Today’s plays › All plays › Cold email
Let AI filter a huge list down to A-tier accounts, then send a 100-contact test batch first
Picked and checked by Olga Pearson, SalesUpLevel
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Reported by 30MPC's founder: 6,092 personalized cold emails reached a 1.9% reply rate by the end of the campaign, against the 1% benchmark he uses. He says 40% of the negative replies came from stale data a 100-contact test batch would have caught.
Armand Farrokh took a list of 224,000 contacts and used AI columns in Clay to filter out duplicates and keep only sales leaders with 10+ reps, at companies where 3+ reps had used 30MPC content. An AI prompt then drafted each email from four inputs. They sent from 20+ warmed-up domains.
By Armand Farrokh, Founder of 30 Minutes to President's Club (30MPC) · 30MPC newsletter ↗ · Feb 26, 2026
If you sell: filter first, then write
- Start with your full contact list and write down the filters that make an account A-tier (title, team size, signs they already know you).
- Add one AI or enrichment column per filter, and add a column that checks the person still works at that company.
- Build the drafting prompt from 4 inputs: your best writing on cold email, everything about your product, examples of personalization triggers, and 2-3 finished emails you like.
- Send a test batch of about 100 contacts first. Read every negative reply and fix the data before you scale.
- Send from many warmed-up domains: warm each for about 2 weeks at 20-40 emails a day, then send no more than 50 per domain.
- Track reply rate, not open rate.
Write a cold email to [name], [title] at [company]. What we sell: [paste product description and the outcome in numbers]. How we write cold email: [paste 1-2 of your best guides or rules]. Personalization triggers we have for this person: [e.g. 3 people on their team use our content; they downloaded our report]. Examples of finished emails we like: [paste 2-3]. Rules: under 90 words, tie together the triggers above in one natural line, one soft question at the end, no em dashes. If a trigger is missing, leave it out. Do not invent facts.
If you lead a team: roll it out
- Have one ops person own the filter columns and the domain setup.
- Make a 100-contact test batch a rule before any campaign goes out to thousands.
Watch out for
- 30MPC ran this with help from the Clay team, who built the filter columns, so the setup time may be longer on your own.
- The reply rate was 1.1% when he recorded the video and 1.9% at the end of the campaign. These are reply rates, not positive reply rates.
- He still edits AI drafts by hand and calls out AI tells like em dashes.
Source: Armand Farrokh, 30MPC newsletter, Feb 26, 2026. Results are as reported by the source; we did not measure them.
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