you, you're going to control the narrative way better by doing it yourself. My opinion, you have to take ownership period. You have to take ownership on that. And I remember when I was in SDR and I created the SDR Chronicles, I was getting inbounds for the organization because of that show. Like people be like, Oh, I saw you on LinkedIn. I had no idea what you were talking about, but I seen you before. That's how I replied. And it's that little extra effort where I truly believe to John's point that if you are a sales rep right now, you need to learn how to be a mini marketer. That's not saying that you need to go create a podcast and a YouTube channel. I'm not saying that.

It's just being a curator rather than a creator and taking content, add your context to it, adding your spin, providing information to the LinkedIn. Because I think right now, y'all can correct me if I'm wrong. I think it's like 2% to 3% of people of the entire population of LinkedIn post consistently. It's less than 1%. Less than 1% of people on LinkedIn are creators. There's a lot of people who repost and share, but less than 1% is an actual creator. Those are crazy numbers. I always say to the frontline reps that I talk to when it comes to being on that frontline, what is it? It was on the tip of my tongue, and then I was going to throw it out there, and then I forgot. Oh, damn it. Stop throwing weed, James.

Yeah, man. It was there. And then it was on. Wait a minute. And I'm the one that got fired here? So, James got fired. Pragmatism is the religion of sales. If you are a sales rep that is struggling with email, and you have leadership telling you not to do social, stay off LinkedIn, that's a distraction. But you're seeing traction there and seeing results. I don't care what they told you not to do. If you scheduled, if your quota is 15 demos in a month, and you scheduled 25 demos this month using video, that leader will not come to you and be like, yo, great job killing it on the demos using video, but we're going to need you to stop doing that like that. And if they do, that's probably not going to have time to tip.

Speaking of which, real quick, let's go around with the last 10 minutes that we have here, because what do we do about this? I mean, let's lean on that, James, as far as that poor kid who's sitting in there, listening to this, being like, yeah, I know. I'm seeing the same anecdotal evidence as you are. I'm looking at my open rates, and they've been down since COVID started. I'm looking at my response rates, and they've been down. But my boss is telling me to double down on this. My boss is still telling me I've got to make 500. So, Leslie, what would be some of your tips for that kid who isn't getting the quote-unquote open, having this honest conversation, and does maybe have that boss who's stuck in the metrics days of number of emails sent, number of activities done, regardless of what the outcome looks like.

So what would be some of your suggestions on how they should think about things right now, and what are some tactical things that they can do to help address this challenge? I think that I would start by you can utilize the same format for your emails that you would for a video, for an audio message, for a voicemail. So you don't have to recreate the wheel every time. You can repurpose some of that messaging and put it into different channels and use it as a touch. Use it as another step in your cadence. So you have to keep up with the activities. That's fine. It's another place where your name is getting recognition. It's another spot for them to have that recognition of your company name, of your name.

And I think it's not, you know, sending an email isn't hurting anybody. Even if that's not the channel they respond on, it is still creating positive sort of interaction. Yeah, and it's like that impression game, right? Just it's an email, it's a call, it's in the mail, it's something, whatever it is. As long as they're all positive and relevant to that person, then they're all part of this equation. It's just, I almost want to see this graph of, like Chris, we talked about this when you were doing last week. I would love to see kind of a, you know, the graphs where you see the richest people in the world and it's like, oh, you know, and it kind of grows and it goes over the years. And all of a sudden, like Elon Musk goes, you know, over the course of like three years.

I want to see that as a graph for us with like email. So like first and foremost, it was direct mail, right? Or first and foremost, it was knocking on doors, right? So knocking on doors was 100%. And then all of a sudden direct mail came in and it became 75% knocking on doors, 25%. And then all of a sudden phone came in and then phone expanded significantly and door to door dropped. And then all of a sudden social came in, then video. And you just kind of see this gliding scale of where you should be. I'd love to see that because I think the progression of this stuff is critical. And I think right now the percentages are closer than ever of the different channels. It's no longer 75% email, 5% LinkedIn, you know what I mean?

And whatever the remaining is phone, you know, 20%. I'm not a math major. That's what I got into sales. But anyways, James, what would be some of your suggestions to a kid out there thinking, yeah, I'm seeing the same thing you guys are. What the fuck do I do about this? Yeah, don't keep doing the same thing expecting a different result. Step outside that box and try something different. And don't worry about what your leadership says, right? Go for the result. Go for the value. Help out that customer. Get the result that you're after by going that extra route. No one will come to you and tell you you suck if you do that anyway and see the result they expected. In addition, you might actually open up some new perspective at the company.

