What is a Breakup Email in Sales?
A sales breakup email is the last email you send to a prospect who has stopped responding to your messages. You send it to an unresponsive prospect before you close their file or send it back to marketing to requalify or continue nurturing.
An unresponsive prospect should be treated as one that has gone cold. You assume they have lost the interest they had previously shown or which you assumed they had in your solution.
The other side of the coin is that the prospect may still be interested in your solution but have been busy with other things to respond to your emails.
While breakups are hard, sometimes they cannot be avoided. In fact, in many cases they are necessary.
The downside to a sales breakup email though is once you send one and the prospect accepts the breakup, the relationship is over. You can’t email them again with new or revised offers.
Why Should You Send a Sales Breakup Email?
A sales breakup email sounds like a dramatic overreaction. Doesn’t it make sense to just stop sending the prospect more emails?
Not when the same email can be used as a last attempt to re-engage the prospect:
Sales breakup emails can nudge cold prospects enough to respond
No one wants to get dumped. As my mother always said, “It’s better to be the dumper than the dumped.”
But this is a sales email and the prospect may not care who between the two of you pulls the plug on the relationship. It’s possible they didn’t directly sign up for it in the first place.
What you hope to trigger in an unresponsive prospect with your break up email is FOMO. The fear of missing out.
The reason the prospect will finally open your email may be the fear they didn’t give your offer a fair shake and may miss out on something truly beneficial as a result.
Maybe in one of the emails they ignored you offered something to sweeten the deal, like ‘sign up now and get 50% off your first year’. That is a lower-risk offer they could take up. So they will open your breakup email.
On the other hand, a sales breakup email is an admission that there are only so many leads you can close:
Sales breakup emails help clean your list
It takes time to perfect a lead qualification process. Before that happens, misfitting leads will find their way into your list. These are the ones that will get cold, if they were ever warm.
So a breakup email is an opportunity to accept that a lead was a mismatch and that they must be let go. What you will end up with is a cleaner list full of leads that have real potential to become paying customers.
How Email Breakups Work In Sales
Just as when you send a breakup email to a love interest, sales breakup emails are not really intended to put an end to your relationship with a prospect. You hope it can jolt the prospect into a response and push them back into your sales pipeline.
Picture yourself in a relationship with a fiance you aren’t engaged with as you once were. You have stopped being the attentive, invested partner that you once were. You don’t call or text and ignore their messages.
And then a text from them with the message ‘I am breaking up with you’ pops up on your mobile phone.
Tell me you are not going to stop right there to open that message!
So, since we are talking about sales relationships, how do you write a break up email the prospect will finally respond to?
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Go through a variety of filters to zero in on the leads you want to reach. This is crazy specific, but you could find all the people that match the following:
- A company in the Financial Services or Banking industry
- Who have more than 10 employees
- That spend money on Adwords
- Who use Hubspot
- Who currently have job openings for marketing help
- With the role of HR Manager
- That has only been in this role for less than 1 year
How To Write A Professional Sales Breakup Email – 7 Tips
Before you sit down to write a sales break up email, and to give it the right tone, it is crucial to consider the reasons why the prospect has gone cold.
Some of those reasons could be:
- Was busy and couldn’t reply to your emails,
- We changed our tech stack, which fixed our problem,
- We decided to proceed with another vendor,
- The solution isn’t a fit for our setup,
- Funds are tight right now,
You can assume some of the reasons above if your email analytics show that your previous emails were opened but not responded to. But if the emails were never opened, there isn’t any software available yet that tells you what their reason for not responding could be.
That is what makes writing a sales breakup email not as straightforward as it may seem. To help you write one that has a better chance of re-engaging your cold prospects, we will break the email down to its main parts and give you tips on each.
To start, what do you title a breakup email?
Breakup email subject line
1 Be clear about what the email is about
You are writing a breakup email because your previous communications have not been responded to. The emails are hitting the prospect’s inbox and they are probably seeing them. Yet they are not opening them.
So if there’s anything that will nudge them this time it is the headline, which is that subject line. It must catch their attention and get them to open the email. For that to happen, you have to be clear that you intend to end the relationship.
