134: 6 Prompts I Use For Cold Email

Welcome back to the Practical Prospecting newsletter!

Today, I’m sharing 6 prompts I use all the time for cold email campaigns.

Before we jump in, ZoomInfo built a 2-minute AI Readiness Assessment (based on MIT research + thousands of customers) that scores you across the 12 factors that predict AI success. Check it out here!

Agenda

• Account Scoring Prompt

• Personalized Email Intro Prompt

• Personalized Email Intro Prompt

• Bonus Prompts I Use on Every List

Click here for a recorded webinar where I break down how I use these exact prompts and many more.

Account Scoring Prompt

Click here for the prompt.

I use this prompt to categorize a big list of target companies into one of three buckets:

1. Hiring — Active job postings in the roles I care about.

2. Growth — Not hiring yet, but clear growth signs (M&A, product launch, new sr. leader, funding, etc.)

3. Stagnant — No hiring or growth signs.

This helps me figure out which accounts to focus on and how to message them differently depending on the signal.

Once everything is tagged, it becomes obvious where to spend time and how to adjust the message.

Urgency for hiring accounts, relevance for growth accounts, and lighter, exploratory outreach for everything else.

Find Contact Info From Website Prompt

Click here for the prompt.

We have a lot of clients who sell into SMB and “blue collar” businesses whose contact info is much harder to find on traditional data tools.

Think: contractors, trades, local services, restaurants, K-12 schools, etc.

Most of the time, these businesses have the owner’s email on the website. Or at the very least, they have the owner’s name.

And when you have the owner’s name + domain, cheap tools like Prospeo, LeadMagic, FindyMail, Icypeas, etc., can easily find their email for you at a high hit rate.

I use this prompt when I’m prospecting a big list of SMB accounts, and it’ll output their name, email (if found), and job title.

Personalized Email Intro Prompt

Click here for the prompt.

This is a two-step prompt designed to do one thing well: give you a real reason to reach out.

First, it researches everything publicly happening at a company right now, and in the very recent past, so you’re not guessing or forcing relevance.

Then it takes that context, finds the most relevant signal tied to what you sell, and turns it into a believable first sentence that sounds like how a human would actually start an email.

The guardrails matter here: too specific feels creepy or AI-generated, too generic feels templated.

This prompt intentionally sits in the middle, where it’s observant but casual.

The goal isn’t to “wow” someone in the first line, it’s to earn a few extra seconds of attention so the rest of your email actually gets read.

Bonus Prompts I Use on Every List

Here are 3 prompts I use every time I’m prospecting a big list.

On a list of 10,000 contacts, even a 2–5% error rate means hundreds of emails that immediately feel “off.”

These prompts look small, but they protect you from wasting hundreds or thousands of leads at scale.

#1 — Normalize Company Name

This prompt cleans up the “LLC”, “Inc”, etc., and outputs the company name in the way a normal person would call it casually.

Click here for the prompt.

#2 — Normalize First & Last Name

A small percentage of any list will have names that no human would actually use in conversation, and they instantly expose that your email was automated.

For example: Mr, Mrs, Dr, all caps first names, or first names with emojis in them.

Cleaning names removes the obvious tells that break trust before the prospect even decides to read your email.

Click here for the prompt.

#3 — Verify Employee Size & Location 

If you sell into the U.S. and rely on employee size ranges, you’ve probably seen how unreliable they can be. Companies will claim 501–1,000 employees, but a quick look at their LinkedIn team shows closer to 50 people.

The same thing happens with location. Some companies list a U.S. headquarters, but the majority of their team is offshore or overseas, which can change whether they’re a fit for your ICP.

This prompt filters out companies that misrepresent their size or location, so you’re not wasting time on accounts that don’t actually match who you’re trying to sell to.

Click here for the prompt.

These three prompts are more so clean up prompts but make a huge impact when doing high volume.

Thanks for reading,

Jed

P.S. I’m launching my biggest project yet in Q1 2026: Precision Prospecting Pro. It’s my complete blueprint for outbound success. Including in-depth video guides, templates I’ll never share in the newsletter, GPTs, and more. Click here to join the waitlist!