The Prospecting Agent fails quietly. It generates “personalized” sequences, contacts get enrolled, and your reply rate sits at 0.4% while your CRM fills with stale tasks. The defaults are tuned for demo, not deliverability.
Lock the ICP filter before anything else
The agent reads from your contact and company properties to assemble its target list. If lifecyclestage and num_associated_deals aren’t gated, it will re-prospect existing customers. Set the inclusion rule to:
lifecyclestage IS lead OR subscriber
AND num_associated_deals = 0
AND hs_lead_status NOT IN (Disqualified, Customer)Without this, expect 8-12% of touches to hit existing accounts. That’s a brand-damaging mistake.
Constrain the personalization window
Breeze pulls from website activity, news mentions, and intent signals when crafting the first email. Cap the lookback at 30 days under Agent Settings -> Context Window. Anything older reads as creepy (“I noticed you visited our pricing page last August”).
Throttle send volume per rep
The default cadence allows 50 contacts/day per owner. At that volume, your domain reputation tanks within two weeks. Drop it to 15-20 with a 90-second minimum interval. Use the workflow action delay_until_business_hours to keep sends inside the recipient’s timezone.
Force human approval on the first touch
Under the agent’s Action Permissions, switch the first email from auto_send to requires_review. Reps approve or edit in the Breeze Inbox card. This single change typically lifts reply rates by 2-3x because reps catch the obvious misfires.
Wire the feedback loop
Create a workflow that fires when a contact replies positively to a Breeze sequence and writes back to a custom property breeze_winning_pattern. Pipe that into the agent’s training set monthly. Without this, the agent never learns from your actual wins.
Watch the right metric
Reply rate is vanity. Track meetings_booked_per_100_contacts segmented by Breeze vs. human-authored sequences. If Breeze isn’t within 80% of your top SDR, it’s not earning its license cost.
What to do this week
Audit your ICP filter, drop daily volume to 20, and switch first touches to manual review. Re-baseline reply rate after 14 days before scaling back up.
