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I hope this message finds you well!

In my nine years as Textio's CEO, I wrote 1,100 messages (!!!) to reignite conversations with people who, despite initial enthusiasm and engagement, had gone ghosty on our sales team.

Most salespeople will tell you that this kind of exec outreach is hit or miss. After all, if someone wanted to talk to you, they wouldn't be ghosting you in the first place. This week, I break down all 1,100 messages to figure out which patterns fizzled out and which got a 90% response rate.

Not into sales? That's ok. If you've ever been ghosted in any circumstance, the data may intrigue you.

(Also, a 90% response rate, right?! Alas, if only we'd closed 90% of the deals.)

Your email is probably bad

If you've ever written to someone cold, you've probably experimented with outreach to see what works (and, as I showed recently, it isn't AI). But few people are applying that experimental rigor to exec outreach, because those messages are almost universally terrible.

For instance, here's what ChatGPT suggested for this scenario:

You might recognize this template, since everyone sends this kind of thing. ChatGPT's sample checks all the usual boxes:

• "Checking in" subject line
• Pleasant greeting and space-filling intro including your title
• Generic check-in on timing and priorities
• Pablum of reassurance
• Upbeat request for response
• "Best" or "Warm regards" or other insincere closing

Boring. Fake cheerful. My overall response rate for this kind of message was just 16%. Honestly, those 16% of people were nice to even bother. Why would anyone respond?

Let's look at the data!

A 16% response rate is pretty terrible under these circumstances. After all, by the time someone receives this mail, they've already invested a lot of time in the relationship. If 84% of people ignore a check-in message from the CEO in this scenario, then 100% of them are not going to work with you in the end.

Harsh reality: No one wants your long-winded, self-important intro, and no one wants to "check in" with you

Is there anything more self-aggrandizing than spending the first three lines of an email asserting, "I am the VP of Sales at some company you forgot the name of and I am honored to make your acquaintance" or, "I am the Co-Founder and CEO and I love customers and am thrilled to connect with you, as a like-minded executive?" It's a bad look. Stop doing it.

Busy people read mail on their phones. Your self-important intro just took up their entire message preview and they don't even know what you want yet. If you saw that in your phone inbox, you'd swipe to delete without opening, too.

At some point I realized this anecdotally, so I experimented with removing my intro long-winded intro and covering it in the subject line, like:

• Textio contract logistics | hello from Textio CEO
• Your Textio start date | hello from Textio CEO
• Textio rollout plan | hello from Textio CEO

Look at the difference in open rates when I used these subject lines!

Harsh reality: No one is fooled by your fake cheerfulness, so you might as well say what you mean

824 of my messages had good subject lines. But what about the contents of the messages? I experimented with a few different flavors over the years, e.g.

• Asking for an update
• Providing new information or resources
• Asking for feedback about our process
• Offering my help

As you can see from the chart below, some approaches are more effective than others at getting a response, but none are great.

A single message can contain more than one of the approaches above, and sometimes I combined them into a longer mail. But within the 824 messages with good subject lines and high open rates, the longest mails have the lowest response rates. Too much work for people to engage with them.

1,100 messages later, it turns out that being brief, direct, and vulnerable gets the best response rate: 90%.

By far my most successful messages were the 278 that 1) had the good subject lines and 2) respectfully cut to the chase rather than dancing around the situation. Like this:

"It seemed like you were initially excited to partner. When people go quiet on us, it usually means our product or process disappointed you somehow. Can you tell me what happened so we can get better for next time?"

Viral Data Stories 101 Learn to tell data stories that go viral. I break down my formula for conceiving of a story, identifying the data set,... Read more Get it now!

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Looking at the data, I found that 90% of people replied to this kind of message. Many of them provided valuable feedback while declining to move forward with us, but nearly as many replied to apologize and say they were still interested to partner.

Why does this work where the other approaches fail? Whether someone is moving forward or looking for a way out, this kind of outreach absolves them of any guilt they may be feeling over having ghosted in the first place, and makes it safe for them to reengage.

The bottom line: I looked at this in the sales context, but I suspect it's the same in other ghosty situations too: If you want someone to respond, be brief, direct, and vulnerable.

What do you think?

Thanks for reading!

Kieran

Want to tell data stories of your own? Viral Data Stories 101 is for people who want to learn to tell data stories that go viral. For marketers, data scientists, entrepreneurs, and anyone with a passion for storytelling with data. Includes a 1-1 consult with me to help bring your own data story to life!

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kieran@nerdprocessor.com
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