Ask any assistant for a cold email and you get the same artefact: a warm opening, a paragraph about your company, three benefits, and a request for "15 minutes to explore synergies". It is grammatical, polite, and completely ignorable.

The model is not the problem. It has read millions of cold emails, most of which are bad, and you asked it for a cold email.

What actually gets replies

Strip out everything a busy person skips and you are left with four things:

  1. Evidence you know who they are. Something specific, from the last month, that you could not have written to anyone else.
  2. One problem, named in their words. Not your feature list. The thing that annoys them on a Tuesday.
  3. One line of proof. A number, a comparable customer, a result. One line: this is not a case study.
  4. An ask small enough to say yes to. "Worth a look?" beats "book a 30-minute discovery call".

Then stop. Under 120 words, or you are writing a brochure.

The prompt

You are an experienced B2B copywriter who writes short, specific cold emails.

My offer: [ONE SENTENCE, WHAT IT DOES, FOR WHOM]
Ideal customer: [JOB TITLE, COMPANY TYPE, COMPANY SIZE]
What I know about this specific prospect: [PASTE NOTES, THEIR WEBSITE COPY,
A RECENT POST, ANYTHING SPECIFIC TO THEM]
Proof I can use: [ONE RESULT, NUMBER OR NAMED CUSTOMER]

Write 3 cold email variations. Rules:
- Under 120 words each
- Open with a specific observation about them, never "I hope this finds you well"
- One clear problem, one line of proof, one low-friction ask
- No superlatives, no jargon, no exclamation marks
- Subject line under 6 words, lowercase, no clickbait

After the drafts, list the single assumption in each that would make it fall flat.

Three parts of that do most of the work.

The research slot. If you paste nothing specific, you get nothing specific. Two minutes on their site or their last post is the difference between a cold email and a mail merge. If you genuinely cannot find anything, that is a signal about the prospect, not about the email.

The negative rules. "No superlatives, no jargon, no exclamation marks" removes the tells that mark an email as automated. Naming the clichés you do not want is faster than asking for "a human tone" and hoping.

The final line. Asking the model to name its own weakest assumption stops you sending a draft built on something you never actually verified. It will tell you, plainly, that it assumed they are struggling with X, and half the time you will realise you have no evidence for that at all.

The follow-up matters more

Most replies come from the second and third touch, and this is where AI-generated sequences fall apart: each message repeats the first one in slightly different words.

Give the sequence a job per message instead:

Write a 3-touch follow-up sequence for the email above.

Touch 2 (day 4): share one specific, useful thing (a benchmark, a short
observation about their market) and do not ask for anything.
Touch 3 (day 11): one question they can answer in a single word.
Touch 4 (day 21): a break-up email that closes the loop without guilt-tripping.

Each under 80 words. No message may repeat a sentence or claim from an
earlier one. No "just following up" or "bumping this to the top of your inbox".

That last constraint alone improves the sequence more than any amount of rewriting.

Where this fits

Cold outreach is one workflow with maybe a dozen distinct writing jobs: research, first touch, follow-up, discovery notes, objection handling, proposal summary. Each needs its own brief.

The Sales Outreach Prompt Pack has 68 of them, written this way and grouped by stage, so you fill in your offer once and reuse them for every deal.