Cold Email for Microsoft, AWS, and Google Cloud Partners
We run cold email for cloud partners, and only the email. Your solutions lead runs the assessment and the scoping call. We get the CIO to write back in the first place. That’s the part that’s been failing.
We set up sending domains and mailboxes in your name, separate from the domain your partner manager and your clients email you on. We build the list every day from companies that just posted a cloud architect role, hired a new infrastructure leader, have a colo lease running out, posted modernization roles, or picked up a compliance requirement. And we write each email about that specific thing, naming the funded program that fits it, under your solutions lead’s name. Pricing starts as low as $2,999 a month, month to month.
Who reads it, and why they’ve stopped reading
A CIO at a 600-person company. A VP of Engineering at a company that just raised. An IT director who’s been told the data center lease isn’t getting renewed. They are, as a group, the most email-fatigued buyers we work with, and it isn’t close.
Every software vendor emails them. Every hyperscaler partner in the region emails them, usually with the same “accelerate your cloud journey” the partner’s marketing agency wrote. The hyperscaler itself emails them. And every one of those emails is about the sender’s offering. A CIO deletes twenty of them before his first meeting and doesn’t feel he’s missed anything.
What he reads is an email about his environment. “The Cloud Architect role and the Ashburn lease” gets opened by the CIO who posted that role and signed that lease, because it’s the two things on his whiteboard. It doesn’t say cloud journey. It names a funded program in the second paragraph, because that’s the sentence that turns a pitch into an offer he can say yes to without finding budget.
Why the funded program goes in the email
Most partners keep the funded assessment in the deck, for the meeting. That’s backwards. A CIO who gets an email offering a migration assessment assumes it costs money and involves a sales process, and he deletes it. A CIO who gets an email saying Microsoft covers the assessment through a program with a name, so it doesn’t come out of his budget, has been handed a reason to reply that isn’t about you.
So the second paragraph of every email names the program that fits the signal. Azure Migrate and Modernize for a Microsoft partner emailing a colo-lease company. AWS MAP for an AWS partner emailing a company that posted modernization roles. Your solutions lead confirms the program and the entitlement before the first send, because the terms change and you know them better than we do.
There’s a second reason it belongs in the email. A named program is what makes the resulting assessment partner-sourced in the hyperscaler’s portal, and that’s the number your partner manager asks about every quarter.
What the sequence says
Three emails over 12 business days, all about one signal. This one’s a 400-person company that just hired a new VP of Engineering, from an AWS partner.
Email 1, day 1.
Subject: Your first quarter and the AWS estate
Hi Priya,
Congratulations on the VP Engineering role. Most engineering leaders coming into a company your size inherit an AWS account nobody’s reviewed in two years: three regions, a dozen orphaned resources, and a bill that’s 30 percent higher than it needs to be.
We run a funded well-architected review for companies between 200 and 1,000 people, covered by AWS, so it doesn’t touch your budget. Four VPs we worked with this year came in through a hire like yours and used the review as their first-90-days plan.
Would it be useful to see what the review covers before you build the roadmap?
Sam
Email 2, day 5, as a reply to email 1.
One thing from the four reviews worth passing on: every one of them found the same three things in the first week, unattached EBS volumes, over-provisioned RDS instances, and IAM roles nobody could name. Happy to send the checklist we use, whether or not we talk.
Email 3, day 12, as a reply to the thread.
Priya, should I close this out, or check back after your first quarter? Either’s fine.
Sam
Each one’s under 100 words. The subject line is about her first quarter, not about the partner. The first email names the program and says it’s covered. The second says something an engineering leader would want to know regardless. The third gives her an easy out, and a lot of assessments get scoped from exactly that, six weeks later, once the roadmap is written and she wants a second opinion.
The five signals, and how the email opens
The list gets rebuilt every day from these, and the first line comes from whichever one fired.
A cloud engineer, architect, or DevOps role posted. “Saw the Cloud Architect posting go up.” Then a funded assessment that scopes the work before the hire starts.
A data center or colo lease running out. “From what’s public, the Ashburn colo lease runs through next August.” Then the assessment while there’s still time to do it properly.
Migration, modernization, or platform roles. “Saw the Kubernetes and Terraform roles go up together.” Then an offer to run the first phase with partner funding.
A new CIO, CTO, or VP of Engineering. That’s the sequence above.
