Reply Handling

What it does

Reply Handling is a skill that tells Claude exactly what to do with a reply to your cold email. You paste the reply in, and Claude sorts it into one of 8 categories: meeting interest, a question, not right now, already have a solution, wrong person, not interested, out of office, or anything else. Then it writes the response for you, short and human-sounding, and tells you whether this one needs you personally or can be handled on autopilot.

It writes the replies, it doesn't send them. If you want replies going out automatically, ask Claude and it will walk you through setting that up in your sending platform.

Who it is for

Anyone running cold email whose replies sit for hours because nobody is sure what to say back: a founder doing their own outbound, an SDR, or a small agency handling replies for clients. Instead of deciding from scratch every time whether a reply deserves a meeting link, a polite exit, a referral ask or nothing at all, you paste it in and get the right answer and the actual words.

What it is and what it runs in

• It's a skill. Think of it as a playbook Claude follows. There's no app to download.
• It runs in Claude Code. It also works in Codex, Cursor and other tools that support skills.
• It's free. No API keys, no signups, no paid accounts.

Before you start

• Claude Code installed (or another agentic tool that supports skills).
• git installed. On a Mac, if it's missing, your computer offers a one-click install the first time Step 1 runs.

Install

Open Claude Code (or your agentic tool) and run these two steps.

Step 1: Download the skills library

git clone https://github.com/LeadMagic/gtm-skills.git

Step 2: Copy Reply Handling into Claude Code

mkdir -p .claude/skills
cp -r gtm-skills/skills/outbound/reply-handling .claude/skills/reply-handling

Run it

Paste a reply into Claude Code, for example:

Classify this reply and write my response:
"Hey, actually decent timing, we've been talking about this internally.
Can you send over some times this week to walk me through it?"

You get back something like:

Category: 1 - Positive, Meeting Interest
Routing: reply within 15-60 minutes
Draft reply:
"[First name] - great to hear from you. Here's my calendar, grab a
time that works and I'll confirm: [calendar link]. Looking forward
to it. [Your first name]"

Troubleshooting

Claude doesn't seem to use the skill. Make sure you opened Claude Code in the same folder you ran the install steps in. You can also call it directly by typing /reply-handling.

You want it to send replies automatically. Ask Claude for the setup guide and follow those steps.

Credit

Built by LeadMagic (https://github.com/LeadMagic/gtm-skills), MIT license, 53 stars. Free and open source.