Outbound AI Sales Tools Generate Activity But Do Not Book Demos

“That demo feedback being warm audience is the trap, you already know that now. The cold test with total strangers will tell you if there is actual pull or just people being nice to you. Quickest way is find 10 people who sell the type of stuff your tool helps with and see if they even reply, not even about closing them, just if the message makes sense to them. If nobody responds, the message is wrong or the problem is not painful enough, both are fixable but you need to know which one before sca”

Give me your thoughts! submitted by /u/Andoniman1 [link] [comments]

“Cool idea, i find the intent signal part quite interesting for sales. Like If you know which workflow someone checked out before the rep joins,the follow up gets specific in a good way, then just knowing they watched a demo. I'm from the team at Guideflow and we see a similar use case with interactive and sandbox demos. Prospects get to explore a controlled version of the product on there own and the team can see what they really spent time on. It's a different approach then letting AI r”

submitted by /u/WayMountain3226 [link] [comments]

“Agents feel like they're 10x more effective when you are able to be specific like you're saying. I always shake my head reading vibecoder stories where it started off well then they eventually are stuck in quicksand. [re: My feedback on 6 months full AI development]”

“We provide a LinkedIn outbound platform. We used to rely on a very famous platform to use LinkedIn infrastructure to send DMs and reply to messages. LinkedIn doesn't really provide open APIs for a lot of these things, so we used to rely on their infrastructure. They're very famous, just one prompt away from you knowing who they are. We used to pay a pretty heavy amount to them. Sometimes, our latest bills were $10,000 a month, and it could go up to $20,000 or $30,000, depending on the nu”

“Thanks. Been messaging for about 2 weeks and will keep going. I’ve also used AI to help me assess all booths worth visiting. [re: B2B sales ideas - I will not promote]”

“I think most marketers deal with the "everyone has an opinion on marketing"... But with the rise of AI, I'm getting full AI generated marketing plans/ideas from sales, and then being asked to implement them. How do I set boundaries/push back without it making it seem like I don't want to collaborate or that I'm unwilling to share the LEGOs, so to speak? submitted by /u/archandcrafts [link] [comments]”

“Our Salesforce data is not great, and everyone knows it. We have got free-text fields where picklists should be, duplicate records, and plenty of incomplete entries. Leadership still wants to pilot Agentforce, and I'm trying to set realistic expectations before we get started. For anyone who has rolled out Agentforce with imperfect data, how did it actually go? Did the data quality issues cause major problems, or was it still useful enough to justify the pilot? submitted by /u/lo”

“Honestly, distribution is the real skill now. building the product is easy part, finding people who actually need it is the hard part [re: AI made building a SaaS easy. now why is getting 1 customer harder than building the whole thing 💀]”

submitted by /u/ImaginationThese5409 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/negotiatorsh [link] [comments]

“That is a sales and marketing issue… if you don’t produce things customers wants than it doesn’t matter how quickly you deliver [re: Harvard just released another study about AI productivity in software engineering and it found there is no increase in productivity from using Claude code.]”

“either sell them a product like you mentioned or automate a response like "These 3 books and these 2 podcasts really helped me out when I was at your stage in the game. all the best" [re: How to handle people reaching out to "pick ny brain"?]”

“Day 10. I was out most of the day, and it turned out to be a useful test of what actually runs without me. What ran by itself - LinkedIn sent its full 30 invites (the daily limit). Total so far: 88 invited, 5 accepted, 0 replies. A 6% acceptance rate is low, so I'm slowing the daily pace instead of speeding it up. I'd rather not lose the account. - The first follow-up questions went out to the people who accepted. - 32 more founders are queued for tomorrow. What I did by hand - Sent 5 em”

“i'd pause the automations for a week. 5 manual messages a day gives you 25 chances to learn why the offer gets ignored before you code more. [re: **I will Not Promote** Does anyone know the Solution]”

“You've got the combo most AI agencies lack: actual sales/CS experience. I'd package that as a done-for-you outreach service — you use AI video/prompting to generate leads, then close them yourself with your 10 years of sales. Bilingual is a moat in DMs. tbh coaching is a slower sell; sell the service first, then you've got a proven playbook. [re: What would you do with this mix of skills? Looking for monetization and business ideas.]”

“I think that’s fair. The more I think about it, the generic “AI shopping agent” pitch is probably too broad because most people already have a shopping process that works well enough. I’m leaning more towards high-consideration purchases now, things like laptops, TVs, appliances etc where people can spend ages researching and really don’t want to get it wrong. The idea would be to use that as the wedge, then hopefully retain people with the wider shopping features once they trust the product. I”

“A focused job for your compatible AI: find sales leaders discussing deals slipping between forecast calls, contribute an anonymized pipeline example for them to assess, and follow up on where their judgment differs from your tool's forecast. Ask testers which difference would change a decision in their next pipeline review; that gives the feedback a practical target. By the way, I make ThreadFox; the connection lets your compatible AI research, write and publish Reddit outreach through your”

“I’m building a startup on the side of my sales job, and I’ve been doing founder led sales for a good six months now. I’ve completely shifted my mindset around AI and sales. I get bombarded every day by AI bots trying to sell me something. You know the type, referring to something niche in my LinkedIn bio which they scraped. I know I’m getting very allergic to it. So I've started hand-writing every outbound message again - And I’ve started to get many more meetings booked. It's juts like”

“Exactly, nobody wants to find out live with 50 people watching. Funny thing, it's already there: one click adds 10 demo players with made-up names who answer on their own. Nobody used it, so it's clearly too hidden. I'm thinking of offering it the moment someone hits Start in an empty room. In the tools you've seen, did the fake run start by itself, or did you pick it?”

