How to improve cold B2B outreach

One of the most frequent questions I get is: how do you personalize outreach? The answer is simple: if you know who your customer is, you don’t need “personalization.” What you need is an offer that fits their context.

Let me explain with an example. Our client, Guesty, is a U.S. unicorn that makes CRM software for property managers (Airbnb, Booking, etc.). We won them through our own outreach.

Before that, we validated demand:

• we worked with another company in the same segment and produced a case study,

• we learned how to scrape Airbnb, extract the right contacts, and attract property-management companies,

• we compiled that case study to show our results.

Only after that did we go after Tier-1 companies in the same segment with cold outreach. And in my very first message to Guesty’s CRO I wrote:

• We see that your ICP is property-management companies;

• We’ve already worked with similar companies and know how to scrape Airbnb;

• Here’s the case study.

We’ve run hundreds of cold-outreach campaigns and every time come away convinced that “personalization” like “I saw your recent post” or “Congrats on your funding” doesn’t work. 99% of the impact comes from hitting exactly the pain point of a specific segment.

To make that possible, your ICP must be narrow. The broader your segment, the worse your outreach will perform. If you think your ICP is “tech companies in the U.S.,” you don’t yet really understand your ICP. Go back a step: think through specific industries and the precise value you can offer them, ideally based on your own case studies and experience.

Build your pitch around genuine industry expertise—that’s the best personalization! If you really understand who your customer is, the context in which they buy, and exactly what they need, your emails will be simple and clear, without fancy LinkedIn-post–based personalization tricks.