Email writing mistakes, how to get a meeting with anybody and the first 9 seconds of a cold call

Leslie Ye recently posted about the 14 worst sales email writing mistakes that sales professionals can make. She begins by saying that you never get a second chance to make a good first impression, and when that first impression is made via email, it’s even harder to come off the way you want it to.

Leslie goes on to detail the 14 mistakes she believes you can make in an email, including:

  • Misusing “your” and “you’re”
  • Misusing “there”, “their” and “they’re”
  • Misusing “its” and it’s”
  • Misspelling your prospects name or company
  • Fumbling the date
  • Using inline lists instead of bullet points
  • Not using paragraphs
  • Mistyping your phone number

Geoffrey James wrote today about the ways in which you can get meetings with VIP and decision makers. He points out that it’s commonly said in business that “it’s not what you know, but who you know”, but he disagrees and says the real truth is that “It’s not who you know but who you can get to know.”

Geoffrey goes on to give pointers on how to get a meeting with just about anybody, including do massive research first, get somebody who knows them to email them and keep it really simple.


Sales Coach World favourite, Paul Castain, recently posted about how important the first 9 seconds of a cold call is, and that it could make it or break it. He points out that salespeople need to imagine they are the person that they typically call or try to set an appointment with. They need to think about the things they would be responsible for and imagine the amount of interruptions they get daily.

He then says they should continue to imagine, a phone call interrupting what they are doing. How quickly would they make a judgement as to whether or not there was an value in continuing the call? He goes on to say that with that in mind, what you say in the first 9 seconds of a cold call will either capture a prospects attention, or lose it fast enough for a call to begin a downward spiral.