Cold Email to a Head of Demand Generation

A cold email to a head of demand generation lands in the one inbox on the org chart that is pitched by every ad network, data vendor, and agency at once, which means the bar for a reply is set by the best hundred emails they got this month, not by yours. They also write outbound for a living. They know a merge field when they see one, they know what 'noticed you're hiring' costs per credit, and they will grade your sequence before they finish reading it. The upside is that a head of demand gen respects a specific observation about a live campaign more than almost any other buyer, because they know how much work it took to see it. The three templates below are built around that: a trigger you can only get by looking at their program, one idea, one soft ask, under 90 words. The Claude prompt at the end does the looking for you.

What a Head of Demand Generation is measured on, and what they delete

A head of demand generation is measured on sourced pipeline, the conversion from lead to qualified opportunity, and cost per opportunity, and every one of those numbers is reviewed weekly with sales in the room. They read email in Gmail on a laptop between campaign launches, usually mid-morning after the dashboard check, and nobody filters it for them, so it is a hundred-plus vendor pitches a day scanned in the preview pane. They delete on sight: 'grow your pipeline' in the subject, a paragraph about your product before a sentence about their program, a fake reply-thread subject, and any email that could have been sent to a CMO unchanged. What earns a reply is an observation about a campaign they shipped, a webinar they ran, or a channel they just started testing, paired with a single idea they have not already tried.

Cold email to a head of demand generation: the three templates

Pick the template that matches what you can actually see about their program, fill the placeholders with facts you found rather than guesses, and send one. Every body is under 90 words on purpose; if yours grows past that, the trigger is not specific enough yet.

Subject: your {{webinar name}} follow-up

{{First name}}, saw the {{webinar name}} promo running on LinkedIn this week. The registration page is strong, but there is no visible follow-up once the replay goes out.

Most of the registrants who go cold do it in that gap between replay and first sales touch, because nobody owns the handoff.

I wrote up how {{customer}} closed that gap without adding headcount. Worth sending, or is it already covered?

Subject: MQL to SQL at {{company}}

{{First name}}, a guess based on the {{number}} open roles on your team: pipeline targets went up and the conversion from MQL to SQL did not.

That is the number that gets litigated in the Monday meeting with sales, and most demand gen leaders I talk to are fixing it with more volume when the leak is in routing and speed to first touch.

If routing is where yours leaks, I can show the two changes that fixed it for {{customer}}. Fifteen minutes, or a written version?

Subject: {{customer}}'s cost per opportunity

{{First name}}, {{customer}}'s demand team ran roughly your motion: {{channel mix}}, a {{team size}}-person team, and a sales org that questioned every lead.

They cut cost per qualified opportunity by {{result}} in {{timeframe}} by {{one-line change}}. No new channel, no new budget.

I can send the before-and-after numbers and the exact change. Useful, or is cost per opp not the metric you are graded on?

your {{webinar name}} follow-up
MQL to SQL at {{company}}
{{customer}}'s cost per opportunity
the {{channel}} test you just started
who owns the replay handoff?
{{competitor}} is bidding on your brand terms

Send from a real person's mailbox with no tracking pixel; this persona checks headers, and a marketing-domain sender tells them exactly how many other inboxes got the same email.

Personalize these to the account, not just the persona

The templates are the floor: they work on any head of demand gen because they are about the job, not the company. The reply comes from the trigger, and finding a real one means reading their LinkedIn ads, their webinar page, and their job posts, which is the twenty minutes nobody spends on a cold send. Paste the templates and the company URL into the prompt below and let Claude do the reading.

You are writing a cold email to the Head of Demand Generation at {{company}} ({{company URL}}).

First, read what their demand program is doing right now: the LinkedIn ads library for {{company}}, any webinar or event pages, their blog cadence, and open roles on the marketing team. Note the channels they are visibly investing in and anything that looks new in the last 90 days.

Then take the three templates below and rewrite each one around a real trigger you found. Keep every body under 90 words, one idea per email, one soft ask. Replace every {{placeholder}} with a specific fact, or with a clearly marked [NEED: ...] if you could not find it. Do not invent metrics.

Finish with the three subject lines you would test first and one sentence on which template fits this account best and why.

MY PRODUCT: {{one-line description}}
PROOF I CAN USE: {{customer, result, timeframe}}
TEMPLATES:
{{paste the templates above}}

Write cold email at scale with Claude

• B2B cold email templates skill →The Claude skill that writes cold email in your brand voice with the banned-word list and the one-idea rule baked in.
• Cold email from a value prop prompt →The copy-paste prompt version: one value prop in, one specific email out.
• Personalize cold email with Clay and Claude →The use case that runs these templates across a whole list with real enrichment data.

Frequently asked questions