Your first outreach campaign, without burning your domain.

Outbound is the highest-leverage thing an agent can do for you and the easiest to do badly at scale. Badly at scale gets your domain flagged and your name remembered for the wrong reasons. This guide is the sequence that avoids that: a sharp ICP, a list you veto, volume that ramps, and a human on every reply.

1. Write the ICP in one sentence

"B2B companies" is not an ICP. "Agencies with 5 to 30 people that run outreach for clients and still write it by hand" is. The agent sources and scores leads against whatever you give it, so the sharper the sentence, the better the list. If you cannot name the pain in the same sentence, you are not ready to write the email either.

2. Let the agent source; you veto

The lead sourcing agent builds and scores the list continuously. Your first pass is a veto pass: skim fifty sourced leads and kill the ones that make you wince. Every veto teaches you where your ICP sentence is fuzzy. Tighten the sentence, not just the list.

3. Feed it your real voice

The difference between outreach that gets replies and outreach that gets deleted is whether it reads like a person. Give the agent emails you have actually sent and would send again. It drafts from real signals on the lead, in your register, not from a template with a first-name token. If a draft sounds like "I hope this email finds you well," fix the source material.

4. Ramp volume like you mean to stay

Sending 500 emails on day one from a domain that never sent 50 is how deliverability dies. Start small, watch replies and bounces, and increase week over week. The agent handles the cadence; your job is to resist the urge to floor it. Outbound is a compounding asset only if your domain survives the first month.

5. Keep sends on Approve-each

Drafting can run on Auto-run from day one; a wrong draft costs nothing. Sends wait in the Approvals queue until you have watched the campaign long enough to be bored by it. Every send is logged, so when a lead replies "who is this?", you can see exactly what they received and when.

6. Route replies to a human, always

The goal of the campaign is a conversation, and conversations are yours. Replies land with the full thread and the lead's history attached, so you walk in knowing everything the agent knows. The agent chases silence politely; the moment someone answers, it hands off.

7. Measure replies, not opens

Open rates are noise. Count replies, count booked calls, and read the negative replies closely; they are free consulting on your ICP sentence. A campaign that books three calls from two hundred sends beats one that gets a thousand opens and silence.