Outbound Sequences

Outbound Sequences

Prerequisite: sales/outbound-compliance must have passed its six-gate check. Do not draft a send-ready sequence before that. Output of this skill feeds sales/pipeline-and-closing stage 1.

The purpose of a cold message is not to sell. It is to earn one reply. Every structural decision below follows from that.

The only message structure that reliably works

Four sentences. Under 90 words. Plain text, no images, no signature block art, no attachment.

1. RELEVANCE   — why you, specifically, right now. A fact about THEM.
2. PROBLEM     — the problem that fact implies, in their language, stated as a guess.
3. PROOF       — one concrete, true, specific piece of evidence you can act.
4. ASK         — one tiny, low-commitment, unambiguous question.

Worked example:

Saw you're hiring two more installers for the Leeds branch (relevance). Usually when a crew scales past ~8, scheduling moves from a whiteboard to somebody's full-time job (problem, as a guess). I built the dispatch board a 6-van plumbing firm in Sheffield now runs their whole week on — cut their Monday planning from 4 hours to about 30 minutes (proof, true and specific). Worth a look? (ask)

Why each part is load-bearing:

• Relevance must be a fact about them, obtained from a public source. "I see you're in construction" is not relevance, it's a category. A hiring post, a new location, a specific page on their site, a recent award — that's relevance. This sentence is ~80% of reply rate.
• State the problem as a guess, not a diagnosis. "Usually when X, Y happens" lets them correct you, and a correction is a reply. "You clearly have a problem with Y" invites a defensive no-reply.
• Proof must be specific and true. A number with a context beats an adjective. If you have no result yet, the honest substitute is the mechanism or an offer to prove it free — never an invented client. (sales/outbound-compliance gate 6.)
• The ask must be tiny. "Worth a look?" / "Want me to send the 2-min version?" / "Is scheduling actually a headache or am I off?" — all answerable in four words. Never "do you have 30 minutes Tuesday or Thursday for a discovery call?" on touch 1: that asks for the biggest thing you want before you've earned anything.

Subject lines

Lowercase, 2–5 words, looks like a human typed it, describes content honestly.

• Good: leeds branch, scheduling question, quick one re: installers
• Bad: Unlock 10x Efficiency Today!, Re: our conversation (if there wasn't one — that's gate 3), anything with an emoji, anything in Title Case With Every Word Capitalized.

Cadence — 4 touches, then close the file

Then stop, and move the record to Lost with a reason, plus the 90-day nurture slot from sales/pipeline-and-closing.

Hard rules:

• Every touch adds something. If you can't think of what to add, that's information: the targeting is weak.
• Touch 4 is not a threat or a guilt trip. It works because it genuinely removes pressure.
• Reply to the same thread for touches 2–4, so they have context.
• Any human reply ends the sequence and moves to the pipeline. Never let automation talk over a person who answered.

Personalization that actually scales

The trap is a binary choice between 500 identical messages and 20 lovingly hand-written ones. The resolution is a fixed template with one genuinely researched variable:

• Template: sentences 2, 3, 4 are fixed per segment.
• Variable: sentence 1 (relevance) is researched per prospect — one public fact, ~60 seconds of work.
• Segment tightly enough that the fixed sentences are actually true for everyone in it. If sentence 2 isn't true for all 50 people on the list, the segment is too broad. This is the whole technique.

Anti-patterns: {{first_name}}-only personalization (everyone sees through it); "I loved your post!" about a post you didn't read; flattery of any kind; mentioning their city as if it's insight.

Channel choice

Check for a warm path before building a cold list. Mutual connection, existing customer referral, community membership. One intro is worth ~100 cold sends.

Metrics and kill criteria

Measure per segment, not per campaign, and with N≥50 sent before drawing any conclusion.

Diagnostic ladder — read it in this order:

• Good open, near-zero reply → the message is wrong (or the offer is). Iterate sentences 1–2.
• Low open → subject line, or deliverability. Check DMARC/warmup before rewriting copy.
• Replies, all negative/"not us" → targeting is wrong. Fix the segment, not the copy.
• Nothing at all across 2 segments and 100+ sends → the offer doesn't address a real problem. Stop sending and go back to business/offer-design / business/opportunity-scan.

Kill criteria, written before launch (per thinking/decision-quality): if a segment is below 2% reply after 50 sends, stop, and either re-segment or kill the offer. Do not scale volume to compensate for a bad reply rate — that converts a copy problem into a domain burn.

Procedure

1. Confirm sales/outbound-compliance gates PASS. Stop if not.
2. Define the segment narrowly; write the relevance sentence template and confirm it's true for all members.
3. Write touch 1 in the four-sentence structure. Cut it to under 90 words.
4. Read it back and strike: every adjective, every "I hope this finds you well", every "I wanted to reach out", every sentence about us that isn't the proof.
5. Write touches 2–4 with their distinct angles, including the close-the-file message.
6. Verify every factual claim (thinking/evidence-grading); strike anything unevidenced.
7. Set kill criteria and the metric you'll judge on, in writing.
8. Hand to a human to send. Log every send in the pipeline file at stage 1.

Boundaries

• I draft and sequence; I cannot send. No sending tool exists in my kit. Finished sequences exit as a repo artifact plus a surface_finding.
• No invented proof, no fake threads, no fake urgency, no invented personas — these are outbound-compliance gate 3/6 failures and also just don't work twice.
• No automated social DMs and no volume DMing, regardless of what a tool makes technically possible.
• If asked to scale a sequence that's below kill threshold, the answer is the diagnostic ladder and a recommendation to fix targeting — not more volume.