Anyone know what the Voight-Kampff test is?

It was administered in the science fiction classic ‘Blade Runner’ to ascertain if a subject is human or replicant.

It was a series of questions designed to elicit emotions (that replicants don’t have) by monitoring physiological responses, like pupillary motion and reaction time. 

Here’s the thing: 

Although these signals were weak and small, on detection they revealed a gulf between a warm human and a cold, uncaring replicant.

And what, you may ask, does this have to do with prospecting? Or data insertion points for that matter?

Read on, and all will be revealed.

The perfect prospecting mail

The last thing you want is your prospecting mail to read as if it has been sent to hundreds of people.
It should read one-to-one and personal.
That is how best to elicit a response.

It should come across as warm and human not cold and calculating.
After all, no-one wants to do business with a replicant.

Data insertion points

One of the best ways to provide that personal touch is by using personalized data insertion points in
your copy.

At the simplest level, this can be use of a |NAME|.
Time signals also work really well, particularly mention of a specific |WEEKDAY| or rooting your
mail temporally by mentioning whether it is |MORNING_OR_AFTERNOON|.

Mention of your prospect’s |COMPANY| can also be powerful, as can mention of the
|INDUSTRY| that they work in or the |JOBTITLE| (role) that they hold.

But consider this:
Hi David Demontcrief,
I’d love to grab 10 minutes with you to quickly run through how we can help ACME Plc Limited make
headway in the General Manufacturing market this year.
We’re actually not too far from you in Brighton & Hove, United Kingdom, so I was hoping to swing by
for a coffee.
As Operations & Efficiencies Manager (Job Share), I thought you’d be interested in hearing…

The highlighted words are data insertion points.
But, rather than enhancing the personalization these are acting like sure-fire giveaways that this is
not a personal note but a mass-mailed, cold email.
They stick out like sore thumbs – or like the lack of pupillary motion of a replicant.

Informalized data

Let’s clean up our data points and run the same prospecting mail through it again.
Here’s what you get:

Hi David,
I’d love to grab 10 minutes with you to quickly run through how we can help ACME make headway in
the manufacturing space this year.
We’re actually not too far from you in sunny Brighton, so I was hoping to swing by for a coffee.
As Operations Manager, I thought you’d be interested in hearing…

All of that clunky sense of forced data insertion give way to a natural-sounding, bright and breezy
personal mail.
Which is what you want.

‘More human than human is our motto.’

So says Tyrell, the manufacturer of replicants, in Blade Runner.
And that is our aim in prospecting too.
So, don’t let your clunky data insertions give the game away!