Get Your Email Pitches Rated for Free

Ryan O'Hara
The LeadIQ Blog
Published in
4 min readApr 8, 2016

You may have noticed I now am working on a project called LeadIQ.

My video (below) kind of explains everything you need to know about LeadIQ in under 90 seconds. If you want to prospect or get access to people, you should check us out. That’s not the point of this blog post though.

I’ve had a crazy couple of years since I left Dyn, an internet infrastructure company. I joined an exec team at a startup in South Carolina and helped them prep for launching a medical app.

After my girlfriend and I didn’t want to set our roots down there for life, we came back to the Greater Boston area and I co-founded a social startup with a few friends, trying to find product market fit in a complicated space.

We struggled, but I learned a lot. After we shut down, I went back to my old Dyn friends and helped do some freelance work for some Dyn alumni on various startups. It was refreshing, and great to work with some old friends. I quickly started helping too many companies at once. My workload got crazy.

Over the winter, I focused on helping branded.me prep for their incredible launch of their blogging platform. I also started advising a cool prospecting tool called LeadIQ.

So why am I sharing these experiences? All of them have been very different, as you can see, in different spaces, yet they had one thing in common: all of them needed good sales emails to be successful

I know what you might be thinking…

“ I don’t work in sales…,”

If you’ve ever written a cover letter, pitched an investor, sent an intro to someone, or reached out to a marketing influencer, you’ve written a sales email.

OR

“ I send good sales emails, what are you talking about?”

The problem is, not to be mean, but I have an inbox at all of these companies, and some decent buying power. The truth is, most of you don’t send good sales emails. Otherwise, I’d be on the phone with vendors all the time.

There are many reasons a lot of sales emails are bad.

This could be a whole book, but at the end of the day it comes back to one big thing.

We all get lazy, and we all value time too much to write good sales emails.

A good sales email should be the following:

  1. Entertaining — yup, that’s right. If a sales email isn’t entertaining, it’s not worth sending.
  2. Clear — inbox space and attention is precious. A good sales email tells the person why you wrote the email in the first place, and what you want with their time.
  3. Human — despite what The Matrix says, we are not all machines, so we shouldn’t talk like one. An email needs to be personal, and be full of your personality.

These 3 traits translate into one key trait. All good sales emails should be thoughtful.

If you took 90% of the outbound emails you send out and posted images of them on Facebook or Twitter, what would your friends think? Would they like it…or would you be embarassed? Thoughtful emails aren’t embarrassing and have awareness of the situation of you sending a cold email.

This brings me to my big point.

We all need to challenge ourselves to send better emails.

Imagine if the whole world put as much thought into a cold email as ad agencies do with a Super Bowl ad? How much better would our inbox experience be?

The best way to do this is slow down on sending your emails, be more thoughtful with sending out emails. Ask yourself if you really are doing your best? The scary part about this is it takes more time, and may lower your outbound production. However, you’ll get more responses this way.

That’s why I’ve joined LeadIQ. I know having a tool like LeadIQ can save people time in getting email addresses, finding prospects, and getting contact info. It can open up time to focus on writing better, more thoughtful emails, and give you access to those people.

As I mentioned earlier, all my experiences required sending sales emails, and all of them gave me opportunities to send thoughtful emails. I generated millions of dollars worth of pipeline while at Dyn sending cold emails, brought in millions of impressions with marketing influencers, acquired users, and found partners, all through sending thoughtful emails.

If you want to your pitch emails judged for free, I’ve launched a sales tool for LeadIQ called RateMyPitch.com. Visit the site, fill out the form, and I’ll rate your email and give you tips, obviously for free. Let’s get better at sending email, and make it more delightful for senders and receivers.

Visit: RateMyPitch.com

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Ryan O'Hara
The LeadIQ Blog

Marketing and Pitch Man for @LeadIQ. I help startups look cool before they actually are cool.