GTM 101 defined outbound. AI in GTM 102 showed what AI changes about it. This course is where you build the play and run it. No definitions, no theory, and no walkthrough of which button to press. That last part lives in the product course. This is the craft: the judgment calls that make an outbound play work or fail, whatever tool you run it in. We will show how the play executes in Alta, but the thinking comes first.
An outbound play is five decisions in order
Every outbound play is the same five decisions, made in this order: the signal, the audience, the channels, the message, and the metrics. Get the order right and the play holds together. Skip one and it leaks, usually somewhere you will not notice until the numbers come back flat.
The rest of this course is those five decisions, one at a time.
Decision 1: The signal
A signal is your reason to reach out now. The decision is not "do I have signals," it is "which signal is strong enough to build a play around." A senior hire in your buyer's department, a funding round, a competitor switch. Strong signals answer "why now" in a way the buyer actually feels.
A weak signal is anything true of half your market. They have a website. They are in tech. If the signal does not narrow the field and suggest timing, it is not a trigger, it is a filter dressed up as one. The operator move is to choose the trigger first and let the audience fall out of it, rather than starting with a list and bolting a reason on afterward.
Decision 2: The audience
Choosing the audience is two questions: who fits, and how much they are worth. Fit you mostly know. The part teams skip is worth, and that is tiering.
Tiering means deciding, before you spend a minute on an account, how much effort it earns: one-to-one attention, a light personal layer on a strong play, or a fully automated touch. Effort is your scarcest resource. Hand-researching a low-value account is waste, and fully automating your best account is malpractice. The tier tells you which kind of motion each account gets, so your attention lands where it pays.
Decision 3: The channels
The mistake here is picking the channel you like instead of the channel that fits. Channel choice follows the buyer and the deal size, not the rep's comfort. A senior exec on a large deal earns a different mix than a self-serve persona.
And it is rarely one channel. The play is usually email, LinkedIn, and phone working together, and the skill is the order and the timing. An email that lands the day after a LinkedIn profile view hits differently than the same email cold. Sequence the channels so each one warms the next, rather than firing them at random.
Decision 4: The message
This is the highest-leverage decision in the play, and the one most teams get lazy about. A strong outbound message has a structure: a hook that earns the next line, context that proves you know their world, a clear single ask, and nothing else.
There are three archetypes, and the decision is which one fits the signal and the buyer:
- Pain-led. Open on a problem they feel.
- Signal-led. Open on the thing that triggered the play, the hire, the funding, the switch.
- Value-led. Open on the outcome they want.
And here is the operator skill that actually matters now. You are not writing four hundred of these by hand. You are briefing the thing that writes them, which is the entire point of the prompting course in 102. The brief carries the archetype, the context, the constraints, and the no-list. Write it once, well, and it runs across the whole audience.
The honest risk: a lazy brief or a weak signal just produces four hundred mediocre emails, fast. The agent scales whatever you give it, including bad judgment. The leverage is not that the agent writes better than you. It is that the judgment you already have, the signal you picked and the brief you wrote, now covers the whole list instead of twenty accounts.
Decision 5: The metrics
Measure the play in stages, not at the end, because each stage points at a different fix.
- Reply rate tells you whether the message landed.
- Meeting rate tells you whether the targeting was right.
- SQO, qualified opportunities, tells you whether the meetings were real.
- Win rate tells you whether the whole play was worth running.
Read them as a chain. Low replies means the message or signal is off. Good replies but no meetings means the ask or the targeting is off. Meetings but no opportunities means you are reaching the wrong people at the right accounts. The stage that breaks tells you what to repair.
When the play stalls
Most stalls trace back to one of the five decisions, not to bad luck. The signal was too broad, so nothing felt timely. The message was personalized but not relevant, a detail with no point behind it. The targeting was loose, so good copy hit bad accounts. Or the volume outran the infrastructure and sends started landing in spam.
So when a play fails, do not rewrite the email first. Walk back the five decisions and find the one that broke. It is usually upstream of the copy. The copy gets blamed because it is the part you can see.
How this runs in Alta
In Alta, this play becomes a campaign, and each decision maps to something you set. The signal becomes your campaign source. The Pitch carries your positioning. Enrichment variables pull the real detail into each message. Katie drafts the touches across email, LinkedIn, and calls off that brief, and Performance shows you the reply-to-meeting chain so you can see which stage is breaking.
The thing to notice is that every one of those is a decision you made first. The tool executes the judgment. It does not supply it. A campaign built on a weak signal and a lazy brief runs beautifully and produces nothing.
Key takeaways
- An outbound play is five decisions in order: signal, audience, channels, message, metrics.
- Choose the signal first and let the audience fall out of it. A signal that does not suggest timing is just a filter.
- Tier the audience by worth, not just fit, so effort lands where it pays.
- Sequence channels so each warms the next. The message is the highest-leverage decision, and your job is to brief it, not type it.
- Measure in stages so the broken stage tells you what to fix. When a play stalls, walk back the five decisions before touching the copy.
Up next: The Inbound Play, End to End
You have built the motion where you reach out first. Next is the other direction: what changes when the buyer reaches out, speed becomes the whole game, and the decisions shift from who to target to how fast you can respond well.