Outbound Playbook v5

The cold rail, rewritten against the offer of record. Who owns which lane now that email and SMS move to the builder, what you may say, and what never leaves the building in writing.

Updated 3 September 2026 · replaces v4 (29 July), which sold a retired offer

1Who owns what

Cold email and cold SMS are being handed to the builder. They are not switched off. This section is the split, so nothing falls between the two of you.

Lane	Owner	What that means
Cold calling	Akash	You dial. Nobody else speaks to a prospect first.
Cold email	Builder	Domains, warm-up, list building, sending, replies routed to you.
Cold SMS	Builder	Same, and only to numbers that gave permission on a call.
The offer	Akash	Never delegated. No price leaves the building in writing.
Any live send	Akash	The builder stages it. You press send until you say otherwise.

The one rule the builder cannot break. No price, no dollar figure, and no terms in any email or text. Prices are spoken on the phone, on your voice, or not at all.

2The offer of record

Ruled 26 August. The price is flat, charged per appointment request, and charged whether or not the job is won. Everything the old v4 playbook said about taking a share of closed work is retired.

The one promise, everywhere

You only pay per booked appointment.

That is the whole promise. It goes on ads, on the landing page, and out of your mouth on the phone in the same words. No revenue share. No block of weeks. No trial.

The prices

These are the top of each range. Anything below these floors fails the 40% margin test, so they are not yours to discount.

Trade	Per appointment request	Prepaid blocks
Concrete leveling	$50	10 for $500 · 50 for $1,250 at the $25 rate
Flatwork	$75	Priced off the same weekly block
Waterproofing and crawl space	$100	Priced off the same weekly block
Foundation repair	$125	10 for $1,500 weekly · 50 a month for $6,250 at $125

What a booked appointment has to contain

A homeowner who owns the property or decides on it, wants the service you actually sell, sits inside the service area, and has a job normally worth $5,000 or more. It arrives with project details, an address, and a preferred window such as this week or this weekend. Their team calls to lock the exact slot.

Things that are true and easy to get wrong

Replacements are no-questions-asked. That is the guarantee — say it plainly.
Ad spend is separate. You do not front it. The v4 line saying you did is retired.
Never take a share of what the client wins. That billing model is retired.
No free trial and no zero-down offer. Both are retired.
Never promise the work inside a block of weeks. It is a weekly flow.
Never quote any of these prices in writing. They are spoken, on a call, or not at all.

3The one provable number

The v4 numbers were eight days of Dallas data from 29 July. They are five weeks old. Here is what the brain actually holds today, pulled 3 September.

Measure	Value	Window
Real homeowner leads landed	293	5 Aug – 2 Sep
Of those, qualified	174	same
Best single client	107 leads, 64 qualified	same

What you may say on a call: 174 qualified homeowner conversations in the last month across the accounts we run. That is a volume claim, it is verified, and it needs no cost maths.

Do not quote a cost per lead until someone refreshes it. The paid-media snapshots in the brain stop at 19 July, so any cost-per-lead figure you say today is guessed. An unknown stays unknown — never a default. First job for the builder: pull live spend from Meta and put a real number here.

4The cold call

The craft reference is the Cold-Calling Field Guide at 01-Projects/StPierre-GTM/outbound/st-pierre-cold-calling-field-guide.html. Below is only what the new offer changed.

The sequence: permission, then problem, then offer, then observation, then a small ask.

Opener

Hey [First name] — it's Akash St. Pierre. I know I'm catching you out of the blue. Can I take 30 seconds, tell you exactly why I called, and you tell me if it's relevant?

Then stop talking. The first ten seconds only has to earn the next thirty.

The thirty seconds

I work with concrete leveling contractors. Most don't have a lead problem — they've got a calendar that swings between slammed and empty. I do something different: I put homeowners who want the work on your calendar, and you only pay per booked appointment. Not a retainer, not a share of your jobs. I noticed [specific fact about their business]. That usually means [consequence].

The ask

Before we talk about any of that — can I send you the free piece? It's a chatbot that sits on your website and books the homeowner while you're on a jobsite. Takes me a minute to build on your actual site. No charge, yours whether or not we ever talk again. Can I text it to you?

A yes here is the whole call. You are asking permission to text, not for a meeting. That is a much smaller yes, and it makes the second touch welcome.

If they want to talk properly

Get a callback, not a calendar invite. Ask when they are next off a jobsite and call them then. Book the follow-up as a time you will dial, not a slot they have to attend.

Objections that changed under this offer

They say	You say
What's the catch?	No retainer and no contract. You pay per booked appointment, and if one isn't right I replace it, no questions. The exact number depends on your trade — I'm not going to invent it on a cold call.
So you're a lead vendor.	A lead vendor sells the same homeowner to you and three competitors. You get an appointment with a homeowner who asked for you, in your own system, and you replace any that miss the spec.
How much?	Depends on the trade and the volume, and I'd be guessing if I said a number now. Give me fifteen minutes properly and I'll give you the real one.
We already have someone.	Good — I'm not asking you to fire anybody. Do you own the data, and do you know what a booked job costs you right now?
Prove it.	174 qualified homeowner conversations last month across the accounts I run. And the demo I'm sending is your own site, so that part you don't take my word for.

The rule of two: two real attempts after an objection, then book a callback or exit cleanly. Do not argue with a no.

Permanently banned. Fake-customer openers, "we were supposed to talk," competitor-callback voicemails, implied referrals, borrowed logos, invented scarcity, and any price quoted before the call. Territory exclusivity is the only scarcity you get to use.

5The demo gift

This is still how every lane opens, and it still costs nothing to give.

1Self-serve. Send them demo.stpierre.ai. They type their own website address and about twenty seconds later they are looking at their site with the bot on it.
2Pre-built. For accounts you care about, drop a config file in 01-Projects/SP-Demo-Bot/configs/ and send them their own link.

Here's the thing I built for [Company] — it's your actual site with the bot on it, not a slide deck: [link]. Made it before you paid me anything so you can see it's real. Have a play. Reply STOP to opt out.

No cold first text. Touch one is always a call or a voicemail.
Any reply or link click gets an answer inside five minutes.
Every text carries STOP. STOP suppresses instantly, forever, on every channel.
Text only between 9am and 7pm in their local time.

6Email and SMS — the builder's lane

The builder runs the machinery. You still own what it says and when it fires.

What the builder sets up

Sending domains, and the warm-up. The runbook is the Cold Email Warm-Up Kit.
List building and verification. Bounce rate over 3% pauses sending, no debate.
The test board — which cells are live and which are staged.
Routing every reply to Akash within five minutes, on any channel.

Caps and guardrails

Rail	Cap	Why
Cold email	20–30 sends per inbox per day	Above this, domains burn.
Cold SMS	Permission only	A number that did not say yes on a call is not a cold SMS target.
Any automated send	Off until Akash says otherwise	Staged by the builder, fired by Akash.

One cold rail at a time. Email and SMS do not run at the same prospect in the same week. Pick the rail per account and stay on it.

7The daily block

The old playbook reserved 5–8am for content. That block is gone — content is off for a year. Outbound starts the morning.

18:50–9:00. Say the opener, the thirty seconds, and your three worst objections out loud. Every day.
29:00–9:20. Warmest first — callbacks, replies, anyone who touched a demo link.
39:20–10:40. Protected cold block. No Slack, no inbox.
410:40–11:00. Log dispositions, send the demos you promised, listen back to one call.

Scoring the day

The hundred-point game is the target, not a dial count. One point per real conversation, twenty-five per demo sent, one hundred points a day. It is live in the sales room.

8Scoreboard and kill rules

Score the funnel one stage at a time. A single blended rate hides where the leak is.

Stage	Metric	If it's weak, look at
Reach	Connect rate	Phone accuracy, number reputation, time of day
Attention	Permission granted	The opener, your pace, the first pause
Relevance	Right-fit conversations	List quality and hook quality
Commitment	Demos sent and callbacks set	Problem framing and the size of the ask
Revenue	Signed clients	Diagnosis depth, proof, terms

Auto-stop, no debate

Connect rate under 5% — stop and check the list and the numbers before touching the script.
Zero positive replies after 50 touches — change the opener or the list, not the volume.
Any unusual cluster of STOPs or complaints — pause that channel and review the list source.
Email bounces over 3% — pause sending, fix verification and authentication.

9Two places still carry the old offer

The deploy gate already enforces the 26 August ruling. It rejects any promise of won work, any revenue share, and any promise made inside a fixed run of weeks. This playbook is written to what the gate allows. Two live surfaces are not, and this page deliberately does not reprint their wording — the gate blocks that too.

context/offer.md still names the 21 August ladder as the offer of record and instructs every agent to treat it that way. It is out of date, and it will keep pulling copy backwards until someone corrects it.
The offer landing page still leads on a count of won jobs inside a fixed run of weeks. It would fail the gate if it were redeployed today, which means it predates the rule.

Neither is this playbook's to change. Say the word and both get corrected to the pay-per-appointment promise in one pass.

10Sources

01-Projects/StPierre-GTM/context/offer.md — the offer of record. Currently stale — see section 9.
01-Projects/CommandCenter/sales.html — the Sales Room, rebuilt nightly.
01-Projects/StPierre-GTM/outbound/st-pierre-cold-calling-field-guide.html — call craft.
Cold Email Warm-Up Kit — domain and inbox setup, the builder's first job.
Lead figures pulled from sp_client_leads on 3 September 2026.