Most of what broke in our outbound setup happened after the prospect replied

After running signal-based outbound for the last four months and booking 30+ meetings, here are two problems we kept hitting and how we're solving them:

1. Replies were stuck in a tool our BDRs don't live in

Our sequencer is Getsales. BDRs already juggle an enrichment tool, an outreach tool, the CRM and other tabs. We didn't want to give them one more tab to check.

So replies now come to where they already work: Slack. Every prospect reply lands there, tagged to the account owner, with a draft already written.

- Jev (from TypeSafe) classifies every reply and gives it a confidence score
- A Claude skill drafts a response from the thread and the emails we already sent
- The owner approves, edits or rejects it right in Slack, and it goes out from the same inbox, in the same thread

When someone edits a draft, they add a line on why. Every night a job turns those edits into rules in the skill, so the next draft starts closer.

2. Out of office replies were inflating our reply rate.

The problem wasn't just that they inflated the reply rate; the bigger issue is that the people behind them may never have seen our email.

A lot of those auto replies say when the person will be back, though. So:

- Jev reads the reply and tags it as out of office
- If the message mentions a return date, Jev picks it out
- The reply skips the draft step, so it never lands in a BDR's queue
- A nightly job re-enrolls the prospect into the same campaign after their return date

The email shows up when someone is around to read it.

What problems have you encountered in your outbound setup? I'd love to hear how you're solving them.

#GTMEngineering #SalesDevelopment #RevOps #AIAgents #OutboundSales