At SaaStr AI we are aggressive users of AI outbound tools. Monaco runs cold outbound. Artisan runs warm outbound. Agentforce runs our win-back campaigns, which are getting 72% open rates. Our inbound agent on Qualified has closed $2M+ in the past year. 10K, our AI VP of Marketing, now uses several of these tools more than any human on our team does.
We’re keeping all of them.
We also recently built our own prospecting tool inside 10K to complement them. It writes detailed outbound pitches using all of our first-party data about an account, including the data that never syncs to Salesforce. We use it on a small set of accounts, and we use the vendors for everything else.
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90% of Our Outbound Still Runs Through Vendors, and Yours Should Too
For most outbound, the proven vendors are the right choice, for us and almost certainly for you.
Outbound at scale depends on deliverability, sequencing, reply handling, meeting booking, list hygiene, and protecting your domain. Monaco, Artisan, Agentforce and Qualified have put years of engineering and thousands of customers into those problems. We have a 450K-contact database, and rebuilding deliverability infrastructure for it would be a poor use of our agents’ time and ours.
If it’s a volume motion at SaaStr AI, a vendor runs it.
But Most Vendors Only See A Fraction Of Our First Party Data. Mostly Just Part of Our Salesforce Data
Where most of these vendors come up short is how much of your own data they can use.
A typical AI SDR connects to your CRM and reads some of it: contacts, accounts, maybe activity history. At SaaStr, what we know about a company lives in at least six systems:
- Salesforce: contracts, sponsorship history, the AE on the account, lifetime value
- Bizzabo: who attended SaaStr AI Annual, how many times, badge scans, actual lead counts
- Marketing Cloud: who on their team subscribes to our newsletters, and what they open and click
- WordPress: every article we’ve written that mentions them
- Our podcast archive: every time they’ve come up on 20VC x SaaStr or The Agents
- Momentum and Qualified: call history and chat conversations
No outbound vendor will wire into all of that for one customer. The systems they do connect to are also getting more expensive to read from. Salesforce has announced it will meter agent API calls in Flex Credits, and 10K alone already makes ~35,000 Salesforce API calls a day. Deep CRM reads on every prospect will cost vendors more over time.
The vendors write good emails from the data they can reach. For most of our outbound, that’s enough.
Our Pitch Generator Pulls Salesforce History, Event Attendance and Newsletter Data
[Screenshot: 10K’s Prospecting tab with the Pitch Generator]
This is the Prospecting tab inside 10K. It has an Attendee Lookup and Ticket Follow-ups, and for new sponsors we mostly use the Pitch Generator.
You enter a company name. 10K pulls their Salesforce history, event attendance and newsletter data, then writes a custom sponsorship pitch. The pitch can include:
- Who on their team has been to SaaStr AI Annual, and how many times
- Which of their executives subscribe to and read our newsletters
- Whether they’ve sponsored before, at what level, and the ROI they got
- What we’ve written and said about them on the blog and the podcasts
A typical vendor email says something like “companies like yours sponsor SaaStr to reach B2B executives.” 10K’s version can say how many people from their team came to Annual last year, which of their leaders read our newsletter, and what their leads looked like the last time they sponsored. Every one of those facts is about their company, and they can check each one.
We think of it as an “AI ABM” tool: account-based marketing where an agent does the account research.
The Renewal Agent Sent 20 to 30 Custom Decks Where We Used to Send 5
The prospecting tool came out of what already worked on renewals.
As we covered on Episode #013 of The Agents, Amelia built a renewal agent on top of 10K in about half a day. It pulls the Salesforce side (contract, history, LTV, opens, Qualified chats, Momentum calls) plus data that was never in Salesforce (WordPress, social, the podcast archive, Bizzabo lead counts), then builds a custom deck through the Gamma API.
Before agents, we built real custom decks for about five renewals, the diamond sponsors. Everyone else got a templated follow-up. With the agent, 20 to 30 custom decks went out.
The silver sponsors, with the smallest checks and historically our lowest renewal rate, replied at a higher rate than the diamonds. A $25K sponsorship is a bigger decision for a smaller company than $300K is for Google Cloud, and a custom deck showed them we’d tracked their results as closely as a diamond’s.
The prospecting tool applies the same approach to new logos.
Two Rules From the Renewal Agent We Kept for Prospecting
The agent proposes a narrative, and a human approves it before anything gets built. For one silver renewal, the agent proposed “you’re a silver, upgrade to gold.” That company had come out of stealth right before the event and grown a lot since, so Amelia changed the pitch to three options, including a media-plus-content tier. Fixing the story before generation took a few minutes. Editing a finished deck would have taken much longer.
The first email is short, and the deep version goes in the follow-up. On renewals, a first email without the deck got better responses than leading with it. Replies to that first email also told us what to put in the pitch. The agent sends the first touch, and a human sends the detailed follow-up.
Our Setup: Four Vendors for Volume, One Internal Tool for Named Accounts
This is how we’ve set it up, and we’d make the same call again:
- We buy the volume layer. Four AI SDR vendors run the bulk of our outbound. We haven’t rebuilt deliverability or sequencing, and we don’t plan to.
- We built a thin layer on our own data for top accounts: event attendance, newsletter engagement, content mentions, call history. The renewal agent took Amelia half a day. The prospecting tool lives in the same app.
- A human approves the story on every named account before the agent writes the pitch.
