Coaching a seller on openers

Coach the research, not the wording. When a seller's opener misses, the problem is almost always upstream of the sentence. They didn't know enough about the account, so they wrote around the gap.

Rewriting their draft fixes one email. Fixing their research fixes the next hundred.

Start with what they knew

When a seller brings you a draft, don't read it first. Ask what they found.

What happened at the account? Who's the reader, and what changed in their seat? What do they think is hurting? Where did they get each fact?

If they can answer those cleanly, the draft is probably close. If they can't, no amount of editing will save it. Send them back to the 3x3. Three sources, up to three facts each. Public record, social context, market.

A seller who knows the account writes a specific opener almost by instinct. A seller who doesn't writes "I noticed your company is growing."

Fix one part at a time

The Hypothesis Opening has four parts. When you review a draft, check each part on its own and fix only the weakest one.

Is the research hook a real, named event? Or is it vague, like "saw the news"?

Is the personal trigger about this reader's seat? Or is it about the company in general?

Is the misery hypothesis a specific guess they could be wrong about? Or is it a soft phrase like "some challenges"?

Is the binary exit easy to answer and easy to correct? Or is it an ask for a meeting?

Pick the part that's weakest and talk about that one. If you mark up all four, the seller learns that you have opinions. If you fix one, they learn how to write that part.

Don't rewrite their draft

It's tempting. You can see the better version in your head, and typing it takes thirty seconds.

But a rewritten draft is your email, not theirs. They'll send it, it might work, and they'll have learned nothing about why. Next week they'll bring you the same mistake.

Ask questions instead. "What's the real problem you think this person has?" "Would they be able to say no to that guess?" "If you deleted the first line, would the email still make sense?" Let them find the fix.

It's slower in week one. It's much faster by month three.

A coaching session, start to finish

Say a seller brings you this draft for a VP of Finance at a regional distributor.

"Hi, I saw your company has been growing fast. We help finance teams modernize their reporting. Would you be open to a quick call?"

You ask what they found. They say the company announced an acquisition last month, and the VP of Finance started six months ago.

That's the hook and the trigger, sitting unused. You ask what problem an acquisition creates for a new finance leader. The seller thinks about it and says two sets of books, two close processes, and a board that wants combined numbers.

Now they can write it.

You closed the acquisition last month, six months into your time as VP of Finance. Leaders in your seat tend to get asked for combined numbers well before the two finance teams are working from one system. My guess is the monthly close is running twice and getting stitched together by hand. Is that right, or have you already moved them onto one platform?

You didn't write a word of it. You asked three questions.

What to watch over time

Track whether openers get replies from senior buyers, and whether those replies include corrections. A correction means the hypothesis was specific enough to be wrong, which means the seller is doing it right.

Watch whether the seller starts researching without being asked. That's the real sign the coaching is working.

And watch for template drift. Sellers under pressure slide back toward generic. When you see "I noticed" creep back in, go back to the research questions.

You're not trying to produce good emails. You're trying to produce a seller who can produce good emails without you.

Ask about the research. Fix one part at a time. Keep your hands off the keyboard. The seller who learns to think this way will write better openers than you could write for them.