Crafting intriguing email subject lines that will make your recipients think to themselves, “Finally, an email that I wanna read,” is the holy grail of cold emailing.
In this week’s episode of INSIDE Inside Sales, Darryl’s guest is our very own Ollie Whitfield, super-talented product marketing manager at Autoklose – a VanillaSoft company. Ollie analyzed more than 680,000 cold emails that we sent out in Autoklose and will share his findings that offer a data-driven perspective on creating the perfect subject line that will make your open rates soar. Darryl and Ollie discuss, among many other things, the importance of subject line length, the tone and terminology you use, the most effective timing, as well as the most common mistakes. Learn how you can boost your open rates and impress your recipients by making your cold emails a lot warmer. Be the one in charge in the game of Open or Delete!
LISTEN
WATCH
READ
Host: Darryl Praill, VanillaSoft
Guest: Ollie Whitfield, Autoklose – a VanillaSoft company
Darryl Praill: How is everybody doing? It is another week here on the INSIDE Inside Sales Show. My name is Darryl Praill. I’m your host. You know what? I’m kinda missing you guys. I don’t know why, you know, we’ve all been doing work from home for so long, or as we like to say podcast from home because that’s what you do. And, I just miss the interaction. I miss the energy of being side-by-side with my sales colleagues. How about you? Do you miss that? Do you miss that whole dynamic of being together? I mean, what do we do now? We do Zoom calls, which is just so impersonal. In fact, I’m kind of Zoomed out, if I’m honest with you. I tend to phone people on the phone.
Darryl Praill: You know why I do that? Because when I’m on the phone, I can actually pace. And when I pace, I have a whole different set of energy, and I get excited, and I pace, and I stop, and I pace, and I stop. So, I actually try to not do Zoom. But that’s me, but you get the idea. Whether it’s a phone call or a Zoom meeting, we’re doing a lot of that. But then, the other aspect we do a lot of is, we do emails. How about you? This is my routine. Tell me if you’re cringing when you hear this because I’m going to speak to you as your potential buyer for a second. I look at my inbox and I just, every time I open it up because of my role, and because of my brand awareness, because of my, you know, my credentials are everywhere, as far as, you know, my job. So people can find it easily whether it be LinkedIn, or Twitter, or Navigator, or whatever. It’s basically, you know, you’re trying to sell me. And then you found me.
Darryl Praill: And you reach out to me, and you use email. And I open up my email, and I just have a lot of emails. And this is what I do. I go, I do bulk select. I go, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click-click, on, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40 emails. And there’s always one or two in that range. That’s why I don’t do a Start Range, End Range, Delete. I actually select them one at a time. There’s always one or two or three in that range that I don’t. And they’re from people I don’t know. And then I say marker’s on red, and then I say, delete, and they’re gone. I don’t even open them. I don’t. Sorry guys. But let’s stop there. I said there was two or three that I don’t delete. Why? Well, honestly, because even though I don’t recognize the sender, there’s something in that subject line, or something in the preview, the preview of the body, that intrigues me, and I want to learn more.
Darryl Praill: All right. When I talk to all my C-level officers, or my colleagues, all my V-level colleagues, all the managing directors, and directors I know, apparently that’s pretty typical. I hear that from a lot of people. And we all laugh about it, and then we all lament about it, because we know while that’s our behavior, we’re also in charge of procuring the revenue that drives our company and keeps us in business to live another day to make a nice little take-home paycheck, to buy those baubles and those trinkets that we so value, like food, and heat, a roof over our heads. Every couple of years, maybe a new phone. You know, the basics. Put the kids in little league, et cetera.
Darryl Praill: So we lament because that means all the stuff that we’re doing our teams are doing, whether it be marketing or sales, this is similarly getting deleted. So we then talk further about, well, what is it that you react to? What is it that you’re not deleting? And it’s kind of fun to watch. And we actually have some interesting stories. So imagine. Imagine that as the setup, and I know this is what you guys face every single day. I feel for you. You’re doing the activities, and not getting the results you wanted, right? So, you’re feeling the same pain I’m feeling cause of bastards like me just blindly deleting your outreach on email. So imagine how engaged I was when my own team, my own team, goes into our own little VanillaSoft Autoklose labs, and starts culling data. That’s right. They start culling data on email.
