A simple AI cold outreach hack that has totally overwhelmed my calendar

Today I'm going to give you a highly actionable gem to get more calls/opportunities, whether that's in the acquisition space, or in other high ticket consulting...

I've never been much of a fan of cold email. In fact, the thought of it would make me shudder - list building, copywriting, etc, just to be ignored by 99% of recipients.

But this year, I have been absolutely swamped with meetings and opportunities for potential acquisitions. So I'm going to break down the exact tool-stack and strategy we use.

And this one AI tool we included in the stack decreased our input by 99%, and multiplied our response rate ten-fold.

Firstly, the data...

List building is a disgusting process. It's slow, tedious, and a terrible use of any entrepreneur's time. Yet the cold email experts all say that the success of a campaign is dependent on the quality of the list.

We use Apollo for all our data and list building. We apply our filters, export the list, and plug it straight into our email sending software. Apollo has worked like magic for us, and I'm in a market where data is notoriously terrible and difficult to acquire at scale.

Then we take that CSV and plug it into an AI data enrichment tool called Clay. Before we added this step, results were average at best - not very exciting at all. After adding this, I literally cannot keep up with the amount of responses we're getting.

Let me break it down for you...

Apollo provides a couple of important datapoints for us: business name, owner name, email address, and website URL.

Clay is a data enriching tool, and to be quite honest, I don't know exactly what the hell that means. But theres a feature that allows you to scrape the web URLs within the website URL listed by Apollo. We scrape these URLs, and pull all of the website text into our excel sheet of leads. So each lead now contains business name, owner name, email address, website URL, AND WEBSITE TEXT.

Then, you can tell Clay to use ChatGPT to, in another column, write a personalised email intro. Here's the exact prompt I use:

============================================

You are Dimitri Nikolakakis, the Founding Director of Great Western Industries, a South African industrial holding company. You are writing a confidential letter to the owner of <company name>.

Write the SECOND paragraph of this letter (No more than 100 words). This paragraph is intended to demonstrate the the email is highly personalised, and meant specifically for the recipient. Explain why you are specifically interested in THEM based on their website text.

Guidelines:

1. The "Hook": Analyze the provided website text. Open this sentence with "What stands out about is...". In the middle of the paragraph, specifically mention their key product line, their long history (e.g., "40-year track record"), or their niche manufacturing capability.

2. The Connection: Conclude the paragraph by stating that this specific reputation makes them a strong fit for your acquisition criteria.

3. Tone: Serious, professional, and respectful, but personal. No marketing fluff (e.g., avoid "exciting," "cutting-edge," "world-class"). Remember, you are speaking directly to the owner of the business, so when referring to the company, use pronouns such as "your", as opposed to "their". The first time you make reference to the company, use the company name, and not a pronoun. Never refer to the company in the third person.

4. Format: Single paragraph. Do not use "Dear [Name]" (this is already in the letter).

5. Spacing: The Hook and Connection should be separated by a line break, so that it is easily readable\digestible.

============================================

This is an example output:

What stands out about REDACTED is the breadth of your turnkey REDACTED offering—particularly your PRODUCTS REDACTED, robotics and bespoke jigs and fixtures—and the way your engineering and fabrication capabilities are presented as end-to-end solutions, suggesting a long, disciplined track record (a 40-year track record in similar firms is the profile we seek).
This specific reputation for reliable, niche industrial automation makes your business a strong fit for our acquisition criteria.

And it does that for every single one of our leads... Thousands of them...

Then, we throw that CSV with all of those details into Instantly, the cold email sending software. We write a template, with the usual field references such as {first_name}, but include, at the beginning of the email, {AI_intro}.

And we now have the ability to send thousands of highly customised cold emails. I've literally had people phone me and say "hey, I get emails like this all the time, but I'm calling because yours was so thoughtful and you've clearly researched to understand our business".

I'm not exaggerating when I say I'm being overwhelmed by the responses. We have also duplicated this approach across our physical mail campaigns.

Give it a go, let me know your thoughts!

Dim Niko