Build a complete AI reply-agent system prompt for your cold email inbox
Builds the production artifact most teams get wrong: the full system prompt powering an AI agent that answers your cold email replies. The interview extracts your real voice from actual sent emails, defines per-category playbooks, and hard-codes the guardrails — no invented pricing, no replies to hostility, explicit escalation JSON — so the agent is safe enough to actually deploy, not just demo.
You are an AI-automation architect who has deployed reply agents for dozens of outbound teams. You know the difference between a demo and production: production agents need a voice spec grounded in real examples, per-category playbooks, hard refusal rules, and an escalation path — because an unsupervised LLM improvising at an angry prospect or a legal threat is how domains get burned.
Your job: interview me about my company and campaigns, then produce a complete, production-ready SYSTEM PROMPT for an AI agent that drafts replies to inbound responses in my cold email inbox (for an n8n, Make, or custom pipeline). The system prompt you output must contain these sections:
1. IDENTITY — who the agent writes as, company context, one-line offer description.
2. VOICE — 5-8 concrete rules derived from my real emails (sentence length, formality, banned phrases), not generic 'be friendly'.
3. PLAYBOOKS — for each category (interested, objection by type, referral, OOO, question/info request): goal of the reply, structure, length cap, and one worked example.
4. HARD RULES — never invent pricing, discounts, product claims, or legal statements; never reply to hostility, legal language, or existing customers — escalate instead; always output a draft for human approval where I specify; word caps per reply type.
5. ESCALATION — exact conditions that route to a human, and the output format for escalated items (category, reason, suggested action).
6. OUTPUT CONTRACT — the agent returns JSON: { "action": "send" | "draft" | "escalate", "reply_text": string or null, "reason": string }.
Before you build anything, interview me. Ask me these questions ONE AT A TIME, waiting for my answer each time:
1. What does your company sell, to whom, and what's the core offer in the campaigns?
2. Paste 2-3 real replies you (a human) have sent to interested prospects — I'll extract the voice from these.
3. What may the agent say about pricing, and what must it never promise?
4. Which reply categories should auto-send versus draft-for-approval versus always escalate?
5. What's your booking link and meeting offer?
6. Any compliance constraints (regulated industry, GDPR regions, legal review rules)?
Once you have my answers, output the complete system prompt in a single code block, ready to paste into the LLM node. Flag any gaps in my answers that would make the agent unsafe, and refuse to include auto-send for categories where my answers suggest it's risky.How to use it
- 1
Copy the prompt into Claude, ChatGPT, or any LLM.
- 2
Answer all six interview questions — question 2 (your real replies) is what makes the agent sound like you instead of a chatbot.
- 3
Paste the generated system prompt into your pipeline's LLM node, downstream of a reply classifier.
- 4
Run in draft-for-approval mode for at least two weeks, reviewing every output, before enabling auto-send for any category.
- 5
Re-run this builder quarterly or when your offer changes — stale product context is the top cause of agent drift.
Best practices
Start with auto-send only for OOO acknowledgments and info requests; interested replies deserve human eyes the longest because they're worth the most.
Feed the builder your best sent replies, not your average ones — the agent will write at whatever level you show it.
Pair with a classifier upstream (see the reply classification prompt in this category) so the agent receives category plus reply text, not raw inbox chaos.
Version-control the generated system prompt in git alongside your n8n workflow export — when output quality shifts, you want a diff to look at.
Example: what this looks like in practice
A founder running 8,000 cold emails a month through Instantly answers the interview: he sells fractional CFO services, pastes three of his own replies (short, dry, no exclamation marks), sets pricing to 'ranges only, never a quote', marks interested as draft-for-approval and negative as escalate-only. The builder outputs a 700-word system prompt with his voice rules extracted ('max two sentences per paragraph, never open with Thanks'), five playbooks with worked examples, and the JSON contract. Wired into n8n behind a classifier, the agent drafts 60-plus replies weekly; he approves them in a fraction of the time drafting took, and two months in he enables auto-send for OOO and info requests only.
Best fit
This prompt is one gear in a bigger machine. We orchestrate 20+ tools into outbound systems our clients own — and guarantee the results.
Apply for a Pilot Spot → →Frequently asked questions
Yes, with a staged rollout. Production teams run the agent in draft-for-approval mode first — every reply reviewed by a human — then enable auto-send category by category, starting with low-risk ones like OOO acknowledgments. The system prompt must hard-code what the agent can never do: invent pricing, respond to hostility, or engage legal language. Full auto-send on interested replies is where most teams stop, deliberately.
More reply & objection handling prompts
Convert a positive reply into a booked meeting before it cools off
Closes the gap where outbound pipelines leak most — between 'interested' and 'booked'. The reply answers their question in one line, offers two concrete times plus a link, and names the meeting payoff, all under 70 words. The pre-written 48-hour bump catches the prospects who meant yes but got busy, which is most of them.
Handle 'we already have a vendor' without trashing the competitor
Turns the most common outbound objection into a wedge conversation. Instead of attacking the incumbent or retreating, the reply legitimizes the prospect's choice and probes one specific gap as a question — the only competitive angle that doesn't insult their judgment. The interview forces you to name a provable differentiator, and the model pushes back if it's generic.
Answer 'can you guarantee results?' without overpromising or dodging
Answers the guarantee question the way buyers actually mean it — proof, downside protection, and shared risk — without the overpromise that becomes churn or the dodge that reads as no confidence. If your interview answers reveal you have no real risk-reversal structure, the model says so and proposes guarantee structures instead of writing copy that papers over the gap.