Welcome Ollie Whitfield
Darryl Praill: Now, I would like to think that I’m on top of my game, but the reality, and I know everything what what my employees are doing, but the reality is, we’ve gotten pretty big here, and I don’t know everything they’re doing all the time. And I trust them to be big boys and girls, and, or to suck up to me. Either way, you do your job, you keep your job. You suck up to me, you keep your job. If you don’t do those two things, you’re in trouble. And I loved it because my good friend, Ollie Whitfield, and he’s my good friend, but he’s also working for us. Ollie is the product marketing manager we hired here not too long ago. Last summer, 2020, late in the summer, to run with the Autoklose acquisition that was forthcoming. It was in the final closing. We announced that at the start of October, the middle of October, maybe. And so, Ollie, he’s run with us. Ollie’s got an interesting background. And why is that? Well, because he, and I don’t want to give everything away here, but Ollie’s worked with, for a long time, he worked with Creation Agency.
Darryl Praill: Creation Agency is a good sales and marketing agency that works with the Who’s Who of the industry. Lots of people you all know and love. You attend all their events. You read their blogs. You receive their emails. And often, often that was done by Ollie and the rest of the crew there at Creation Agency. I know my good friend, Jack Kosakowski, is a big player there, as well. I think he’s the CEO of the Americas for Creation Agency. That’s my way of saying that they actually made their living ensuring that the other people, their clients, were successful in their business development. So they had a chance to both practice their craft, but also to actually experiment across multiple vendors and players And so, he did this study. I stole, admittedly, totally stole him, and of course, it was great.
Darryl Praill: The Creation Agency was awesome, so thank you for that. And he’s been fun. But one of the things he did was, he did a study of all of the emails that we send out in Autoklose. And my last chat, when I looked at his content. He tells me he analyzed over 680,000 cold emails sent out on the Autoklose sales nurturing platform. Autoklose.com, with a K. Check it out. And he has some very interesting takeaways. So today, we’re gonna go back to basics, and I’m going to pick Ollie’s brain on what did we learn? So that guys like me can be thwarted, and guys and gals like you can have big fat commission checks. I’m kind of curious to see what happens here. Ollie, my friend, welcome to the show.
Ollie Whitfield: Thank you very much for having me, Mr. Praill. And for the listeners, this is such a weird experience for me. I’ve been a listener of this podcast for the longest time. And it’s a little-known fact that there was mentioned in there some of the clients that, well, you know, the types of clients that might come from my former company I have been working, with, Darryl is the elusive goose himself. I prospected him relentlessly. I never cracked it. I got close, I think, so maybe he can throw me under the bus in a minute here, but we never quite got there. I sent a lot of cold emails, and I mean, a lot. He never responded to one of them. But the second I went over to him and said, “I don’t like the visuals you have on this thing you were doing,” he bit. But, that’s where we got started, anyway. Just thought I’d share a fun story there with everybody, trying to start off with something different.
Darryl Praill: Well, you know what I like about story actually, Ollie, is that you what you basically did was you transitioned from, and correct me if I’m wrong, from basically trying to hook me on your services, if for lack of a better word, which is what we all do, our products and our services, to actually then spending time in my world, which was secondary to what you were trying to do, saying, “I don’t like what you’re doing with your graphics there, and I think you could do better.” Well, that’s my world. That’s what, how I’m held accountable. So all of a sudden, it was very personable and relatable, and I wanted to hear your insights. Also, because I mean, I know you. I know Creation Agency. I have a lot of respect for them. I know the clientele you have. I have respect for them. So all of that worked together to say, you came to me in a topic that was near and dear to my heart, and how many people don’t do that. So lesson number one, Ollie was slow getting there, but he did get there, and it did get the reaction. And ultimately that led to him being poached by me. So, hey, there you go. Ollie, talk to me about what you guys did.
