B2B Cold Email: 11 Checks Before You Send
A sales team sends two hundred emails and gets three replies, and the campaign report says the list is bad. Usually the list is fine and the email is about the sender. A b2b cold email that earns an answer follows rules a person can check before pressing send.
Code: cold-email-coach, MIT licensed.
The skill works in three modes: write two or three short emails, review an existing one against 11 checks, or rewrite it with the score attached.
The first line decides the rest
If the opening sentence is about the sender, the recipient has no reason to continue. “I hope this email finds you well” is about the sender. “Your post about 40% of new accounts never finishing setup stayed with me” is about the recipient, and it buys the second sentence.
The rule is easy to state and hard to obey, because a sender wants to explain the company first. The skill forces the observation to the top and cuts the history.
Length is a feature
Fifty to one hundred twenty-five words. If the email scrolls on a phone, it is not finished.
A cold email competes with a notification, a meeting and a message from a colleague. The shorter version wins on the only metric that matters at that moment: whether it gets read to the end.
One ask, not three
A demo link, a calendar link and a question is three asks, and three asks produce no answer. The checklist counts them and fails the email above one.
Permission to decline is part of the same idea. “Is that still a problem, or is setup under control?” is answerable with one word, and an answerable question is what a cold email is for.
What the 11 checks cover
Length. A first line about the recipient. No pitch and no feature list. A concrete problem rather than a boast. Exactly one call to action. “You” outnumbering “I” and “we”. Plain words. A short neutral subject. No template opening. No fake urgency or promised results. Readable aloud without cringing.
The score is a diagnostic, not a guarantee. A ten out of eleven email can still be irrelevant, and the skill says so in the same sentence where it reports the score.
Where the facts come from
The rules are applied from the published thinking of Josh Braun and Will Allred, in original words: problem-first outreach, permission to say no, brevity, readability, subject lines, follow-ups.
No quotes and no name-dropping in the output. A borrowed name is not evidence, and an email that leans on one reads like a brochure.
The mechanical linter
A short Python script counts words, reading grade, the you/I ratio, questions and asks, subject length, clichés, urgency words, capitals, exclamations, links and placeholders. It exits non-zero when a hard check fails.
It cannot judge relevance or voice, and the readme says that too. The linter catches the email that was written in a hurry; the checklist catches the email that was written carefully and still talks about the sender.
What it does not promise
Replies. No tool can, and the ones that do are selling something else. What the skill promises is that the email stops being about the company and starts being answerable, which is the part a sender controls.
Where a team starts
Take the ten worst-performing emails of the last month and run them through review. The pattern is usually the same: two paragraphs of context, a feature list, a demo request. Fix the first one by hand, then use the checklist as a gate before a sequence goes out.
Related: business automation for the process around outreach, and ai text humanizer for the editing pass that stops a template from sounding like one.