You are a manufacturer's rep. You carry a few lines, say motion control, sensors and pneumatics, and you cover a territory, here Ohio, Michigan and Indiana. Your income depends on getting onto plant floors, and the people who can let you in are the plant manager, the operations manager and the maintenance manager. This use case finds them across your territory, opens each email with what that plant actually makes, and turns a yes into a visit on your calendar.
- A saved list of about 2,500 plant, operations and maintenance leaders at manufacturers with 51 to 1,000 employees in your three states.
- A campaign with three emails in one thread, each naming what that plant makes, with a short line walk as the ask.
- A subsequence that answers every yes with two visit mornings, so the call or the visit is booked before you are back in the car.
Step 1. Write the sentence first
Ours is this. "Plant, operations and maintenance managers at manufacturers in Ohio, Michigan and Indiana with 51 to 1,000 employees." The territory is part of the sentence on purpose. A rep who writes outside the territory books visits they cannot drive to, or hands leads to another rep for free.
Step 2. Set the filters
Open Search, then People, and set these.
| Filter | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Location | United States, then the states Ohio, Michigan and Indiana | Your territory. States combine as any of them, so each one adds to the count. |
| Industry | Manufacturing, Machinery, Plastics, Automotive, Electrical & Electronic Manufacturing, Industrial Automation | Plants with production lines that run on drives, sensors and air. Leave out Industrial Automation if your lines compete with integrators. |
| Employees | 51-200, 201-500, 501-1,000 | Big enough to have a maintenance team and spare parts budget, small enough that the plant manager still talks to reps. |
| Job titles | Plant Manager, Plant Director, Operations Manager, Maintenance Manager, Manufacturing Engineering Manager, Director of Manufacturing | The people who own uptime on the floor. Titles match whole words, so Plant Manager also finds Assistant Plant Manager, which the link leaves out. |
| Must have | Only people you can write to. |
Step 3. Read the count, state by state
Three industrial states and six titles usually come to several thousand people. Before you look at the total, take the states out one at a time and write the numbers down. If one state is far smaller than you expected, that is where your territory knowledge beats any filter, and it tells you where the second wave goes.
- Above 15,000 means a filter did not apply. Check that all three states show as chips.
- 2,000 to 10,000 is the working range. Start with 2,500, the plants closest to where you already drive.
- Under 800 means the industries are too narrow. Add Manufacturing back first, it is the broadest label.
Then scroll twenty rows. Head office people slip in, a VP of operations at a corporate office in another state has the title but no floor. If a lot of rows look like that, drop Director of Manufacturing and keep the plant and maintenance titles.
Step 4. Save the list, keep only valid emails
Click Select matching, choose how many people you want, then Save list. Name it like OH MI IN - Mfg 51-1000 - plant, ops, maintenance. Because a saved list keeps the filters, the same list next quarter shows the new plant managers too, and plant managers change jobs often.
When you attach the list to the campaign, include only Valid emails. Each person from search costs 1 credit, unless you already unlocked them.
Step 5. Name what the plant makes
A plant manager reads an email that shows you know what runs on their floor. That fact goes into {{custom_plant_products}}, and every plant where you found nothing gets a plain fallback.
- From a file. Export the list, add a column called
custom_plant_productsand upload it to the campaign with Upload CSV. - From Claude or ChatGPT. Your assistant reads each company's products or capabilities page, writes the line, shows you five examples first and saves the rest when you agree. It never guesses a customer or a part.
For my campaign "Demo: OH MI IN plant managers", set up a personal line called custom_plant_products.
It says what the company makes, from its products or capabilities page,
as a phrase that fits after "Saw that <company> makes", 4 to 10 words, lowercase,
e.g. "injection molded housings for appliance makers".
Fallback: "parts for other manufacturers".
Show me five examples with the page you used first. Never guess.| Company | Personal line | How the sentence reads |
|---|---|---|
| Ashgrove Plastics | injection molded housings for appliance makers | Saw that your plant makes injection molded housings for appliance makers. |
| Silverline Stamping | stamped steel brackets for truck frames | Saw that your plant makes stamped steel brackets for truck frames. |
| Copperline Wire Harness | custom wire harnesses for farm equipment | Saw that your plant makes custom wire harnesses for farm equipment. |
| No line of its own | parts for other manufacturers | Saw that your plant makes parts for other manufacturers. |
Step 6. Write the three emails
Press New campaign, name it, attach the list and go to Emails. Change the lines you carry to your own.
What they make, what you carry, and a small concrete ask with a limit on their time. A line walk is how reps actually get in.
A useful offer that needs no meeting at all. A part number by email is how many rep relationships start.
The exit that asks for the person in maintenance or purchasing. Plant managers forward these more often than they answer them.
Step 7. Mailboxes for 2,500 people in 5 weeks
Cold email never goes out from your main domain. It goes out from separate mailboxes on domains that look like yours, for example a short variation of your brand name. If one of them gets tired, you retire it and your real domain never notices.