Ollie Whitfield: What did we do? Wow. We spent a lot of time in Excel. And, by a lot, I mean waking up at 1:00 a.m., thinking, “I need to just get through the rest of this. It’s not going to go away If I don’t spend time doing it.” So, a little bit of that. But, the cool part was it’s a lot of different sources, a lot of different statistics. And if you put it all together, you do get some core trends, a couple of surprises, I will definitely add. And the best bit is you can go write a bunch of cold emails, and I do some prospecting myself. I’m not a quota-carrying rep, so I don’t necessarily have to, but it’s a hobby, a bit of a, an exercise to build my strength in that. And, if I can apply some of the stuff that the stats I’ve found here indicate to me, and that there’s a correlation, and not necessarily causation, that’s what hopefully I can turn the tables on Darryl here to get a little bit of insight into. But, I’ve started to see my own performance uptake a little bit, and if I can do that with not a huge amount of prospecting experience behind me, then full-time, quota-carrying reps who are crushing it, you’re going to see a lot of impact.
Darryl Praill: You really recently did, I think it was on a webinar, or a podcast with the folks at demandDrive And they asked you if I recall, five questions. But what was interesting, you shared a step we’ll kick it off with this, which is indicative of email. So, if you’re guilty of what I’m about to share with you, you should hang your head in shame. I love it. You said the biggest email in the whole data pool, so remember, 680,000 emails, was 6,580 words, which I love this. Only you would do this. You made that relevant to me. That’s 8% of the length of the second Harry Potter book. So somebody sent an email, somebody actually sent an email that was 8% of the length of the second Harry Potter book. So what were the stats in that email, Ollie? I gotta ask you, how’d that go down?
Ollie Whitfield: I just wish that I could get some audience predictions on this but, of course, we record ahead of time. That would be good fun. But you know, it got opened. That’s the cool thing. So it almost, I would never say it doesn’t matter what you write because it does, but the subject line comes way before that, of course. And that’s where some of the more interesting stats come from too. But yes, it got opened. It didn’t get a reply that time. Not that many emails actually do get the reply unless it’s out of office, or, you know, something to that nature. But, I found one with a 52-word subject line, and to say what we may already know, that one didn’t get open.
Darryl Praill: 52-words subject line.
Ollie Whitfield: A five and a two, yeah. If you think about it, an iPhone has maybe four, five, maybe six words before it truncates. And that’s where most people view their emails. So that’s, what’s the maths on that? That’s like eight times the length of a subject line on a phone.
Darryl Praill: I mean, that’s, my maths says that’s 13 times, that four words, you know if there’s 52 words. Wow. Okay.
Ollie Whitfield: That’s why I didn’t become a mathematician.
Darryl Praill: That’s very true. But you’re a very talented marketer, and product marketer, especially, with incredible insights on how the sales game works. So let’s start with that.
Email subject lines
Darryl Praill: Okay. What do we need to know to optimize? What did we learn? You, you hit it, you start talking about subject line. What do we learn about subject line? What, what advice do we have? What mistakes are you seen made on the subject line? What do we need to do if we’re looking at improving your emails to get open? What’s the word? 680,000 emails, what did we learn?
Ollie Whitfield: They’re a little bit longer in subject line than we would think. And I did a little LinkedIn poll just to see what people would guess the most common length of a subject line is by words. Most people in, you know in the response to that poll, they said between five to 10 words is roughly what most people are sending in their subject line. Thankfully, it’s not that. It’s very close, though. The most common length of a subject line is four words. And that’s what I found. And very, very, very, very closely behind these six words. A little bit behind that is three.
Ollie Whitfield: And sort of my thoughts, as I go through the whole of this document of research that I have got, the more I make my email sound like a text, without, you know, LOL, what you up to, smiley face emoji, that type of thing. The more you make it sound SMS-friendly, or if you’re WhatsApp-ing your boss, that type of quick terminology, but with the appropriate tone, that seems to be working better for me as I’ve applied trying a four-word subject line, which yeah, it’s very, very close to a three-word subject line. But the six and a seven, I got a way worse open rate, and it didn’t seem to matter so much what I said, because I couldn’t tell you with any real numbers that I found with my replies to a seven-word subject line was any better than, you know, an eight-word subject line.
