I had a client recently who wanted a letter of introduction for a company he was prospecting in the hope of clinching a $300k plus supply deal.
He runs a highly specialised manufacturing business, producing replacement parts for a very expensive make of packaging machinery, and wanted a letter to introduce his company and muscle in on the huge contract they were offering to a new spare sparts supplier.
Now while my client is in the States his prospect is in Singapore, so one of his main requirements was that we kept the tone a little more ‘business like’ than the regular mail outs he sends to American firms. Another important factor was to keep things tight – there were more than a hundred other companies in the running for the contract and many were in Asia, giving them a real edge geographically.
The letter actually took me about three days to finish after I’d trimmed everything down, which took some doing as my client had a lot of key points he wanted to make.
So I sent my client the final draft – he loved it – sent it off immediately and received a reply within 3 hours taking him up on his offer of a free sample.
The rest, as they say, is history. Three weeks later I had an email thanking me for my work, and informing me my client had signed a 3-year deal netting him 6 figures a year. What really made me glow was that he’s taken on two new staff to cope with the increased workload.
Enough, I won’t go on, you’re still reading this because of the letter – so here it is (with names deleted), let me know what you think…
Dear XXXX
As chairman of XXXX, a leading global manufacturer of (PRODUCT DESCRIPTION) systems, I’d like to take a moment of your time to introduce our company and invite you to test our precision tooling for rebuilding your XXXX equipment.
In a cost driven industry where maintaining production and minimising downtime is essential, our tooling solutions for XXXX are consistently reliable, high performing and very competitively priced.
As well as saving money and reducing wastage XXXX tooling provides an effective way to increase service life and productivity, cutting costs and offering a workable in-house solution to reducing wastage.
Our products are built to the highest standards in the USA and we ship worldwide. I am so confident in the quality of both our tooling and the service we provide, that I would like to offer you a free trial of our XXXX compatible precision tooling, for the consideration of you and your team.
If this is something that is of interest to you, please feel free to contact me, either by email or telephone.
Sincerely XXXX XXXX