Most PE firms rely on banker-led deals. The best source proprietary deals with disciplined, scalable cold outreach infrastructure.
PE cold email isn't about volume. It's about targeted outreach to CEOs that doesn't damage your firm's brand reputation.
Sending from your main firm domain (@firm.com) for cold outreach is a critical error that can get your entire team blacklisted.
Founder-CEOs ignore generic PE outreach. Your message must show you understand their specific market, not just their EBITDA.
Scaling deal origination beyond 100 emails/day requires dedicated domains and inbox rotation to protect deliverability.
Coordinating deal team follow-ups manually is impossible. Outbound infrastructure prevents duplicate emails and missed opportunities.
Private equity deal origination is shifting from pure relationship-sourcing to a hybrid model powered by data and disciplined outbound. But most deal teams approach it incorrectly.
They treat cold outreach like personal email, sending from their primary firm domain via Outlook or Gmail. This approach doesn't scale, creates massive operational drag, and puts your firm's reputation on the line. Scaling proprietary deal flow requires thinking about outbound as an infrastructure problem, not a sales task.
Unlike typical B2B sales, outbound in private equity has unique, high-stakes challenges:
@yourfirm.com) is a guaranteed way to get blacklisted by Google and Microsoft. This can disrupt critical communications with LPs and portfolio companies.The playbook for 2025 is about disciplined execution, not spray-and-pray. It combines a sharp thesis with robust infrastructure.
First, your list quality must be impeccable. Go beyond basic firmographics. Target companies based on specific growth signals like key executive hires, product launches, or recent press that aligns with your investment thesis.
Next, structure your message around a "Researched Compliment + Relevant Thesis" framework. A 5-touch sequence spread over three weeks is persistent without being obnoxious. Use email as the primary channel, supported by a LinkedIn connection request after the first touch to build credibility.
Example 1: The "Relevant Thesis" Angle
Instead of saying "We invest in SaaS," try: "Saw your recent expansion into the APAC market. Our thesis on logistics tech suggests companies that make this move early capture disproportionate market share, similar to our portco [XYZ Corp]."
Example 2: The "Peer Signal" Angle
Demonstrate you understand their world: "We recently worked with [Founder Name] at [Similar, non-competitor Company]. A key challenge they overcame was scaling their channel sales program. Wondering if that's a priority for your team in Q3."
Here’s where most PE outbound efforts break. A principal asks an analyst to email 300 target companies. The analyst sends them from their Outlook account over two days. By day three, the firm's domain is on a blocklist, and emails to LPs start bouncing.
This is not a theoretical risk. It is an inevitability of sending cold email at any meaningful volume without the right infrastructure.
Professional deal teams operate with a dedicated sending infrastructure, which includes:
firm-partners.com or firm-equity.com to completely isolate cold outreach from your primary corporate domain.k.tryber@firm-partners.com, kurtis.t@firm-partners.com) that have been properly warmed up to establish a good sending reputation.For Private Equity firms, the primary domain is a critical asset used for LP relations, portfolio company communication, and legal correspondence. Using it for cold outreach exposes this asset to immense risk. A single spam complaint can get your domain flagged, causing critical emails to bounce. This is why sophisticated deal teams never send cold outreach from their main domain. They use dedicated, warmed-up domains as a firewall.
Your outbound strategy should be built around specific "plays" or patterns. Here are three common ones for deal teams:
The transition happens when you move from one analyst "hacking it" in Gmail to a team of three or more trying to coordinate outreach to 500+ companies a month.
It's the point where you ask questions like:
Solving these problems requires an infrastructure-first platform like SuperSend, which is built to manage dedicated domains, rotate inboxes, and run multi-channel sequences at scale. It's the technical layer that enables your deal team to focus on the message, not the plumbing.
Before jumping into a tool, the next step is to map out your firm's specific outreach use cases and understand the core strategies for scaling deliverability. This ensures you build a system that lasts.
Join thousands of teams using SuperSend to transform their cold email campaigns and drive more revenue.