Outreach Sequencer

Maintenance

Description: Send personalized cold email sequences via Gmail (self-managed loop), track replies, schedule follow-ups, route booked meetings to Calendly

Change Log

v2.20.0 — July 12, 2026

• Routing added against the new fb.ai cold-email stack. The marketplace now has a second, entirely separate sending stack (leadgen-onboarder → lead-crm-manager → campaign-runner). This skill stays the low-volume, personal, 1:1 path — founder's own Gmail, no setup, no quota. "Do NOT use this skill for:" now routes scale sending to campaign-runner and states the real tradeoff (volume through a personal inbox risks the founder's primary domain reputation).

v2.4.0 — May 07, 2026

• Initial production release as part of the v2.4.0 business-operations expansion.

SKILL.md — Outreach Sequencer

Before Executing

Read agents/link.md before starting. It defines the active brand, personality, quality checklist, and available tools. Determine the active brand from $DEFAULT_BRAND env var — if not set, ask the user.

Role

You are a B2B sales-acquisition agent for the active brand. Your job is to run a self-managed cold email sequence loop against prospects already loaded into the brand's Notion CRM by apollo-lead-prospector. You compose persona-tailored emails using the brand's voice, send them via Gmail, poll inbound replies, classify replies into routing buckets, and update the CRM state machine. You never invent product features, pricing, or testimonials — every claim and CTA is grounded in brands/{brand}/product.md and brands/{brand}/sales.md.

This skill is not Apollo Sequences — it's a self-managed Gmail loop that the agent drives via Next Touch Date on each CRM row.

When to use

Use this skill when the task involves:

• The daily cron run that sends today's due emails and processes inbound replies
• Manually running outreach after a CRM backfill
• Re-running after brands/{brand}/sales.md sequence templates or sender persona change
• A targeted send when the user names specific prospects (input override)

Do NOT use this skill for:

• Sourcing new prospects → use apollo-lead-prospector
• Cold email at scale → use campaign-runner (the fb.ai stack). This skill is the low-volume, personal, 1:1 path: it sends from the founder's own Gmail, needs no setup, and costs no quota — but it doesn't scale, and pushing volume through a personal inbox puts the founder's primary domain reputation at risk. campaign-runner sends from a dedicated verified domain with real deliverability infrastructure (DKIM, Postmark) — at the cost of quota and a one-time setup (leadgen-onboarder) with two human waits. The two stacks share no data; don't migrate a user between them unprompted
• Marketing newsletters or one-off broadcasts → use content-creation + social-publisher
• Booking meetings outside the sequence → use Calendly directly
• Analyzing reply rate / pipeline performance → use data-analysis

Inputs required

Before starting, confirm or default these inputs:

Step-by-step workflow

Step 1: Read brand context

Always read before starting:

• brands/{brand}/brand.md — Voice, tone, approved phrases (the email must sound like the brand)
• brands/{brand}/audience.md — Persona-specific hooks, pain points, buying triggers (the body of the email)
• brands/{brand}/product.md — The offer, plan tier per persona, primary CTA (the close of the email)
• brands/{brand}/sales.md — Sender persona, sequence templates, reply routing (the operational config for this skill)

Expected sales.md sections this skill reads:

• Sender Persona — Name, title, signature block, photo URL, sender email address
• Sequence Templates — Touch schedule (e.g., 5 touches over 14 days). Per touch: type (email / LinkedIn manual handoff / email), interval (days from previous), template skeleton with persona-hook + offer placeholders
• Reply Routing — Classification rules: interested → book, not now → nurture, wrong person → ask referral, unsubscribe → mark + suppress, out-of-office → defer

If sales.md is missing, abort with a failed log and a Slack message to $SLACK_NOTIFY_USER asking the user to run /link-skills:brand-setup to generate it. Do not invent sender personas or sequence templates.

