The Outbound Rulebook

What the Rulebook is

The Outbound Rulebook is the running order we follow when we put a new B2B outbound campaign live, written down in the order the work actually happens. It is not a theory of sales. It is the sequence of decisions between signing a client and the first reply landing in their inbox, with the number attached to each one: how many domains, how many days of warm-up, how many sends per mailbox per day, how many follow-ups.

Most cold email advice skips that layer. It tells you to personalise, to lead with a problem, to keep it short. All true, all useless on day one, because on day one you do not have a domain that can deliver, a list worth sending to, or a mailbox that will survive the first 500 sends. The Rulebook starts there instead.

Every number in it comes from campaigns we run for paying clients across the Baltics, Poland and German-speaking Europe. Where a number varies by market, the PDF says so rather than averaging it into a figure that fits nowhere.

What is inside

Eight chapters, in the order you would work through them:

1. Domain setup. Why the sending domain is never your main domain, how many to register, and the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records each one needs before a single send.
2. Warm-up. How long a fresh domain and mailbox need before real volume, what the ramp looks like week by week, and the signs that a mailbox is burning.
3. ICP. How to write an ideal customer profile a list builder can query: firmographics, the buying trigger, the person who signs, and the exclusions that keep competitors and current clients out.
4. List building. Where company and contact data comes from, how to verify it, what a tolerable bounce rate looks like, and which sources are free.
5. The message. The structure of a first email, what the follow-ups are for, and the phrases that put a message in the spam folder before anyone reads it.
6. Sending. Volume per mailbox, spacing, time zones, how many mailboxes a target list of a given size needs, and when to stop and fix something.
7. Replies. What to do in the first hour, how to sort interested from polite, and how to hand a reply to whoever runs the meeting.
8. EU compliance. The legal basis for B2B cold email under GDPR, where the national ePrivacy transpositions add a stricter bar, what the unsubscribe and sender identification have to carry, and which records to keep.

The last section is a 30-day plan that puts all eight in order, with the checks that have to pass before each stage starts. If you only read one page, read that one.

Who it is for

Founders running outbound themselves, before there is budget for a team. Sales leads who have hired an SDR and need the setup right before that person starts. Marketers who have been handed outbound on top of everything else. Anyone about to brief an agency who wants to know what good looks like before the sales call.

It is also useful if you have a campaign running and it has stopped working. Most stalls trace back to one of the eight chapters, and reading them in order tends to surface which.

If you have run outbound for years and your deliverability is sound, the Rulebook will mostly confirm what you already do. That is a fair outcome for a free PDF, and we would rather say so than pitch it as new.

Why we give it away

The honest answer: we sell the work, not the knowledge. Reading the Rulebook and running it yourself takes a few hundred hours across a year, most of it in list building and inbox maintenance. Plenty of companies have those hours and should use them. The ones that do not, hire us, and they hire us better informed, which makes the first month faster for both sides.

There is no drip sequence attached. You get one email with the PDF. If you tick the box on the form we will send the occasional note about outbound, and unsubscribing takes one click. We do not sell or share the address.

The whole Outbound Academy is free on the same basis, so if you would rather read than download, the material is already on the site.

Get the PDF

One field. The PDF arrives in your inbox, and the link on the confirmation opens it straight away.

Prefer to talk it through instead? Book a strategy call and we will go through your setup on the call.