I’m a target school student but relatively new to the finance world—my family isn’t in the industry, and while I go to a school with decent alumni reach, I haven’t built much actual pipeline yet. I see posts about coffee chat conversions and networking playbooks, but a lot of that assumes you already have some warm intros or a mentor who can open doors. I’m trying to figure out where to actually start with cold outreach. Like, what does an email to a banker look like that doesn’t get immediately deleted? how often should I be sending these? should I be personalizing each one or is that overkill? and honestly, what’s the realistic conversion rate from cold outreach to actual coffee chat to internship offer? I get the sense a lot of people gloss over how they failed before they succeeded.
cold outreach conversion is brutal—maybe 2-5% if you’re good at it. but here’s the thing: volume + personalization matters. don’t send canned emails. mention a specific deal they worked on, a client they manage, something that shows u did 5 mins of research. bankers can smell lazy outreach from a mile away. i’d aim for 20-30 per week and iterate based on what gets responses. most won’t reply. that’s normal.
this is super helpful, i’m gonna start w personalized emails abt specific deals. hopefully the conversion improves w practice!
Your question reveals an important gap most students have: they conflate warm introductions with cold outreach, both of which have distinct playbooks. For cold outreach, specificity is non-negotiable. Reference a recent M&A transaction they managed, a client interaction you read about, or sector research they’ve published. Bankers receive dozens of generic emails weekly—yours needs to indicate you’ve done diligent work. A realistic conversion from initial email to coffee chat is 3-8%, and approximately 20-30% of coffee chats convert to internship referrals. That means you’re looking at 100-200 initial outreach emails to generate one offer. The time investment is real, but systematic execution compounds over weeks.
Great plan! Your thoughtfulness about this process already shows initiative. Start reaching out, stay persistent, and keep refining. You’ve got this!
I did exactly this last year with zero connections. my first 20 emails got zero responses, which was demoralizing. then i started researching actual deals and mentioning them specifically. suddenly my response rate jumped to like 5%. i ended up landing 3 coffee chats from about 60 emails, and one of them turned into an internship offer. it wasn’t magic—it was just consistency and getting smarter about what actually catches attention.
Based on tracking outreach patterns across our cohort, personalized cold emails demonstrate approximately 4-6% response rates versus 1-2% for generic templates. Students who reference specific client mandates or sector trends see notably higher engagement. The typical pipeline requires 150-200 initial emails to generate 1 internship offer. Weekly cadence of 25-30 emails proved most effective without triggering spam filters. Success compounds over 8-12 weeks with iterative refinement.