Being a follow-up machine is a sales superpower.

You want to be all over your customers without bothering them at all.

One of the best “tricks” is to always give a reason for anything you’re asking for (and in most cases, every follow-up email is, or contains, an ask).

Robert Cialdini, the famous behavioral psychologist, explained this in his book Influence when he outlined a study by Ellen Langer where including any reason in an ask increased the odds of success by more than 50% (insane).

You could argue the example above is oversimplified, but personally I can imagine plenty of situations where I’d send the second email to a customer literally just like that.

But of course sometimes you need more. Something I’ve long believed is you can give a sort of “opening reason” for a follow-up email, which sort of heads the customer off at the pass before they can think “man, this dude just will not stop nudging me along…” because it gets them thinking “oh well I suppose that IS fair…”

Here are 5 “email opener” examples I personally use:

Since #4 is the most “advanced,” here’s an example of how it might look in a full email:

Try these and let me know how they work.

And if you like this topic, check out next week’s live training on How to Become a Follow-Up Machine in the next section…

Luke and I will share the follow-up emails, talk tracks, and mindset we use to stay all over our customers.

Join us next Tuesday, November 3 at noon Eastern on Zoom: SIGN UP HERE.

(Missed last week’s training on how to sell against “We’ll just build it with Claude”? Recording on YouTube.)

I talked to a very impressive candidate last week (joined a now-super-hot company 5 years ago reporting directly to the founder).

Currently: in a sales-adjacent leadership role

Wants: IC role as a new biz AE

He’s weighing trying to jump to another very hot company (likely would not be able to get the AE seat) with finding a role somewhere earlier stage (likely can get AE because he’s very raw talented: smart, high EQ, hardworking, and so on).

The reason he’d have to “downgrade” the hotness of the company he works at is once established, they rarely take chances on people like him when they have their pick of perfect-résumé candidates.

But earlier-stage companies often can’t attract perfect candidates, they have the founder directly involved in hiring, and they’re usually willing to bet on high-potential candidates with a multi-year payoff in mind.

Of course I’m a bit biased, but it’s basically the same thing I personally did. I walked into my first AE role at a 150-person startup with zero sales experience.

When thinking medium term about your career, I think it’s often better to get the exact ROLE you want, where you’ll be doing work you find intellectually stimulating, rather than trying to optimize for the right company (in a role you don’t want).

Another example is an AE I know who almost took a horrible role (new verticals; these often suck) at Gong, but ultimately decided to take a classic Enterprise role at a more up-and-coming startup and he’s now KILLING it.

From a résumé perspective, what you’ve done is often more important than where you’ve done it.

But more importantly, becoming excellent at your craft and a top performer is the most valuable thing you can have when looking for your next role. This is much more likely if you’re doing work you’re excited about.

Food for thought.

I started posting (my 2nd attempt) about a week and a half ago. It seems to be working.

I actually think the sales community there is borderline more interesting than the one on LinkedIn because there are lots of smart anon accounts (obv lots of dumb ones too) run by seemingly great reps who simply don’t want the public attribution that comes with LinkedIn (very interesting).

Here’s a post that was popular this week, if you want to check it out: