Hey Niepodam,

I’m going to say something that’ll piss off most sales teams:

90% of cold emails should never be sent.

Not rewritten.
Not A/B tested.
Not “personalized.”

Deleted.

I was auditing outbound for a Series B last month.

30k emails/month.
Good tools.
Good reps.

Pipeline was flat. So I did something uncomfortable.

I asked every rep to justify why today for their last 5 emails.

Not why the account fit.
Not why the persona mattered.

Why. Today.

Here’s what I got:

• “They’re in our ICP.”
• “They use a competitor.”
• “They’re a mid-market SaaS.”

Cool.

That’s not a reason to email someone now.

That’s a reason to put them in Salesforce.

So we flipped the rules.

New outbound law:

No trigger = no send.

If the rep couldn’t point to a fresh, external signal, the email got killed.

Reply rates doubled in 14 days.
Volume dropped by 22%.

Less work. More pipeline.

Here’s the radical part most teams won’t do.

The 48-Hour Rule

You’re only allowed to send a cold email if something changed in the last 48 hours.

Yes, 48. That forces discipline.

Valid triggers:

• Exec posted an opinion
• Team posted a role
• Pricing page changed
• Tool added or removed
• Public complaint
• Board/leadership move

Invalid triggers:

• “They’re growing.”
• “They’re scaling.”
• “They’re a good fit.”

Then we changed the structure of the email.

No more feature/value/CTA nonsense.

Every email had to follow this exact format:

1. Name the change
One sentence. Observable. No adjectives.

2. Name the friction
What usually breaks because of that change.

3. Ask for correction
Not a pitch. A check.

Example:

Subject: Quick check

Hey {{First Name}} — saw you just hired a new RevOps lead.

When that happens, teams usually realize their outbound data + triggers aren’t as clean as they thought.

Am I off here?

—

That’s it.

No link.
No case study.
No “15 minutes?”

Why this works:

• You’re not selling
• You’re diagnosing
• You’re letting them confirm relevance

Most cold emails fail because they try to convince.

High-performing ones try to be disconfirmed.

If you want to go even more extreme, try this rule for a week:

If you can send the email to 200 accounts, you shouldn’t send it to one.

Cold email isn’t a messaging problem.

It’s a permission problem.

Earn it by showing up only when something breaks, shifts, or changes.

Everything else is noise.

Want me helping you and your team within your outbound efforts? Let’s talk.

Or book me here directly for a Free Strategy Call

Alan "Modern Seller" Ruchtein.

Act like +1000 heroes:

Check out The Only Sales Course you'll ever need.