And if that's not what you're after in the leadership role, I don't know what you're doing with your time. But don't hire smart people and then push that KPI on them. For that frontline rep, though, look the other direction. There are tons of resources out there for you, you know, not to hit the nail on the head, but on demand. You know, lots of people in your ecosystem that you're connected to are putting out content that could help you. Don't turn your back on that just to hit some KPI. Have the courage to have a one-on-one with your leader and say, I'm feeling uneasy. This is not going the way I want it to. Let me show you some data. Can we talk about some other opportunities we might have?

Have that meeting. It's going to be much more fruitful for you. Worst thing that can happen, they tell you, hey, screw off. Don't waste my time. Keep doing what I tell you to do. And then you know what your next move is, and that's to update your resume. Well, I'm going to jump in. I was going to go to Morgan, but I want to jump in on that, James, because that was going to be my suggestion here to everybody else, is a slight alteration on your, James, because I don't say ignore what your boss is telling you, because that's an easy way to get fired. But let's create a side hustle. Create a side hustle. And anybody tells me, well, I got to do that after hours. Go fuck yourself. Stop listening to this goddamn podcast if you're not willing to work past five o'clock.

And if you want to be successful, right? But create this side hustle that says, I want to take, all right, my boss is telling me make 50 dials, send 100 whatevers. So I'm going to do what my boss tells me to do. But I'm going to measure the ever-living shit out of it, okay? And I'm going to measure every interaction, every conversion ratio, and I'm going to become a scientist. And then on the side, I'm going to take these 10 clients that I really want to get into. I'm going to go deep on them. I'm going to do a social groundwork. I'm going to connect with them on LinkedIn. I'm going to send them an email. I'm going to create a different cadence for this group down here. And then at the end of the week, the end of the month, whatever it is, look at the data and say which ones.

Because I will be straight with you. There might be certain organizations out there listening to this right now where the mass volume play still works. And so shut our mouths. Look, if you're an SMB right now and you're selling something that's a one to two call close below 10,000 ACV, email is still probably a really viable channel. And you probably have to use it at scale because you won't be able to hit the numbers that you don't. But if you come back to your manager with, boss, I've been doing it your way. And I got out of a thousand activities I did last month, I got three meetings. And I took my approach where I took 10 tier one accounts and I went deep on them every single week. And I got 10 meetings out of the 40 that I sent out.

If you're tier to James now to James's point, if your boss then says, eh, stop it, go, you know, go back to doing what I'm telling you to do. That's when you start looking for another job because that's when you, you know, leadership is not interested in, in learning about changing anything or whatever it is. They're just looking about numbers. And there's probably some PE or venture capital firm stuffing down their throat that says they have to do this. And so it is what it is. Go look for another job unless you have a bunch of stock options. It could be shitload rich, right? Then stay. But anyways, Morgan, Morgan, thank you for the clarification, John. In no way, in no way was I telling anyone out there listening to be like, hey, fuck you, boss.

I'm going to do what I want. I'm just going to throw in my stocks. I want to put a point of clarification on Morgan. What are you saying out there? Or what do you, what do you think people should be thinking about right now? Well, yeah. So I think it's a, it's a theme of what everyone's saying right now. And exactly what you said is own your own development. It's, it's almost as simple as that because no one is going to come and save you at the end of the day. Like you have to own it yourself and proactively find the resources that James talked about on demand and all these other things. So I would have two main things that I would touch on. So number one is create templates inside of your sales engagement tool.

I'm assuming every single person here probably uses a sales off or whatever other engagement tool that you have. And inside of that tool, they have something called templates. So typically, right. You'll have your cadences already segmented out. You may have that already created. And so within that, you could create templates that you can customize. That is your own work. So then you can start AB testing and be a scientist. Like John said, that's a way that you can start doing your own thing and figuring out what actually does work without recreating cadences across the board. Number two is I got this from shout out to Cal Coleman, but the five, five strategy, and this comes down to time management, which is the number one skill right now for a rep is to manage your time effectively.

So I would say that if you get up early in the morning or you work late, depending on who you are, block out 45 minutes. This is not that much in your day. 45 minutes as a rep and be like, I'm going to write seven to eight personalized emails to who I want to go after and what meetings I want to schedule in these target accounts. And the five, five strategy basically at the end of the day is you're doing five emails emails and it's taking you five minutes to write those personalized emails. Now, again, it may take you longer, but the key here is to set a timer when you do the emails, because how the human brain works is if you have a timer in front of you, you operate faster. So that should help you move in that direction.

