Outbound playbook

Sequences are available on some plans. LinkedIn steps need a plan that includes LinkedIn sequences.

This page is the starting point for running outbound in Lightfield. It covers the order to do things in, the plays you can run, which channel suits each, and how much you can send. Everything happens by talking to the agent in chat.

The order to work in

1. Give Lightfield your context. Build your ideal customer profile, buyer persona and scoring rubric first. Every later step reads them. See Preparing to send.
2. Run warm plays. Sequence people who already know you, from your own connected work inbox. No new domains or warm-up needed.
3. Build a cold target list, if you need one. Source new companies, score them and find the right people. This is slower to set up and is the only track that eventually needs separate sending domains.
4. Build, test and activate sequences. See Building sequences.
5. Keep it running. A weekly check stops pipeline from quietly drying up. See Running and troubleshooting.

Steps 2 and 3 aren’t sequential. Most teams have both moving in the same week.

What a play is

A play is one specific reason to reach out to one specific group of people. “Email our closed-lost deals from last year about the feature we just shipped” is a play. “Do outbound” is not.

Good outbound is a series of plays, not one big campaign. Run one, read the results, and pick the next. Behind every play, Lightfield does two things:

• Finds and screens companies against your ideal customer profile, built from your own won and lost deals. It applies the same standard to company 300 as to company 3, and can check things a person wouldn’t bother to look up, such as recent funding or hiring.
• Finds the right people inside those companies against your buyer persona: the kind of person who actually bought from you before, not just the most senior or easiest to find.

The plays below are grouped by how well the recipient knows you. That is also how hard each play is and how much setup it needs. Work top to bottom.

Group 1: people who already know you

The fastest pipeline you have, and the most often overlooked. These people recognize your name, so they reply far more often than strangers. All of these send from your connected work email.

Revive

Go back to lost deals, stalled opportunities, churned customers and sign-ups who never came back. Run this first.

The version that works best: you lost deals because something was missing, and you’ve since built it. Pull the deals that died on that gap, group them by the problem they were trying to solve (not by the feature), and write to each group about their reason.

Build a list of closed-lost deals from the last 18 months where the loss reason relates to [feature]. Group them by the specific problem they were trying to solve, write a separate sequence for each group, and include 2 to 3 contacts per company.

Contact two or three people per company. The person you dealt with last time may have left or be away.

Expand

Reach new people at companies that already pay you. It’s the shortest path to revenue, because the company already decided you’re worth paying for. Your call recordings and notes are full of needs customers mentioned and nobody followed up on.

Look across our customer accounts and find problems or needs that came up on calls in the last 12 months that match something we do but they are not using.

Champions who moved

Find people who liked working with you and have since changed companies. They already know the product works and how to explain it internally. Run this monthly or quarterly, because people change jobs all the time.

Your own product users

If you have a free tier, a self-serve plan or a second product, its users have already used your software. Bring them into Lightfield, score their companies against your ideal customer profile, and sequence the best fits with messages based on how they actually use the product.

We imported all our product users into Lightfield. Score their accounts against our enterprise ICP, then build sequences to reach the top ones, using what we know about how they use the product.

Existing LinkedIn connections who went cold

People you’re already connected to on LinkedIn but haven’t spoken to in months. No new connection requests go out to people you’re already connected to, so this play doesn’t spend your LinkedIn invitation budget, which is the scarcest resource in outbound.

Keep the invite step anyway. Every LinkedIn DM in a sequence must follow an invite and a wait-for-connection step, so a DM-only sequence is rejected when it’s built. For someone you’re already connected to, the invite succeeds without sending a new request and they move straight on to the DM.

Ask for referrals

Ask happy customers and investors for specific introductions. “Do you know anyone who might need us” gets almost nothing. “You mentioned you know the VP of Engineering at [Company], would an introduction make sense?” gets a yes or no. Lightfield can find the specific people worth asking about.

Group 2: people one step away

They half know you, or there’s a genuine reason for the message to exist. Reply rates are lower than group 1 and much higher than cold. These still run from your connected work email at the volumes they need.

• People you’re missing at companies you already track. Most CRMs are full of accounts with one contact, often the wrong one. Run this early.

  Find our accounts with fewer than three contacts, and find the people at each one who match our buyer description.

• Warm paths through your network. Look across the connections your team, customers and investors hold, and find people one introduction away. Check for a warm route before running a cold play against the same companies.
• Shared investors. Find investors that you and your customers have in common, pull their other portfolio companies, filter those against your ideal customer profile, find the right people, and use the shared investor as the reason for the message.
• Lists you already have. Partner lists, past event attendees, community members, waitlist sign-ups. Import them and use them.
• Events and dinners. Invite a focused list of 30 or 40 people who match your ideal customer and buyer persona two or three weeks ahead, or follow up within 48 hours of meeting someone.

  Build a list of 40 people in [city] who match our ideal customer and buyer descriptions, for a dinner on [date]. Write a two-touch invitation sequence that reads like a host rather than a salesperson.

• An offer for one specific group. Scope a real offer to a real community (“for YC companies”, not “for startups”). The offer can be the subject line.
• Website visitors. If you identify visitors to your site with another tool and bring them into Lightfield, sequence them. Keep volume small until you have proper sending set up.

