the not-talked-about holy grail cold email metric

I was on a call with a founder the other day of a company doing just under 500k in ARR who was talking to me about their outbound setup.

I asked about inbox management and who was handling the inbox for them.

“Oh we have one of our sales guys check a few times a day for replies".

Which is code for, “we are flushing cash down the toilet for fun.”

Speed-to-lead is one of the longest standing outbound metrics that is of extreme importance.

Every minute ABOVE 5-10 minutes elapsed after a reply your chances of booking a call with that person decrease drastically.

This is simply because people have other shit to do in their jobs.

The second they hit send to reply back to you is the highest level of interest they will have with you.

Once they go grab a coffee, talk to a co-worker, remember that report that’s due at EOD, I promise they are not thinking about your cold email from 5 hours ago.

Here’s how we combat this to make sure this process is as dialed in as can be for clients we run campaigns for.

1. Use Smartlead’s GPT categorization to automatically tag replies to what kind of intent they are

   • This means that before the message is even opened, it will have a tag of “interested”, “not interested” or “out of office” so that sifting through large numbers of replies is easy

2. Dedicated inbox manager trained on all of our clients’ offers who replies to all leads within 5-10 minutes of them coming in

3. Automated sub-sequences setup of the most common types of replies we see to have automated messages sent out

   • We have the most common 4-5 types of responses we see from leads and have automated messages ready to send to those responses with the click of a button

Inbox management might not be the most fun part of outbound, but I promise you that not having it dialed in is a sure way to shoot yourself in the foot with the leads you generate.

Hope this helps gents.