Cold Email for B2B SaaS
We run cold email for B2B software companies with $10K or more in ACV. If you’re reading this you probably already send cold email. You’ve got Outreach or Apollo, you’ve got reps, and you’ve watched the reply rate slide for two years while the volume went up. That’s the person this page is for.
What we do differently is the list and the domains. We set up sending domains in your name, separate from your main one, and we rebuild the list every day from companies that just posted the role your product serves, or hired a new leader, or changed their stack. Then we write each email about that thing. Your reps keep doing calls and LinkedIn, or we feed them the signals and they run it themselves. Gainsight got 90 sales accepted leads in two months this way. Starts as low as $2,999 a month, month to month.
What happened to SaaS cold email
A VP at a mid-market company gets 20 to 40 cold emails a day, and most of them are from software companies built the same way: a database pull by title, a first line generated off their LinkedIn, and five emails that each ask for 15 minutes.
Three things broke it. The personalization arms race made every first line sound identical, because they’re all generated from the same profile fields. Then sending volume went up as reply rates went down, and the filters learned the pattern. And the buyer learned it too. A compliment about a recent post followed by a pitch gets recognized in the first four words.
What still works is an email about something that changed at the prospect’s company, written the way a peer would write it, sent at low volume from a domain with a clean history. That’s roughly the opposite of what most SaaS outbound stacks are built to do, which is why an agency running it looks different from adding another seat to your sequencer.
Why the list is a deliverability problem, not just a reply-rate problem
SaaS buyers are mostly on Google Workspace, and Google’s filtering is driven by engagement. A domain whose emails get deleted unread loses reputation fast, and once it’s gone every mailbox on that domain goes with it.
So a title-based list of 5,000 people with no reason to open the email will burn a domain in a month. A signal-based list of 300 people who recognize the first line keeps the domain healthy and gets more replies. Same copy, same infrastructure, opposite outcome.
The other SaaS-specific problem is the in-house stack. Outreach, Salesloft, and Apollo make it very easy to send more, and sending more is how domain reputation dies. Our program runs on separate domains at a fixed low volume and never touches your primary domain or your sequencer.
Last thing: SaaS buyers reply from their phone with six words. We route those six words to your rep’s real inbox with the signal attached, so your rep can answer in the same register.
What the sequence says
Three emails over 12 business days, all about one signal. This one’s a company that just hired a new VP of Customer Success, sent by a company that sells customer health tooling.
Email 1, day 1.
Subject: Your first 90 days
Hi Nadia,
Congratulations on the CS role. Most VPs who come into a team your size find the same thing in month one: renewal risk is tracked in three places and none of them agree.
We give CS leaders one view of account health inside two weeks, before the QBR calendar takes over. Two of the last four VPs we worked with came in through a hire like yours.
Would 20 minutes in week three or four be useful?
Elliot
Email 2, day 5, as a reply to email 1.
One more thing on this. The teams that got the most out of their first quarter did one thing early: agreed on a single health score definition with sales before building anything. Happy to send the one-pager we use, whether or not we talk.
Email 3, day 12, as a reply to the thread.
Nadia, should I close this out, or check back after your first QBR cycle? Either’s fine.
Elliot
Each one’s under 90 words. The subject line’s about her, not the product. The follow-up gives something away. The last one offers a graceful “later,” which on SaaS programs turns into a meeting two months on more often than most sales teams would guess.
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.
The role your product serves gets posted. “Saw the RevOps Manager posting go up last week.” Then the product as the faster version of the hire, or the thing that changes what the hire needs to be.
A round or a new leader. “Congratulations on the CS role.” Or “Congratulations on the Series B.” Then a question about the plan for the function. We don’t ask for a demo.
A stack change. “Saw the move to HubSpot in the ops posting.” Then the integration, and what the teams that made the same move added around it.
A competitor’s renewal coming up badly. “Saw the review your team left last month.” Then a migration path and a reference from a company that got off the same tool.
Expansion into a new segment. “Saw the new enterprise tier on the pricing page.” Then a question about how that segment’s being handled in the current tooling.
How the sending is set up
Three to six domains that look like yours, registered in your name, two to four mailboxes each on Google Workspace. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on all of them from day one.
Two to three weeks of warmup before anything real goes out. Twenty to forty emails a day per mailbox, and that number does not go up when reply rates look good. Raising it is how domains get burned.
The sender is a named AE, founder, or rep on your team. We don’t send from a generic alias or a first name with no last name.
Plain text, no tracking pixel, no link in the first email. Unsubscribe by reply, honored the same day.
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 and the reply history.
How it runs
Week one we register the domains, set up the mailboxes, agree the ICP and the SAL definition with you, and turn on the five signals across your segment.
Weeks one to three the mailboxes warm. First real sends go out in week two.
From week three, replies land in your rep’s inbox with the signal attached. Your team books the meeting, or we do, whichever you want.
Every morning we look at yesterday’s SALs 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
Gainsight is a software company, and the case study has the detail on how the 90 were counted.
Book a 15-minute fit call
Tell us your ACV, your buyer, and what your current outbound stack looks like. We'll tell you whether we'd take the account, what email 1 would say for your buyer, and, if you'd be better off keeping it in-house, that too.
Other ways we work with B2B SaaS
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if you want the SAL definition, the reply report, and the meeting booked, not just the email.
Cold Email for other industries
Questions people ask us
We already have Outreach and our own reps. Why hire a cold email agency?
For the list and the domains. Your reps are working a database pull through a sequencer on your primary domain, and both of those are why the reply rate fell. We hand them a list built from what changed at each company, on separate domains, at a volume that keeps landing. A few clients run both: we send to the signal list, their reps call it.
Do you use AI to write the first line?
No. The first line’s about the signal, which is a fact about the company, not a compliment about the person. AI openers get recognized in the first four words, and that’s a big part of why the tactic stopped working.
Our domain reputation is already shot. Does that matter?
Not for the program, because it runs on new domains in your name. It matters for everything else you send, and the first thing we’ll do on the fit call is look at whether the damage is on your primary domain or on old outreach domains you can just retire.
How many emails go out?
A few thousand at most, to a few hundred companies. The signal list for a segment is small on purpose, and each company gets three emails. That’s a fraction of what a sequencer sends, which is why the domains stay healthy.
Can the emails go out under our AEs’ names?
Yes, and they should. A VP replies to a person with a title, not to “the team.” Emails go out under the AE’s or founder’s name on mailboxes you own, and replies come back to that person’s real inbox.