Cold messages to people in my field, do they work?

I want to talk to people in a new field but I hate cold messages. This is my first time dealing with any of this. I worry about bothering people. How do you phrase the request?

Keep everything in writing and save the confirmation numbers. It saved me later.

Thanks for writing this out. I went through something close to it last year, and it settled down once I kept a simple log of every call and form.