“Good point, thanks. I actually don't send any trial emails yet, just the sign-up code. The catch is I don't know when their event is, so I'd have to ask. Would you ask for the date at sign-up, or while they're building the quiz?”

“A reminder about the quiz they already made sounds worth trying. Something like 'Your quiz is ready for Friday' feels more useful here than another trial-expiry email.”

“Hey, I found this webinar that's taking place next week (October 13th). These guys say that they have a huge amount of data and insights (2.6 billion impressions) that they will share throughout the webinar. I signed up to see what valuable information I can get out of it, hopefully it helps some of you with your ads. Sign Up Link submitted by /u/Stankos987 [link] [comments]”

“Brand search converting better while non-brand stays flat is exactly what it looks like when the assistant did the selling and the brand ad just collected the receipt. Those buyers already typed your name, so a chunk of them would have clicked your organic listing one slot lower for free. Before giving brand campaigns more love, pull branded organic clicks from Search Console for the same weeks. If organic brand clicks dipped while paid brand grew, part of that nice conversion rate is relabeling”

“Yeah but having Claude agents do it for you giving each agent a different set of rules based on the type of consumer or user and then being able to just turn all of the agent actions into a video with a few prompts or hooking it up to a video editor is so easy. And yeah most of that stuff is vibe coded which in itself isn’t a bad thing I use it all the time I’m not a developer, but there is a big difference between typing in a prompt and saying the end and actually coming up with your own plan a”

“Agreed. Even the new Agentic insight in Google search console is showing impressions and not clicks, for us. I presume it's because it's, so far, great for impressions but not traffic.”

“The distinction between the first sale and proving the business is really interesting. I think getting someone to try a product can be a lot easier than getting them to come back and keep paying for it. In this case, the author’s existing audience probably makes the first part easier because there’s already some trust. The harder test seems like whether the skill becomes useful enough that people naturally come back to it instead of treating it as a one-time purchase. I’d probably pay close atte”

“Lately there are some AI agent companies such as Caesar io that message your shoppers like a 1:1 sales person would, and over iMessage not SMS. And all the messages are personalized. I heard imessage has 5x better results than regular SMS campaign blasts. because now everyone uses SMS and consumers get gazillion of those SMS's per day. But imessage is still untapped.”

“is useful for turning your sales and inventory export into scenarios, but it cannot invent reliable demand inputs. Start with weekly units sold, margin, stock on hand, promotions, and channel spend in one sheet. Use it to flag where margin or stock cover breaks first. Which of those exports do you already have?”

“AI can code but you need to model what drives sales and that's the part AI can't do: ads spend, seasonality, holidays, competitors, promos etc only you can model this product by product and then test accuracy and iterate. It's not easy that's why a data scientist is needed.”

“You probably don't have a sales problem. You have a switching problem. AI receptionists for clinics, then quote tools for construction, then a bunch of other things. Every new niche resets you to zero, so you never get enough reps in one market to learn what actually works there. Pick one niche and one offer and stay put for a couple months. Same outreach every day, then look at where it breaks: no replies, replies but no calls, calls but no closes. That tells you what to fix instead of star”

“AI is useful here, but I wouldn’t ask it to invent a forecast from a blank chat. We use Claude connected to Omnisend through MCP to see which campaigns and customer segments actually lead to purchases and repeat orders, rather than treating opens and clicks as demand. That gives us a better signal for where discounts and marketing spend are working. It won’t replace an inventory model, but it makes the marketing side far less guess-based.”

“6 bucks for a VA doing hundreds of cold calls a day? That's its own sales pitch. How much is the course”

“Background - I have been working in tech sales for over an year now, and sales reporting takes a lot of my time and energy, with AI tools, it got easy but still not as simple as I would want. So, I’ve been thinking about building a small SaaS and wanted to see if this is actually useful or just sounds good on paper. Imagine you manage 5–10 regions/teams and have tons of weekly meetings. You upload/push the meeting transcripts into one place, and instead of just getting individual summaries, the”

“Background - I have been working in tech sales for over an year now, and sales reporting takes a lot of my time and energy, with AI tools, it got easy but still not as simple as I would want. So, I’ve been thinking about building a small SaaS and wanted to see if this is actually useful or just sounds good on paper. Imagine you manage 5–10 regions/teams and have tons of weekly meetings. You upload/push the meeting transcripts into one place, and instead of just getting individual summaries, the”

Rec Agency types for us!