And if you do the math, because I was a finance major, but it's 20. So if you do five emails, right in a week, that's 25. And if you do 25 times four for the month, that's a hundred personalized emails. And if you get a 10% meeting efficiency rate, that's 10 meetings. People would love to get 10 meetings in a month. And again, if we ask Chris, John, James, Leslie on this call, how many personalized emails you get in a month, it's going to be very, very low. So that would be the two things that I would say there. And, you know, if you do have to go look for another opportunity, James just got fired from this podcast here. So you could go join, you could go join his new venture, right? 100%. Or you could send your resume to apply at johnbarrow.com.

Chris. Great. Thanks, James. All right. So let me rip these. What your thoughts are. Yeah. And I'm just going to list these really quickly. And there are going to be a ton of notes in the show notes that we'll send out. This was amazing. This is beast. I know we could keep going, ripping apart every channel here. But again, so first of all, the email is trashed. In my honest opinion, email is trashed for me now. Yes. And I'll put it. Okay, here we go. Now. So first thing is, I know that we're all being asked to get a certain amount of activities done. But like just everyone else has said, please trust your gut. If you don't know your reason to reach it. John always says, know your reason. If you don't have a reason, you didn't earn the right to do it.

You better know why you're reaching out to that person. And we had, John and I had a few people, some SDRs who had to humble themselves down because they didn't know why they're reaching out. They were cutting and pasting and John called them on the task. We ended up like becoming friends and it was a good learning environment. But just know your reason. If you don't go back, figure out a better way because you're most likely right. Get your technical hedge in gambling. They call this, this is our house advantage, right? And right now, email, the house advantage is in their favor. We're losing 20 to 30% right off the top. You can hedge it as an individual contributor. Check your deliverability rate often.

Go to Glock apps. Google Isaacs. I'm not sure if it's glockapps.com. I think you can get some free credits. You literally send out one of your emails. It sends out to like 80 email boxes and tells you your deliverability score and your health. I encourage you to do that once a month. If you see anything poor, bring it to your IT department or fix it yourself. You know, we can even hit me up. I can send you to a few people that are really good at this. On your data side, right now more than ever, you need to, even though if you get it from Zoom, if you get it from Elite IQ, I encourage you to use, just validate it. Use a zero box, zero bounce. Use, I think it's Bright Verify. And the whole thing there is don't send to, only send to valid email addresses.

Do not send to accept all. You'll know when you see it, when you run this, what that means, and you can research it. Become a mini marketer. Lay that ground cover. Don't wait for marketing to do it for you. I believe in control challenge. John uses the AB. Once you have something that works, always break apart from it every now and then and see if you could improve on your lie. Stop selling. There's no such thing as a one-click close email for the type of products we sell. Know what the call to action, what success measurement is. And for the most part, it should just be attention, hand raisers, another question. It's not a selling, it's not the selling step. But I do come back to the trust your gut.

You know when you're spamming people. You know when you're just filling in boxes. And you know you're writing an email that has a very small probable chance. If that's the case, go find a different medium that you connect with for your ICP and go deep with that. Email will come back. Things will change. Paul Graham, I'm going to put notes in here. Paul Graham of YC Combinator in 2012 wrote an ambitious blog post. It was basically an essay about replacing email. And all of the things he wrote in 2012 still stand today. But nobody's tackled it. The medium's here to stay. So let's adapt. I will stop calling it trash and come back in a month with some other results. All right, fine, you're rehired.

Look, I'm going to end with one more thought on this, which is, you know, think about instead of thinking about it as a cadence or a sequence, whatever you want to call it, think about it as a story that you're just trying to get people involved in. Like it's almost like this one-way conversation where it's just that's why, you know, the data on the calls to action, right, have changed. You know, instead of a hard CTA, which is when you're, you know, are free tomorrow at three o'clock, the interest CTA is actually getting a higher response rate. So when you treat it as a conversation, which is why I think it's so important, especially when you're doing quality, is to sit down and think through the entire story from soup to nuts.

And Morgan said this, take your phone, the five by five, here's an easy way that everybody can come out of this. Take your phone, put 10 minutes on your phone. And during, and I'm going to give you an extra 10 because it's going to take you a little bit longer than it would once, you know, once you're fully ramped on this, but 10 minutes, pick one account that you want to get into, do all your research on the same time on that account and the person you want to go after. So go on their website, look for anything you could possibly imagine, make a connection to do not discriminate, go on their LinkedIn profile, look for any reason to connect with them and mention something or a reason and don't discriminate.

And at the end of those 10 minutes, take a step back and figure out which ones are legit. And then how are you going to tell your story? Because this will help you figure out when you should ask for that call to action. Like, Hey, we should talk versus when you should just kind of say, Hey, let me know or something like that. Or when, when should you put video into this equation versus a little bit of social, right? And then have that cohort and then compare it against another one that didn't have social in it that didn't have video in it, but a similar profile, similar things, but tell the fucking story and make sure it's not. The story isn't all email. Cause if it is, you will die a long, a slow, painful death.