Here are some examples:
- Goodbye, [prospect’s name],
- It’s time to part ways,
- Thank you/Goodbye from [your company’s name]
- I guess this is goodbye
- Permission to close your file
Breakup email body
2 Keep it short
Always assume that the prospect is busy, as you may usually be. So for the sake of all involved, keep the breakup email short. Get straight to the reason you are writing.
You are writing because the prospect has not responded to your previous emails, probably because their circumstances have changed and it’s no longer a priority, they can’t afford it right now, or they chose another vendor. So say that right away.
3 Keep emotions out
The breakup email is about you realizing that the prospect may no longer be interested in your product. So, other than reminding them of the value they are losing, it should not push for a sale. It must be free of emotions and state unambiguously that you accept you may not be a fit for them.
They may also have missed your emails because they were busy, which means there may be hope they can now re-engage. So you can point that out too.
4 Don’t guilt-trip the prospect
You are not going to win the prospect back by making it clear to them that it’s their fault the relationship is ending and that it’s their loss. It’s your job to win them over.
5 Ask a question
You will find it easier to close their file and move on to more promising prospects if you know the reason they have not responded to your approaches. So ask them.
A subtle way to ask is to list possible reasons they have not responded – like those we have already assumed above, You then ask them which of 1,2, and 3 is true. They could oblige with an answer.
But don’t stop there.
6 Leave them an option to reconnect
Their answer to the question you asked above should guide your next steps. If they are no longer interested, tell them they will not hear from you again.
It’s also important to leave the door open for future engagement, perhaps when their circumstances change. Ask them when it will be most convenient to take your call or chat over coffee if they have been too busy to reply before.
7 Leave them with something of value
The breakup email is also an opportunity to show the prospect you have always cared about their success. Even though you accept that the relationship has come to an end, you wish them well.
And to show that you leave them with something that will help them manage their problem. This should be a low-commitment resource that can help them with the business challenges they are dealing with, like a free e-book or whitepaper download.
Tell them they are free to get in touch with you whenever they are ready. This will leave a positive impression on the prospect and prevent it from becoming an awkward goodbye.
When you end things this way, it becomes a break, not a breakup, as they may well re-engage.
Sales Breakup Email Template
With all the tips we have shared, our sales breakup email template could look something like this:
Subject line: I guess this is goodbye
Hi, [prospect’s name]
I have emailed you several times regarding our offer to help your company collect more leads, but you have not responded.
If you are not interested in our solution, this is the last email I will send you. If you have been busy when would be most convenient for you to take my call or chat over coffee?
Before I go, I thought these free resources could help with your lead-generation efforts:
- Resource A
- Resource B
- Resource C
Best wishes.
This sales breakup email shows you accept that you may be a mismatch and must end the relationship. It shows that you don’t force yourself on your prospects. Those free resources will serve as lead magnets that will keep your product as something for the prospect to consider in the future.
Of course, this template will not work in every scenario, and there are many other variations you could try. Funny breakup emails can lighten the mood for what is never an enjoyable email to write or read, so you can try them as well.
Do Sales Breakup Emails Work?
Do you like losing prospects? No, but you don’t like to run after lost causes either, wasting time following up on leads that have gone cold. So sales breakup emails give you a clean break from a prospect that is unlikely to become a paying customer.
From that perspective, breakup emails serve an important purpose.
When done right, sales breakup emails can get a stalled sale moving again. If the last-ditch attempt to re-engage the client fails, it should not feel like you have lost a sale because you were in fact trying to revive one.
Need Help Automating Your Sales Prospecting Process?
LeadFuze gives you all the data you need to find ideal leads, including full contact information.
Go through a variety of filters to zero in on the leads you want to reach. This is crazy specific, but you could find all the people that match the following:
- A company in the Financial Services or Banking industry
- Who have more than 10 employees
- That spend money on Adwords
- Who use Hubspot
- Who currently have job openings for marketing help
- With the role of HR Manager
- That has only been in this role for less than 1 year
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