Ollie Whitfield: I didn’t get enough replies because I wasn’t getting the open rate. So the shorter that I could go, the better, is the short way of saying it. And that doesn’t mean one word, obviously. What I’ve tried to do, is I’ve tried to say skip the just, definitely, very, you, anything like that in a subject line. I’m going straight for the hiring a, or hiring Darryl Praill, or firing Darryl Praill, or firing Ollie Whitfield, hiring Ollie. Something like that really, really, really clickbait-y to the point. “Why the hell would he write that?” That’s what I’ve been going for in that three- four-word radius. That’s what I’ve been trying to do.
Darryl Praill: So what was really sad was you came up with a stat that said 12% of the cold email subject lines have between 11 and 20 words. So 12% kids. Are you the 12%? If you are, there’s therapy. Brevity is an art. So three, four, five words, whatever you want to hang out, and you want to be a little provocative. Like I like your example. You talk about, if you were sending me something it might be like, you know, your Autoklose case study. That was the example you use, you know, well, what about it? You know, I got to open this and find out more. Cause it’s about mine. It’s about me. Which is how you got me to react the first time. It was about me.
Which day is the best for cold emails?
Darryl Praill: All right, let’s move it along. What other wonderful tidbit? For example, I think you guys talked about days of the week. So I, you know, and it’s funny, I never really thought about days of the week. I know it comes up all the time, but I don’t think about which days I get more emails, or less emails. So, and does that influence me? I mean, for example, I know my Mondays are shit. They’re just full of that kickoff-the-week meetings, get your shit together. So I’m curious, what did we learn about days of the week? What is best? What are the mistakes we’re making? Does it even matter?
Ollie Whitfield: It does. I would add the first thing I thought of when I looked at the days of the week is, obviously, there’s seven days of the week. Most people don’t touch the weekend. The weekend wasn’t bad. Yes, it was, it performed less, as you’d expect. Not as many people would even open, nevermind reply to a prospecting email, but do not write it off. That that was the first thing that I found. The first thing I thought, “Wow. I didn’t expect that at all.” Second thing is the open rate of an email, the click rate of an email, meaning any attachment or any link that you put inside of an email and then the reply. There’s not really a runaway leader. So there’s never a case for, don’t ever touch Thursdays, but email those on Friday.
Ollie Whitfield: It’s not like that at all. Weirdly, Monday is the best day, by the stats that I’ve found. So what I wanted to try and do here is you said Mondays suck for you. I think it’s not about when you’re sending it, it’s more about, “Oh crap, it’s Monday. What am I doing?” And that’s my Sunday night, I think, “Oh gosh, what am I doing tomorrow?” And then on Tuesday night, I think, “It’s Tuesday already, what am I doing tomorrow?” And then when I come back from lunch, I do the same thing. It’s “What’s my afternoon? Because I just can’t remember, and I forget, and that’s the way my stupid brain works. So that’s a weird way of saying it’s not necessary, don’t send emails on Friday, or do. It’s more about, Darryl’s a CRO, want to get attention, want to get his attention to want to get the attention of his team.
Ollie Whitfield: Probably Monday he’s going to be quite busy, but he will probably have a lot of emails to go through from the team and other people, so it’s worth pitching in there. So what kinds of things go on in your routine that mean you might have space to have a little look at the inbox, or when you might be expecting certain things to come through on a recurring basis? Is there a slot that you regularly have? And you know, I’m aware a lot of people are going to go and say, “Darryl’s free at 3:30 on a Wednesday.” But is there any kind of slot there that you have that happens regularly?
