Quick How-To Guide · Outreach Administration
Sequence States Cleanup Playbook
How to use Activity → Sequence States to clear locked-user prospects first, then bring active-user failures, pauses, and pending steps back under control.
Fill in the fields above, then walk the team through Phase 1 live on a screen-share, using their own Outreach instance. Phase 2 works well as a homework item they run themselves, with this page left behind as the reference. Every this style label is the literal name of the button, filter, or menu item to click — read it as a click-path, not a description.
This guide covers Sequence States — the prospect-level activity view. It's a separate exercise from archiving unused sequences themselves in the Sequence Library (filter Contacted ≤ 0 + Owner is locked user, select all, Manage → Archive). Archiving a sequence hides it and blocks new prospects from being added, but any prospects still active in it keep moving — it only freezes them if you deactivate the sequence outright. Do that cleanup separately; this guide is about the prospects themselves.
Clear out locked users
Start here. Every prospect sitting in a sequence under a locked (deactivated) rep is guaranteed to fail — their mailbox can't send — so this bucket is the fastest, safest win.
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Open the Sequence States view
From the left nav, go to Activity, then click Sequence States.
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Filter to locked-user prospects
Clear any existing filters, then Add filter → Sequencer → is locked user. This surfaces every prospect currently sitting in a sequence step under a deactivated rep — pending, active, paused, and failed alike.
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Decide: reassign, or mark finished
For each locked rep's queue, check whether someone else should pick up the work.
Someone's taking over Select the rows → Assign new mailbox → choose the active replacement → confirm. Active prospects stay on their current step; the next task just becomes due to the new sequencer.Nobody's taking over Select all → check the box → mark as Finished. Don't bother retrying first — a locked mailbox can't send, so every attempt fails regardless.
Clear out active users
Once locked users are clean, run the same view against active reps. This is the one to turn into a recurring habit — every prospect stuck here is a rep losing potential revenue without knowing it.
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Filter to an active rep (or work sequence by sequence)
Back in Sequence States, filter by Sequencer is a specific active rep — or by Sequence name is a specific sequence if you're doing a focused pass. Look across all four buckets: failed, paused, pending, active.
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Work Failed first — this bucket should trend to zero
Click the failed count to open the list. Hover the State column on any row to see the exact failure reason — most often a missing or misspelled template variable (e.g. the wrong merge field for first name or phone number).
- If it's a bad variable: open the sequence, jump to that step's template, fix it, and save.
- Back in Sequence States, select the fixed prospects → the ⋯ menu → Retry.
- Anything that's been stuck for weeks with no realistic fix: just check the box and mark it Finished rather than let it linger.
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If Retry fails again, use Move to step instead
When the failure was baked into the template itself (not just a one-off missing value), a straight Retry can fail again — it's still queued against the old, broken template snapshot. Instead: ⋯ → Move to step → the same step number → Confirm. That re-queues the prospect against the corrected template.
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Then work Paused
Open a paused prospect and check its Sequence tab to confirm what paused it.
- Paused with a resume date (e.g. Outreach detected an out-of-office reply) is healthy — leave it alone.
- Paused indefinitely at step 1 usually means it was paused manually or by a trigger. Check the sequence's Settings for throttling / auto-activate, and check the prospect's Activity tab for a "paused" event to trace who or what did it.
- If it's isolated to one rep or one old sequence, it's low priority. If the same pattern shows up across multiple reps, flag it — that's a systemic issue worth investigating, not a one-off.
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Then Pending
Usually prospects added to a sequence that was never activated, or genuinely queued for a future step. Confirm with the sequence owner before bulk-marking these finished — sometimes it's intentional, sometimes it's a sequence that never got turned on.
State reference
What each bucket in Sequence States actually means, and how much attention it deserves.
Cadence & ownership
Sequence States drifts back to messy fast. Keep it clean with a regular rhythm rather than a one-time sweep.