New Leader to Follow on LinkedIn - Josh Norris on his Simplifying Emails to Sell a Technical Product
Updated: Jun 30
Josh, Our New Leader to Follow on LinkedIn, is sharing with us some great content on his Simplifying Emails When Selling a Technical Product!
""Any tips for simplifying my emails when I sell a very technical product?"
Been getting this question a lot lately. Let's talk about it :)
First, I'll give you an exercise I do when coaching teams.
(I started developing it when I sold devops software to engineers. ๐๐ฆ๐ณ๐บ technical stuff)
Then, I'll show an example.
Here's the exercise:
1๏ธโฃ Highlight all the technical terms in your email
2๏ธโฃ Pick ONE
3๏ธโฃ Write down a problem your recipient experiences related to that ONE technical term
4๏ธโฃ Write a new email based around that problem. Use your ONE term
5๏ธโฃ Minimize other technical terms. Only include them if they're critical and related to the problem you're writing about
You end up with a completely different email.
And because it's focused on a problem, not a product, it uses fewer technical terms.
Check out the example in the image.
Last week, a rep sent ๐ Will Allred the email on the left.
Cerebras Systems makes computer systems for training AI models. They literally made a supercomputer.
You don't get much more technical than that ๐คฏ
What's the purpose of that email?
It's showing off their tech, clearly.
What do you think of my rewrite?
I picked one technical term - distributed training.
Then I wrote about a problem - distributed training takes longer as your AI model gets more complex.
I didn't know anything about distributed training or Cerebras' case studies when I started writing this email.
But it took me less than 5 minutes to research them and finish this draft.
Now, the caveat.
Yes, some industries do use more big words than others.
Writing at a 3rd-7th grade reading level will be harder.
But remember that clarity isn't the only factor that makes a good email.
This post isn't meant to be a plug, but Lavender illustrates this. The goal is to score over 90, not to hit 100.
You can compensate for longer words by improving your email in other ways:
โข lower word count
โข using unsure language
โข splitting up long sentences
What do you think?
Anyone else have tips for simplifying emails when selling technical products?
