You will be able to research a prospect quickly enough to personalise at volume.
You sit down to send ten personalised emails. You open the first prospect's LinkedIn, then their company website, then a news article, then their Instagram, then a review site. Forty minutes later you know a lot about this one person, you have written nothing, and the other nine are still waiting.
Personalisation works. Lesson 4.1 showed why a first line about the buyer gets read. But research with no limit eats the time you meant to spend sending, and a prospecting block that produces three messages is not much of a block. This lesson is about doing just enough research, fast.
Give yourself a fixed time per prospect. Five minutes is a good starting point. Set an actual timer, on your phone or your computer, and start it when you open their first page.
What you are looking for is one specific, relevant detail. Not their life story. One thing that is true, recent, and connected to the problem you solve. A new outlet. A job ad for an accounts executive. A post about a hard month. A promotion. As soon as you find it, stop, even if the timer has minutes left.
The arithmetic is simple. Ten prospects at five minutes each is fifty minutes of research. Ten prospects at twenty minutes each is over three hours, which is a whole prospecting block gone before you send a single message. The extra fifteen minutes per person rarely produces a better first line. It mostly produces a feeling of being thorough.
If the timer runs out and you have found nothing specific, do not keep digging. Use the fallback from lesson 3.2, A reason for calling that is about them: name the problem people like them usually have, ask if it applies, and go to the next prospect.
Search the sources most likely to give you a detail quickly, and check them in the same order every time so you stop wasting minutes deciding where to look.
For business buyers, start with their LinkedIn activity, then their company's news or social media, then the company's job ads. For household buyers, it is usually LinkedIn or whatever public profile they share. A recent post or review, either by them or about their business, is often the quickest find of all: Google reviews of a cafe that mention slow service on weekends tell Mei something real about the founder's week.
Most of the time you will find something in the first two places. If you have to go to the fifth source, the detail you find there is usually too obscure to sound natural in a first line.
Stay with information people have chosen to make public about their work or business. A detail that makes the reader wonder how you found it does more harm than a generic opening.
Only the first line needs to be unique. The rest of the email, the sentence on what you do and the ask, can be the same for everyone with the same persona, as long as it reads naturally after the first line.
This is how sellers personalise at volume. Mei keeps a tested template for her founder persona: two sentences on what she does, in the result format from lesson 4.1, and one easy ask. For each prospect she writes one new first line and slots it in. Writing one line takes a minute or two once she has the detail.
Check that the line and the template fit together. "Saw your post about weekend rosters" followed by a template about month-end bookkeeping needs a bridging phrase, such as "and it made me think about how much admin a fourth outlet adds".
You can stretch your research further by grouping. When several prospects share a trigger, one researched line can work for all of them with small changes.
Say Mei finds that five cafe groups on her list advertised for outlet managers in the same month. The research on what that usually means, more outlets and more admin, only needs doing once. Each email then names the specific job ad and the specific outlet, but the thinking behind the line is shared. Darren does the same with clients who all had their first child this year: the line about new parents and cover is researched once, and each message adds the one personal detail he knows.
Grouping also makes your testing in lesson 4.4 cleaner, because messages to the same trigger group are easier to compare.
Here is how Mei spent her timer on one prospect. Minute one: LinkedIn. The founder has not posted in months. Minute two: the cafe's Instagram, which announces a second outlet opening at a mall in the west. That is the detail. She stops. Her first line: "Saw the announcement about your second outlet, congratulations." Then her template. Research and writing together took her about three minutes.
The next prospect took the full five minutes and gave her nothing specific, so she used the common-problem line and moved on, which is exactly what the timer is for.
The activity below asks you to do this for ten prospects, with the five-minute timer running each time, and write one personalised first line for every one of them.
Research ten prospects with a five-minute timer each and write one personalised first line for every one of them.
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