The Sales Email Sequence That Balances Personalization with Productivity

I get this question from fellow salespeople — both inside and outside my company — all the time:

How do you reach out to prospects for the first time? What’s your best prospecting email template?

I always feel a little funny when someone asks me this question because I actually find email templates to be a hard thing. I don’t like using templates all that much because I love to personalize my emails based on my research and what I have learned about the company I am working with and the person I am reaching out to.

With that being said, there did come a point when I realized my process could use some streamlining. When HubSpot originally released HubSpot Sales — its free email tracking and sales automation tool —I decided to give it a try, and started to create base templates that I could personalize.

If you want to speed up your sales cycle while still incorporating research and personalization, I would suggest automating your email prospecting with templates like the following. While the email structure won't change much from one company prospect to the next, the email content changes dramatically — and that’s the key to great prospecting.

However, before we go any further, some ground rules:

• Never write a prospecting emails unless you have a reason to reach out. I'm not sure about you, but I'm not great at calling or emailing a prospect and saying “Hey, yeah, I'm calling for no reason … but this is what we do.” I'm a big believer in trigger events and use them as the basis of my outreach.

• In your email, you should answer the core questions you would cover if you were to connect with the buyer on a call. What would you say on a call and why? Incorporate the main elements in your emails.

• Before deciding to work any lead, ask yourself two questions: 1) Why are you working the company?, and 2) What do you think you can help them with? If you don’t have answers, you haven’t done enough research.

Now, let's discuss the email templates. I queue these up to send as a Sequence, so I can set it and forget it.

Sales Email Template #1

Sales Email Template #2

Sales Email Template #3

Generally, I send a couple more emails between attempt #2 and the final "break-up” email, but these are one-off messages that can’t and shouldn't be saved as templates (there are a few examples you might want to lean on, though, for direction in this blog post).

I have always prided myself on personalization. I don’t want to reach out in a generic, spammy kind of way to every company I am prospecting — and I attribute my success in sales to this rule.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in April 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.