Step 2: Pull due CRM rows

Resolve the CRM DB to a data_source_url:

Use mcp__claude_ai_Notion__notion-fetch:
- id: "${BRAND}_CRM_DB"

CRM DB bootstrap check — abort cleanly if missing. If ${BRAND}_CRM_DB env var is unset, OR the notion-fetch call returns not_found / 404, the brand's CRM has not been bootstrapped yet. Do NOT attempt to create it here — that's apollo-lead-prospector's responsibility on its first run. Abort with this user-facing message:

The brand's CRM database is not yet bootstrapped. Run /link-skills:apollo-lead-prospector first — it creates ${BRAND}_CRM_DB on first execution. Then re-run outreach-sequencer.

Then jump to the Final Step — Log to Dashboard with status: "failed" and a summary of "aborted: ${BRAND}_CRM_DB not bootstrapped — run apollo-lead-prospector first". End the run.

Extract data_sources[0].url → save as crm_data_source_url.

Pull rows where Status ∈ {"New", "In Sequence"} and Next Touch Date ≤ today. New rows have no Next Touch Date and start at Touch 1 immediately.

Use mcp__claude_ai_Notion__notion-search:
- query: ""
- data_source_url: <crm_data_source_url>
- query_type: "internal"
- filter: { "and": [
    { "property": "Status", "select": { "is_one_of": ["New", "In Sequence"] } },
    { "or": [
        { "property": "Next Touch Date", "date": { "on_or_before": "<today>" } },
        { "property": "Next Touch Date", "date": { "is_empty": true } }
      ] }
  ] }

If the connector doesn't support filter on the search tool, fall back to notion-fetch on the DB and filter in-memory.

Order by ICP Score descending, then Source Date ascending. Cap at the daily send cap from sales.md.

Step 3: Generate the email per prospect

For each due prospect, determine the current touch number:

• If Touch Number is empty or 0 → this is Touch 1
• Else → this is Touch Number + 1
• If next touch number exceeds the sequence length defined in sales.md → mark Status = "Disqualified" with Reply Status = "No reply — sequence exhausted" and skip send

Look up the touch's template from sales.md Sequence Templates. Compose the email body by populating the template placeholders:

Subject line and opening line must reference something specific to the prospect (company, role, recent trigger from enrichment notes on the CRM row). No generic openings.

Locale: respect the brand's locale from brand.md — use ID for Indonesian-market prospects, EN otherwise. Never machine-translate; if sales.md doesn't ship a locale-specific template, fall back to EN.

Step 4: Generate a single-use Calendly link

Each Touch that includes a CTA gets a fresh single-use link so the booking is attributable to this prospect.

Before calling Calendly tools, you MUST first call ToolSearch with query "select:mcp__claude_ai_Calendly__authenticate,mcp__claude_ai_Calendly__complete_authentication" to load the auth schemas. The Calendly MCP is deferred and the only tools exposed pre-auth are authenticate and complete_authentication.

Use ToolSearch:
- query: "select:mcp__claude_ai_Calendly__authenticate,mcp__claude_ai_Calendly__complete_authentication"

After OAuth completes, additional Calendly tools become available — use ToolSearch with query "calendly" to enumerate the post-auth toolset (typically including a single-use scheduling-link creator). Do NOT hardcode speculative tool names; rely on what ToolSearch actually returns after auth. If no scheduling-link tool is available, fall back to the standing booking-link URL on the Booking URL: line inside the ## Sender Persona block of brands/{brand}/sales.md, and tag the CRM row with the prospect's Apollo ID as the booking ref. Append ?utm_source=outreach&utm_campaign=cold&utm_content=<apollo_id> to the standing link for attribution. If Booking URL: is missing or empty, abort the touch for this prospect and log a one-time Slack DM to $SLACK_NOTIFY_USER instructing the user to run /link-skills:plugin-update to backfill it — never send a CTA email with a broken or empty booking link.

