Sales Outbound Sequence

Outbound Sequence

Design the skeleton of an outbound cadence - the touch-by-touch plan of channels, days, spacing, exits, and recycling - sized to the user's segment, list, and rep capacity, with metric thresholds committed before launch.

Two facts frame everything here:

• Cadence length is contested. Sales-training practitioners and sales-engagement vendors teach roughly 10-15 touches over 14-30 days. Email-quality vendors and outbound agencies cap it at 3-5 emails, fewer when multi-channel, and call long sequences a symptom of low relevance. Neither is law: this skill applies a decision rule instead of picking a side, see references/cadence-patterns.md.
• Most figures are vendor-published. Nearly every statistic in the references comes from companies selling outreach tooling - trust the direction, never the magnitude, and label it as vendor-published when quoting it to the user. The only hard numbers are mailbox-provider policies (spam-complaint ceilings), flagged as platform policy where they appear.

Scope: the cadence plan is the whole deliverable. Never write message copy in depth, route it to the sibling skill for that copy type:

• Subject lines: mbfinotti/sales-skills@cold-email-subject-line-tester
• Call openers: mbfinotti/sales-skills@cold-call-opener
• Personalization-angle selection: mbfinotti/sales-skills@sales-outreach-personalization
• Rebuttals: mbfinotti/sales-skills@sales-objection-handling
• Post-meeting follow-up: mbfinotti/sales-skills@sales-meeting-recap

Never audit deliverability, domains, or authentication - plan within the sending constraints, then hand the audit to mbfinotti/sales-skills@cold-email-deliverability.

Interview

• Ask one question per message.
• Offer multiple-choice options.
• Skip anything context already answers.

If your harness has persistent memory and a prior run stored this user's answers, confirm them instead of re-asking.

1. Regime: B2B outbound to businesses, or B2C to consumers? Ask first - consent, speed, and volume rules diverge.
2. By what date must this land results? A hard near date promotes the short pattern, the near-zero channels, and reply rate as the committed metric. A soft date lets the long multi-channel pattern and meetings-per-100 back in.
3. A one-off win, or a compounding asset? One-off promotes a single sprint on the best-scored cohort. Compounding promotes staggered cohort entry, a recycle window, and the trigger-watching that makes re-entry work - all of which cost more now and pay from cohort two onward.
4. Effort ceiling: rep hours per day, headcount, and how much sender risk is acceptable? A founder doing their own outbound has no daily call block, which deletes the manual channels rather than demoting them. A new or warm-up-limited domain caps email touches at any budget and promotes the call block instead.
5. Motion: cold outbound, inbound-lead follow-up, event follow-up, or closed-lost/dormant re-engagement? For B2C: which lifecycle trigger - signup, cart or browse abandonment, win-back?
6. B2B segment: SMB high-velocity, mid-market, or enterprise ABM? This drives the length decision rule.
7. Persona, seniority, and account size? Senior buyers tolerate fewer, better touches.
8. Which channels are actually available and staffed - email, phone, social, SMS, video - and what is the consent basis for each? SMS or messaging without express opt-in is off the table, not a design choice. Calling lists must be screened against do-not-call registries.
9. List size per launch, and how many reps with how much daily manual-touch capacity?
10. Personalization depth planned: deep per-account research, light segment-level, or templated? Also drives the length rule.
11. What can the sequencer automate versus surface as manual tasks? Does it auto-exit on reply? Are per-mailbox daily send caps known?
12. Which metric can you actually measure reliably: replies, meetings, call connects, conversions - or only opens?

Every ranking in this skill is a default, not a law. Re-rank against the answers before proposing anything, and say out loud which answer moved which option - the order shifts with the deadline, with the domain's state, and with who executes it.

Workflow

1. Run the Interview. Confirm regime, motion, segment, channels-with-consent, volume, capacity, and metric before drafting.
2. Read references/cadence-patterns.md. Apply the length decision rule and record which factors pushed the choice - never default to a template silently.
3. Draft the touch table: for every touch, a day, a channel, a step type (automated or manual), a one-line purpose, and the exit check that precedes it. Model the shape on the filled examples in references/example-cadences.md - match the structure, not the content.
4. Assign channel roles. Buy channels in efficiency order and stop where step 7's capacity math stops you:

in-thread bump > blank connection request > extra email angle > call + voicemail > social DM > video message

• Email carries the ask; every other channel exists to lift email replies.
• Rep minutes per touch and how reversible the damage is decide the order: a domain burned by complaints is the one thing a cadence cannot undo, and a call block is a standing daily job.
• Full axes, per-channel costs, the two deletions, and the re-ranking conditions are in references/cadence-patterns.md.
• Practitioner guidance, not law - say so.

1. B2B: add a multi-threading plan - 2-3 contacts per account, staggered entry, account-level pause when any one of them replies. Vendor-published data reports reply rates falling sharply past a handful of contacts per company; spraying a whole org is a failure mode, not thoroughness.
2. Define exits, suppression, recycle window, and trigger-gated re-entry (rules below; elaboration in the patterns reference).
3. Run the capacity math in references/capacity-and-measurement.md. When the plan does not fit, buy the fix in this order:

stagger cohort entry > cut the active cohort > drop the heaviest manual touch > add mailboxes or reps

• Staggering costs a sequencer setting and changes nothing about the sequence under test.
• Dropping a touch forfeits comparability with the last cohort.
• Never plan touches nobody will execute.
• Hand the actual mailbox/domain audit to mbfinotti/sales-skills@cold-email-deliverability.

1. Pre-commit the metrics: numeric thresholds, floors and ceilings, and a review date, using the template in the capacity reference. Commit the highest-ranked metric that is actually measurable (order in KPIs below).
2. Score the plan against the Quality gate below. Iterate until every item passes.
3. Deliver the output package (shape in references/example-cadences.md). If your harness has persistent memory, store the segment, chosen pattern, committed thresholds, and eventual results; otherwise include a compact log block the user can paste into a future session.
4. Route all copy work to the sibling skills listed in Scope. Any outline-level copy this plan does carry (touch themes, a voicemail one-liner) stays at outline level; anything shipped as actual copy goes through your preferred humanizer skill first.
5. At the committed review date, compare results against thresholds and change exactly one variable per revision. If you can browse the web, verify any re-entry trigger (funding, job change, product launch) before re-enrolling a prospect; otherwise ask the user to confirm it.

Exit, stop, and recycle rules

Apply these exit rules: