Your first outreach

One: release the buyers worth writing to

Your agent’s finds wait in Leads for your review. Read the fit reason on each one, keep the companies worth an email, and dismiss the rest. Approving a company and mailing it are two separate acts, on purpose: the first is you agreeing the research is right, the second is you agreeing to put your name on something.

Two: read the sequence properly, once

For each released buyer the assistant drafts a short sequence in your voice: a first email and a few spaced follow ups over about a fortnight. Read the first one properly, the way you would read a letter you were about to sign. Change anything that is not how you would say it. Those edits are the fastest teaching this product has, and the ten minutes you spend on the first sequence changes every sequence after it.

Three: approve, and let the pace do its work

When you start a sequence, sends go out on weekdays inside the buyer’s own working hours, in the buyer’s own country, at a deliberately small daily pace. A buyer in Lyon is written to in the French working day, not yours.

A new sending address starts slower and builds up. That is how sending reputations are made rather than burned, and it is why the caps are not switches you can turn off. If that feels slow in week one, it is the same slowness that means your mail is still arriving in inboxes in month six.

Then the desk watches

The moment a buyer replies, their sequence stops. Not the next touch, all of them. The reply lands in your Replies queue with the intent suggested in plain words, and the conversation is yours. If a buyer asks your price the assistant does not answer: it hands you the thread, because a price is a commercial decision and not a sentence for a machine to write.

An out of office does not stop a sequence, because it is not an answer. A real reply does. A dead address stops itself and never gets a follow up.

What to expect, honestly

Replies arrive in weeks, not hours, and most of them come from the follow ups rather than the first email. Running this on our own export business, about seven in every hundred buyers we wrote to eventually replied. The industry average for cold outreach is around three and a half. Your market and your product will differ, which is the whole reason the trial exists.

The desk’s real job is not the first email. It is making sure the follow ups actually go out, in a week where you were busy, which is the part a person almost never does.

Where to watch it

Outreach opens on Today, which holds only what needs a decision from you. In flight shows each buyer’s next step and when it is due, Replies holds the answers waiting on you, and Playbook is where your sequences and your identity live.

Next: What happens when a buyer replies