Vocabulary
Glossary
Definitions for the terms the practice uses, from sender reputation to sales handoff. One sentence each, then why it matters and how it is done.
The category itself is defined on what is outbound engineering.
Sender reputation
Sender reputation is the score a mailbox provider such as Gmail or Outlook keeps on a sending domain and mailbox, built from how recipients react to its mail, and it decides whether a message reaches the inbox.
Domain warmup
Domain warmup is the slow, measured ramp of real mail from a new domain or mailbox so it earns a sending reputation before it is used for outreach.
Warmup ramp
The warmup ramp is the week-by-week schedule of daily sending volume a mailbox follows during warmup, with each step gated by the reputation reading.
Isolated sending subdomain
An isolated sending subdomain is a separate subdomain, with its own mailboxes and DNS records, from which all outbound runs so that nothing about it can affect the company's main domain.
Function mailbox
A function mailbox is a sending address named for a role or function rather than for a person, used so that outbound never relies on a fabricated human identity.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC
SPF, DKIM and DMARC are the three DNS records that let a receiving mail server verify a message really came from the domain it claims to, and decide what to do when it did not.
Deliverability reading
A deliverability reading is a daily measurement of where a mailbox's messages actually land in real Gmail and Outlook inboxes, used to set that mailbox's sending cap.
Evidence-graded address
An evidence-graded address is an email address that carries a grade for how it was obtained: published on the company's own site, verified by its mail server, or inferred from a naming pattern.
Inferred email
An inferred email is an address built from a company's naming pattern rather than found or verified, and in outbound engineering it is never sent to.
Provenance
Provenance is the record, kept on every field of a prospect, of where that fact came from, so that a personalization without evidence never reaches an email.
Ideal customer profile
An ideal customer profile is a written description of the company worth talking to: what kind, what size, where, and what has to be true about it for a conversation to be worth anyone's time.
Scoring rubric
A scoring rubric is a written scale, one to ten, that ranks each company against the ideal customer profile and decides which band gets outreach.
Plain-text first message
A plain-text first message is the opening email of a sequence, sent with no links, no images and no tracking, short enough to read on a phone.
Behavioral follow-up
A behavioral follow-up is a next message chosen by what the recipient did with the last one: not opened, opened without replying, or replied.
Reply classification
Reply classification is the sorting of every reply by an agent into a small set of states, such as interested, not now, wrong person, or has a question, before a person acts on it.
Sales handoff
The sales handoff is the moment an interested reply is placed in front of a salesperson, in Slack, in the CRM and on a shared calendar, with enough context to call while the thread is still open.
Shared board
The shared board is the CRM view the client and the operator both look at: the base as it fills, each mailbox's cap for the day, every contact's state and every reply with its classification.
Open-rate honesty
Open-rate honesty is the rule that opens are always reported both in total and excluding known proxies, and that no screen leads with open rate alone.
Target versus measured
Target versus measured is the rule that every number in an outbound program carries a status, either designed-for or read, and that a target is never shown as a result.