Cold email that lands in a real pipeline
A campaign that ends in a spreadsheet of replies is half a system. Here is the whole path, from the data bank to a deal, and where a person stays in it.
- Suppression at freeze and at send
- Replies stop the cadence
- Deal creation waits for review
The short answer
- Build and freeze: an audience is drawn from the data bank through an ICP and a segment, and suppression is applied when the audience is frozen so the list that sends is the list you approved.
- Send and pace: cadence steps go out through the mailbox pool with per-account daily caps, cooldown stamps between touches, a business-hours window, and suppression re-checked at send time.
- Reply and convert: an incoming reply pauses the cadence for that contact, gets classified in the shared inbox, and a positive reply becomes a deal after a person approves it.
Trigger to logged
Six stages, and what is visible to a human at each one.
- 1
Trigger: an audience is defined
An ICP describes who counts. A segment turns that into rows from the data bank. Nothing has been sent and nothing is committed yet.
- 2
SalesCrew freezes the audience
Freezing snapshots the list and applies suppression. Anyone who unsubscribed, bounced or was added to the suppression list by hand is removed at this point rather than being filtered later.
- 3
The human reviews the copy and the list size
Cadence steps, timing between them and the sending mailboxes are all visible before anything sends. So is the count, which is the number most people should look at hardest.
- 4
SalesCrew sends through the pool
The mailbox pool rotates accounts under per-account daily caps and cooldown stamps. Sends stay inside the business-hours window, and suppression is re-checked at the moment of sending.
- 5
Replies arrive in one inbox
IMAP brings the reply into the shared inbox. Rules classify it first, an LLM fallback labels what the rules miss, and the cadence for that contact pauses automatically.
- 6
What gets logged
Every send, every bounce, every unsubscribe and every classification, with the actor recorded. Bounces and unsubscribes write straight to suppression, so the next audience is already cleaner.
What gets configured
The objects behind the campaign, and the guardrail on each.
| Object | What you set | Guardrail |
|---|---|---|
| ICP | Titles, company size, industry, geography | One definition drives both sourcing and reporting, so the numbers describe the same people |
| Segment | The filtered rows drawn from the data bank | Frozen before sending; suppression applied at freeze |
| Suppression list | Unsubscribes, bounces, complaints, manual entries | Checked at freeze and again at send time |
| Cadence | Steps, wait days, the copy for each step | At least three days between touches per contact, plus a per-cadence cap |
| Sender pool | Mailboxes and sending domains | Per-account and per-domain daily caps with cooldown stamps |
| Send window | Business hours in the recipient's terms | Nothing sends outside it, including a step whose timer expired at 2am |
| Inbox rules | Regex classification, with an LLM fallback for the rest | Rules run first; the model only labels what patterns missed |
| Agent policy | Which classes run in auto and which wait | Any external send is review by default; classification and pausing on reply are auto |
Where it stops and a human starts
Approving the copy is a human step. An agent can draft a sequence from a brief, and that draft waits in the approval queue. Nothing leaves the building because a model thought it read well.
Creating a deal from a positive reply starts in review. The default policy moves it to auto only after a clean week, and that promotion is a decision someone makes rather than a threshold the product crosses on its own.
Consent and legal basis are entirely yours. SalesCrew enforces suppression and opt-out, which is machinery, not permission. Whether you may email a given list under CAN-SPAM, the GDPR or CASL is your call with your own counsel, and this page is not legal advice.
Warmup is not part of this. SalesCrew does not warm mailboxes, so a brand new domain sent at volume will behave exactly as badly here as anywhere else.
Questions
- What happens if someone replies to step one?
- The cadence pauses for that contact automatically, which is one of the few classes that runs in auto by default. The reply lands in the shared inbox with its classification, and any draft answer waits for a person.
- Why apply suppression at freeze rather than only at send?
- Because the audience you approve should be the audience that sends. Filtering only at send hides the real list size at the moment you are deciding whether to run the campaign at all. It is then re-checked at send as a second net.
- Can an agent run the whole campaign?
- It can build the audience, draft the steps and classify the replies. Sending and creating deals from replies are held by the policy table, and a kill switch stops every agent at once.