“So I'm interviewing for a growth role at a small AI startup, and the take-home is kind of wild. They want me to find 3+ property managers with 20+ units each and get them booked on actual demo calls with the founder next week. I kind of get it? It's a growth role, they want to see if I can actually bring in leads. But it's unpaid as far as I know, and they keep those demos whether they hire me or not. If they're sending this to a bunch of candidates, that's a lot of free sale”

“Definitely distribution > building. Right now I'm fully focused on this, how can I reach out in a respectful delightful way instead of the disgusting email blasting crap.”

When you say finding, what does that mean?

“So basically, it is a chat bot, and it has other features like help articles, banners, resources and so on. Firstly, it did not lift conversions. Big customers don't really convert because of a chat bot. Secondly, it didnt make support or onboarding better. It's a messy window of information, compared with dedicated systems, like a ticketing page or a fully custom onboarding. Their pricing was rediculous, and it was cheaper to just build the custom things we needed. Our website is moddy.”

“I’m going through an intensive training right now on building AI tools, and I need practice on real businesses — not just fake ones. So I’m looking for 2–3 business owners who want a custom Closing Call app for FREE. It texts you the SECOND a new lead comes in with a score & sales script based on their info, so you can call & close them before anyone else does. FYI: • 78% of ppl buy from the first business to respond • Responding within 1 min increases conversions by 391% • You’re 100x m”

“This is what I do: making selling easy. One assistant like this cut repeat questions by about 75%. What does it need to plug into, and is there a deadline? Sent you a DM with a bit more.”

“Hey man, this is an amazing post, so much value! Is this approach still working for you in 2026?”

“That is exactly how it plays out with my customers. They book the person they expect to see walk through the door, so a copy of me would lose the one thing that actually does the selling.”

“The product probably isn't useful if you have one sales call every few days. I'm looking specifically for people whose calendars look more like: 9:00 demo 10:00 discovery 11:00 close 13:00 demo 14:00 follow-up 15:00 close Because those small admin tasks between calls start stacking up. SealMe captures important details from calls and helps handle the admin afterward. Free beta. If you're doing 5+ qualified calls/day, you're exactly the user I'm trying to speak with. sub”

I answered all comments here .

I answered all comments here .

“I think there is a version of this already happening on linkedin and email. The hardest part of building something like this is building the network and trust. I dont think we are at a point where I give the agent my credit card and let it buy whatever it wants but I think a lot of people are already drafting contracts, doing research for suppliers, answering emails, quotes etc all inside claude and chatgpt. The payment layer will probably be taken by a company like stripe and the social relatio”

Simple, use flags on your email and use an AI agent

“A few things I'd add from the engineering side, since you've already got good tool recommendations: whatever you pick, the quality of the bot mostly comes from the knowledge you feed it, not the platform logo. A bot grounded in your actual product catalog, shipping and return policies, and past customer questions will answer "is this available in size M" far better than one trained on generic FAQs. Second: insist on a clean human handoff. A good bot escalates to a person when i”

“The "you are completely right" followed by an extensive detailed reasoning. That is very much how AI phrases responses.”

“Most people in the general public experience it on a spectrum of “useless chatbot replacing real customer service” to “slop generator” to “thing threatening jobs” or “thing I’m forced to interact with or babysit at work.” Add in the environmental concerns and the association with scams and fraud with misrepresented or outright faked products, and it’s no wonder that a lot of people are genuinely disinterest in it being included in their shopping experience, or knowing it’s involved in product de”

“why would a dev ever need this? I can spin up claude/chatgpt to review our own PR's for a far cheaper cost using personal subscription token than you can ever do. AI code reviewer is a dead market”

“For web tracking, the real buying blocker is usually verification, not explanation: will it capture the right events, survive consent choices, and fit their existing stack? Test the podcast against a short technical proof page that answers those questions and tags each CTA by source. Otherwise you'll only learn whether people watched, not whether it removed the objection that prevents a purchase.”

“That quoting workflow is a great example of AI actually doing a job. When you dump your notes in, do you have to re-explain the business every time, or does the tool remember your pricing and how you talk to customers between sessions? I used to burn time re-teaching tools context they had already had the week before. Would you pay for something that just remembered all of that on its own, or is the copy-paste fine for how often you do it?”

“We've had larger and larger percentages of our sales coming in through first touch ChatGPT. Not sure if attribution is over the top or if we are actually having success TBH. Have put in a good amount of work into cleaning up data structure etc. so I'd like to believe it's actual rapid growth.”

“Our clients ask if we use AI in our business operations, and I’m happy to tell them we don’t. We have also talked publicly about it as a part of broader conversations about Shopify forcing sellers to opt into AI features.”

“what worked here isn't the AI part, it's that you turned your own sales calls into the content instead of writing what you think they need to know. the questions business owners ask you live are the real FAQ, a blog post written from the implementation side skips half of them because you forget what confused people the first time. I'd track which questions from the podcast still show up again on calls. if the same three keep coming up despite the content existing, the format isn'”