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name: cold-sequence
description: "Craft a personalized 5-touch cold outreach sequence for a specific prospect — forces positioning work that separates 1% reply rates from 3-5%."

/cold-sequence

Generic outreach fails not because of bad writing but because it skips the hard part: understanding why this specific person should care. The blank text box lets you default to "just wanted to reach out" and call it done. This skill forces you to do the positioning work first — the research, the honest differentiation, the objection mapping — and then derive the sequence from that, not the other way around.

Prospect Research

• Full name, title, company, and company stage (Series B? 500 employees? Just hired a new CRO?)
• What business problem are they accountable for right now? (Not their job description — their current quarter's pressure)
• What tool or process are they using today? What does that vendor's weakness look like from the outside?
• Any recent signal: job post, funding round, LinkedIn post, earnings call, press release — something that shows their world is changing

Your Differentiation — Be Honest

• What does your product do that their current approach can't? One specific thing, not three.
• Who is a customer in a similar situation, and what specifically changed for them? (Company size, role, before/after metric)
• What does your product NOT do well? Name it — because they'll find out anyway, and knowing it helps you disqualify early

The 3 Objections They Will Raise

• List the objection, the real fear underneath it, and one sentence that acknowledges it without dismissing it
• Example: "We already have a solution" → fear is switching cost → acknowledge inertia, ask what prompted them to build that way
• If you can't name 3 real objections, you don't know your buyer well enough yet

5-Touch Sequence Design

• Touch 1 (Day 1 — Email): Lead with their specific pain from research. No pitch. One question that opens a thread.
• Touch 2 (Day 3 — Email): One-line case study relevant to their situation. Ask if it maps.
• Touch 3 (Day 7 — LinkedIn): Short connection note referencing something specific from their profile or recent post
• Touch 4 (Day 10 — Email): Address objection #1 preemptively — shows you know their world
• Touch 5 (Day 14 — Email + optional call): Explicit breakup email. Make it easy to say no. Sometimes this gets the reply.
• Subject line for each touch must thread back to their specific pain — not your product name

When to Give Up

• After Touch 5 with no response, add to a 90-day drip — don't burn the relationship with a 6th follow-up in 2 weeks
• If they reply "not interested," find out why before archiving — one sentence asking for the real reason recovers more than you'd expect
• If the company has a hiring freeze, acquisition rumor, or leadership change, pause the sequence — timing beats messaging

Rules

1. Every touch must reference something specific to this prospect — no merge fields that could apply to 500 people
2. The subject line of Touch 1 must contain their pain, not your product name
3. You cannot write Touch 2 until you have written the honest differentiation section — no shortcuts
4. Each touch must have one clear action, not two
5. The case study in Touch 2 must be a real customer — approximate numbers are fine, fabricated ones end careers

This sequence gives you a ready-to-send cadence, a clear positioning argument, and pre-loaded objection responses — so the first live conversation starts with credibility instead of from scratch.