Cold Email for MSPs and MSSPs
We run cold email for MSPs, and only the email. You keep doing the calls and the LinkedIn, and we handle the part most MSPs have tried twice and given up on.
Here’s what that means in practice. We set up sending domains and mailboxes in your name, separate from anything you use for clients. We build the list every day from companies that just posted an IT job, or picked up a compliance deadline, or opened a second office. And we write each email about that specific thing, under your name. Starts as low as $2,999 a month, month to month. This page is about the email itself: who reads it, why MSP prospects are hard to reach, what a sequence says, and how the sending is set up.
Why email, and not the phone
Your prospect is an owner or an ops lead at a company with 20 to 500 people. They don’t take cold calls. The receptionist screens them, and the owner’s on a job site or in a meeting anyway. But they do read email, on their phone, in the gaps.
The email they read is short, from a named person, and about something they recognize. The email they delete is from “the team at” some IT company, with a logo, a headline, three bullets about proactive monitoring, and a link.
Most MSPs know this and send the second kind anyway, because the marketing vendor they hired sells newsletters and the sales vendor they hired sells lists. The email that works looks more like a note from one business owner to another, and it’s harder to write than it looks.
Why MSP prospects are hard to reach
Three reasons, and the program has to be built around all of them.
Most of them are on Microsoft 365. Small and mid-sized businesses in the US skew Microsoft, and Microsoft’s filtering is harder on new sending domains than Google’s. A program that lands fine in Gmail can go straight to junk at a 60-person law firm on Outlook. So we warm mailboxes against Microsoft tenants specifically, keep the volume per mailbox low, and send plain text with no images, no tracking pixel, and no link in the first email.
They’ve been hit by every IT vendor there is. “Are you happy with your current IT provider?” has gone out to most SMB owners in the country several times a year for years. The filters have learned the pattern and so have the owners. The email has to be about the prospect’s own event, in words a vendor wouldn’t use.
Your own domain is off limits. Your main domain carries client email, RMM alerts, and invoices. A spam complaint against it is a business problem, not a marketing problem. Everything we send goes out on separate domains that look like yours, so the main one is never at risk.
What the sequence says
Three emails over 12 business days, all about one signal. This one’s a company that posted an IT Administrator role and holds a DoD subcontract.
Email 1, day 1.
Subject: The IT Admin role and November
Hi Marcus,
Saw the IT Administrator posting last week. With a DoD sub in the mix, the Level 2 requirements start showing up in contract renewals this November, and one admin hire doesn’t get an environment through an assessment.
We run the gap analysis and the fixes for DoD subs with 40 to 200 seats, then keep the environment running after. Two clients went through it this year.
Want to see what the assessment would cost on your setup?
Priya
Email 2, day 5, as a reply to email 1.
One more thing on this. The two subs we took through it both had the same finding: MFA and logging were fine, but the documentation wasn’t, and documentation is what the assessor reads first. Happy to send the checklist we used if it’s useful.
Email 3, day 12, as a reply to the thread.
Marcus, should I close this out, or check back once the admin starts? Either’s fine.
Priya
Each one’s under 90 words. Neither of the first two says the word “MSP.” The third gives him an easy way to say “later,” and a surprising number of MSP meetings come from exactly that.
The five signals, and how the email opens
The list gets rebuilt every day from these, and the first line is written from whichever one fired.
An IT admin or sysadmin job. “Saw the IT Administrator posting last week.” Then a co-managed option that costs less than the salary and starts sooner.
A compliance deadline. “The Level 2 requirements start showing up in renewals this November.” Or HIPAA, or SOC 2, or a state privacy law with a date. The date goes in the subject line.
A new office, warehouse, or clinic. “Saw the lease on the Ridge Rd location.” Then a quote for the new site’s network and endpoints as its own project, not a takeover of the whole account.
A breach at a company that looks like them. “The notice from [peer company] last week probably landed on your desk too.” Then a question about whether their current provider has run the same checks.
A Microsoft 365, Intune, or Azure migration role. “The Intune role suggests the migration’s on the calendar.” Then an offer to run it as a fixed-price project, which is how a lot of managed contracts start.
How the sending is set up
Three to six domains that look like yours, registered in your name, each with two to four mailboxes on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on every one from day one.
Two to three weeks of warmup before anything real goes out, with a chunk of the warmup traffic going to Microsoft tenants because that’s where your prospects are.
Twenty to forty emails a day per mailbox. A single-metro program sends a few hundred a week, not thousands, because the list is small.
Plain text, from a named person on your team, no images, no pixel, no link until they reply. Unsubscribe by reply, honored the same day.
Positive replies go to the sender’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. Your deliverability history goes with them.
How it runs
Week one we register the domains, set up the mailboxes, agree with you who you want and what seat range, and turn on the five signals in your territory.
Weeks one to three the mailboxes warm. First real sends go out in week two on the ones that are ready.
From week three, replies land in your rep’s inbox with the signal attached. Your team takes it from there.
Every morning we look at yesterday’s meetings 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 on your account, that’s the outbound program, linked below.
Results
Those are software, logistics, and restaurant clients. We'll put an MSP number here the first time an MSP client lets us use their name.
Book a 15-minute fit call
Tell us your seat range, your territory, and which compliance frameworks your clients fall under. We'll tell you whether we'd take the account, what the domain and mailbox setup would look like at your volume, and, if it shouldn't be us, who to call instead.
Other ways we work with MSPs and MSSPs
,
if you want the qualification line, the reply report, and the meeting booked, not just the email.
,
if you want email plus LinkedIn and calling with our team on the phones.
Cold Email for other industries
Questions people ask us
Will this hurt our main domain?
No. We never send from it. Everything runs on separate domains in your name, so a spam complaint on the outreach can’t touch your client email, your RMM alerts, or your invoicing.
Our prospects are all on Microsoft 365. Can you actually land there?
Yes, but it takes a setup built for it: warmup against Microsoft tenants, low volume per mailbox, plain text, no links in email one, and more domains than a Gmail-heavy program needs. It’s the main reason MSP programs look different from our software programs.
Do you write the emails or do we?
We write them from the signals, and you approve the first set before anything goes out. After that, changes go through the daily log. Your job is answering the replies.
How many emails go out a month?
A few hundred a week for a single-metro program. The signal list for one territory is a few hundred companies a month, and each gets three emails. That’s a small fraction of what a list vendor sends, which is a big part of why it lands.
Can we run this from our own Microsoft tenant?
The mailboxes go on their own tenant, in your name, so warmup and volume don’t touch your production environment. You get the admin credentials.
What about our newsletter list?
Nothing changes. This is cold outreach to companies that showed a signal, not a broadcast to a list. Keep the newsletter running from your main domain. They do different jobs.