Every morning I start my day with Dilbert & coffee and one of my favorite secondary characters in that strip is Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light. Unlike Satan, Phil punishes people for small crimes by “darning them to heck”.
There are hundreds of articles in the business and startup press written about best practices and big mistakes to avoid, but surprisingly little about the small faux pas that, while they don’t immediately doom a relationship, will get you started on the wrong foot.
So in that spirit, here are four things that mildly annoy me and if you don’t stop doing them, I will sic Phil on you with his “pitch-spoon”.
1. No or the uninformative subject lines
I know you think you get a lot of emails, but wait until you see my inbox. Anyone in the VC or accelerator business gets hundreds of emails each day from prospective startups, would be service providers, colleagues, portfolio companies – and that’s not even counting newsletters and personal correspondence.
Blank subject lines are like unattended bags at a train station; are probably not important but have a slight chance of being a bomb. You force me to open it just to be safe, when I have too many more time pressing emails to handle. Stop being lazy and toss me a bone here.
Meaningless subject lines are even worse. I can see you didn’t simply forget to use a subject, but how does “Hi!” help?
I’m a little less judgmental about ambiguous subjects like “Intro request” or “Follow up”. You are actually trying but don’t quite get it. When I’m staring at a screen with a hundred emails on it, how do I know what company or project this is about? If I’m later searching for this email, how can I tell at a glance that this is the right one?
Consider these alternative subjects instead:
“X would like to meet Y (Co Y)”
“Follow up – Event Z, X (Co X) / Y (Co Y)
These tell me at a glance who is involved. In the second example though, the event can be a phone call, meeting, conference, etc. and by including it in the subject you are giving me critical context.
Note: I’m not including misleading subject lines here because tricking me into opening your email crosses the line from mildly annoying to really pissing me off.
2. Poorly executed quasi spam
While we are on the subject of email, I’m getting a lot more unsolicited email for b2b services. Some masquerade as one to one emails but obvious lack of any clue as to what Dreamit and I do. This combined with the unsubscribe link at the bottom are dead giveaways. (Btw, if you are going to spam me, goddammit have the balls to commit and drop the unsub!)
At this point, I can even tell just by the formatting of the email that it’s a mass email. There is something about it that’s just looks to… formatted.
Some of these quasi spams even pretend to know me. They say things like “I’d like to follow up with you on…” as if it’s possible I’d suddenly remember a conversation we’d never had. Some claim to be connected to me through “a mutual friend” but when I reply asking who, there’s no one. A few even make up names of this mutual acquaintance. Now, I meet a lot of people so it is possible that I don’t recognize the name right away but it’s not hard for me to check LinkedIn and search Gmail to get to the truth. I might let the first group get off with a quick Delete, but the pretenders made me think and for that, they get the Report Spam finger.
A refreshing few openly and candidly admit to being cold emails. If they are targeted (or lucky) enough to actually be relevant to me, I might even respond.
One of these days, I may write a post on how to do the quasi spam right, but for now, on with my rant.
3. Generic Cold LinkedIn connection text
Would you go up to someone at a conference and say, “We should network”? Of course not. (Although, believe it or not, this did actually happen to me once.) You try to figure out enough about the target – from their name tag, where you are standing, any other scraps of context you can dig up – to lead with something that might, just possibly, interest them enough to want to continue the conversation.
So why on earth would anyone send a LinkedIn request to someone they didn’t already know with just the genetic “I’d like to add you to my network” message? If you have an idea why it might make mutual sense for us to connect, why not take the extra seven seconds to spell it out? Because if you direct me to crawl through your LinkedIn profile in order to read your mind, it ain’t happening. As you’ve probably noticed, I resent being made to think.
4. Calls without prior scheduling
Phone calls disrupt my flow. So if you call me without prior scheduling you’d better be my wife, kids, mom, or someone who I really, really want to talk to. Otherwise, you are one step below a Jehovah’s Witness knocking on my door. At least they care about my soul; you just want to sell me something.
Here’s a tip: if you are not sure, text me first. “Ok to call about xxx? Somewhat time sensitive” is not too much to ask for.
Please help make my days mildly less annoying by sharing this with the people you know who most need to read it… and I’m sure you know exactly who they are.
Image Credit: CC by Dustin and Jennifer Stacey
