How to personalise a cold email from a LinkedIn profile in two minutes

Most advice on personalisation ends with a line about the prospect's college or their favourite cricket team. That is decoration. Real personalisation is giving a stranger a reason to believe you wrote to them in particular. Here is a routine that takes about two minutes a lead and needs no special tools.

Step 1: Read what is public, by hand

Open the person's public LinkedIn profile and the company's own website. Do not use a scraper or a browser bot; they break platform terms and the data is often stale. Read the headline, the About section, the current role and one recent post. On the website, read the home page and the careers or news page.

Step 2: Copy the lines that describe change

You are hunting for one of four things, strongest first:

1. A trigger event: a new branch, a new hire, a new service.
2. A stated priority: something they say they are working on.
3. A visible gap: something on their site that connects to your work.
4. A shared context: a real thing you have in common.

Copy those lines and paste them into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini with a clear instruction: use only this text, list five observations, and quote the phrase each came from.

Step 3: Choose one observation

One is enough. Pick the observation that is professional, recent and closest to what you sell. If a dental clinic's page says a second location has opened and appointments are by phone, and you set up online booking, you have your reason.

Step 4: Write a bridge, with a hedge

The bridge links their fact to your offer. Phrase it as a possibility, because you do not know their business from inside: with two front desks, I would guess double bookings become harder to avoid. Never state a guess as a fact.

Step 5: Finish in four lines

• The look: what you saw and where.
• The link: the bridge.
• The offer: what you do, in one line.
• The ask: a question they can answer in a word.

Add a line that makes no easy, and sign with your name, business and city.

Step 6: Check before you send

Compare every statement about the prospect with the text you pasted. Assistants sometimes add a plausible detail that was never there. Check the date on any news you mention; congratulating someone on a launch from two years ago is worse than saying nothing.

If the page gives you nothing honest to use, do not manufacture a compliment. Open with a problem you know their kind of business faces and ask whether it applies to them.

The Leadloom Prompt Vault has ten research prompts built for exactly this routine, including an extractor that shows the source phrase behind every observation.