Cold outreach is like asking for a date. Most people are doing it wrong.

If you’ve been online for any length of time, you’ve probably had the experience of someone showing up in your inbox, offering you services you don’t want or need, with no reference to who you are or what you do. I mean, I’ve literally been offered an opportunity to open my own kitchen showroom. Not sure that’s gonna help my coaching conversions to be honest 😂.

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So we know what bad cold outreach looks like - it’s impersonal, it’s irrelevant, and it’s solipsistic. And AI, as much as it purports to solve this, only exacerbates the issue, as we’re inundated with fake “ultra-personalised” emails that just make everything worse. The moat of hard work and research has gone up in smoke, obliterated by the suspicion that every personalised email is just more automated AI slop.

But here’s where the best make their millions. Because there’s always been noise in this space — from mailers, to the early days of email funnels, to the carwash flyers on your windscreen — and amongst that noise, those who know how to whisper in the right way will be heard.

This is why the principles are so important; though the tactics may change, the foundations remain the same.

The foundations of influence

2000 years ago, Aristotle gave us the three levers of influence: ethos (trust, credibility, authority), pathos (emotions), and logos (structure, clarity). Every piece of persuasive communication is going to have within it a mixture of these three elements, and the more that you can leverage them to your benefit, the more persuasive you’ll be without having to force your ideas down someone’s throat.

Ethos

This is the trust or authority that you project or have inside of a conversation. It’s created by any number of things including how you look, how you sound, how similar you are to the people whom you’re speaking to, how well your idea accords with what they already expected to hear, and your reputation.

Common examples of ethos in action are the white lab coat that a doctor wears or the uniform of a policeman. These are external signals that confer trust and authority on someone without any of us even knowing who the policeman is or whether or not they’re actually worthy of that trust.

Pathos

Pathos is all about how a person feels when they’re speaking to you. This is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of persuasive communication. The main thing that you need to know about pathos is that people are far more affected by how they feel about you and what you’re saying than they are about the actual content of what it is that you’re saying. This is why it never works to win an argument against someone. Winning an argument never convinces them, because inevitably they feel very bad about being bludgeoned into thinking a certain way.

Logos

This is the most straightforward of the three parts of persuasive communication, and probably the part which you’re going to be most familiar with. This is the logical coherence of your argument. So does point B follow from point A? Does point C follow from point B? Does the story you’re saying make sense in reality? Is it clear? This is where the ability for you to think in a logical and step-by-step manner and present your ideas in a clear straightforward way is going to shine.

On all of these three things, cold outreach is behind the eight ball.

Ethos: Unknown people showing up in my inbox or calling me are the least trustworthy people I know. Anyone can email me, including my long lost uncle in Nigeria. My phone is fair game for anyone willing to pay the right websites, and every call I get from an unknown number inevitably wants money from me. What’s worse is that on these channels, you don’t even have your physical presence or charisma to fall back on; you can’t smile your way through awkwardness over email.

Savage Garden had it right:

“But on the telephone line I am anyone / I am anything I wanna be / I can be a supermodel or Norman Mailer / And you wouldn’t know the difference / Or would you?”

Pathos: The most prevalent emotion in cold outreach is going to be exasperation; not exactly what you’re looking for when you’re trying to make a sale. Cold outreach also runs the risk of triggering people’s emotions around money and finances, around the success (or lack thereof) of the business, and a million other things that people get triggered about these days. It’s not for nothing that if you’ve done cold outreach for any length of time, you’ve likely been the target of horrid abuse.

Logos: You know your message inside and out. You’ve been telling it for months or years; you’re infinitely familiar with the context and the details. All this means that you have the “curse of knowledge”, the inability to know what you don’t know. Cold outreach often makes the mistake of assuming too much context, or trying to be clever before it’s clear.

Better cold outreach

Let’s start with this premise: there is no one-size-fits-all good cold outreach. Doesn’t exist, never will. In fact, it’s probably the case that what worked for you in one season of your business won’t work in another, or what worked for one ICP of yours won’t work with the next. There’s no formula or framework because people (and culture/context) are so idiosyncratic.