Darryl Praill: For me, it’s not necessarily a day, because my days vary. I don’t think I’m uncommon. You know, most people have had this conversation the other day with a group of executives in the sales space. And talking about the average is 35 meetings a week. So for me, I do a boatload of my emails and, believe it or not, my social media posting after five o’clock at night because that’s when I’m finally done meeting everybody else and being that advisor. So Mondays, it doesn’t surprise me that the open rate’s high. Why? Because the first thing I do in the Monday morning is to come in because it’s been the weekend, I’ve tried to somewhat stay off email, and have quality time with the family and preserve my marriage. And the first thing I do is I open them, and I delete them. So, and here’s the one thing I will say. I’ve heard more SDRs, for example, over and over again, say, “Dude, I got an 87% open rate. Well, let me show you what to do.”
Darryl Praill: Okay. Two things with that. When you guys do that, number one, dude is not going to impress me. Although I do use it myself all the time. That’s different. An 87% open rate is bullshit. If you’re getting 87%, then something’s not right with your tracking. And finally, open rates don’t matter jack. Marketers don’t care about open rates. They’re an interesting stat. What we care about our click-through rates, and even more so, reply rates. But if at least, if you’re clicking through I know you’re at least consuming my content, and that’s an intent signal I can proactively follow up. And if you reply, well then, my gosh, it’s already marketing qualified. You know, I’m following up on you right away.
Darryl Praill: So, open rates are interesting. So I’m not shocked Monday was the highest open rate. But, I find interesting, I’m looking at your stats here, Your cold-email click rate, the highest was Wednesday, followed very quickly by Tuesday, and Monday. And then, the cold-email reply rate was Monday. It doesn’t shock me. I’m getting, just getting in. I’m dealing, I’m just getting rid of the weekend. Thursday, and then Thursday, and then Tuesday. So what’s interesting here, if I look at the commonalities, Tuesdays and Mondays are applicable to both open, and click, and reply. That part is provocative. So, it depends what you’re trying to achieve. Any final lessons learned on this one that you can give us, on what to do, how to apply this?
Ollie Whitfield: Yeah, well, it really depends on the industry you’re working in, doesn’t it? That’s just the one thing that a piece of data like this can’t necessarily divide unless you want, you know, five million different industries to be cut by emails. But, the way that I’ve tried to do it is personally, my own experimentation, if I’m sending emails between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., and I can see that the best time of the day is potentially the afternoon. That’s okay. I can change my campaigns to do that. I don’t have to be writing my emails at that time. I can pre do it. Maybe that time, the day before and schedule ahead, I can do it in the morning. What I’ve tried to do is rearrange my calendar so that it’s working best for me with that in mind.
Ollie Whitfield: It’s not, I’m going to do my calls at 9:00 a.m. for two or three hours, and then I write my emails, and then I have my demos during the time that I’m sending the best, the most emails at the best time of day. I’m just trying to find the best way to block off my own calendar so that it works for that. So maybe the answer is, if the best email-open rate and reply rate is the afternoon, I don’t necessarily want to be doing anything that takes me away from it. Cause if I get, let’s say a load of reply saying, “Yeah, I’d love to chat.” I don’t really want to leave that till the next morning, and I don’t want to be in a demo dipping out of that demo to reply, because, you know, you’ve already lost my attention. I’ve given you a crappy demo, and I’m moving, you know, way down my pipeline. So it’s things like that. It’s just how to readjust the pipeline, readjust the pipeline, readjust your calendar and how you think about when you’re doing stuff and then what you can do with it, adjusting based on that
Darryl Praill: I really like what you’re getting at. To me, it’s about being intentional. So, you know, clearly we’re just sharing the stats here you’ve got using the Autoklose data, and you nailed it. You know, it could be everybody who’s listening different product, different service, different markets. Some are SMB, some are enterprise, some are high tech some are, you know, insurance, or manufacturing, or financing. And they’re all very, very different. So, you know, this is an interesting guide, and I should mention that this data composition is truly spread over a ton of industries. It’s not high-tech bias. I want to make sure you understand that. But, the best decision on your part is to start doing your own AB testing.
Darryl Praill: You can say, for this week, I’m going to do all my sends at this time, and see what happens. I’m going to stay sends on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and I’m going to see which day of the week works, and which time. I’m going to do all at 9:00 a.m., then 10:00 a.m., and 11:00 a.m. In the course of two or three months, you can figure out what works. That’s the biggest thing. The other point I love what you’re saying, is about being intentional. I don’t necessarily want to send emails to the key people that might reply if I’m going to be booked or, like, you know, a bunch of demos at a certain time.
