I recently pitched a procurement manager at a major company. One breath to convince him I was worth talking to, which is standard. We had a conversation and at the end he told me if I wanted an appointment I should write him a letter and put it in his mailbox.
I thought he was having me on.
He wasn’t. He explained that he receives over 800 emails a day from salespeople. He has two full time staff whose sole job is deleting them. But if someone bothered to write him a physical letter he knew three things immediately. He’d spoken to them, he’d qualified them, and they’d made enough effort to put pen to paper. That letter went to the top of the pile.
I wrote the letter. I got the appointment.
Why It Works Now When It Didn’t Before
Twenty years ago email was the novelty channel. Getting an email felt significant. Meanwhile everyone was drowning in physical mail, catalogues, brochures, flyers, direct mail campaigns. The letterbox was the noisy channel and the inbox was where you actually paid attention.
That has completely reversed. The inbox is now the noisiest place in business and the letterbox is almost empty. A physical letter or card arriving in the mail in 2026 gets noticed precisely because nothing else is there.
Nobody does it anymore. Which is exactly why it works.
How to Use It
Write to twenty prospects you haven’t been able to crack through email or phone. A real letter, on decent paper, with a genuine message. Not a mail merged template with their name pasted in. Something that shows you know who they are and why you’re reaching out to them specifically.
It doesn’t need to be long. A short, direct, handwritten or well presented letter is more powerful than a three paragraph email that took thirty seconds to send and looks like every other cold outreach they received that day.
Send Christmas cards to every client you won this year. Not an e-card. A real one. I do a piece of original art for my clients every year and post it to them. It costs time and thought and that’s precisely the point. It lands on a desk and stays there. A digital message disappears in seconds.
The Takeaway
Pick ten prospects you haven’t been able to reach this month. Write them a real letter this week. Not an email, not a LinkedIn message. An actual letter in an actual envelope with an actual stamp.
It will feel strange because nobody does it anymore. That’s the whole point.