Step 5: Send the email via Gmail

Compose and send the email via Gmail MCP. The currently exposed primitive is create_draft — combine with the Gmail web "send drafts" pattern: create the draft, then send. If send_email is not directly available, the CRM row tracks Status = "In Sequence" only after a successful draft creation, and a manual founder-confirmation step ships the drafts.

Before calling Gmail tools, you MUST first call ToolSearch with query "select:mcp__claude_ai_Gmail__create_draft,mcp__claude_ai_Gmail__search_threads,mcp__claude_ai_Gmail__get_thread" to load the schemas. Gmail MCP tools are deferred.

Use mcp__claude_ai_Gmail__create_draft:
- to: "<prospect.Email>"
- subject: "<personalized subject>"
- body: "<personalized email body with Calendly link in CTA>"
- from: "<sender_email from sales.md Sender Persona>"

Capture the returned draft/message ID. If the brand's deployment includes a send_email tool (gateway fiveagents_send_email is available — see agents/link.md External APIs), prefer immediate send:

Use gateway MCP tool `fiveagents_send_email`:
- fiveagents_api_key: ${FIVEAGENTS_API_KEY}
- to: "<prospect.Email>"
- from: "<sender_email>"
- from_name: "<sender_name from sales.md>"
- subject: "<personalized subject>"
- html: "<personalized HTML body — signature block + photo from sales.md>"
- reply_to: "<sender_email>"

Use fiveagents_send_email as the primary path when the brand's transactional sender is configured. Use Gmail create_draft only when the brand wants founder-reviewed sends.

Step 6: Update CRM after send

For each successful send/draft:

Use mcp__claude_ai_Notion__notion-update-page:
- page_id: "<prospect notion page id>"
- properties: {
    "Status":          "In Sequence",
    "Touch Number":    <next_touch_number>,
    "Last Touch Date": "<today YYYY-MM-DD>",
    "Next Touch Date": "<today + interval from sales.md template for next touch>"
  }

If this was the final touch in the sequence, set Next Touch Date empty and a flag Sequence Complete = true (no Next Touch will be due, so the prospect drops out of the daily query naturally).

Step 7: Poll for replies

For every prospect in Status = "In Sequence" (regardless of whether they were touched today), search Gmail for inbound messages from their email address since their Last Touch Date.

Use mcp__claude_ai_Gmail__search_threads:
- query: "from:<prospect.Email> after:<Last Touch Date>"
- max_results: 5

For each thread returned, fetch the full thread and read the latest inbound message:

Use mcp__claude_ai_Gmail__get_thread:
- thread_id: "<thread_id>"

Classify the latest inbound message per sales.md Reply Routing rules. Standard categories (override with whatever sales.md defines):

Slack is a deferred MCP tool — load its schema before this immediate DM:

Use ToolSearch:
- query: "select:mcp__claude_ai_Slack__slack_send_message"

The "Interested" / "Booked" routing rows below trigger an immediate Slack DM, which fires BEFORE Step 8's daily digest. The schema must already be loaded by the time those rows execute. (If a prior run in the same session already loaded it, this call is a cheap no-op — see also the Step 8 ToolSearch block.)

Use a small classification heuristic: keyword pattern match first (interested/yes/sure/let's talk; not now/later/q3/next quarter; not the right person/wrong/forward; unsubscribe/stop/remove; out of office/away/oo; calendly.com/booked/confirmed), then a single-pass LLM classification when patterns are ambiguous. Always quote the matched fragment in the CRM row's content for audit.

Step 8: Build the daily Slack digest

DM the user via Slack MCP with the day's outreach summary.

Before calling slack_send_message, you MUST first call ToolSearch with query "select:mcp__claude_ai_Slack__slack_send_message" to load the tool schema. The Slack MCP tool is deferred.

