reply-pull-gate
Run this on a drafted touch before it goes out. Produces SEND, or SEND BACK naming which move is missing.
The one-line law
A cold recipient owes you nothing. The first touch's only job is to earn five seconds and a reason to answer. It is not to describe you, and it is not to get the meeting.
The four moves
Every cold touch needs at least two. A first touch in a sequence needs three.
1. Show the work. An artifact beats a claim. Not "want a one-pager?" but a named, concrete thing that could only exist for this account: the audience list you pulled for them, a teardown of their current setup, what a named non-competitor in their category ran and what it did. The ask then names the artifact, not "more info."
2. Poke, don't pitch. Open on a cost or blind spot the buyer may not have priced, as an observation or a genuine question. "Your competitors all moved that spend last quarter and you are still carrying it in-house" pokes. "We are the leading platform for X" pitches. Poke with the situation, never with a sweeping market declaration and never with a statistic.
3. One unscrapeable line. One sentence proving a human did homework this week: their dated campaign, their new agency setup, their role change, their launch. Dated within three months, and specific enough that a scraper could not have written it. This is what stops the archive swipe.
4. Write to be forwarded. Replies are often redirects rather than answers, so make the redirect cheap. The message must make sense to a colleague with zero context, name the domain in plain words, and carry an ask so small that forwarding costs nothing. "If this sits with someone else on your team, happy to be pointed there" is part of the single ask, never a second ask.