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Personalization done right: The email that made me want a sales pitch
Most sellers use personalization in their cold outreach the wrong way.
But I got a cold email from a B2B SaaS seller that got everything right.
Read this great example of how to personalize your approach so masterfully that it stops your prospects in their tracks.
Personalization Tip #1: Pay attention to the person.
You can’t do personalization well unless you pay close attention to the things that matter to your prospects as individuals.
Notice I said “individuals.” Not “groups” or “segments” or “demographics.” It’s called person-alization for a reason.
The sales rep who reached out to me, Austin, understood this well.
Since I’m the ideal target customer for Austin’s product, he was probably watching my LinkedIn posts like a hawk, waiting for the ideal time to reach out.
He spotted his opportunity when I posted this on my personal LinkedIn account:
From this post, he learned that I post comedic content, I love Taylor Swift, and he found a great subject line to use in his outreach—mine.
He took his prospecting research even further. He was also paying attention to the Close company LinkedIn account, which posted this:
With these two posts, Austin identified two perfect references to make in his cold email—perfect because they were hyperspecific to me and only me—and sent this:
His creativity floored me:
He knows I usually post comedic content on LinkedIn, so he felt comfortable matching my tone.
His subject line, “Taylor Swift?” was a callback to my LinkedIn post. (And I genuinely laughed.)
His email opened with a callback to a Close LinkedIn post.
A callback—when someone makes a joke and you reference it again later—is a very effective comedy device. People love clocking a reference, and a callback is not only an easy way to get a laugh out of someone, it also shows that you’re paying attention to them specifically.
AND READER, IT WORKED ON ME.
I replied to Austin’s email with follow-up questions about his product because I was actually curious about it—his company had been in the news recently, and I figured, hey, as long as I’ve got a Cool Guy in my inbox willing to tell me more about it, I was all ears.
His follow-up response:
If you've got a Blank Space on your calendar, I can walk you through the highlights All Too Well (short-version, promise). …Ready for it?
For Non-Swifties, that’s THREE Taylor Swift song references he managed to fit into his pitch for a demo.
Austin was obviously having fun with this personalization—and I was just as delighted to read it.
The lesson here is not “Mention Taylor Swift and you’re guaranteed high response rates” (although, let’s be real—it probably couldn’t hurt).
The lesson is: Personalization works when you spot the opportunities to create a connection that will uniquely resonate with a specific person.
Too often, I see lame attempts at outreach that sound like this:
Hey Desiree! I see you’re from Orange County. I visited there once. Have you ever been to [insert popular local restaurant]. So good!
Or
Hey Desiree! I noticed you liked John Smith’s post about AI. Crazy, right? Anyway, here’s my SaaS…
Small talk. Generic. Frivolous. Total flops.
Pay attention to how your leads are showing up on LinkedIn and try to go one level deeper than the superficial personalization “tricks” sellers use in their outreach.
It might seem like a minor tweak, but if you can do it well, you’ll stand out in my inbox so much, it’ll shock me to my core—like Austin did here.
Personalization Tip #2: Take a multithread approach.
There’s a second tactic at play that made Austin’s outreach so effective: a multithread approach to personalization.
I forwarded his email to my boss, Chelsea, and she revealed that Austin also sent her a DM on LinkedIn that got her attention, too:
Here’s why I like this layered, multithread approach:
He reached out to two different, relevant contacts at our company.
He reached out via different channels (one email and one LinkedIn).
His messaging was unique to each of us.
He included multiple specific, personal details to create strong resonance in his messages.
He sounded like a real human being having a normal conversation, not AI.
At a time when we’re trying to find ways to automate every damn thing, we also need to acknowledge the things that can’t be automated—and this is the kind of personalization you can’t automate.
“Personalization” doesn’t mean writing a generic template for an entire demographic and plugging in a few random details to make it seem unique. Great personalization usually isn’t scalable.
This human-to-human outreach might slow you down, but it’s often worth it because it wins the hardest battles in sales: capturing interest, earning responses, and booking demos.
⚡️Get Dialed-In
Select a prospect on your list you’re most excited about. Pick 2-3 stakeholders and do a deep dive: stalk their LinkedIn, read their posts, look at their comments and profile recommendations, listen to their podcast guest spots, etc.
Find out what’s important to them and craft a message that shows you’ve been paying attention and understand them.
Bonus points if you can make your outreach as enjoyable as Austin did.
Cheers,
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