Group 3: people who don’t know you

Cold outbound. You’ll need it eventually to reach companies that have never heard of you, but it’s the hardest group and the only one that carries real risk to your sending reputation. Read Sending safely before you start.

• A target list from your ideal customer profile. Lightfield finds matching companies, scores them and finds the right people at each. See Preparing to send.
• Look-alikes. Companies that resemble the ones you’ve actually won, rather than companies that match a filter you wrote. When look-alikes and your ICP disagree, the disagreement is worth an hour of your attention.
• Signals. Reach companies because something just happened: they raised money, they’re hiring for a role that implies your problem, a leader changed, or they adopted a tool that pairs with yours. Fit says a company could buy. A signal says it might buy this quarter.

If cold volume is in your plan, start setting up sending domains in week one. New domains need weeks of warm-up before they can carry cold volume, and that clock runs whether or not you’ve started.

Choosing a channel

Channel	Use it for	Setup
Connected work email	Warm plays (groups 1 and 2) and modest cold volume	Turn on Enable for sequences for your account in Settings → Sequences
Warmed mailboxes	Cold volume above what your own inbox should carry, or to keep cold mail off your primary domain	Separate domains, warmed before use. See Sending safely
LinkedIn	People you can’t reach by email, and existing connections who went cold	Connect LinkedIn in Settings → Sequences

Don’t spend LinkedIn invitations on people who already know you. They’ll open an email from your real inbox. Save invitations for people you can’t otherwise reach.

A note on vocabulary: a warm audience is people who already know you. A warmed mailbox is a sending account prepared to carry cold volume. They’re unrelated. Warm audiences need no special setup.

Sending limits

Lightfield ships with conservative defaults and enforces a ceiling on each channel. The gap between sends is randomized within the range.

Channel	Default per day	Ceiling per day	Default gap between sends
Connected email account	20	50	3 to 8 min
Warmed mailbox (each)	20	100	3 to 8 min
LinkedIn invites	10	30	5 to 10 min
LinkedIn DMs	20	60	5 to 10 min

By default, sequences send between 9 and 5 on weekdays in your timezone. For how the limits work and when to raise them, see Sending safely.

Sizing your volume

Work backwards from the meetings you want. The figures below assume the default weekday send window (about 20 sending days a month). The conversion rate is common industry guidance, not a Lightfield figure; your own results will differ.

A rough guide is that about 1% of people emailed cold book a meeting. So 10 meetings a month means reaching about 1,000 people a month, or 50 a day.

• Connected inbox at the default 20 a day: about 400 people a month, or roughly 4 meetings.
• Connected inbox at its ceiling of 50 a day: about 1,000 a month, with no headroom left.
• One warmed mailbox: starts at 20 a day. Raised to 50 once it’s well warmed, it reaches about 1,000 a month, with room to grow to 100.
• Three warmed mailboxes at the default: 60 a day, or up to 300 a day at the ceiling. Warmed mailbox limits are per mailbox, so adding mailboxes is how you add volume.
• LinkedIn invites at the default 10 a day: about 200 a month. That makes LinkedIn a precision channel.

Volume is better spread across many small, sharp campaigns than one large one. Small campaigns tend to reply at a much higher rate.

When you need sending domains

Either reason is enough on its own:

• Volume. Above roughly 1,000 emails a month, your connected inbox runs out of ceiling.
• Isolation. Cold outbound on your primary domain puts customer mail and live deals at risk. Separate domains keep that contained at any volume.

If either applies, start warming domains now and run warm plays while you wait. If you already have warmed mailboxes elsewhere, you can upload them. See Sending safely.

What you own

Lightfield does the labor: research, sourcing companies and people, enrichment, scoring and drafting copy. Three decisions stay with you:

• Which markets to target, and how to separate them. Markets are ranked inside your ideal customer profile and separated at the target-list level.
• Your angle and your voice. Give the agent the specific reason you’re reaching out, and paste in two emails you’ve actually sent so it writes like you.
• When to push and when to hold: volume, pacing, and stopping a campaign that isn’t landing.

What sequences don’t do

• Sequences run in a straight line. There’s no conditional branching.
• Email and LinkedIn only. No SMS or dialer.
• Step timing and content are changed by talking to the agent.
• Lists don’t refresh themselves as new signals appear. Re-run them.
• Newsletters, announcements and designed-template blasts belong in a marketing tool. A sequence sends each person their own short series and stops when they reply.
• They’re built for reaching a few hundred specific people at a time, not a high-volume floor with rotating inboxes behind each rep.

Picking what to run next

Run the warmest play you haven’t used up yet. Work down this page rather than jumping to group 3. If you’re stuck, ask:

Show me three plays we have not tried yet that make sense for this business.

The agent generates options quickly. Choosing between them is your job.

Next steps

• Preparing to send: build your knowledge base and target list.
• Building sequences: write, test and activate a sequence.
• Sending safely: domains, warmed mailboxes, limits and quality checks.
• Running and troubleshooting: the weekly check and fixes for common problems.