What to Send with that Letter of Introduction
(Don’t miss the Letter of Introduction Free Book Offer at the end of this post.)
Hoping to obtain a meeting with a senior executive, you have drafted a letter of introduction and rewritten it a dozen times, whittled and honed it down to three terse paragraphs. Without wasting a syllable it states who you are, what you want, and why the client will want to give it to you.
At the end of the first paragraph, which describes your firm, you have written,
”I have attached __________________.” Uncertain what to include, you have not completed the sentence, but the letter must go out today, and so you must decide.
If you send the letter electronically, the choices are:
- A link to your website, which includes a client list, partner bios, descriptions of work done by the firm, a list of services and other information
- A link to an electronic reprint of a an article you wrote
- A link to the firm’s newsletter
- A one page description of a case or project the firm worked on, also available on the website.
If you send a paper letter of introduction, your choices are:
- A twelve-page glossy brochure
- A client list
- A one page description of a case or project the firm worked on
- A list of firm publications available on request
- Your bio and those of others in the firm
What would you send?Here are some guidelines:
- Less is more. The less you send with a document, the more it looks like executive-to-executive correspondence. More attachments make it look more like a pitch or a mass mailing. Don’t send the brochure. DON’T send the brochure.
- more senior the executive, the more that less is more, if you follow my drift. Just in case you don’t, let me repeat that in other words. Very top executives don’t read a lot of marketing collateral; they don’t have time for reading through mass-mailed documents or anything that looks like one. So with letters to senior execs, you really want to reduce enclosures to a minimum. Consider sending your letter without any attachments.
- If the receiver has never heard of you or your firm, it sometimes helps to send some form of external validation, such as an article about you or your firm or a reprint of an article you have published in a journal he would recognize. But keep it small, because less is more. An exception might be a copy of a book you or a colleague from your firm has written, because, by its nature it appears substantive rather than salesy.
- If your objective is something other than getting a meeting, you might want to attach a little more. A letter sent primarily to remind an executive of who you are and what you do may benefit from a short attachment, like a reprint of an article that mentions you, a reprint of an article you wrote of relevance to the person you are writing to. But skip the brochure.
- You have more flexibility if you send an email, because you can create links to your website that are subtle because they look like a standard link appearing in all your documents.
And when should you use the brochures, you might ask? Many find that they are really good for toasting marshmallows.
My Letter of Introduction Free Book Offer: I am looking for examples of good emails and letters of introduction used by professionals. After changing or blocking out any names of people or firms that you wish to keep private, please send your best samples by April 21, 2008 to fharding@HardingCo.com.
I will send copies of one of my books, Rain Making-2nd Edition-Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field or Creating Rainmakers to the two people who, in my opinion, provide the best examples. Be sure to include your name, mailing address and phone number with your submission.
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Order your copy of Ford Harding’s new and revised edition of Rain Making, called ”…an essential guide for anyone responsible for business development in the professional services industry…” - Mark Mactas, Chairman and CEO Towers Perrin
