How I Email: Marti Sanchez, Founder and CEO of Influence Podium
Email is a non-negotiable part of everyday life. For some, it’s an unruly time suck, but enlightened email users have systems to ensure they’re not a slave to the inbox. We’re asking smart thinkers to give us a peek inside their inboxes, share tips, ideas, gripes, and everything in between.
Marti Sanchez started Influence Podium to offer an easy way for B2B CEOs to build out their personal brands. Along the way, he’s had to master the cold email game and he shared some of his best outreach tips with us.
What’s your daily approach to email?
It starts with understanding that it’s not going to be perfect and that I am not capable of
getting to Inbox Zero — so I’m not even going to try.
Every morning after I wake up, I check email in bed from my phone then I answer the ones that are urgent — from bed. I star the ones that I want to answer later on from my laptop when I have more time, and I archive the other ones that don’t need an answer.
Then I have a few time slots during the day when I check email so that I’m not checking all the time — or at least I try to stick to those. I mostly try to stay out as far away from email as possible because it can be really time-consuming — and not only time-consuming but energy-consuming — it can be really energy draining.
What are some of your best tips for writing outreach emails?
Number one — follow Josh Braun on LinkedIn. He gives great tips, and I check his LinkedIn every single morning for outreach and cold email tips.
My attitude towards cold outreach is to personalize as much as possible — a good cold email outreach can easily take 30 to 45 minutes because you have to do a lot of research. With cold emails, it’s like that story — if you had five hours to cut down a tree, you should spend four hours sharpening your ax.
Eighty percent of your time should be spent doing research on the prospect. Find the trigger — and by a trigger, I mean something that he or she can relate to and connect to a personal level — not just business-wise. It might take time to find the trigger.
If you connected with them over Game of Thrones, look for a GoT reference. Try to have fun with it. I think people like humor, and if that’s you, I try to make my emails and my cold outreach. Funny. I think people appreciate it and it shows my personality. Don’t be afraid to show your personality.
Personalize the email a lot. If 10 people can read the same email and think it’s for them, it’s not a good cold email.
Make the email short, make it personal, and make it about them — use you versus I exponentially more.
What’s your biggest email pet peeve?
I’m from Spain originally. I spent 10 years learning to write perfect English. And that was really hard for me. I put in a lot of hours to perfect my grammar and my spelling. Now, I email B2B CEOs every single day, and they don’t give a crap. They write with poor grammar. They spell words wrong. The email will be a sentence long — there will be no caps, no periods, no commas. It makes me feel like I wasted my time learning how to write.