Darryl Praill: So managing that is really ingenious. The last thing is, a lot of the stuff you can schedule. As you mentioned, you can write it in advance, and I can send it later on, or you can schedule it to go at certain time using your sales engagement platform, or your sales nurturing platform, if that’s what you’re, if you’re, so if you’re equipped with something like that. So those are really cool. All right, now you, now, Ollie, you did mention, you know, the best time to get ahold of Darryl is Thursdays at 3:30.
Is there a time that works best?
Darryl Praill: So, we’ve covered off getting hold of Darryl. We covered off making the subject line provocative. We covered off making it about me. We covered off what the right day of the week might be, but you said 3:30. So, I got to follow up on that. Is there a best time we should be looking at?
Ollie Whitfield: No. I’m just kidding. There is.
Darryl Praill: So, we’re done, Folks. Have a great day.
Ollie Whitfield: That’s the end of the show right there. Sorry for dropping the bomb there, I just I couldn’t not do it. So yeah, this is really, really weird. I mean, as you saw in the days of the week for engagement, it’s never just Monday Tuesday, Wednesday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. It’s kind of all over the place in a weird way, but Friday, Tuesday, Monday, the order is weird. But for open rate, click rate, and reply rate, it’s the same order, 2:00 p.m., 3:00 p.m., 4:00 p.m., in that order for each of those metrics. I will say the difference is not that big between any of them on each of the metrics.
Ollie Whitfield: We’re talking about 1% different in average open rate, average click rate is 1 1/2% difference, 2% or 3% on the reply rate. So really, you know, there’s not a huge difference between sending something at 2:00 and sending something at 4:00. The probably, the bigger differentiator is who you’re sending it to and what industry, what seniority they have. But, you know, as a loose guide, this is telling me that sending it the same time as every newsletter in the world and every rep who wants to send their morning emails, cause that’s what they were doing in the morning, it’s working worse by engagement. That might still be the case for what a lot of people are doing, but for the engagement, it seems like later in the day, maybe post-lunch, is where it’s at. That’s what it tells me.
Darryl Praill: And it is interesting. That was my takeaway, post-lunch. You’ve got the 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, but you don’t have the 8:00, 9:00, 10:00, 11:00, 12:00, which is really kind of interesting. I almost wouldn’t have expected that. But, I can definitely see, you know, the afternoon, because right away, most people are in meetings in the mornings, especially the senior folks, and then they tend to have cancellations that can then have more openings in the afternoons. Not much, but some. So, that doesn’t shock me, but you’re right. At 2:00 p.m. you are competing with all the newsletters and all the webinars and everything else.
Darryl Praill: So some of those, again, I would say, folks, test it. Be intentional, and test it. All right. So, overall, we’ve just kind of touched the tip of the iceberg. I know you got a lot more findings here. You’ve got some stats coming out soon. They’ll appear in the Autoklose website. Is there any piece of advice, whether it be from your study here at Autoklose, your own experience as the Autoklose product marketing manager, dealing with all the clients, or your time at Creation Agency that you have for today’s sales reps when it comes to being successful using email. What, any final thoughts?
Ollie Whitfield: I did something really stupid a couple of weeks ago.
Darryl Praill: That doesn’t narrow it down. You do that almost every day, but carry on.
Ollie Whitfield: No, not most, every. A couple of times a day, maybe. Okay. I’ll have to send you an attachment and we’ll have to put it into the show notes because if you want to embarrass me publicly, this is the way. I researched the prospect who was the owner of a marketing agency in I believe it’s Florida, and, you know, right type of size in terms of headcount for Autoklose. Just an experiment to prospect into a market I know. I can, you know, leverage my own experience there. So, it’s not just completely guesswork, as it would be for something else. So I tried, and I did a very, very, very one-to-one campaign to a gentleman called David. And he, we had a meeting together. All went well. But what I did was really stupid.
