Today’s plays › All plays › Cold email
Have AI read your sequence as a cynical VP of Sales, then rebuild it to give first
Picked and checked by Olga Pearson, SalesUpLevel
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Reported: the old 5-step sequence had a 15% open rate and a 1.2% reply rate after 6 weeks. The rebuilt sequence reached a 6.8% reply rate in three weeks.
Jack Banister pasted a 5-step cold email sequence one of his BDRs had run for 6 weeks into Claude and asked how a cynical, time-poor VP of Sales would react to each step. Then his team rebuilt it with one rule: every email gives something before it asks for anything.
By Jack Banister, Managing Director at Kluvo, a UK outbound agency, posting on LinkedIn · Jack Banister on LinkedIn ↗ · Mar 10, 2026
If you sell: run the critique before your next send
- Paste your whole sequence into Claude and run the prompt below.
- Rebuild with one rule: every email gives something before it asks.
- Email 1: one specific observation about their business. Email 2: one data point. Email 3: a short story from a similar company. Email 4: one honest question. Email 5: a clean close.
- Run it for 3 weeks and compare reply rate with the old version.
Read this sequence and tell me what a cynical, time-poor VP of Sales would think at each step. [paste your 5 emails]
If you lead a team: roll it out
- Run the critique on every live team sequence in one session.
- Rebuild the worst one first and compare reply rates after 3 weeks.
Watch out for
- One sender, one list, three weeks. Treat 6.8% as his result, not a benchmark.
- Keep the observation in email 1 true and checkable; AI will invent one if you let it.
Source: Jack Banister, Jack Banister on LinkedIn, Mar 10, 2026. Results are as reported by the source; we did not measure them.
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