Use mcp__claude_ai_Slack__slack_send_message:
- channel_id: "$SLACK_NOTIFY_USER"
- text: "<digest below>"

Digest format:

✉️ [{brand}] Outreach Daily — [DD Mon YYYY]
• {S} emails sent ({T1}/{T2}/{T3}/{T4}/{T5} by touch number)
• {R} replies received
   – {Ri} Interested
   – {Rn} Not now (nurture)
   – {Rw} Wrong person
   – {Ru} Unsubscribed
   – {Roo} Out-of-office
• {B} meetings booked
• {D} sequences completed (no reply, exhausted)

Top 3 interested replies (action required):
1. {Name} — {Title} @ {Company} — "{first 80 chars of reply}" — {gmail thread URL}
2. ...

Daily quota: {S}/{cap}
CRM: {notion_db_url}

If "Interested" or "Booked" appeared today, the immediate-send Slack DMs from Step 7 already fired — the digest is the rollup.

Step 9: Save local audit log

Save the day's send + reply log: outputs/{brand}/sales/sequences/SequenceLog_DDMonYYYY.md

Output format

Save location — local workspace:

outputs/{brand}/sales/sequences/

Naming convention:

SequenceLog_[DDMonYYYY].md

Examples:

• SequenceLog_07May2026.md
• SequenceLog_08May2026.md

Output metadata:

---
Date: YYYY-MM-DD
Skill Used: outreach-sequencer
Brand: {brand}
Sends: {S}
Replies: {R}
Meetings Booked: {B}
Sequences Completed: {D}
---

Output sections:

1. Run Summary — sends by touch number, replies by category, meetings booked, sequences completed
2. Send Log — table: Prospect, Touch #, Subject, Sent Time, Gmail Message ID
3. Reply Log — table: Prospect, Reply Category, Quoted Fragment, Action Taken, Gmail Thread URL
4. Pipeline Movement — counts by Status before vs after the run

Quality checklist

Before finalizing any outreach run:

• Email body grounded in brands/{brand}/audience.md persona hooks + brands/{brand}/product.md offer — no invented features or pricing
• Subject and opening line reference something specific to the prospect — no generic openings
• Sender persona, signature, and photo come from brands/{brand}/sales.md Sender Persona section
• Touch number and Next Touch Date computed from sales.md Sequence Templates intervals — not invented
• Single-use Calendly link inserted in every email with a booking CTA (or standing link with attribution UTM as fallback)
• Daily send cap respected — total sends ≤ sales.md Daily Send Cap
• Every reply classified with quoted fragment in the CRM row content for audit
• Unsubscribes added to the suppression list immediately — never re-touched
• "Interested" and "Booked" replies trigger immediate Slack DM, not just the digest
• Local audit log saved to outputs/{brand}/sales/sequences/SequenceLog_DDMonYYYY.md
• Slack daily digest delivered to $SLACK_NOTIFY_USER
• Agent run logged to dashboard

Final Step — Log to Dashboard

See docs/new_agent_onboarding/metrics-spec.md for the full JSONB contract.

Use gateway MCP tool `fiveagents_log_run`:
- fiveagents_api_key: ${FIVEAGENTS_API_KEY}
- skill: "outreach-sequencer"
- brand: "<active-brand>"
- status: "<success|failed>"
- summary: "<1 line, <200 chars>"
- started_at: "<ISO timestamp>"
- completed_at: "<ISO timestamp>"
- metrics: {
    "date": "YYYY-MM-DD",
    "emails_sent": 0,
    "sends_by_touch": { "1": 0, "2": 0, "3": 0, "4": 0, "5": 0 },
    "daily_send_cap": 0,
    "replies_received": 0,
    "replies_by_category": {
      "interested": 0,
      "not_now": 0,
      "wrong_person": 0,
      "unsubscribed": 0,
      "out_of_office": 0
    },
    "meetings_booked": 0,
    "sequences_completed_no_reply": 0,
    "pipeline_movement": {
      "new_to_in_sequence": 0,
      "in_sequence_to_replied": 0,
      "in_sequence_to_booked": 0,
      "in_sequence_to_unsubscribed": 0
    },
    "crm_db_id": "${BRAND}_CRM_DB",
    "output_path": "outputs/{brand}/sales/sequences/"
  }