The next axiom is that biology and psychology rule. We are not just brains, but embodied beings, and evolutionarily old ones at that. We’re still the same cavemen as we were 10,000 years ago, just now we’re running around in suits; our decisions are made with our feelings, not our heads. As much as you can map your outreach to the psychological principles of all humans, things like “don’t tell anyone what to do” (psychological reactance - Gong found that including a pitch in a cold email reduced reply rates by 57%) or speaking to that status and hierarchy baked in to how we operate in the world, the better your outreach will be.

So some things that might be useful right off the bat:

1. Don’t get lumped in with everyone else. Grab the attention of the person you want to talk to. It’s imperative that we stop our message from getting slotted in to the same neural pathway as every other message. Just breaking this wall alone does most of the work, because without this, your message simply won’t get read. That means don’t start “Dear [first name], I hope you’re well.” Yes, I am well, and you sir, are winding me up for a pitch. No thanks.

2. Seduce your prospect. This sounds a bit weird, and no, I’m not telling you to actually physically seduce them. BUT, cold outreach is just another variation of asking someone for their number so you can go on a date. You don’t talk all about yourself, you don’t talk for twenty minutes before making the ask, you don’t list all the other people you’ve successfully dated. You find something that will intrigue the person you want to talk to, and you carry on a lively but somewhat teasing conversation. This is all about energy and curiosity, about being someone who is attractive. And the number one thing you need to do to be attractive is to be “other-focused”.

3. Be clear. Don’t prevaricate, hedge, or apologise. If you believe in your product, cold outreach is a service, not a bother. So write that way — you have something powerful to offer the world, and you’re just checking if they want it.

4. Don’t be desperate. This is connected to seduction, and ultimately is tied in to the biology/psychology axiom from above. Desperate people are not attractive people, they’re not high-trust people, and they’re not someone you’re going to want to work with.

Ultimately, we have to satisfy the three criteria of persuasive communication: clarity, credibility, and emotion. You might, for example, want to lead with a piece of social proof (results from your service): “We helped XXX raise $35M in seed funding. Is that kind of result relevant for you right now?” Take my cold message that I send to prospects and which books me 3-5 calls a week with founders — it does all of these three things:

Spent 15+ years navigating high-stakes comms, now helping others do the same. Recently helped [company] close [amount] in funding from [investor]. If that’s relevant, let’s grab 15 minutes.

[credibility] + [biggest win that’s relevant to ICP] + [cta]

The first sentence establishes credibility and authority (ethos). The second presents an outcome my ICP will want (pathos). And the third is a clear ask without being pushy (logos). It breaks through the noise because it’s not a long wind-up; it doesn’t have the “pick me” energy of other cold messages — just in or out, relevant or not, yes or no.

So you need to know who you’re talking to

Now for your ICP this could look very different. In fact, Gong has some data to show that longer (51-100 words) cold emails actually work better in some verticals.

This is where the real personalisation of emails comes in, and where we humans can differentiate ourselves in a world of AI noise. Rather than having a template that we slap someone’s name and business into, we have styles of communication. Some people will want to be pitched short and sweet, like I did above. Others want to read longer emails. Some need blunt, others need oblique and fluffy. When you personalise, you understand how you need to come across to the person that you’re talking to.

Putting it all together

The answer to good cold outreach is the combination of ethos, pathos, and logos with empathy — is this clear and does it elicit trust and goodwill with the reader. This is so tough because we're stuck in our own frame of reference and we can't know what other people are thinking. What we can do is to lean on the timeless principles of all human psychology that we'll be unpacking here each week.

Checklist before you hit send:

• Who is this for? One ICP + a recent trigger (why now?).
• Ethos: One proof point or point of common ground. Credible, not chest-thumping.
• Pathos: What feeling do you want to evoke? Other-focused, non‑desperate, non‑defensive.
• Logos: One clear outcome, one-sentence ask. Remove cleverness and jargon.
• Pattern break: Does your opener avoid the “hope you’re well” lane? Is it specific to them?
• Personalisation: Match style to reader (short/long; blunt/soft). Include one bespoke line.
• Brevity: 40–120 words (by vertical). Cut any sentence that doesn’t earn its keep.
• CTA: Binary, low-friction next step (yes/no to 15 minutes). No pitch dump.
• Risk check: Would you be glad to receive this? If not, fix tone/length.
• Hygiene: Name/company correct, links work, mobile legible, subject line earns the open.
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