swan-gtm Applies to a book of running campaigns on a recurring cadence. Produces a reply queue in urgency order, a ranked fix list, and the week's movement.
Two questions, in this order
A weekly review answers who is waiting on me and what is broken, and the first outranks the second every time. A prospect who replied four days ago and got nothing is a lost deal that already happened; a campaign three points below benchmark is a problem that will still be there tomorrow.
Most dashboards invert this, leading with aggregate performance because it's easier to compute. Lead with the people.
Nothing is scored below ten sends
A campaign with six sends and one reply does not have a 17% reply rate. It has six sends.
Set a floor — ten sends per metric before it gets a status at all — and render everything under it as insufficient volume rather than as a number. Without that floor, the smallest and newest campaigns dominate every ranking, and the weekly review turns into a tour of statistical noise.
The same rule applies per step, not just per campaign: a sequence can have plenty of total volume and a fourth touch that only twelve people ever reached.
Aggregate on the ratio, not on the percentages
Portfolio-level numbers are where this goes quietly wrong. Averaging campaign reply rates gives a 2,000-send campaign and a 40-send campaign equal weight in the number leadership reads.
Sum the numerators, sum the denominators, divide once. A volume-weighted portfolio rate is the rate that actually happened; a mean of percentages is an artefact of how the work was split into campaigns.
Judge the campaign on its primary channel
A multichannel campaign that sends 900 LinkedIn messages and 60 emails is a LinkedIn campaign. Letting the email leg's weak numbers flip the whole campaign to "broken" sends someone off to rewrite copy that 6% of the audience saw.
Identify the primary channel by volume, treat a channel as co-primary only when it carries a meaningful share, and let only the driving channel's metrics set the campaign's status. A weak secondary channel is worth flagging as a leg to fix — not worth condemning the campaign for. Technical health is the exception: a bounce problem counts regardless of channel weighting, because it damages the sending domain rather than just this campaign.
The zone thresholds, the scoring floor and the weighting rules are in references/benchmark-zones.md.
One fix per campaign, at the earliest broken step
A campaign failing on three metrics does not need three fixes. Walk the funnel in order — deliverability, then connection acceptance, then opens, then replies — and name the first thing that's broken. Everything downstream of a broken step is measuring a filtered audience, so fixing the later metric first is treating a symptom.
Two refinements that matter. Exclude the terminal break-up message from diagnosis: it's designed to underperform and flagging it wastes the fix. And cap how confidently you state a diagnosis when the flagged step's own volume is thin — a red metric on eighteen sends is a hypothesis, not a finding.
Rank the fix list by severity multiplied by the number of people affected. The mildly-broken campaign touching four thousand prospects outranks the badly-broken one touching ninety. references/campaign-diagnosis.md covers the funnel order, the cause-to-action mapping, and the severity scoring.
Sort the replies by what they cost to ignore
Explicit meeting requests first, then interested, then neutral — and inside each group, longest-waiting first. Past about three days a warm reply has cooled enough to flag.
Only surface the replies that need an action. Rejections and wrong-fits collapse to a count; they're worth knowing and not worth reading. Where an automatic qualification was corrected on review, keep that visible — a classifier that keeps mislabelling one category is itself a finding. references/reply-triage.md has the classification and the sort.
Compare against two baselines
Week over week tells you what changed. A trailing multi-week average tells you whether it matters — a single week's movement is mostly noise, and teams that react to it thrash their campaigns weekly.
Show both. Get the direction right per metric: for bounce rate, down is the good direction, and an arrow pointing the wrong way is worse than no arrow. On the first run there is no history — say "baseline week" rather than rendering zeros as deltas. And when a review is re-run mid-week, a refresh may only add to the week's counts, never drop something already counted. references/weekly-trends.md covers the comparison and the recount rules.
What good looks like
The tell of a good operator: they know their own numbers well enough that published benchmarks are a sanity check rather than a target, and they can name which campaign is dragging the portfolio average without opening anything. They treat one bad week as noise and three as a trend.
The mediocre version leads with a portfolio reply rate, averages it wrong, celebrates a number that moved because a small campaign ended, and shows a tidy dashboard with no reply queue in it — so the team reads their metrics and still misses the person who asked for a call on Thursday.
Good output is short and ordered by what to do first. Every rate carries its denominator, every campaign flagged for a fix names one step and one action, and anything with too little volume says so instead of showing a number. If someone reads it and doesn't know what to open first, it failed regardless of how much is on it.
Rules
- MUST lead with replies waiting on an answer, before any performance metric.
- MUST require a minimum send volume before scoring any metric, and render thin data as insufficient volume rather than as a rate.
- MUST aggregate portfolio metrics as summed numerator over summed denominator, never as a mean of rates.
- MUST set campaign status from the primary channel's metrics, flagging a weak secondary channel separately.
- MUST name one fix per campaign, at the earliest broken step in the funnel.
- MUST state the sample size alongside every rate.
- NEVER diagnose a campaign on its break-up step.
- NEVER present a single week's movement as a trend without a longer baseline alongside it.
- NEVER let a mid-week refresh reduce a count already reported for that week.