Three Bullets and a Call to Action
If, however, they can fix something by reading an email in 10 seconds and waving a magic wand (i.e., mailing one of their minions to Make It Happen), they’ll likely do it. They spend a few seconds delegating and get a big pile of political capital from you in return. After years of trial and error, we’ve found that shorter emails are even more likely to get a response. We call this the “Three Bullets and a Call to Action” technique, and it will drastically increase your chances of getting action—or at the very least, a response—from just about anyone you email out of the blue asking for something, not just an executive. good Three Bullets and a Call to Action email contains (at most) three bullet points detailing the issue at hand, and one—and only one—call to action. That’s it, nothing more—you need to write an email that can be easily forwarded along. If you ramble or put four completely different things in the email, you can be certain that they’ll pick only one thing to respond to, and it will be the item that you care least about. Or worse, the mental overhead is high enough that your mail will get dropped entirely.
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