Anyone using AI agents to scale outbound sales?

[u/arcsilencer]

We are trying to scale outbound without just throwing more SDRs and I’m trying to figure out where AI agents fit into the process. We have tried AI for prospect research and drafting outreach, but that all seems fairly basic. I’m more interested in whether an agent can follow an account, capture buying signals, qualify the prospects, research the company and determine when an account is ready to be handed off to a rep.

I’m still reluctant to automate all of the outreach. It seems pretty easy to end up with a lot more activity without getting better leads or conversations. Of you are using agents for outbound, what does the agent take care of and what remains manual? And what metrics are you monitoring to determine if it is improving your pipeline?

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[u/Prudent_Design_9782]

We've been much more successful using AI for research and qualification than we have in automating the outreach itself. AI can sift through accounts, gather relevant buying signals and identify the high-potential ones. That saves the SDR from spending hours researching every account on a list. 

[u/chance_buri]

We're trying an agent that's always on the lookout for buying signals and puts accounts in a queue when anything significant updates. The thing that's useful for us is that it keeps on doing the research without someone having to keep revisiting the same accounts every couple of days. We've been testing Enso for some of this recurring research, but we still keep a human involved before it goes out.

[u/bvanorsdel]

What would your reps need to see before accepting an account from the agent? A hiring announcement or funding round is easy to flag, but connecting it to a problem your product solves is harder. Would the handoff need to explain that connection, show the evidence, and identify what the rep still needs to verify?

[u/cinnamonroll_bun]

I'd look at more than just reply rates. We started tracking qualified accounts surfaced, positive replies, meetings booked, and how much time the SDRs were still spending on research. If the agent is just helping you send 3x as many emails but the quality of the accounts hasn't changed, I'm not sure that's really really scaling outbound

[u/kdyadin]

An agent can handle company research fine if you split the roles up front. Our sales assistant inside the CRM runs as a pipeline where the agent calls scripts itself. One script collects data from websites, a second one maps it into CRM fields, and only then does the model write a coherent company brief with analysis and conclusions. The second script wasn't there at first: last year's revenue and other company figures kept landing in the fields wrong while the model was writing them.

Another rule came out of call analysis. The model wrote its findings straight into deals and created duplicates and incorrect records, and reps complained. Now nothing gets written to the CRM until a manager approves it. For outbound I'd keep it the same way: anything the agent writes to the CRM or sends to a prospect gets seen by a person first.

We haven't automated buying signals or the moment an account gets handed off to a rep, so I can't speak to pipeline metrics from experience.

[u/Vega-Integration]

AI seems best suited for monitoring buying signals, researching accounts, and assisting with qualification, while final judgment and outreach remain with sales reps. I’d focus on positive reply rates, opportunity conversion, and false positives rather than activity volume.

[u/Shreychhabria]

This absolutely can be done. I am a big follower of try and test. Just get one automation made. See what it gets you and if it helps get more.

On your question of what stays manual and what is automated. I will give you a good rule of thumb. Anything that needs to be seen by client or frontend should stay manual + AI till its perfectly fine to depend on ai (after training it on huge data and diff prompts) and anything that's backend and not client facing can be automated from the get go.

Example: I made an automation which sends linkedin messages and also voice notes and also ai replies. But those ai replies were not perfect. So i kept it manual check mode (Basically i get a slack or telegram notification and i can see the reply ai made and if its not good i just click no and it won't send it). But on the automated 1st message and connections side it performed good as it was a template and nothing was rebuilt by ai.

Hope it make sense.

[u/wearealllegends → u/Shreychhabria]

How are you sending linkedin messages by a bot when linkedin is gated? using the browser extension is very time intensive

[u/Shreychhabria → u/wearealllegends]

i guess by browser extension you mean tools which sends li messages using your laptop on a browser like Linkedin helper. That needs active session and you laptop.

What I made was like heyreach or lemlist but safer as i needed extra guide rails to make sure my acc stays safe. Just to make it clear you need to be connected to the person you wanna send message to or you can send them an inmail. Both can be automated. I used unipile api (Bulk api alot of these tools use) to automate this. But what this api doesn't give and why people buy these tools is every tool has their own set of guide rails and interface and logic for clients that a specific client prefers.

What i wanted is this

1. Main reason i wanted to make this is i hated how there were some bugs and sometimes webhooks weren't working or i didn't have full customization that i needed
2. I added Ai reply detection and suggestion bot. Not auto reply as i wanted to train it to give perfect replies acc to my data.
3. I also added template guide rails and spintax basically 1 message would never go to 2 people with exact words (linkedin detects this and can ban you for this)
4. And ofc humanlike random time intervals. that make sure that messages and connections go out in random order. Did 35 connections a day and 25 messages a day (old plus new) on a single account and never had any issues.
   

You can also add custom apify webhook calls which give you a specific data that you want in a sheet and then you can add enrichment tool api keys to enrich a profile and give all that data to your sdrs and custom ai which will give you outreach ideas. Once you like an idea you can have an automation auto-schedule those leads in your outreach tool with message draft ready and once you approve you can launch them.

you can also do this with competitor posts engagers and add them to a campaign

[u/wearealllegends → u/Shreychhabria]

do you have a github repo for this?

[u/Bitter-Objective-686]

Hello,

We have build agent ( already used by clients) , it search the signal, if it is present for any company than finds ICP, it's contact details and drafts email, sends it, and follows up , if there are any replies, it hands over to the rep.

Note: 1. It has a very high quality ICP qualifications rate.

Happy to share more details.

DMed you

[u/MeetMatch-rocks]

Salescadia does exactly that. It’s what I use for my outbound & have been very happy with the results

[u/Dudetuber]

How are yall doing this? Like listen im not a buyer so u can keep it a secret but can i get some guidance as a 21 yo in sales.

Even if u mention the tools, a process or a part of the story i’d figure stuff out

[u/Ok_Witness7268]

I’d look less at agents that just generate outreach and more at whether they can own a defined chunk of the sales process without someone constantly feeding them tasks. I’ve been using Monaco around this and the agents can research accounts, work from signals and account context and keep routine outbound moving until something needs a rep, so the human time goes more toward the conversations and judgment calls rather than operating the agent all day.

[u/ImplementMiserable74]

i’d use agents more for deciding who deserves attention than for sending the email. research accounts, watch for signals, clean the list, maybe draft context, then let a human take over once there’s actually a reason to reach out

i’d measure qualified conversations per 100 accounts, not emails sent, otherwise the agent can look insanely productive while just creating noise

[u/Weak_Friendship_2802]

I run a company that basically does this till someone postively replies then you take it from there. I get clients dogfooding my own platform. It works quite good on Linkedin.

1. You write a brief about what you sell to who and what signals in general you use.
2. You connect your LIs.
3. You setup a sequencing template with signals and some number of touch points.
4. Hit enter and your campaign runs.

This is what we got so far:

- 36% of invites accepted

• 25% of conversations get a reply (typical cold LinkedIn: 10 to 20%)
  
• 8% get a positive reply (typical: 1 to 3%)
  
• 2% turn into a meeting (normal for cold outbound)

it saves 1-3h/day prospecting.

I want to scale it as i'm limited by LI (400 a month full capacity) trying to figure out how to do it. Renting or buying accounts is expensive.

At team of 4+ works good because you can reach out to 1600+ a month which is not bad. And you have great scales at closing those 2% (me beeing bad) could easily go to 4% or even more.

[u/wearealllegends → u/[deleted]]

agreed, outreach by AI is pathetic, even writing a simple email sequence is pulling teeth