Write a cold message

1. Why a cold message has a different job

You are writing to somebody who does not know you and does not trust you, and the consequence is measured in seconds rather than in argument.

Attention is a spectrum, and where you sit on it decides your budget. When a family member calls and wastes your time, you eventually say you have to go — but not immediately. Somebody you are familiar with gets more of your time. Somebody you are less familiar with gets less. Somebody you do not know at all gets seconds.

So the two halves of the message each fix one of those problems. They did not like you before, so you personalize. They do not trust you, so you give them a large, quick, free result.

2. Personalize: act like you know them

The aim is to make a cold message feel like a warm one — to make it feel like a friend reaching out. The best way to do that is to actually know something about the person you are contacting.

Move	What it buys you
Matching their area code on a phone call	A higher pickup rate, because the number might belong to somebody they know or who knows them
Knowing their name	A couple of extra seconds
Knowing something about them	More seconds than that

The action step. Do a little research on each lead before you send anything. When you have the list of names, collect a small snippet about each one. Then include that snippet in whatever you send — cold call, cold email, cold direct message, any of them, because you can do all three.

Why it works is not politeness; it is self-interest. A generic message gets deleted as fast as the recipient can manage it. A message showing that somebody took the time to understand the business, the needs and a little of the background will usually get read, because people are interested in themselves. The job of the snippet is to borrow that interest.

So invest the time in it. Pay people to do it, or pay the software that does it — software for this exists now.

3. Give a large, quick, free result

Personalization gets the message opened. The second half is what makes it worth having opened.

Aim well past curiosity. The value you are about to hand over should astonish them within 30 seconds. That is what the lead magnet is for, and it is why the lead magnet comes first in the sequence of things you build.

Make the lead magnet exceptional. Not adequate — exceptional, to the point where saying no feels stupid. If your cold outreach is not working, this is the component to fix.

The measured breakthrough: offer what other people charge for. One company multiplied its outbound response rates threefold, after months of work, by changing what it offered free on the phone. The distinction matters and is easy to get backward:

Wrong version	Right version
Offer something so good that you could charge for it	Offer something other people do charge for

The reason the second works better is that the prospect already has an anchor for what it is worth. They know that thing costs businesses money, so the free version is legible to them immediately — and they are significantly more likely to respond.

The conditions on that figure. It is one company's number, it came after months of working on the outbound system, and it is the result of changing the offer rather than the copy.

4. How long the message should be

Shorter than you think, which is the point of stating it as a rule.

Format	Length
Phone scripts	Never more than a page or two
Chat scripts	Never more than a page or two
Emails	Rarely more than half a page
A first direct message	Might only be two or three sentences

None of that is a lot of writing. The reason for saying so is that the action is the reaching out, not the script — and the script is where people hide from the reaching out.

The same point, put as a return on time: you will learn more from your first hundred cold calls than from a hundred books about how to cold call. Getting started is the higher-return use of the hour.

5. The order to write it in

Step	What you do
1	Take the name off your list
2	Do a little research and collect one snippet about them
3	Open with the snippet, so it reads as though you know them
4	Give the largest, quickest result you can afford to give — the lead magnet, or the offer
5	Keep it inside the lengths in section 4
6	Run it through the reading-level check on SOP 31 before it goes out
7	Send it, and follow up on the schedule on SOP 29

The same order on a live call. Spoken, the opening is a run of short beats, and you leave a pause after the first two for them to answer:

Beat	What you say
1	Their name, then stop
2	Your first name, then stop
3	Something you learned about them, a compliment on it, and ideally how it helped you
4	What you do, in a single line
5	A nearby business (whether they know it does not matter) and the result it got
6	Whether they offer what that business offers
7	That the same campaign could run for them
8	A light question that takes for granted they would welcome the result
9	A specific time later that day to walk them through it

In one invented example, a caller rings the owner of a bike repair shop. She says his name, then her own; praises the shop's recent post on fitting winter tires and says it saved her a trip; says she sets up online booking for repair shops; names a shop two towns over that filled its Saturday slots; asks whether this shop also does tune-ups; says the same setup could work here; asks, half joking, whether a full Saturday would be a problem; and offers half past three that afternoon. The details in this example are invented. Open with the pitch instead and the call probably ends; the personal beats are what keep them on the line. The pause and the borrowed third-party name are also on SOP 30.

6. One advanced note, marked as advanced

If you can make cold work, run your warm outreach the same way.

The reasoning is that a cold audience is the hardest audience to establish value and trust with quickly. Any method that does that to a stranger will do considerably more for somebody who already knows you.

This is a pro tip rather than the standing instruction, and it is kept out of the main steps for being a complication.

7. The checklist

Question	The answer
Who runs this	You
The two halves, in order	Personalize, then give a large, quick, free result
The order on a live call	Name, your name, what you learned, what you do, a nearby result, whether they offer the same, the same campaign for them, a light question, a time today
What personalization is	Acting like you know them, on the strength of one researched snippet
What the value is	The lead magnet, or the offer, given as fast as you can
How good the lead magnet has to be	Exceptional — good enough that saying no feels stupid
What to offer free	Something other people charge for
Phone and chat script length	A page, or two
Email length	Rarely more than half a page
First direct message length	Perhaps only two or three sentences
How many words a cold email should be	Not established on this page
What the response rate should be	Not established on this page

8. What this page does not cover

Building the list this message goes to is on SOP 27. How many of these to send, how often to follow up and what the yields look like are on SOP 29. The voicemail variant, which borrows a third party's name instead of a researched snippet, is on SOP 30. The reading level to write all of it at is on SOP 31. Choosing and building the lead magnet itself is on SOP 13, and the acknowledge, compliment and ask pattern for replies is on SOP 14.

Legal compliance in your region and the pricing of what you eventually sell are not covered on this page.