Here is the math for this campaign. 2,500 people over 5 weeks is about 100 new people per weekday. Each gets three emails, so once the follow-ups overlap you send roughly 300 emails a day. At 5 cold emails per mailbox per day, that is about 60 mailboxes.
| Input | Value |
|---|---|
| New people per weekday | 100 |
| Emails per person | 3 |
| Emails per day once everything runs | about 300 |
| Cold emails per mailbox per day | 5 |
| Mailboxes | about 60 |
There are two ways to get there. Under Outreach, Inboxes you connect mailboxes you already have, from Google, Microsoft or any other provider. Or you have new Microsoft 365 mailboxes set up on new domains. Those come in bundles from 100 mailboxes, you do not need a plan to buy them, and they connect to your campaigns on their own. 100 mailboxes carry 500 cold emails a day, which leaves room for a second campaign.
New mailboxes wait at least 24 hours before they send anything. Warm-up is included and starts switched off. Switch it on for new mailboxes and give them one to two weeks before full volume. Never raise the limit per mailbox to go faster. More mailboxes is the right lever.
If you represent several principals, keep one set of sending domains under your own agency name, never the principals' names. The relationship with the plant is yours, and so is the sender reputation.
Step 8. Schedule and launch
In the Senders step of the wizard, every connected mailbox is ticked. Untick the ones that belong to other campaigns or brands. Sends rotate across the ones you keep, and each one still respects its own daily limit.
In the Schedule step, set the timezone of the people you write to, here US Eastern (ET), not your own. Keep the sending window at 09:00 to 17:00, keep Skip weekends on and keep the gap between sends per mailbox at 60 to 120 minutes. Plain text stays on, so the email looks like it came from a person and carries no tracking pixel.
The last step is the review. Read it as if somebody else built the campaign. The audience with the grades you picked, the sequence with its waits, the senders, the start and the pace. Then press Launch campaign. Launch is not possible without senders and leads, and mailboxes still in their first day hold the launch until they are ready. Afterwards, open the Settings tab and check that Stop on reply and Bounce protection are on. Bounce protection pauses the campaign when more than 10% bounce once 100 people have been contacted.
Step 9. Replies and booked visits
Every reply lands in the Unibox, from every mailbox and campaign, and gets a label on its own. The standard labels are Interested, Meeting request, Out of office, Unsubscribe and Other. Switch on Referral and Wrong person in the settings as well. On our own largest campaign, one in four human replies pointed us to a colleague, more often than a straight yes.
A yes gets answered by the campaign itself, with a subsequence. It starts when a reply contains one of your keywords, takes the person out of the main sequence and answers in the same thread in the next sending window. A reply that says "not interested" or asks you to stop never triggers one.
On the campaign's Subsequences tab, press Add subsequence and use these keywords. interested, visit, come by, part number, sure, tell me more. Then write the first email.
Two mornings, because plant visits happen before lunch. The call option keeps a yes from stalling when the week is full.
Replies with a part number are the best leads in this campaign. Label them Interested by hand if the labelling missed them, answer within the day, and put the visit on the calendar while you are at it.
Every morning, filter the Unibox by Meeting request and Interested. Those are the conversations one answer away from a call. Propose a specific time instead of just a link, and add your booking link as the second option. When the call is set, change the label to Meeting booked so your numbers count it. Answer referrals the same day. Thank them, write to the person they named, and mention who sent you.
If you would rather work from Claude or ChatGPT, your assistant can read the Unibox, sort replies by label and draft answers. Nothing is sent until you confirm. The use case Run it all from Claude or ChatGPT shows how.
What to expect
The ranges below come from our own sending, scaled to 2,500 people. Our healthy campaign, two emails to a valid-only list from mailboxes at 5 cold emails a day, got human replies from 1.3% of the people contacted. Campaigns from overworked mailboxes sat at 0.3%. About one in five human replies says yes, and about one in four points you to a colleague. These are reference points, not promises. Your offer, your segment and your copy move them a lot. The reply rate in Argorant also counts out-of-office notes, so it reads higher. Compare these numbers with the reply rate excl. OOO.
| Number | For 2,500 people |
|---|---|
| Human replies (0.3 to 1.3%) | 8 to 33 |
| Of those, interested | 2 to 7 |
| Referrals to the right person | 2 to 9 |
| Bounces with valid-only addresses | under 1% |
| Booked calls if you answer the same day | 3 to 10 |
Plant people answer email less than office people, and more of them answer with a referral to maintenance or purchasing. Count a referral that turns into a visit as a booked call. Within a territory, two or three visits a week from one campaign is a good result, and each visit tends to open the next plant through the people you meet there.
On the calendar it looks like this. The first replies arrive in week one, 65% of all replies come within an hour of the email landing and 84% answer the first email. After 5 weeks everyone has had the full sequence, and a week later nearly everything that will come is in. If human replies stay near zero after a few hundred people, check delivery first and copy second.
Do the same from Claude or ChatGPT
Every step above also works as a conversation once Argorant is connected. This request builds the territory list. Your assistant counts, shows sample rows and asks before it spends a credit.
The full setup, from connecting the assistant to launching and handling replies, is in Run it all from Claude or ChatGPT.
Claude
Using Argorant