Go beyond basic welcome emails. An effective automated onboarding flow uses AI to trigger CRM entries, send personalized messages, collect intake data (even via voice), and ultimately generate a custom presentation for the first human-to-human call. This scales a high-touch experience without adding headcount.

Historically, SDR teams often report to Sales, leaving marketing with indirect influence over converting demand into meetings. By deploying an AI SDR that works for the marketing team 24/7, CMOs regain direct control over the critical MQL-to-meeting conversion process, putting them "back in the driver's seat" of their pipeline number.

Instead of pitching features, Katera builds AI agents that find sales opportunities for their prospects (e.g., relevant Reddit threads) and sends those leads directly. This "show, don't tell" approach provides immediate value and dramatically increases response rates.

By building a custom AI assistant integrated into Salesforce, Personio dramatically increased its expansion SDRs' productivity. The tool consolidates customer information from over 10 systems, reducing daily research time from two hours to just 15 minutes and doubling the pipeline generated per employee.

Instead of relying on word-of-mouth, Miha Books built a scalable marketing engine. They use free book giveaways to capture leads, then use tools like Zapier and MailChimp to automatically trigger a sequence of texts and emails, systematically converting low-intent leads into high-value B2B customers.

Fueled by massive inbound demand, some AI B2B companies scale to $50M ARR with sales teams of five or fewer. This represents a 20x reduction in sales headcount compared to the traditional SaaS playbook, which would require over 100 reps to achieve the same revenue milestone.

To fill her sales calendar without sacrificing her own time on manual outreach, Merge's founder hired a college intern. The intern's sole job was to research prospects and send cold outbound messages using the founder's identity, allowing the founder to focus only on booked meetings.

The AI company generated 30-35% of its new ARR over the past year using an efficient Account-Based Marketing (ABM) stack. They use Apollo for data sourcing, Clay for data enrichment, and Smart Leads for sequencing email and LinkedIn outreach, supplemented by a small in-house orchestration tool. This offers a concrete playbook for lean teams.

By building a custom AI agent for inbound lead qualification, Vercel reduced its inbound SDR team from ten people to one. The agent, which cost only $1,000 per year to run, maintained conversion rates while decreasing response time and number of touches needed.