Hi, it’s Melissa, Cofounder and CEO of eWebinar. Welcome (back) to “your founder next door“, a weekly publication on the strategies and stories behind building a company without an abundance of resources and friends in high places. No BS, just straight-up truth bombs.
Last week I wrote about what cold outreach is and why it matters, after hiring Bogdan Liutic to teach me how the whole machine works. The infrastructure, the list, the message.
This week is the part I promised you. The message.
I’ve since taken Josh Braun’s course and gone through Sam McKenna’s Sequence Playbook, on top of what Bogdan taught me. Three people who are good at this, and every one of them teaches something different.
Three sentences, max 📏
In our session, Bogdan showed me how to write a cold email and his rule was three sentences.
Subject lines should be short and obvious, something like eWebinar + {company}. Those get the best open rates, he said. The thinking being that people don’t have time and they skim.
I understand it. I get a ton of those a week.
What I couldn’t work out was how anyone says something meaningful in three sentences. I sell a product most people have never seen before. Three short sentences barely covers what we do, let alone why they should care.
On top of that, when I see emails this short, I delete them right away. Precisely because they don’t say anything.
Great copy isn’t written, it’s found 🔍
Josh’s philosophy is that you don’t write good copy. You find it. Before writing a word, you watch your customer testimonials, you listen for what sucked before they found you and what changed after. You observe what you can about the prospect’s job. Then you write the email using your customers’ words, not yours.
When a prospect reads their own pain described in a peer’s language, they think you get me.
The rest of his rules follow from that. Talk about them, not you. Nobody cares how great your product is, they care what they can do after. Write casually, like something you’d say over coffee. Words like “effortless” and “10X” read as sales talk, don’t use those. Use humor when you can.
Keep it short. He says write with an eraser.
Never ask for thirty minutes. Nobody owes you any time. Ask whether they’re interested. Worth exploring?
Write like a person wrote it ✍️
Sam comes at it from the other end. Probably because she writes for the executive audience. More targeted outreach than mass cold.
Her point is that your first email has the highest open rate you will ever get with that person, so don’t waste it. All cold emails read the same, and the shorter it is, the more it looks like one. It’s okay if it’s long, as long as it reads like a human being wrote it. Everyone has time for more than three sentences.
Her first email opens with something non-salesy, close to we have yet to be properly introduced. Then you connect the dots to something relevant about them. Then you name their likely problem without claiming to know it, phrased as I suspect.
Don’t use my company + your company, because those are obviously cold emails and get deleted before they’re opened.
So who’s right? 🤷♀️
They’re all experts in this and yet contradict each other in multiple places.
Here’s the thing, none of them are wrong. They’re each playing a game shaped by what has worked in their own career.
I took what I liked from each and wrote something that sounded like me.
That process reminded me of a story…
The nine months I didn’t sell anything 🏠
Growing up, I wanted to be a real estate developer. I had no idea what it took, I just wanted to build skyscrapers.
My first job out of university was at a luxury residential development company. It didn’t take too long for me to realize there are only two ways to become a developer. You’re born into it, or you marry into it. I was nowhere near either.
When the project I was on wrapped up, I went to apprentice for a top realtor in Vancouver to learn how to sell real estate. I was 22 and eager.
He told me exactly what to say. How to open, how to handle every objection, how to negotiate on price. I did it exactly his way against my own instincts because I was inexperienced and I looked up to him.
Every time I repeated his words to a client, it felt cringey. The moment a client came back with something he hadn’t scripted, I was lost, because the conversation was never mine to begin with.
In nine months I didn’t sell a single property on my own. He got increasingly frustrated with me and I decided to go off on my own.
The year after I left and did it my way, I sold more than 25 properties.
What changed?
I found my own clients, and they were nothing like his.
Looking back, I was trying so hard to be someone else because I didn’t have the confidence to be myself. I’m sure that didn’t give anyone much confidence in working with me either.
One of the most underrated skills in sales is to be yourself.
What I ended up sending 📩
Here’s the first email of my first campaign, written for proptech founders and sales execs.
Subject: ex-proptech founder intro
Hi {{firstName}},
You don’t know me yet. Hi! I’m Melissa, an ex-proptech founder (still recovering). 🙃
Anyway… awkward transition…
I spent over 10 years in proptech selling to agents and brokers, and kept hitting the same walls:
I only had the bandwidth for the top 200 brokerages, so thousands more went untouched.
Brokerages who didn’t want a call had no low-pressure way to see our demo and for me to stay in the conversation.
I wanted to sell direct to agents and teams, but a live demo never made sense for the deal size.
My growth had a ceiling, and I had to live with it. I imagine you’re running into one or all of these too, which is why I’m reaching out.
After my last startup, Spacio, was acquired by HomeSpotter (now Lone Wolf), I started eWebinar to solve this once and for all.
We turn recorded demos into interactive sessions prospects can hop into anytime, with questions answered through chat that works like texting. It’s like a salesperson who’s always selling, whether it’s 10am or 11pm.
We work with close to 100 real estate companies, including RealScout, Cloze and Inside Real Estate.
Worth exploring? I can send you a 1-minute video on how it works.
Melissa Kwan
Cofounder, eWebinar
It’s longer than three sentences and shorter than Sam’s. The subject line is mine. The opening is closer to Sam’s. The three bullets are the pain in my own words, which happen to be my customers’ words too, because I lived the same thing they did. “I imagine you’re running into one or all of these” is Sam’s I suspect. “Worth exploring?” is Josh.
I took the pieces from each person I agreed with, and left the rest.
That campaign got over 10% response.
This doesn’t make me a cold email guru. It means the email was hyper relevant, and relevance is the whole game.
I spent over ten years in proptech, and a few years selling real estate out of school. eWebinar was conceptualized while I was running my last startup, when I couldn’t get real estate agents to show up to my demos and trainings. It’s the product I wished existed back then.
When I wrote to proptech founders about hitting a ceiling, I wasn’t borrowing anyone’s pain. I was writing from our shared one.
The next campaign I ran was for real estate brokerage recruiters. It got zero responses.
We do have brokerages using eWebinar for recruiting, it’s not a major use case and I wanted to test it. I couldn’t name a single one of them in the email, because those companies want to stay private and don’t want competitors knowing their strategies.
The first email came from somewhere real and the second one didn’t.
Sales is not magic 🪄
The thing is, sales is a science, and that’s great news, because it means anyone can learn it. Nobody is born a great salesperson. Every bit of it is learned, and it only gets better with practice.
So learn the rules. Take the courses. Steal the frameworks from people who’ve done it well.
Then write it (or say it) in your own voice, even when that means going against what you were taught. If it doesn’t sound like you, you’ll feel it, and so will the person on the other end.
Whatever your style is, you’ll find your own customers. They won’t look anything like anybody else’s.
Till next time,
— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️
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