The research, the opener and the Loom attachment that finally moves a cold email from the inbox to reply. When the conventional wisdom on cold outreach fails you, forget the numbers game and focus on quality.
Naison Pillay is a senior GTM engineer who’s built 85+ AI sales systems for SA businesses. His own lead-gen build drove a 300% lift in qualified enquiries at Powerbrick Africa in 90 days. He runs all his cold outreach off the same structure, and it starts with a research step most founders skip.
Here’s how to really write a cold email…
The move: write one email to one person at a time
The most common mistake in cold outreach is volume thinking. Send 500 emails, get 5 replies, the math works. It doesn’t; volume thinking produces emails that read like volume, and those get deleted before they’re finished.
“Make them super personal. It tells the person this isn’t just a blast — someone has taken the time to read up on them.”
How to write a cold email that actually gets noticed
1. Find one specific thing about the prospect before you start writing
Open their website, their recent LinkedIn posts, anything they’ve published in the last three months. Look for one specific reference: a blog post, a launch, a recent hire, a problem you can see they’re working on.
One reference is enough. Without it, no structure will save the email. With it, the email gets the next sentence read.
2. Open with that reference, not a generic intro
“I came across your company” is dead on arrival. So is any version of “Hope this finds you well.” Both signal that the email could have been sent to anyone.
“Saw your launch of X last month, the angle on Y stood out.” That earns the next line. One sentence. Don’t milk it.
3. Use the four-part body: reason, credibility, CTA
“An opening message, the reason you’re reaching out, then some credibility or proof, then a call to action.”
The reason: one line on what you do and why it’s relevant to what they’re working on. The credibility marker: one specific result, one client name, one number, not a paragraph of “about us.” The CTA: specific. A yes/no question, a calendar link, or a request for a 15-minute call. Never “let me know if interested.”
4. Attach a Loom for their actual problem
This is the move that separates emails that get a reply from emails that get archived. A short Loom (2–3 minutes) walking through your solution to a problem you’ve seen they’re facing.
Not a generic product demo. Their specific problem, your specific answer. If you’ve seen they’re struggling with lead gen, demo your lead-gen workflow in the Loom.
The email gets a reply because the Loom does the selling, the email can’t.
The big payoff
Reply rates go from 1% to 10-20% on a tightly written, well-researched cold email. Fewer emails out, more conversations in, faster close.
The afternoon you spend on research replaces the weeks you’d spend blasting and waiting.
Want the full playbook?
This structure is one piece of Automating Your Sales Funnel, Naison’s full masterclass inside the Founder Collab. The full session shows you the end-to-end system that turns the structure above into a pipeline running on autopilot:
The full Apollo → Apify → Sheets → n8n pipeline that auto-personalises cold emails at scale
How to build an AI agent that scrapes each prospect’s website and writes their icebreaker
How to keep a human in the loop on AI-written emails so nothing goes out you wouldn’t send yourself
The proposal-generator workflow that drops your proposal turnaround to minutes
The prompt architect Naison uses to design every agent prompt in the system
You’ll also get access to 40+ other masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.
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