Operations · Start here · 9 min read
Your first outbound motion, in one afternoon
A complete first motion. ICP, keywords, sending domain, sequence and the two numbers to watch. Set up in about four hours and honest about what week one will look like.
Most first outbound motions fail in the first hour, not the fourth week. They fail because the ICP was written as a paragraph rather than as a filter, so the list that came out of it could not be written to.
This is the order that works: define the population, prove you can reach it, decide what you are going to say, then set up the sending. Doing them in any other order means discovering a blocker after you have already built on top of it.
1. Write the ICP as a filter, not a paragraph
A usable ICP resolves to a countable population. Write it as attributes with values: company size band, geography, industry, and the role you need to reach. Then count it.
If the count is under about twenty-five, something is wrong with the filter rather than with the market. Usually a location or industry value that does not exist in the data source's vocabulary. If it is over a few million, you have described a market rather than a profile, and any list built from it is whoever the database happened to sort first.
- Company: size band, geography, industry, and one qualifier that is specific to you.
- Person: function and seniority, not job title strings.
- The count, written down. You will compare against it later.
2. Prove reachability before you build anything else
Pull fifty from the population and see how many come back with a real address. If it is under half, your ICP is fine but your data source does not cover it, and everything downstream is going to be disappointing.
This is a twenty-minute test that saves a fortnight. Do it before you write a word of copy.
3. Pick a trigger, not just a filter
A filter tells you who. A trigger tells you when. The difference in reply rate between the two is larger than the difference between good copy and bad copy.
Good triggers for a first motion: a company hiring for the function you sell into, a person engaging publicly with your problem space, or a funding announcement in the last ninety days. Pick one. Running three at once means you cannot tell which one worked.
4. Set up sending on a subdomain you do not care about
Never send cold volume from the domain your invoices and password resets come from. Attach a subdomain, publish the DNS records, verify, and let it warm.
Week one is small on purpose: around ten sends a day. That is not the product being cautious for its own sake. A new domain sending a thousand messages on day one looks exactly like a domain bought for spam, because that is what those domains do.
- A sending subdomain, never the root.
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC published and verified.
- Reply-to on the same domain, receiving enabled.
- Two or three from-addresses, so volume spreads.
5. Write one message, not a sequence
The first message carries almost all of the outcome. Write it, send it to fifty people, and read every reply before you write the second one.
The test for a first line is whether it could have been sent to anybody else on the list. If it could, it is not personalisation, it is a merge field with better grammar.
6. Watch two numbers, ignore the rest
Reply rate per step, and bounce rate per sender. Everything else in week one is noise at the volumes you are sending.
Open rate is not measurable in any honest way any more. Mail privacy protection pre-fetches images, so a meaningful share of your opens are a machine. Do not steer by it.
The takeaway
Reachability first, trigger second, copy third, volume last. Every failed first motion I have seen inverted at least two of those.
Read next
All guidesEverything in these guides is a default in the product rather than an exercise left to the reader.
Everything above, running on your list
Describe the company, confirm the keywords, connect a channel. The agents take it from there, and Supervised mode is available when you want to review before sending.
Start with sales. $2,000 or $5,000 onboarding, then at least $250 monthly credit funding.