Glossary
Warm outbound glossary.
The terms you'll meet when you run warm outbound, defined plainly. Several vendors use the same words to mean different things, so where the definitions disagree, this page says which one we use and why.
On this page 5 sections
The short answer
Warm outbound terms describe who you contact and how warm they are. The key distinction: warm outbound means contacting people who have already interacted with you, or with someone like you (a borrowed orbit). Signal-based outbound is the wider category, which also includes company trigger events like hiring, funding and job changes.
The core terms decide who you write to.
- Warm outbound
- Outreach to people who have already interacted with you, such as profile viewers, post engagers, followers and website visitors, or with someone like you, such as a competitor's engagers. You go first, but they've already noticed you or the problem. Full definition.
- Cold outbound
- Outreach to people who fit your target profile but have never interacted with you. Typically gets around 1-3% replies. Warm vs cold.
- Inbound
- When the prospect contacts you first: a demo request, a signup, a form. The highest intent and the smallest volume. Warm outbound vs inbound.
- Signal-based outbound
- Outreach timed by a signal of any kind: a person's interaction with you, or a company event like a new hire, a funding round or a job change. Warm outbound is the part of it built on interactions with you. Some vendors define "warm" as "a buying signal fired"; we don't, because a company hiring has not noticed you.
- Warm lead
- Someone who fits your ICP and has interacted with you or your space recently. Both halves matter: warm without fit is applause, fit without warmth is cold. Who counts.
- Buying signal
- Any observable sign that someone may be in the market: research behavior, a trigger event, engagement with the problem. Broader than warmth. A buying signal can come from someone who has never heard of you.
- Trigger event
- A change at a company that opens a buying window: funding, a new executive, a hiring push, an expansion. The core of signal-based outbound, not of warm outbound.
- ICP (ideal customer profile)
- The description of who you sell to: industry, company size, roles, regions, what they sell. Warmth tells you when; the ICP tells you who.
The orbit terms describe how close someone is.
- Orbit
- Everyone currently circling your company: the people looking at your profile, engaging with your posts, following you and visiting your site. Picture your company as a planet; the orbit is its atmosphere.
- Borrowed orbit
- The audience of someone like you: people engaging with competitors, category creators, events and communities. Warm to the problem, not to you. The starting point for warm outbound without an audience.
- Deep space
- Strangers who have shown no interest in you or your space. Cold outbound territory.
- Rings
- Layers of the orbit, warmest first. Ring 1: nearly inbound (abandoned signup, pricing-page visit, a question in a comment). Ring 2: profile viewers, post engagers, site visitors. Ring 3: followers. Ring 4: borrowed orbit.
- Warmth decay
- How fast a signal cools. Profile views, post engagement and site visits stay warm for about one to three days; follows for one to two weeks. After that, a warm lead is close to cold again.
The source terms name where warm leads come from.
- Profile viewer
- Someone who looked at your LinkedIn profile. The full list needs Premium or Sales Navigator. How to message them.
- Post engager
- Someone who reacted to, commented on or reposted your content. Comments and reposts with a take are stronger than likes. How to work them.
- Company page follower
- Someone who follows your company page. A slower, steadier warm source that refills on its own.
- Website visitor identification
- Tools that match site visits to companies or, in some cases, individual people. Person-level identification is sensitive under GDPR in the EU and UK; company-level is the safer default. Never mention the visit in a message.
- Competitor engager
- Someone who commented on or reacted to a competitor's post about the problem you solve. In the market now, with no loyalty yet. Never name the competitor when you write.
- Champion (job change)
- A past customer or supporter who moved to a new company. Public, earned trust, and one of the warmest leads most teams never track.
The execution terms describe what you send and when.
- Connection note
- The optional message attached to a LinkedIn connection request, limited to about 300 characters. For warm leads, short or none often works better than a pitch.
- Connection request limit
- LinkedIn caps invitations at roughly 100-200 a week per account. Spend them on warm leads before strangers.
- Narrating the signal
- Telling someone how you found them: "thanks for viewing my profile," "our tracking shows you visited our pricing page." The most common warm outbound mistake. Use the signal for who and when, not for what you say.
- Time to first touch
- The gap between a signal and your first message. The single most controllable number in warm outbound.
- Follow-up
- A message after an unanswered first message. In warm outbound, one or two at most, each adding something new. Follow-up rules.
- Stop rule
- The condition that ends a sequence: two follow-ups sent, any no, a booking, or nothing new to say. Protects the relationship for when they come back into your orbit.
- LinkedIn's paid sales tool. Useful for warm outbound because it shows viewers with filters and saved-lead alerts, and for building a targeted cold list alongside your warm sources.
The measurement terms tell you whether it's working.
- Reply rate
- Replies divided by people messaged. Warm on LinkedIn commonly reaches 15% or more; cold typically gets 1-3%. Benchmarks.
- Interested-reply rate
- Replies that want to keep talking, divided by people messaged. More useful than raw replies, because "thanks, not now" counts as a reply.
- Keep rate
- The share of your orbit that passes ICP qualification. Roughly 10-30% is normal for a high-ticket offer.
Next: what warm outbound is, or warm outbound templates.
