Sales & Outreach

Verified against ChatGPT · 2026-07-27

Build a follow-up cadence that never repeats "just checking in"

Turns one open item from a sales call into a multi-touch, multi-channel cadence where every touch adds a new piece of value, ending in an explicit break-up message instead of trailing off into silence.

ChatGPTClaudeOutreach.io8 fillable variables

The prompt

Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.

I need a follow-up cadence after a demo where they said budget approval was pending with Sarah Lindqvist at Northbridge Analytics. Deal stage: post-demo, awaiting internal budget sign-off. What's still open or unresolved: whether the CFO has actually seen the proposal yet. Channels I can use: email, LinkedIn, phone.

Build a 5-touch cadence over 3 weeks, mixing the channels listed rather than running them all through one channel. For every touch, give me:
- Day number, relative to today
- Channel
- The ONE new piece of value, information, or reason to reply it adds — no touch may simply restate the last one, and no touch may use "following up," "just checking in," "wanted to bump this," or any functional equivalent of those phrases, since a touch with nothing new to say is a touch asking for attention it hasn't earned
- The exact message or call talking point, ready to send or say without further editing

VARY THE VALUE TYPE ACROSS TOUCHES
Don't make every touch a variation of the same value type — mix genuinely different kinds of value across the sequence: a relevant piece of content or data point, a direct question that moves whether the CFO has actually seen the proposal yet forward, a small proof point or customer story, a deadline or time-sensitive reason to act, and a check on whether priorities have simply changed. A cadence where every touch is "here's another article" is nearly as repetitive as one where every touch just says "checking in," even though no single touch technically breaks the banned-phrase rule.

THE BREAK-UP TOUCH
The last touch must be an explicit break-up message: state plainly that you'll stop reaching out on this cadence, and give them one easy, low-guilt way to restart contact later if their situation changes — no guilt-tripping, no exaggerated finality ("this is truly the last time"), just a clear, honest close.

MOST-LIKELY-TO-LAND CALL
After the full cadence, tell me which single touch is most likely to actually get a response given whether the CFO has actually seen the proposal yet specifically, and explain plainly why the others are more likely to be read and ignored — don't hedge this into "they're all equally important," since if that were true there'd be no reason to sequence them at all.

TIMING SANITY CHECK
Look at the spacing between touches relative to 3 weeks and post-demo, awaiting internal budget sign-off and flag if the cadence is too aggressive (multiple touches close together reading as pressure) or too sparse (long silent gaps that let the deal go cold) for a deal at this specific stage — a cold-outbound cadence and a post-demo cadence should not be spaced identically.

Customize

Optional — swap in your own details for the highlighted parts above.

Why this works

Banning "just checking in" and "bumping this" is grounded in a widely documented pattern in outbound sales: near-zero-value bump messages consistently produce the lowest reply rates of any touch type in a cadence, because they ask explicitly for the prospect's time and attention while offering nothing new in exchange, which is a bad trade from the recipient's side of the inbox even if it costs the sender nothing to send. Requiring the value type to vary across touches, not just the wording, closes a gap the banned-phrase rule alone doesn't catch: a model told only to avoid specific phrases will happily generate five touches that are all, functionally, "here's another resource," which is repetitive in substance even while being technically compliant with the letter of the instruction, and a prospect notices the pattern of a cadence, not just the vocabulary of any single message in it. The mandatory break-up message reflects a specific, counterintuitive and well-supported cadence-design principle: sequences that end with an explicit exit message reliably out-perform ones that simply trail off into nothing, because stating plainly "I'll stop reaching out after this" creates a natural deadline effect and often prompts a reply from prospects who never intended to ghost the conversation but also never got around to replying to an open-ended thread with no clear end. Requiring a timing sanity check against deal stage specifically addresses a common one-size-fits-all mistake: the same five-touches-over-three-weeks template applied to both a cold-outbound sequence and a warm post-demo follow-up, when the two situations call for genuinely different pacing — pushing a warm, recently-engaged prospect with the same touch frequency used on someone who has never responded reads as pressure, while spacing out a warm follow-up as sparsely as a cold sequence lets real, active momentum go cold for no reason.

What you get back

Day 12 — LinkedIn: "Sarah — I'll stop following up on this one for now. If the timing shifts on your end, just reply here and I'll pick it back up, no explanation needed." Most likely to land: the Day 3 email, since it offers the ROI one-pager the CFO would actually need to sign off on, not a status check.

Verified against

ChatGPT GPT-5.1 · 2026-07-27

Claude Sonnet 4.5 · 2026-07-28

Changelog

  • 2026-07-28 — Initial publish, verified against ChatGPT (GPT-5.1) and Claude (Sonnet 4.5).

Need this built into your business?

If a prompt isn't enough — Google Ads management, built and maintained for you — that's Scult's day job.

EXPLORE GOOGLE ADS MANAGEMENT
All Sales & Outreach prompts

Check your AI visibility

One URL in, a 0–100 score and the exact fixes out.

RUN THE CHECK

Browse all the tools

15 tools across six categories
13 of them never send your data anywhere

Free · No signup · No trial clock

SEE THE DIRECTORY