In June, I received a cold email from a founder selling an AI tool that personalizes outreach.
The first line said:
“Most LinkedIn automation tools blast generic templates at scale.”
His product promised to read my LinkedIn profile and write a hyper-personalized message.
But the email he sent me was completely generic.
That’s the problem.
If your first message doesn’t demonstrate what your product promises, why would I trust the product enough to test it?
Since AI outreach tools took off, I’ve received 30+ cold emails from vendors promising better personalization.
I can’t remember any that did it well.
And when dozens of vendors make the same promise without delivering, prospects stop believing the promise altogether.
For products like this, the outreach is part of the product experience.
The founder should have run his product on my profile and sent me the output.
The paradox of AI-powered outbound
On a podcast, someone asked me:
“If everyone is using AI, shouldn’t we all be receiving the same great cold emails?”
In practice, the opposite is happening.
AI has made it easier than ever to research a prospect, understand their context, and create a relevant example of the value you’re promising.
Yet I receive more generic cold messages than ever.
That’s the opportunity.
Most teams are using AI to send more, not to prove more.
So the bar has changed:
When you can demonstrate your value directly in the outreach, do it.
I’ve been working on a simple way to bring a small bite of the product or service experience directly into the cold outreach itself:
The Chef’s Bite: demo your product inside your cold outreach
I call it the Chef’s Bite.
A Chef’s Bite is a small, prospect-specific piece of the work your product or service can do, shaped by research into a relevant business problem or priority and delivered through cold outreach before you ask for more of the buyer’s time.
Small: Give the buyer enough to understand the value. Keep the scope below a full implementation or large free project.
Relevant: Build it from what you learned about the buyer’s company, role, and situation.
Native: Show a piece of work your product or service performs. The sample should come from the offer you want the buyer to evaluate.
Visible: Put the sample in front of the buyer. “I’ve prepared something, let me know if you want it” still hides the work.
That’s why it’s called a bite. The buyer sees enough of the solution to judge its relevance without receiving a full implementation.
Use the product itself to build the Bite when you can. If the sample requires manual research, AI can help produce it after you decide.
P.S. Some offers do not produce a useful Chef’s Bite
I tried to create one for a customer in the HR industry last week. I couldn’t find a useful Chef’s Bite for their product.
I don’t think there is a useful version for every product or service. If you can’t find one, don’t force it.
Research gives the Chef’s Bite its relevance
Research identifies what matters to the buyer. Business acumen helps you understand why it could matter. The cold message carries that context.
The Chef’s Bite shows a small piece of the solution adapted to your prospect business.
Examples (What you sell determines the Bite)
AI personalization
For an AI-personalization tool, the message and the product output can overlap. The Chef’s Bite could be the personalized message itself.
B2B contact data
Let’s say you work for a B2B contact data provider like Cognism. If your prospect’s sell to CISOs, a Chef’s Bite could be a sample of 50 mobile phone numbers for CISOs in the target market.
Services
A service may produce a different kind of Bite. It could be a small diagnosis, or recommendation drawn from the prospect’s situation and tied to the work you provide.
SalesMotion
SalesMotion gives reps account research and buying signals across their territory.
A few months ago, I broke down their outbound strategy using my 7-step framework. If you missed it, you can read it here.
The opportunity for a Chef’s Bite is to show the prospect a small example of the research their reps could actually use.
Take Docker.
We know from their website that Confluent is a customer. So we can pick a similar target account, Databricks, and use SalesMotion or an AI research prompt to identify signals that could make Databricks relevant right now for Docker's reps:
Saw you work with Confluent, so I pulled signals for Databricks:
→ 300+ infrastructure roles (K8s)
→ Multi-cloud Kubernetes at scale
→ IPO prep (governance critical)
This is what your reps would see automatically.Now put that inside the cold email:
Hi [First name], saw you’re growing your enterprise team.
Enterprise AE ramp takes 12 to 18 months to quota.
Our tool can help cut ramp and shortens deal cycles. By tracking buying signals for companies needing enterprise containers.
Saw you work with Confluent, so I pulled signals for Databricks:
→ 300+ infrastructure roles (K8s)
→ Multi-cloud Kubernetes at scale
→ IPO prep (governance critical)
This is what your reps would see automatically.
Interested to learn more?The important part isn’t telling Docker that SalesMotion provides account research for their target accounts.
You’re showing them what that research would actually look like for one of their potential accounts.
Before taking a meeting, the buyer already gets a small preview of the product’s value.
Where to use the Bite
The channel is how you deliver the Chef's bite.
Email: Put a short Bite directly in the message.
Follow-up: Send a larger Bite after the first touch.
LinkedIn: Share the sample in the conversation or send a link to it.
Cold call: Prepare the Bite before the call and use it when the relevant problem comes up.
Attachment or link: Use a bounded artifact when the sample needs more space than the message allows.
A short inline sample may work for one offer while an attachment or follow-up works for another.
Use your product in your outreach
Once the message establishes why the outreach is relevant, ask:
What small piece of our product can I put in front of this buyer to show how we could help with something that matters to them?
Put that sample in the outreach before you ask for more of the buyer’s time.
If you can show your product in your outreach, do it.
In 2026, outbound teams have no excuse to send generic cold outreach.
AI makes outbound easier than ever.
Elric
The Chef’s Bite AI workflow
I’m turning the Chef’s Bite into a step-by-step AI workflow.
Beta members will get it inside the new Hub this week.
Elric, I like the “Chef’s Bite” framing because it gets at something outbound often misses: the buyer should feel less risk before they give you time.
The useful line is between giving a proof point and doing unpaid work.
A good Bite is small, specific, and close enough to the buyer’s world that they can judge the quality of thinking. It shows evidence, but it does not turn the seller into a free implementation resource.
That matters even more in complex B2B sales, especially when the offer is advisory or technical. You cannot create a useful sample from a template. You need to understand the buyer’s context, what they are trying to improve, and where the friction is likely to be.
Strong cold outreach does not ask the prospect to imagine the value.
It gives them something small enough to inspect.
And relevant enough to trust.