What 'cut-through' actually looks like in practice
Modern outbound has become a recognisable pattern, and the buyer has learned to switch off the moment they see it. A note on the craft of writing for senior buyers who get hundreds of messages a week.
Senior decision-makers in cybersecurity, fintech and enterprise infrastructure get hundreds of prospecting messages a week. Across LinkedIn and email combined, the volume sits somewhere between a hundred and four hundred touches every seven days. It’s relentless.
So much so that most of them don’t get read at all. The buyer’s developed a defensive reflex — they assume it’s a bot, they glance at the first line, they move on.
So how do you get past this?
The only real way is to make it obvious you’re a genuine interaction. Real research. Real relevance. A first sentence that feels like a real person has thought about them specifically and has something useful to say.
That’s what cut-through means in practice. Getting read.
What “feels hand-written” really means
A message feels hand-written when it carries the marks of human attention. Specificity. Real research. An opening line that could only have been written about this particular person on this particular day.
The buyer can’t always tell you why one message lands and another gets binned. They just feel the difference. Something in the wording, the framing, the relevance - they keep reading.
Often the messages that work best are the slightly unpolished ones. A typo nobody bothered to fix. A sentence that runs a bit long. A phrase that sounds the way someone might actually talk in a conversation. These tiny imperfections read as genuine - because they are. The over-polished, perfectly-cadenced, suspiciously-fluent message is the one that pings the buyer’s bot radar.
Generic openers fall apart in seconds. “Noticed you got a new role — most sales leaders need [thing] when this happens.” “Saw that you acquired [company] — most companies need [thing] when this happens.” Yes, technically these reference something real about the recipient. The structure, though, is so familiar that the buyer sees straight through it. They’ve read the exact same opening forty times this month. They already know what’s coming in the next paragraph before they’ve finished the first.
The personalisation token gives the template away. The recognisable scaffolding around it triggers the switch-off.
The work upstream
You really have to know your buyer to write something that works. The visible part is the message. The craft lives upstream - in the discovery, the research, the buyer intelligence that happens before anyone writes anything.
When we engage with a client, we go deep on the basics. Who can they actually sell to? What are the niches inside their broader ICP that are most receptive right now? What’s the buyer’s pain? What do they care about? What keeps them awake at night? What do they eat for breakfast?
That last one isn’t a joke. Knowing the small texture of someone’s working week - what they’re worried about in Q4 budget meetings, what their boss is asking them about, what the last vendor approaching them got wrong - that’s where the difference between a human-feeling message and a machine-feeling one actually lives.
Most agencies skip this work. They take a high-level brief - “we sell to CISOs at mid-market companies” - and let the tooling do the rest. Tooling is great at finding the CISOs. Knowing what a CISO at a Series C SaaS company worries about during board season, or what’s on their mind in Q4 budget approvals - that’s a different problem. That’s craft. It requires time spent with people who’ve sold into that exact buyer.
Genuine reasons to start a conversation
Once you understand the buyer properly, the next question is how to open a conversation that feels like a natural reason to be in touch. There are several types of trigger that produce genuinely relevant openers - and this is where the modern stack really works.
Intent signals. Tools surface buyers actively researching a category, or behaving in ways that suggest a need is forming. When a CISO’s been viewing pricing pages on three competing platforms in a fortnight, that’s a signal worth acknowledging - carefully, without being creepy about it. The conversation feels relevant because it is.
Conversations the buyer’s having publicly. We can scrape trending posts in a topic that matters, or posts the buyer’s network is engaging with, and step into a real conversation. “I saw the comment you made on Jim’s post about {topic}, I wanted to ask if…” feels natural.
The client’s own warm network. Followers of the company page. Visitors to executive LinkedIn profiles. People who engaged with a recent post. These are prospects who’ve already raised a hand, in a small way. Reaching out with reference to that signal opens a warmer conversation by default.
Technology and ecosystem signals. If there’s a compelling reason buyers using a particular platform, technology or ecosystem should hear from you, we identify those buyers and run sequences specific to them. “I saw from the website you use {technology} and wanted to ask if you’re…” is a message a buyer using that platform may continue reading.
These are just some of the ways sales triggers can be used. Be creative! Think about what kinds of events or situations usually make your product or service more compelling and use it - meaningfully. Relocation? Job cuts? Expansion? Trade shows? These will be industry specific but there are many ways we can use events to spark conversations.
This is the modern stack used well. The tooling supports us in surfacing these important finer details. The skill comes in deciding which signals are worth acting on and what to actually say when we get there.
Writing the message itself
Armed with triggers and buyer intelligence, the message needs to do a few things consistently.
It needs to sound like one person talking to another. Like a peer who’s done their homework and has something useful to offer.
It should be short. The senior buyer reading their inbox at 7am will give you fifteen seconds. A message that takes three minutes to make its point doesn’t get read.
It should include a question. Senior buyers are used to being broadcast at. The shift to being asked something properly — we are not talking about those obscure questions we’ve all received, that usually make no sense! Or, “Im curious,”.. It needs to be genuine. These questions can lead to the right conversations, if asked in the right way.
Stay restrained. Senior buyers are allergic to marketing language. The more human and unpolished you can be, the better. We are aiming for a reading age of about 9 here. No “Game-changing”. Keep the marketing speak to a minimum.
When the timing’s off
Not everyone replies. They don’t. Sometimes the timing’s wrong. It’s interesting, just not interesting enough. Sometimes the buyer’s genuinely intrigued and can’t prioritise the conversation this quarter. Sometimes the message is interesting but the moment passes.
What matters is the buyer’s overall impression of the brand has been a positive one. They haven’t been spammed with reams of AI sludge. They haven’t received seven follow-ups in two weeks chasing a meeting. The interaction was respectful, the message was relevant, and there was no pressure.
That changes everything that comes after. Three or six months later, when the buyer is in-market, when a check-in with something new happens, it lands in the context of an existing positive impression. The relationship hasn’t been burned before it’s begun.
This is the long-game pattern. The compounding work that turns a pipeline channel from a tap-on-demand into something that builds value over time.
A closing thought
B2B buyers are looking for people they’d actually want to work with. The volume outreach, the templates, the bot-pattern messages — those just become noise the buyer learns to filter.
The honest bit is this is hard to keep doing well. The techniques that feel fresh today become tomorrow’s templates. What reads as unexpected and human in 2026 will be the recognisable pattern by 2027. Buyers keep getting faster at spotting whatever the current convention is. There’s no fixed playbook for cut-through — the work is to keep paying attention to what’s changing.
We’ve been doing this for thirty years. The tools and channels have changed completely in that time. The underlying discipline has stayed the same: pay attention to the buyer, understand what they actually care about, write to them like a peer, respect their time. None of that goes out of date.