Outreach that waits for your approval before anything is sent

Yes, you can let an AI employee write to new leads without letting it write to anyone on its own. The Outreach block in xMap Flows turns each result into a short sequence: a first message, then up to two follow-ups a few days apart. With Approve each first switched on, which is how the block starts, every first message waits for you, one person at a time. You read it, change it if you like, and approve or decline it. Follow-ups then go by themselves, and the whole sequence stops the moment that person replies.

This article is for founders, sales leads and small teams who want the speed of automated prospecting but not the risk of a machine introducing their company to strangers unchecked. It explains how a sequence is built, what you see when you approve, a worked example, the mistakes that make outreach feel like spam, and the flow that feeds Outreach every morning.

How a sequence is put together

Outreach sits at the end of a flow, after the blocks that found and researched the people. Everything it needs is in its own settings:

• Send by: Email, or WhatsApp through your own WhatsApp Business account.
• Send to: left empty, it uses the contact's email or phone found by the Apollo block, else the result's own. Results with no address are left out, and the step says how many.
• Subject and First message: your words, with {{name}} or any other field filled from each result. Left empty, they take what an xMap LLM block drafted before it.
• First follow-up after and Second follow-up after: never, 2, 3, 5, 7 or 14 days, each with its own text.
• At most a day: 10, 25, 50 or 100 messages from this block. The rest wait for the next day, so a long list goes out over a week instead of in one burst.
• Send: 08:00 to 18:00 on weekdays in each receiver's own time zone, worked out from their city, or any time.

A person becomes one sequence, never two from the same block, so a flow that finds the same company twice does not write to it twice. Addresses that unsubscribed, bounced or complained get nothing.

What approving actually looks like

When a real run reaches Outreach, nothing is sent yet. Each person is queued, and the first message waits on the Outreach page under Results, with a notice in the bell. For every draft you see who it goes to, why the flow found them and the exact words. You can rewrite the subject or the body, approve it, or decline it so that person never hears from you. Approving a dozen takes a minute or two over coffee.

Only the first message needs you. Once it has gone, the follow-ups are sent on their day, inside the working hours you chose, unless the person answers first. If you set the AI employee to Ask me first (see how much an AI employee does alone), approval stays on whatever the block says.

A worked example

Here is a made-up case to show the rhythm. A company in Lisbon rents espresso machines to small cafes. Its AI employee looks every weekday morning for cafes that opened in the last six months within the city, finds the owner of each, and drafts a note that mentions what the cafe serves.

1. Monday 07:00: the flow finds six new cafes it has not seen before and queues six first messages.
2. Monday 08:30: the sales lead reads them, shortens two, declines one that is a chain with central buying, and approves five.
3. Monday 09:00 onwards: the five emails go out in each owner's working hours.
4. Thursday: two owners have not answered, so the first follow-up goes, three days after the first message.
5. Friday: one owner replies. The reply is forwarded to the flow's owner and that sequence stops. The others carry on until their second follow-up, or until they reply.

Nobody typed an address or remembered a date, and nobody received a message the team had not read.

Writing follow-ups people do not mind

The first message is where an AI draft earns its place, because it can speak to each business. Follow-ups are better written once by you and reused. Keep them short, give one new reason to answer (an example, a question, a date you are nearby), and make the last one an easy way out: if now is not the right time, no problem. A second follow-up that only repeats the first message is the one people report as spam.

Mistakes that turn outreach into spam

• Switching approval off too early. Read at least a few weeks of drafts before you trust them. You will find the cases the AI gets wrong: chains, closed places, the wrong person.
• Writing to people who would not expect it. Keep to businesses that plausibly need what you sell. You are responsible for contacting people lawfully, and every email carries an unsubscribe link.
• Sending everything at once. The daily limit is there to spread a long list over days, which is kinder to your sender's reputation and to your own calendar when replies come.
• No stop on reply. A follow-up landing after someone said yes, or no, is worse than none. Outreach stops by itself, so do not copy messages into a separate email tool that does not.
• Forgetting the email rules. On the Free plan, emails go only to people at your organization's own email domain, so a prospecting sequence needs a paid plan and, ideally, your own verified sender.

The AI employee that feeds Outreach

Outreach is only as good as the list that reaches it. A typical flow, built once in the editor or by describing it to Ask xMap, looks like this:

1. Schedule: every weekday at 07:00.
2. Area of interest: the city or districts you serve.
3. Nearby places: the kinds of business you sell to, opened in the last 6 or 12 months, only places with a phone or website.
4. Only new: drops anything the flow found on an earlier day.
5. Apollo, on your own Apollo account: the owner or manager of each business, with a work email when there is one.
6. xMap LLM: a fit score, and a short first message in email_subject and email_body.
7. Filter: keeps fit scores of 75 or more.
8. Outreach: email, approve each first, a follow-up after 3 days and a second after 7, at most 25 a day.

What lands each morning is a notice that a handful of first messages are waiting, and later, any replies in your own inbox. For the list itself, without any messages, see a list of new leads in your inbox every morning. If your customers are restaurants, selling to restaurants covers when to write to them.

Ready-made versions are a click away: an intro and two follow-ups to new dental clinics, writing to companies that are hiring, and the full outbound engine, which finds, researches, waits for approval and sends.