And, and you will be also labeled. Like I always say, if that's all we're doing, if all we're doing is sending out template shit, then what the fuck is the difference between us and a marketing tool like Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, pick whichever one you can. I, I scare SDR organizations all the time. The first thing I do when I used to walk into companies is if I was an SDR, if I was hired as a new VP, the first thing that I would do first thing day one is I would say, I want to see all the emails that are coming out right now. I want to see every single email that the SDRs are putting out there right now. And if all of them were templated, bullshit cadence sequence, whatever's I'd say, I'm going to say this company, a whole shit load of money.

I'm going to fire every single one of you. I'm going to hire a marketing ops person. I'm going to jack that through the roof and put a bunch of funding towards it and have them do it a thousand times better than you ever would. So that's why this omni channel, this marketing is so important. This social stuff is so important. Your personal brand is so important because it'll get you a response most likely through email, but not because of the email you sent. Because of the story you told. Any final parting gifts from everybody else? Yeah. Read your emails. Read your emails out loud. And if you don't talk like that, don't send that email. There's another good point. That's a good point. Yeah.

And if you're wondering if it is too, too long, like Morgan's point, send it to yourself on an email, on a, um, on your cell phone and reading on your cell phone. It takes more than one or two scrolls. Too long. All right. All right. Everybody will look. Leslie, anything you wanted to wrap us up with or any last final thoughts? Not that I can think of. All right. Well, I mean, and Leslie just, uh, I mean, for everybody out there, Leslie is the newest person to our team and she is got, she is faced with the challenge right now of not being John Barrows. She is faced with the challenge right now of not being Morgan Ingram. And so she is out there representing our brand, which I think is pretty strong out there, but she is Leslie Douglas.

And so she doesn't get the bump that Morgan and I do when we reach out. Cause most people kind of have at least if they don't know us, they know of us for our space. And so Leslie's doing her job right now, building her brand so that those email responses can come. But again, my gut is that they're not going to come because you sent that email. My gut is because you're going to do all that other stuff that drove that email response back. Exactly. All right, everybody will look, hopefully you enjoy the conversation. Uh, you know, we like to have these conversations out loud with our team here cause we're pretty transparent organization. When we see shit's happening, we gotta, we gotta address it.

And we can't, as Chris always says, you know, the lies we tell ourselves here, the last thing in the world we want to be as an organization training shit that, that, that, that used to work or sounded really good. But today is not working anymore. So follow us on social. That's where we can actually put out most of our newest ideas and tips and everything else. And then as Jim said, uh, check out the on-demand cause that has everything that we're doing in it. And we're trying to stay as up to date as possible. So hopefully you all enjoy the conversation. Look, as I say all the time, go out there and make somebody smile today. Even if you had a shitty day, you know, if you made somebody smile, you know, you had a good day in the world needs a lot more of that right now.

So thank you all very much for listening. And we'll see you on the flip side. All right, y'all. That was a really special episode for you. It was a very real conversation. And I think you understand why these types of conversations should be happening at your own Monday morning meetings more often. Am I right? Email's been a talking point since 1997 when Microsoft released Office for the first time, especially in the sales space. But it's becoming numbing for so many people. And at the same time, there's this whole other cohort that's wildly successful with email because of the way that they currently leverage that vehicle to deliver the message. I've really enjoyed where this episode has come from.

And I hope you did too. Let us know what you think and share this out to your network. We could all really use the honesty. Before we let you go, I want to give a warm welcome one more time to our newest sales trainer extraordinaire, Ms. Leslie Douglas. She comes to us from Dude Solutions and was instrumental in making their team successful with JB Sales. We are so thrilled to bring Leslie on board. She's going to turn a lot of sales reps into sales pros in no time. Reach out to Leslie today and tell her what you've been looking for in your next sales training session. She'd be delighted to meet with you. And finally, JB Sales is proud to represent the front lines, the grinders, the callers, the gritty, unfettered, unbridled, passionate sales professionals that every buyer truly deserves.

Visit us today at ondemand.jbarrows.com to become the well-rounded sales pro that you set out to be. You asked for it, so we gave it to you. A place where you can learn. A place where you can grow. A place where you can get the answers. A place where development happens. Join us again at ondemand.jbarrows.com and follow us on Instagram at jbsalestraining, all one word, where we give out daily tips every day there for you to consume and put into practice right away. Join us for our weekly webinars. Find them at jbarrows.com in the blog and events section. And we will see you guys next week with another stellar conversation that will help you sell better.