Skip to main content

Why You Should Use Active Voice In Your Sales Email Pitch

I love to write content, especially email sales pitches, in the active voice to prospects and leads.

The active voice often results in a clearer and more concise sentence which is easier to read than in the passive voice.

Sentences in the passive voice tend to put more unnecessary words in your sentences and often it make your sentences sound vague.

As a salesperson, you want to come across as clear and concise, not long winded and vague.

An example of a sentence in the active voice looks like this - "We deduced that your downtime is caused by sudden CPU spikes".

On the other hand, the passive voice looks like this - "The downtime was deduced by us to be caused by sudden CPU spikes".

Which of the above do you prefer?

If you have problems remembering the differences between active and passive voice, here is a simple guide.

Active - Who does what?

Passive - What is being done by whom?

Even from this guiding sentences, the active voice keeps the sentence short and sweet.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

3 Challenges Of Targeting Singapore SMEs For IT Solutions

IT vendors in Singapore love to target the SMEs (Small Medium Enterprise) in Singapore due to the sheer volume of SMEs here. I learned that targeting SMEs here require a special understanding of the environment, especially when it comes to IT solutions SMEs are defined as enterprise with less than 200 staff and annual revenue of not more than SGD2 million dollars. The sheer number of Singapore makes the industry a "honey pot" for any IT vendors. Source: http://www.singstat.gov.sg There are 216,900 enterprises in Singapore and 99% are made up of SMES and they contribute close to half of the S$367.00 billion nominal value created. While targeting SMEs is a must, I have experienced some the challenges around the way and look to share with readers here. Challenge 1: SMEs may not have a dedicated IT person It is impossible for SMEs to avoid having any IT today as the Internet has made IT a must have. In my discussions with SMEs, it came to a surprise that most SM...

Let Me Sell You This Pen!

How would I sell you this pen? I see lots of linkedin posts about selling pens these days. Looks like there is drum up demand for pen salespeople. On a serious note, if I will gauge your interest in getting a pen. By doing so, I would be asking why you need this pen. From the answer, I probably be able to gauge your interest. You need this pen because you need to sign lots of documents. So probably I will introduce you to a pen that would write and last longer than other pens. Or you need a write upside down or write in zero gravity. In this scenerio, I would probably introduce you to a pencil instead. If you just want to find out more about the pen, or just window shopping for a pen, I would still take time to intro you to some pens, but I wouldn't count on you for a sale. Though, I would put you in our mailing list so you will receive our EDMs on pens and maybe there comes a time you be in the market for a pen. Selling a pen is a test of identifying what your sales ta...

What's The Strangest Thing A Customer Asked To Monitor

I was asked today what was the strangest thing a customer ever asked us if we could a monitor. "A IT manager in a legal firm asked if we could monitor his copier/printer," I replied. Apparently, when the lawyers are photocopying or printing and they run out of paper, they blame the IT manager because his is in charge of the IT devices. Interestingly, the first thing we can discover and monitor in the offices are usually those copier printers type. Apparently the printer SNMP is able to show paper levels. So now with a IT monitoring software, when the paper levels run low, it will send a email to the admin staff and the admin staff will top up the papers. The legal firm also saw less cursing and swearing at the copier printer.