TVA: Triggered Value Asset.
Trigger → Value → Asset. Every outbound starts with an observable trigger, names a specific value, and delivers an asset worth forwarding. If it's not asset-grade, it doesn't send.
Observable, public event indicating active urgency. Last 30 days, ideally last 7.
- VP Sales hire posted
- Series B funded round
- Tech-stack change
- Regulatory filing
The specific connection between the trigger and the prospect's active pain.
- "60-90 days from CRO search"
- "Engineering hire surge means..."
- "This filing predicts a buying window"
- Names the pain concretely
The artifact sent. Useful enough that the recipient would forward to their boss.
- 90-day rebuild plan PDF
- Benchmark report
- Calculator or worksheet
- Specific peer-company comp
Names. Numbers. Dates. Could it be sent to 50 others?
Last 30 days, ideally last 7.
Something they can do this week, not next quarter.
Every subagent we ship reads tva-rubric.md before deciding. Below 7/9, regenerate. Three failed regens, skip and log. The scoring is auditable per send.
Why PVP wasn't enough.
Jordan Crawford's Permissionless Value Proposition framework at Cannonball GTM is one of the best pieces of outbound thinking in the last five years. Its core insight (that the best outbound messages deliver value a prospect would pay to receive) reshaped how serious operators think about cold email.
But PVP was designed for humans drafting messages. When you try to scale it through AI agents at volume, three things break:
- Quality drift. PVP's seven criteria are a great teaching tool. They're a worse quality control mechanism. Agents pattern-match on surface criteria and produce plausible-looking slop that technically passes but doesn't resonate.
- Sender bias. PVP asks "would the prospect pay for this?" That's still a sender-side question. The agent is guessing what the prospect values.
- No shareability test. A message can be valuable in isolation and still be something the recipient would never share. The shareability bar is the stronger signal of real value.
We needed a test that was simpler, harder, and agent-native.
The test.
Would the recipient forward this to their boss, their peer, or their team?
If yes, send it. If no, regenerate.
That's the entire methodology. One question. Two outcomes. Every subagent we build self-scores on this before any message leaves our infrastructure.
Why this is harder than PVP.
PVP asks one audience to like a message. TVA asks two audiences to like it: the recipient AND whoever they might forward it to. A message that clears that bar has to be:
- Valuable enough that sharing it makes the sharer look smart
- Specific enough that it reads as research, not mass email
- Timely enough that forwarding it is still relevant tomorrow
- Actionable enough that the forwarded recipient has something to do
Most outbound fails at least three of those. Most AI SDR output fails all four.
The three criteria.
Every message our subagents draft is scored against three criteria before sending.
How we implement it in Claude Code.
Every subagent we ship includes a tva-rubric.md file in the repo with the three criteria and a scoring rubric (0–3 per criterion, 7+ to send). Before any message reaches the send queue, the subagent self-scores the draft. Below threshold, it regenerates. After three failed regenerations on the same prospect, it skips and logs.
This means:
- You can audit every message that was ever sent
- You can adjust the threshold per campaign
- Your team can modify the rubric as ICP understanding deepens
- No human has to manually review each draft, the system self-regulates
The metric nobody else reports.
Every subagent/gtm engagement tracks forward rate, the percentage of sent messages that were forwarded by the recipient (measured by email thread replies, CC/BCC mentions, and post-meeting references).
Open rate is vanity. Reply rate is closer. Forward rate is the real signal. When a message gets forwarded, you've reached the recipient and every colleague they wanted to impress with their find.
We publish forward rate in every case study. No other AI GTM vendor reports it, because most can't.
Further reading.
- Triggered Value Asset vs Permissionless Value Proposition: why agents need a different frameworkJordan Crawford's PVP reshaped outbound for human writers. TVA borrows the spirit and adds an agent-native test: would the recipient forward this. Why the shift matters.
- Forward rate: the outbound metric that exposes every AI SDRWhy open rate and reply rate stopped meaning anything once AI lifted both ceilings. What forward rate is, how to measure it, and what good looks like.
- How to write a CLAUDE.md for your revenue teamA working template for a revenue-team CLAUDE.md. ICP block, voice rules, banned phrases, signal scoring rubric, and the data the subagents are allowed to touch.
- Why every AI SDR pilot is dying (and what's replacing them)AI SDR vendors trained on the seller's value prop. Recipients pattern-matched it as spam. The category never had a methodology problem hiding inside its tool problem.
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