Outreach to someone who acted toward the user's company — submitted a form, downloaded content, requested a demo, signed up, hit MQL. The highest-intent motion in this skill, and the one where cold-outreach habits do the most damage.
The angle
They asked. The entire cold playbook inverts: their action is public to them, so reference it directly; speed beats polish; the job is to answer the question their action implies, not to manufacture a hook.
The test for this motion: did a human on their side actually do something toward the company? A form fill, a chatbot question, a reply (even negative), a booked meeting — yes. An anonymous visit, an unaccepted connection request, merely existing in the CRM — no; those are cold motions.
Do
- Respond fast — minutes to hours, not days. Inbound intent decays faster than any cold signal. If the lead is already more than a day old, say so gracefully in the framing rather than pretending it just arrived.
- Prioritize by action strength: demo request beats pricing-page hand-raise beats content download beats newsletter/social follows. The weakest tier is nurture material, not sequence material.
- Keep the first line about their trigger and nothing else; the ask comes right after. Inbound replies earn their speed by being short.
- Name their action plainly and quote their own words where possible: "you asked about X" beats paraphrase. This is the one motion where referencing the tracked action builds trust instead of burning it — they know they did it.
- Match the response to the ask. A demo request gets a scheduling path now; a content download gets the content's natural next step; a contact-us message gets its actual question answered first.
- Stop any running cold sequence to this contact the moment they convert inbound — a cold cadence firing at a now-warm lead is the worst version of this motion.
- Qualify against the ICP before investing sender capacity. Fits get a sequence; clear non-fits still get a polite, helpful reply — just not a meeting push; borderline goes to the user.
- Prefer the account owner as sender when the CRM has one; otherwise the user.
- Default to a single real reply and let the human carry the conversation — one soft nudge and one soft close only if there's no response.
Don't
- Don't play it cold. "Noticed you might be interested in..." to someone who filled a form yesterday reads as either broken automation or bad faith.
- Don't drip a 5-step nurture at someone who asked for a call.
- Don't gate a demo request behind qualifying questions the CRM can already answer.
- Don't lead with the pitch when their message asked something specific — answer first, sell second.
- Don't sequence personal-email signups or obvious non-fits just because the form fired.
- Don't use "Re: [form name]" subjects — it reads as automation; reference their actual ask instead.
Sequence shape
Placeholder until this org sets its own:
| Step | Day | Channel |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 (same hour if possible) | email — acknowledge the ask, deliver the answer or path |
| 2 (optional) | 2–3 | email — short nudge with a concrete alternative (async answer, one question) |
| 3 (optional) | 6 | soft close, door open |
This org's rules
Nothing recorded yet. When the user gives feedback on inbound handling in conversation, write it here: forms that mean real intent vs noise, routing rules, stop conditions, response-time expectations. Rules only — approved copy accumulates automatically as message examples.