Ollie Whitfield: I tried every different time of day, every different type of email. So it wasn’t a plain text email, followed by plain text, followed by plain text. Or a cold call followed by a cold call, followed by a cold call. It was a reference of a case study on their website and, you know, likening that to some of the stuff that we can help them do. Secondary was referencing to the fact that they were hiring and which roles. So I said before the subject line length could be hiring AE, or whatever it was. I think it was specifically hiring AE and intern. Third, was a case study. One word, cause the company that the case study was his company name was one word. Lastly, this was just, I laughed my bike rack off when I got the reply to this.
Ollie Whitfield: He was a, he’s a former singer. I know he’s been on an album with Elvis Costello. And I thought, “Oh my gosh, where did that come from?” Just talk about striking lucky with your research. I put his name into Google and found that. Couldn’t believe it. So, just being stupid, and the fact that it was 9:00 p.m. and I was trying to have some fun with writing some emails. I Photoshopped myself onto an Elvis Costello album cover, quoted one of the songs that this gentleman had written, that was my subject line. And I sent it to him and sort of played along with the fact I’ve clearly noted that you’re involved with music, and this album, everything was about, “Let’s make some greatest hits together,” and all kinds of really terrible, very cringe-worthy phrases.
Ollie Whitfield: It worked. I won’t say it works all the time, especially with potentially some buyers in very technical markets, or very high-end decision-makers. But I had way more fun writing that email than any email ever before in my life. And it just so happened to get the meeting. That can’t be a coincidence. It really can’t. Some of the ones I have sent, I tried legal professionals, and I know nothing about legal. I tried it, I sucked. I tried to make it about Netflix and series I’ve watched, It just wasn’t fun. It felt forced. But this was fun because I meant it to be.
Darryl Praill: It’s amazing when you stop trying to be contrived, formulaic and just let your personality shine through, how often people pick up on that. I love that you did that. That’s cool. Personally, I would have sent him a singing version of that song. Maybe a TikTok.
Ollie Whitfield: You haven’t heard me sing.
Darryl Praill: That, and well, yeah, I’m the same way. But just think about it. A TikTok of you singing his song. But maybe some new lyrics about how awesome you are. But, that’s what guerilla is all about. And not too many people are just falling on the templates. You, you had some fun, your research, your personalized it. And you tried everything else, which I love that you were persevering there. That’s fantastic. All right. That’s it. That’s the teaser of the email. Now, with that all said, Ollie is one of those lads who knows everybody. I mentioned this already, and is on the game, on the vibe, in the know with all this going on in this industry. Candidly, you need to follow him. What’s the best way to follow you, LinkedIn, Twitter? I know you’re active on both. What’s the scoop?
Ollie Whitfield: Well, I have a weird name, so, fortunately, you put my name into LinkedIn there’s not that many people that come up. So for ease of everybody, let’s go for that.
Darryl Praill: Sounds good. And on Twitter, just as an aside, I just did a search on Ollie Whitfield, you were literally the first one. That could because we’re following you, but who knows?
Ollie Whitfield: I need to get the guy who’s got my name handle. He’s got the name flat. So I have to have an underscore. I want the handle. I gotta get it.
Darryl Praill: Years ago, I could have bought praill.com, and I paused and went back a couple months later and damn it, it was gone. Taken by a distant relative in the UK, no less. So I’ve been bitter to this day. So instead I just have DarrylPraill.com. But, you know…
Ollie Whitfield: You can blame us for that.
Darryl Praill: But, it’s so much easier. I blame you guys for everything. Okay. That’s it. That’s the show this week, folks. We had a little fun. You had a chance to meet Ollie. Ollie’s on my team. He’s a rockstar. He is the Autoklose product marketing manager. If you have a desire to talk more about Autoklose, or data, or email best practices, or how to Photoshop yourself on an album record, just so you can get in front of somebody at 9:00 at night, he’s your man. The meantime I’m Darryl Praill. And that wraps up another episode of the INSIDE Inside Sales Show. I’ll see you soon. Take care. Bye-bye.