Client and business letters
B2B prospecting letter examples
A prospecting letter sent on paper is competing with nothing, which is the whole reason to send one. The inbox it would otherwise arrive in holds two hundred unread messages; the desk it lands on holds four things. That advantage is spent the moment the letter reads like an email that has been printed out.
Written by Autopen Australia · Updated
Where you have a genuine reason to write
[FIRST NAME],
[BUSINESS NAME] opened a second site in [SUBURB] in [MONTH]. The thing that usually breaks at that point is not demand, it is that the system which ran one site quietly stops working across two.
We have taken about a dozen businesses through that exact transition in [INDUSTRY]. I am not going to pretend to know whether it applies to you.
If it does, my direct line is below and a ten-minute conversation will tell us both. If it does not, you will not hear from me again.
[NAME], [DIRECT LINE]
Where the only thing you know is the industry
Weaker, and honest about being weaker. Lead with the problem rather than pretending to specific knowledge.
[FIRST NAME],
I work with [INDUSTRY] businesses in [STATE] and there is one problem that comes up in almost every first conversation: [PROBLEM].
I do not know whether it is yours. If it is, I can tell you in ten minutes what the three usual causes are and which one it normally turns out to be, whether or not you ever become a client.
[NAME], [DIRECT LINE]
To somebody who has been recommended to you
[FIRST NAME],
[REFERRER] suggested I write to you. We have worked together for [NUMBER] years and they thought [BUSINESS NAME] might be at a similar point to where they were in [YEAR].
I will not take up much of your time on paper. If the introduction is worth following up, my number is below; if the timing is wrong, [REFERRER] will tell me and that is the end of it.
[NAME], [DIRECT LINE]
Getting it right
- What to mention. Why this business specifically, in the first sentence. One thing you know about their situation that you could not know about a list. A small, concrete next step.
- What to leave out. "I hope this letter finds you well". A paragraph about your company before you have earned it. A request for "fifteen minutes to explore synergies", which asks for the largest thing in the letter.
- How long. 90 to 150 words. A prospecting letter is allowed more room than a thank-you note because it has to establish why it exists at all.
- How personal. Write as one person to one person. A letter signed by a company reads as a mailout, and a letter signed by a named human with a direct line does not.
- When not to send one. When you cannot say anything specific about the recipient. A generic letter on good paper is still a generic letter, and it burns the address.
Personalising more than a handful
The fields that earn their place here: [FIRST NAME], [BUSINESS NAME], [SUBURB], [INDUSTRY], [REFERRER], [MONTH].
The industry field is where these letters give themselves away. "I work with cafe businesses" reads as a merge; "I work with cafes" reads as English. Write the sentence so every value in your column fits it grammatically, or split the run.
Before any run, read the piece with the longest value in your data, the shortest, and the empty one. If all three read as English the merge is sound. Personalising direct mail at scale covers the rest.
Sending these at volume
A prospecting run only works at a size where the response rate has somewhere to land, and that size is always more letters than one salesperson can write while also selling.
Autopen Australia writes each piece individually with a real ballpoint, personalises every piece from your list, written into the sentence rather than dropped into a gap, hand-addresses the envelopes and lodges the run with Australia Post, or sends it back to you to release in waves.
Planning a run to a list you have built? Get an exact price
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