How to Target CFOs and Compliance Leaders via Email

Most AEs can’t get a meeting with a CFO. My clients are getting them with CEOs, COOs, and CFOs—consistently. The secret? Not magic. Not spamming. Hyper-personalized, multi-channel outreach powered by ChatGPT. Here’s the exact framework we use (that gets replies when “short and sweet” emails fail): When I ask sales teams how many times they follow up with an executive before moving on, the most common answer is: “Two emails, maybe a call.” That’s why you’re losing. Executives don’t respond because: Your outreach is generic You stop before you break through the noise You rely on ONE channel (usually email) Here’s how we fix it. 1. Go narrow before you go deep Stop prospecting to everyone in your patch. Pick your A accounts—the top 10-20 that would change your year if you closed them. 2. Use 3-4 channels every time If you send an email and don’t follow it with a call, a video, and a LinkedIn touch, you’re invisible. I’ll use ZoomInfo or Seamless to get the cell number, call right after sending the email, leave a voicemail, then send a voice note or video if no pickup. 3. Reach out 10+ times (not 2) My largest deals took 10-15 touches before the first meeting. If you believe you can help them, they need to know you’re serious. 4. Hyper-personalize using AI Forget “Hope you’re doing well.” Here’s the structure: Line 1: Personal, sincere compliment tied to research Line 2: Observation about their stated goals/priorities Line 3: The gap between where they want to go and where they are today Line 4: How you can close that gap Close: Soft call to action 5. Steal my favorite ChatGPT-4o prompt “I’m a sales rep at [Company] targeting [Name, Title]. Write a personalized, executive-ready email that speaks to their role, their publicly stated goals or quotes, and how we can help them. Be concise, use bullet points, and end with a soft CTA.” (more in the video below) Combine this with deep account research before you ever reach out, and you’ll have emails that sound like you wrote them just for that exec—because you did. I’ve seen this method work when: - You’re selling to an account that already uses your product (reference it in the first line) - You can’t find public info on a prospect—personalize at the account level instead - You need to enable champions to sell internally You don’t get meetings with executives by sending “short and sweet” emails. You get them by showing you’ve done the work— And proving, in detail, that you understand their business better than 99% of reps hitting their inbox. Get my top 4 ChatGPT prompts for tech sellers here: https://lnkd.in/gbznEjgq

Every single email we send, has to pass this test. If the email still makes sense when sent to someone in a completely unrelated industry, it gets scrapped. Because if it "could" work for everyone, it will work for no one... Most people think writing generic templates saves time. It doesn’t. It just saves effort at the expense of reply rates. The real efficiency is writing emails so specific they only make sense to your ideal customer profile. That’s when replies go up and pipeline fills itself. Here’s what that looks like in practice: 👉 If you’re targeting B2B SaaS, talk CAC, churn, activation rates. Not just “growth.” 👉 If you’re targeting logistics, bring up shipping delays, warehouse systems, and fulfillment costs. 👉 If you’re targeting compliance-heavy industries, speak their acronyms. HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI. Use their language. Specificity isn’t limiting. It’s a multiplier. It gets responses, builds credibility, and makes your offer feel tailored, because it is. But the hardest part? Actually having leads worth getting specific for. That’s where A-Leads changes everything. We’re not only pulling job titles and generic firmographics. We’re layering real signals; like new tech installs, intent data, hiring trends and matching those to verified emails. That means when you do write that hyper-relevant email… …it lands in the inbox of someone who actually cares. Generic emails get deleted. Specific ones start conversations. A-Leads makes sure they happen with the right people.

Your cold email has one job. And 99% people are failing to do it. It’s to make the reader say: “This email is literally meant for me.” Not: “Cool. Another agency spraying templates.” That’s where most fail. They confuse “personalized” with “specific.” First name isn't specificity. Neither is a job title. Nor is a 3-second {company} mention. True specificity speaks their language so well, They think you used insider intel. Here’s how to nail it every single time: 👉 1. Mention what only someone inside the business would know If you’re targeting SaaS RevOps: Reference their HubSpot→Salesforce sync issues. If you’re targeting eCom: Mention abandoned cart recovery inside Klaviyo. That’s when they stop scrolling. 👉 2. Use metrics that matter only to them “Revenue growth” is meaningless. Try “3.4% churn reduction in 6 months” for SaaS. Try “CPA under $14 with 3.7 ROAS” for DTC brands. These numbers show you get it. 👉 3. Reference their regulations, not just outcomes Selling to fintech? Bring up PCI-DSS compliance. Healthcare? Prior auth delays or HIPAA workflows. Edtech? FERPA compliance. Now you’re not just relevant, you’re trusted. 👉 4. Mirror the tools they use daily “Manual tracking” is vague. “Google Sheets updates missed by RevOps” hits harder. “Stitch breaking in your dbt pipeline” hits hardest. It’s not just about knowing the problem. It’s about knowing how they talk about it. 👉 5. Write for 1 person at a time If your email can go to 10 different industries and still ‘work’ It doesn’t really work at all. We’ve tested this across 2M+ outbound emails a month. Hyper-specific always outperforms “efficient.” So yes… Specificity is more work. But it gets more replies. Which gets you more deals. Which gets you more scale. And isn’t that the whole point? PS: Cleverly has generated 224,751+ B2B leads, and sourced $312M in pipeline revenue for 10,000+ clients. Want results like that? Go to our website and check it out now.

𝗪𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝗱𝗻'𝘁 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝟱,𝟬𝟬𝟬 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀. 𝗝𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝟰𝟳. Why? Because every one of them already believed in the product. A UK-based SAGE implementation partner came to us for help with lead generation. Instead of building a generic list of finance leads, we proposed a sharper approach: What if we targeted only those CFOs and senior finance leaders who had just switched jobs - and had used SAGE in their previous org, but NOT in their current one? The idea was simple but powerful: If someone trusted SAGE before, there's a good chance they'd advocate for it again - especially if their new company is still evaluating ERP options. So we engineered a system that: 1. Tracked job changes in senior finance roles 2. Checked for SAGE usage in their previous companies 3. Filtered out anyone whose current company already used it That gave us 47 prospects. Every one of them was a potential internal champion - with hands-on experience, timing on their side, and the authority to push for change. The campaign was personal. Timed right. And deeply relevant. Modern outbound should NOT be about scale - it should be about signal. And when we do that part right, 47 > 5,000! :D Would this approach work for you?