A compliance requirement or a funding round. “Congratulations on the Series B.” Then a question about what the infrastructure plan is for double the team.
How the sending is set up, and the co-sell rule
Three to six domains that look like yours, registered in your name, two to four mailboxes each. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on all of them from day one. Nothing goes out from the domain your partner manager emails you on.
Two to three weeks of warmup before anything real goes out. Twenty to forty emails a day per mailbox. CIOs are on Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 in roughly equal measure, so the warmup runs against both.
The sender is your solutions lead or a named practice lead, someone who can talk about the environment on the first call. We don’t send from a business development alias.
Plain text. No architecture diagram, no partner badge in the signature, no link in the first email. Unsubscribe by reply, honored the same day.
The co-sell rule, which is specific to this industry: before the first send we load every account the hyperscaler has already introduced you to, and those never get an email. A CIO who gets a cold email from a partner the AWS rep introduced last month thinks the partner isn’t paying attention, and the rep thinks you’re poaching his intro. The exclusion list is rebuilt whenever your partner manager sends a new one.
Replies go to the solutions lead’s real inbox the same day with the signal attached. You see every reply, including the ones that say no.
When you leave, the domains and mailboxes are transferred to you with the logins.
How it runs
Week one we register the domains, set up the mailboxes, agree with you the hyperscaler, target size, industries, and which funded programs you can offer, load the co-sell exclusion list, and turn on the five signals.
Weeks one to three the mailboxes warm. First real sends go out in week two.
From week three, replies land in your solutions lead’s inbox with the signal attached. Your team scopes the assessment.
Every morning we look at yesterday’s scoping calls against the target. If we hit it, we send more. If we missed it, it’s one of four things: wrong companies, not enough of them, the email was off, or it didn’t land. We find which, fix it, and that’s what goes out today. You can follow it in the log.
What it costs
Starts as low as $2,999 a month, month to month. No setup fee, no minimum term.
That covers domains, mailboxes, warmup, the list, the signals, the copy, sending, replies, and the daily log.
It doesn’t cover calling or LinkedIn. If you want those run by our team, that’s the outbound program, linked below.
Several partners pay for this out of market development funds, since it produces partner-sourced pipeline. Ask your partner manager whether it qualifies, and we’ll give you the documentation.
Results
Those are software, logistics, and restaurant clients. We'll put a cloud partner number here the first time a partner client lets us use their name.
Book a 15-minute fit call
Tell us your hyperscaler, your funded programs, and who'd be sending. We'll tell you whether we'd take the account, what email 1 would say for your practice, and, if it shouldn't be us, who to call instead.
Other ways we work with Microsoft, AWS, and Google Cloud Partners
,
if you want the qualification line, the scoped-assessment count, and the daily reply log, not just the email.
,
if you want email plus LinkedIn and calling with our team on the phones.
,
if you want to retarget the same infrastructure-leader list with paid social.
Cold Email for other industries
Questions people ask us
CIOs don’t read cold email. Why would ours get through?
They don’t read cold email about cloud journeys. They read email about the Ashburn lease and the Cloud Architect role, because those are the two things on the whiteboard. The subject line names the environment, and the second paragraph names a funded program, so it’s an offer and not a pitch.
Can we say the assessment is free?
Say it’s covered by the program, and name the program. “Free” reads as a sales tactic and gets deleted. “Covered by AWS MAP, so it doesn’t come out of your budget” reads as a fact the CIO can check, and he does.
Will this step on our co-sell relationship?
No, because of the exclusion list. Every account the hyperscaler has introduced you to gets loaded before the first send and never gets a cold email. The list gets rebuilt whenever your partner manager sends a new one.
Do you know the funded programs well enough to name the right one?
We know AWS MAP, Azure Migrate and Modernize, and the Google Cloud equivalents well enough to match the program to the signal. Your solutions lead confirms the offer and the entitlement before the first send, because the terms change and you know them better than we do.
How many emails go out?
A few hundred a week across your target segment. The list is companies where something changed this month, not every IT director over 200 employees, so the volume is low and the replies are scoping calls.
Can this be paid for with MDF?
Several partners do. The program produces partner-sourced pipeline the hyperscaler can see, which is what MDF is for. Ask your partner manager whether it qualifies, and we’ll give you whatever documentation the program needs.