Sales / Growth / RevOps leader outreach

This persona reads cold email all day. Their bar is "would my best AE write this?" If not, archive. They convert when you sound like a peer who's already shipped what they're trying to ship — and when you don't manufacture stats they could check.

Mindset shift vs. emailing a founder

• Workflow pain, not strategic vision. They care about what's eating their AEs' time this week, not 3-year roadmap.
• Show the workflow, name the tools. They want to see how the agent runs vs. their current stack — Clay/Apollo/Lemlist/HubSpot are the words they speak in.
• Real proof or no proof. Don't invent reply-rate stats. If we don't have the number, describe the workflow change instead.

Voice

• Peer-energy. Like a Growth Ops friend telling them what's working, not a vendor pitching them.
• Normal grammar and capitalization. Don't drop the "I". Don't go all-lowercase.
• Short sentences. One thought per sentence. Email 1 is 4-6 sentences max.
• Use stack words natively: "outbound stack", "enrichment layer", "sequence drafting", "sequenced leads", "rep handoff".
• If you sound like marketing, you've lost. Sound like ops.

Hard rules

• No "quick question" or other fake-intimate openers.
• No invented metrics. No "3.2 → 8.1% reply rate" unless we have the case study and it's true. Workflow changes ("AEs went from 3 enrichment workflows to zero") are okay because they're describable and defensible.
• No made-up URLs. Especially no "writeup at growthengineer.ai/agents/sourcing" if no such writeup exists yet.
• No price or timeline in email 1 or 2.
• No dealroom or specific past employer name unless explicitly approved per campaign — "head of growth at a Series A B2B before this" is sufficient.
• No "demo" word. It's a "teardown" or a "side-by-side" or a "15-min look."
• No em dashes anywhere. Use commas, periods, colons.
• Sign off with first name only. No title.

Canonical sequence (use this as the template)

Email 1 (T+0)

Subject: GTM for {{companyName}}

Hi {{firstName}},

Saw {{companyName}}'s recent growth. I help teams build out their GTM
motion, everything from outbound infrastructure and automation to AI
agents and CRM workflows. Runs inside your existing tools.

Last team I built this for: 68 meetings in the first month, $150K+
pipeline, 30 campaigns across 5 reps.

Curious if you've explored using automation to scale your reps at
{{companyName}} yet?

Best,
Peter

Email 2 (T+3)

Subject: re: GTM for {{companyName}}

Hi {{firstName}},

We build whatever your GTM motion needs: outbound systems, lead
enrichment, AI agents, CRM workflows, content engines. Runs inside
your existing tools, your team just reviews and approves.

I was head of growth at a Series A B2B before this, built the same
infrastructure for our own team. Happy to send a case study if useful.

Best,
Peter

Email 3 (T+7, breakup)

Subject: re: GTM for {{companyName}}

{{firstName}}, no worries if the timing is off. I put together a short
doc on what the GTM infrastructure would look like for a team like
{{companyName}}. Let me know if you'd like me to send it over.

Peter

Variables

• {{firstName}} — first name
• {{companyName}} — company name (real casing)

Personalization beyond mail merge

• Email 1 line 1 references "recent hiring path" generically. The agent can specialize this if it has scraped the careers page and found something concrete (e.g. "Saw {{companyName}}'s 3 AE postings + Growth Ops role"). If no such data, leave generic.
• Email 1 paragraph 2 names HubSpot + Lemlist as the stack. The agent should swap to the actual stack if known (Salesforce + Outreach, Attio + Apollo, etc.). If unknown, default to HubSpot + Lemlist (most common in target ICP).
• Email 2 "her" assumes pronoun. Agent should use "their" if pronoun unknown, or correct based on the prior person's profile if known.

The agent should NOT add:

• A peer company name they didn't actually verify
• Reply-rate or open-rate statistics
• A URL to a writeup that doesn't exist
• A claim about how long deployment takes

Edge case: solo / very small team

If the company is under ~15 people and there's no clear separate sales-leader role, the founder IS the sales leader. Send only the founder sequence. Don't manufacture a second persona email to the same person with a different angle.

Anti-pattern check before sending

• [ ] Does this read like a peer-to-peer email or a vendor pitch? If vendor, rewrite.
• [ ] Did I drop the subject "I" anywhere? If yes, fix.
• [ ] Any em dashes? If yes, replace with commas/periods.
• [ ] Any URLs? Are they real? If made up, remove.
• [ ] Any reply-rate, open-rate, or hours-saved stats? If yes and not from a real case study, soften or cut.
• [ ] Did I name a real peer company? If yes, is it actually true? If invented, remove.
• [ ] Email 1 word count under 90 words?
• [ ] Email 3 closes cleanly without re-pitching?