5 tips for writing e-mail subject lines that'll get recipients to read on One of the most important elements of your e-mail communications is the subject line. Next to the "from" address--which should be a recognizable company name--the subject line will determine whether your e-mail gets opened.Writing a great subject line is no small challenge. You only have a few words to make it compelling, urgent and specific--without sounding too sales-like or misleading your readers. Here are some tips for writing subject lines that'll get great results.1. Keep it short and sweet. Do your best to keep your subject lines under 50 characters, including spaces, as most e-mail clients display 50 characters or less. A recent study done by e-mail monitoring company Return Path showed that subject lines with 49 or fewer characters had open rates 12.5 percent higher than those with 50 or more characters. The study also found that click-through rates for subject lines with 49 or fewer characters were 75 percent higher than for those with 50 or more characters. Want to increase your open and click-through rates? Keep your subject line short and sweet.2. Be specific. A ...

The battle drill is a tool that soldiers use to practice fundamental skills for their trade. The one that comes to mind immediately is Battle Drill #6 for the Military Police. I think of this one because I had to do this a hundred times (at least) in my military career.Battle drill 6 was the act of dismounting a MK 19 grenade launcher from a turret and placing it on a tripod away from the vehicle. Sounds easy enough but when the MK19 weighs in at 72 lbs, it can be a challenge after the 12th evolution and you are being timed to standard.But we did this drill time and time again for the shear fact that when on the battlefield you needed to know how to do this quickly, safely, and correct to complete your mission.Drills like these were rehearsed with most of our free time to keep us sharp and on top of our game. The same should be done in business.Sales leaders should develop their own drills that are specific to their industries. For example I work in a hosted application space for a company called NetSuite that competes with SalesForce.com (CRM) (Who I can say is ...

I am a huge fan of LinkedIn as many of my colleagues can tell you. I found this post from another blogger that explains why LinkedIn is such a great tool. I have listed the top 5 reasons. Go to his blog to read the others. The original poster has the largest LinkedIn network known of. The average number of LinkedIn connections for people who work at Google is forty-seven. The average number for Harvard Business School grads is fifty-eight, so you could skip the MBA, work at Google, and probably get most of the connections you need. Later, you can hire Harvard MBAs to prepare your income taxes. People with more than twenty connections are thirty-four times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than five. All 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. In fact, 499 of them are represented by director-level and above employees. According to my inside sources, the person with the most pending LinkedIn invitations is...Guy Kawasaki. (Though I’m not sure if I should be proud or ashamed of this factoid.)Most people use LinkedIn to “get to someone” in order to make a sale, form a partnership, or get a job. It ...