How I get Claude to find one verifiable detail before writing a cold email opener
In a few weeks I start as a BDR doing outbound for a B2B software company that sells to businesses running multiple physical locations — think a chain of gyms, clinics, restaurants, or retail stores. I've spent the run-up building the process I'll use on day one and testing it on the outreach I already do for my own freelance work. My starting point is a list of company names. Nobody hands me anything else. I can't scrape LinkedIn — that's against the rules I'll be working under. So everything I know about a prospect before I write to them has to come from what that company has already made public. The hard part isn't writing an email. It's writing an opening line that proves I actually looked at the company. Not the kind of line that could be pasted into any cold email to anyone — "I noticed you're doing great work in your space" — anyone who's gotten cold emails before spots that instantly as filler. What changed my process is narrowing what I ask Claude to do. I don't ask it to write me an email. I ask it to find one specific, checkable fact about how a company operates across its locations — something that's only true because they're running several sites, not one — and build two sentences around that fact. Then before anything goes out, I check that fact myself. That last step is not optional. It's the entire difference between a personalized email and a personalized-sounding guess. Below are the steps I actually follow, the exact instruction block I paste into Claude (with a made-up example company so the technique is visible without exposing a real prospect), and where this breaks down in practice.