The Core Mindset
The goal of sending cold emails is to start a conversation, not to make a sales pitch. Focus on having a mutually beneficial conversation with your potential customer, where you can learn if they have a pain you can address so you can discover if there’s a fit.
Key Principle: Most CEO’s of startups have a sense of idealism – they have discovered a problem, are uber passionate about their solution, and want to generate sales, but they don’t think of themselves as being a sales person. This is a formula and “mindset” for selling in a way that feels natural and authentic.
Understanding Your Buyer: The Persona Framework
Before writing any cold email, you must deeply understand:
PERSONA:
- Awareness Stage: Where are they in their buying journey?
- Jobs to Be Done: What are they trying to accomplish?
- Pain Points: What’s frustrating them or holding them back?
- KPIs: What metrics do they care about?
Consider WHO you are targeting and WHY - what can we HELP them with.
The Buyer Awareness Ladder
There are four stages of buyer awareness:
1. Unaware
They don’t feel the pain yet. Life’s good (or so they think).
2. Problem-Aware
Something’s off. They’re annoyed, but not enough to look around.
3. Solution-Aware
They’re actively researching options.
4. Product-Aware
They’re comparing you to competitors and trying to justify the budget.
Why This Matters
Most people only go after stages 3 and 4. That’s fine. If you catch a buyer here, you don’t have to be clever — you just have to show up at the right time.
But those campaigns are reactive, not scalable.
It’s stages 1 and 2 that transform an average outbound motion into something that your competitors can’t copy.
Because now you’re not just waiting for demand — you’re creating it.
The Psychology of Influence
Fear of Loss > Gain
Why this works: Fear of loss is a much more powerful motivator than gain.
Don’t just show what they can gain. Explain what they are missing out on.
Example: “I know from speaking with other founders that many, if not all, find it challenging to developing a repeatable selling process in a way that feels natural, comfortable, and authentic without sounding “sales-y.” The impact – inaction. Lack of a predictable pipeline and sales.”
Make People Feel Good
Do your cold emails make people feel good about themselves?
Most emails are listless and emotionally devoid. They don’t make people feel anything. They feel like they were written by a sales robot.
That’s a shame because when you make people feel good they’re more likely to respond.
Guiding Principles to Make People Feel Good:
- Catch them doing something right
- Give people an easy out
- Label the awkwardness
- Be subtle - Ask a neutral question that makes people think differently about their current solution (Illumination question)
- Be vulnerable
- Stop talking people into things
- Praise but with moderation
- Give without expecting anything in return
When you make people feel good about themselves, you lower the Zone of Resistance.
The Jobs-to-be-Done Framework
Let’s use a practical example to understand your buyer:
FIRST WE NEED A PERSON: A homeowner.
WITH A JOB TO BE DONE: Trim hedges.
WHO’S CURRENTLY: using a pair of garden shears and snapping off tree branches on the trees that hang over the fence into their neighbor’s property.
WHICH RESULTS IN: spending an entire Sunday afternoon on back-breaking labor attacking their overgrown garden and receiving notices from the HOA when they fall behind.
OTHER SOLUTIONS: Hire a landscape or buy a chainsaw.
PROBLEM WITH OTHER SOLUTIONS: Landscapers are expensive. Slapping down a pile of cash on a chainsaw that’s intimidating and heavy.
FINALLY DISCOVERS YOUR SOLUTION: The Cordless MiniSaw is a lightweight single-hand use chainsaw that will cut through 3” diameter branches in approximately 4 seconds and has a run-time per charge of up to 6.5 hours. Landscapers charge 79) on the Cordless MiniSaw to trim five trees in 30 minutes.
This clarity about the buyer’s journey informs everything in your email.
First Principles Applied
Question to ask yourself: “Honestly now, did you spend your youth dreaming about [current painful solution]?”
This question helps you understand the emotional disconnect between their current state and their desired state.
When you understand this deeply, you can write emails that resonate at a human level rather than just pitching features.
Remember
Knowing how to clarify your message is a good skill to master. But it all starts with understanding WHO you’re talking to and WHERE they are in their journey.
Origin: Synthesized from Cold Email Best Practice vault Tags: Sales ColdEmail Psychology FirstPrinciples Created: 2025-10-17