Job-change leads are gems for sales and marketing teams because they’re qualified warm leads. Let alone the fact that previous champions are 114% more likely to convert.

A volatile market and tighter budgets have also made customer job-change playbooks necessary for revenue teams trying to do more with less. 

But knowing your champion just switched jobs is one thing. Writing an email that keeps you top of mind and gets you a meeting with their new company is much harder.

Not sure where to start?

Sara Angell, Director of Account Development at UserGems, and Jen Allen-Knuth, Community Growth Manager at Lavender, share their tips for writing effective job-change outreach emails to help you reach your revenue goals.

You can watch the full webinar here or keep scrolling for the highlights.

Tips for better job-change outreach emails

A job change is a sales trigger that most salespeople look out for. That’s why when someone changes jobs, they’ll usually get a ton of congratulatory emails that include a not-so-subtle sales pitch.

Your message might be one in hundreds of sales emails they’ll receive in their first month on the job. 

So how can write an email that breaks through the noise and leads to a meeting with decision-makers? Try following these tips.

1. Humanize your outreach

There are thousands of marketing and sales intelligence tools and integrations available to help you scale personalized marketing activities. While knowing someone’s first name might have made a difference in the past, your competitors probably have access to the same biodata information you have.

To avoid sounding like every other email in a prospect’s inbox, Jen Allen recommends getting personal about their business.

“Show that person you’re not hitting the easy button,” says Jen. “[Show them] you’re looking at their business and thinking critically about what they want to achieve. You’re going to make an observation, not fully confident that you’re right, and will phrase it with a tonality that does not suggest you know everything when you’ve never worked in their business.”

When writing an outreach email, Jen explains, “I want to demonstrate to that person that I’m not reaching out because they’re an easy target, but because there’s a valid ‘why you, why now’ that has something to do with something their business is trying to get done. And also [show] something I know from working with other companies and executives trying to do the same thing and piece the puzzle together.”

Personalizing your outreach ensures you send a thoughtful and relevant message that goes beyond the “Congrats on your new job” emails that have flooded their inbox. And based on Lavender's internal data, these personalized emails can double your reply rate.

2. Don’t be too reactive

While most people in the sales world know that new executives want to make an impact in their first 100 days, Jen points out that economic uncertainty has made buyers more cautious about spending money. 

“The very last thing that most buyers want to do in their first 30 days is start lighting money on fire,” says Jen. “When there’s as much market uncertainty as there is right now, it creates a risk aversion behavior. [As a new executive and buyer], I’m going to make sure that when I ask for money in my first 30 days, I don’t look like I’m spending it irresponsibly.”

Sara Angell, Director of Development at UserGems, agrees with her and cautions against being reactive. “Internally and for our customers, we don’t subscribe to reaching out with the mentality of ‘we have to get them in the first 30 days’ for job-change leads,” says Sara. “It is still important to reach out to them quickly the first time, but no ask at this stage. We recommend a couple of weeks to a month before you start going in really hard, building that value, and working up to the ask.”

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3. Give before you ask 

Most of the other SDRs will jump right into sales prospecting by reaching out to pitch their products. We recommend that you focus on establishing a relationship instead.

“For our customers and how we do it internally, the first outreach is reminding them about the relationship since we are approaching people who have some knowledge of us either as a customer or user,” Sara says. “Providing value or a gift is a great way to stand out.”

Read through the job description to understand the pain point their role is trying to address. This information can help you to position yourself as a valuable resource they can count on to achieve their goals, boosting your chances of getting the prospect’s attention.

4. Block one day a month to reach out to job-change leads

While we don’t recommend bombarding your ideal customers with emails, you still need to monitor them and follow up consistently. 

“Block off one day each month to check in on your job-change leads,’ says Sara Angell, Director of Account Development at UserGems. “Make it a hot lead day so nothing falls through the cracks, but you’re not obsessing over LinkedIn notifications. Use the day to review your accounts and see who has changed jobs, then do your messaging that day.”

5. Avoid these mistakes when writing your email

Even if you follow best practices for when and how to reach out to job-change prospects, there’s still a chance you could stumble when writing the actual outreach email. Jen shares some surprising tactics that have worked for them at Lavender. 

Here’s what to keep in mind:

• Subject lines: Keep it boring and between 3-5 words instead of going for a flashy subject line. Jen explains that buyers are now familiar with exaggerated subject lines and will probably delete them without bothering to read them.
• Simplicity: You might be trying to impress new prospects with buzzwords and fancy language. But your prospect is likely busy and doesn’t have time to try to figure out what you’re trying to say. Instead, keep things short, simple, and to the point. Writing at a 3rd-5th grade reading level leads to 68% more replies (Lavender Data).
• Tone: Don’t make assumptions during your value proposition. Writing authoritatively on your prospect’s business based on assumptions can be off-putting to the buyer and seem arrogant, leading to 26% fewer replies. Jen explains that using language that sounds unassuming can actually improve your reply rate. For example, “I don’t work in your organization but I was thinking that this might be affecting your business.”
• Brevity: Your emails should be less than 50 words. “Every time I [shorten] an email, I realize I’m much clearer and it’s easier to understand what I’m trying to convey.”
• The ask: Your main goal is to get a reply from your prospect, not a meeting. This is because in the early days, the buyer is trying to settle into their role, not add more meetings to their calendar. Adding 0-1 questions simplifies the conversation, making it easier for them to reply and giving you a chance to build on the conversation in the future.
• Personalization: Show that you’ve done the extra work to understand the prospect’s pain point. You can use trigger-based email frameworks to personalize your emails and 2x your reply rates.

Automate your job-change email outreach to book more meetings

Although sales managers understand the value of job-change leads and how targeting them can reduce pipeline anxiety, many still struggle with scaling the sales process. Manually tracking these leads and setting up an outreach email campaign is time-consuming and sales reps often fail to act on these quickly enough.

Make it easy for your sales teams to follow best practices, develop workflows, and increase conversion rates with job-change email outreach by using tools like Lavender to simplify writing and sending out emails. And try UserGems to automate the outreach process from tracking and surfacing job-change leads in your CRM to enabling alerts to shorten the time-to-action.

UserGems is pipeline generation software that helps revenue teams generate and protect revenue efficiently. With UserGems, companies can track and automate outreach when their champions change their jobs and capture the buying groups to find the warmest path into every account.

Companies like Mimecast, Greenhouse, and Medallia use UserGems to reach their revenue goals quickly and efficiently.