Outbound AI Sales Tools Generate Activity But Do Not Book Demos
Sales professionals are facing challenges in adopting and effectively utilizing AI tools. This includes difficulty reaching decision-makers, concerns about AI-generated content quality, and a lack of demonstrable value and trust in automated sales processes. Many are building solutions to address these gaps.
SOURCES (60)
“Yep! you are right. Curious to know how you cracked and found the truth behind too expensive? What kind of follow up questions you ask to your users?”
“hypothetically, running agent research briefs across 40 small accounts: every citation resolved, and about a third still supported a weaker claim than the brief made. checking that a source exists is not the same as checking that it says that.”
“that phrasing is the useful part. build me ai sales agents is what the buyer actually types, and it is nowhere near how most of us describe the work on our own pages. i would write that sentence down word for word and put it on the site somewhere. costs nothing, and it is the only real sample you have of how they search for you.”
“That’s what I’m leaning toward. Start with a few reps and see if they actually keep using it once the novelty wears off. A month should give us a much better idea.”
“Yeah a pilot is probably the move. The recording part is my biggest question too. If reps stop using it after a couple weeks then none of the other features really matter.”
“Exactly. I definitely don’t want AI nitpicking every sentence lol. If it can flag the same few issues showing up across multiple conversations that would already save me a ton of time.”
“Yeah that’s pretty much what I’m hoping for. Having the actual conversation to point to feels way more useful than giving the same vague coaching advice every week.”
“I manage a sales team where most of our important conversations happen face to face and lately I’ve been looking into AI tools to make coaching less of a guessing game. I can see the numbers and know when someone is struggling but figuring out why is the hard part. Usually it means doing ridealongs or asking the rep what happened after the deal. Neither gives me enough to spot patterns across the team. Someone suggested I look into Rilla since it records and analyzes in person sales conversation”
“Hey! Congrats on growing the business—wearing both the sales and ops hats is definitely a grind, and admin overhead can quickly drain your time. Building a DIY AI pipeline with human-in-the-loop review in Zapier often turns into a full-time maintenance job rather quickly. While platforms like Jobber handle the basics, they rarely offer the flexible AI draft-and-approve workflow you're describing. A lean, custom lightweight backend (or a streamlined webhook setup with an approval queue dashbo”
“I can definitely see a real use case, especially once agents are handling more tasks on their own. But I think trust is going to be the make-or-break part, knowing what an agent can actually do, who authorized it, whether the seller is reliable, and what happens when something goes wrong. The marketplace idea makes sense to me; I’d just want to see a few really practical workflows where agents using it is clearly better than the existing way of doing things.”
“I think there being a critical mass of this is many years out for it to really be a market. At least for general consumers. Even as a tech person who is building a lot with Ai I wouldn't allow any agent to spend my money lol.”
“Until agents are capable of fully autonomous work at the same level as a procurement employee, I dont see most business given them spending authority. I guess the other scenario os when agents start getting paid.”
“I have had a couple of offers that required support contact in the last few days. I really don’t like to take the time to deal with them in the first place, but now the AI assistant gets harder and harder to be put through to an agent. It’s annoying and it takes more time when needed to keep moving than ever before. On one of my calls (f chat) it actually hung up on me. Not to mention that the AI’s time and speech patterns make it seem very much like a human, and it’s disingenuous to try to tric”
“A good first-screen test is whether someone can explain the core job in one sentence after five seconds. I’d make the primary action answer that job directly, then keep the supporting metrics secondary so the interface doesn’t feel like a dashboard dump. One useful safeguard is to separate “what changed” from “why it changed” so the AI summary doesn’t overstate causality. Promarkia”
“Agreed that stars tell you nothing about whether a skill actually works. The hard part is where the replacement data comes from though. Reviews only show up once you already have traffic, so early on the directory looks empty and nobody has a reason to come back. Are you planning to seed it yourself at first, or pull signals from somewhere existing?”
Would you be open to connect about your agency experience while we look for automation opportunities? Seriously looking to validate an idea for agencies but it’s been hard to find people I…
“Have any of you guys experimented with or currently use any sort of lead gen software, something like Apollo, Seamless ai, Zoominfo, etc.? Curious if these are worth it. More specifically, I have found a large number of CRMs and sales tools in general are more geared towards lower outreach industries and don't really work out that great for our industry that requires very high outbound activity. For example, a guy selling SaaS might only focus on a couple dozen prospects per month whereas we”
“Consider niching the types of MVPs you do. All dev shops are struggling to adapt right now because of AI. Picking a niche helps. You can generalize eventually.”
“Potentially a problem. I wonder if keeping it confined to only be end-meeting questions and never specifically challenging decisions within the meeting? or if it had an accurate follow-up as though it was a junior learning. That way, it improves between meetings and eventually is credible and accurate. Just as general wide thinking, not as an immediate thing.”
“AI seems most useful for handling the repetitive stuff while keeping the important conversations human.”
“I can see why SaaS teams are using AI more for sales now. Lead research, follow ups, CRM updates, and basic qualification all seem like pretty good use cases. That kind of repetitive work is where AI can save a lot of time 😅 But once it gets to objections, negotiation, or understanding why a customer is hesitating, I feel like full automation gets risky. You might save time but lose trust if the conversation starts feeling too generic. I feel like AI works best as a sales assistant rather than”
“I recently had to run a full SWOT analysis and ad spend audit for a SaaS client. Doing it manually takes around 20 hours. Meanwhile i keep seeing these "AI marketers" flexing their prompts online, but let's be real, if you're just asking ChatGPT to "analyze a competitor," you're getting hallucinated summaries and outdated data. Sure, it takes 5 minutes, but it's like 40% wrong. So yeah, i've been looking for a better way to do this. I don’t have much exper”
“Before each customer call, write one sentence predicting the decision the buyer is trying to make and the evidence they still need. After the call, compare that prediction with the questions they actually asked. Keep the mismatch, not a polished summary. Review one mismatch each day and rewrite the next question you would ask. This gives you a deliberate practice loop tied to real conversations without rehearsing on extra prospects or turning every loss into a script change.”
“You reminds me to the ERP sellers. It is a wonderful tool that impregnate all the company and make you save lot of money but it requires also lot of work (and budget) and many just work worse after implementation due to it is not for them or just wrongly setup or use. I still do not see how all those things you describe help me to manage the project of building a prototype for a coilgun in a workshop or designing a kitchen for example. But glad that it works for your company.”
“We ran into something close to this early on. Cold outreach dries up fast once everyone is doing it, and buyers get numb to the same pitch. What worked better for us was showing up where the people you want already spend time. Find the subreddits, Discord servers, or Facebook groups where editors and e-com brands already talk shop. Answer real questions there for a few weeks before you mention anything you built. People buy from names they already trust in the room. Also worth checking if the de”
“Market insights? AI gets them wrong Math for ROI? AI gets it wrong 50% of the time Email templates? Totally unpersonalized, most email filters block them out now for spam. Good luck getting it even read. Meeting Notetaker? Misses chunks of the conversation, mixes up buyers/sellers sometimes. Stick with picking up the phone, taking your own meeting notes, talk to actual people in the industry for insights and take the 5 min to curate your emails to your customer. Don’t fall for this “AI making yo”
“If used effectively… that is the key. How is an agent helping you exactly for that role? In real life I mean, not the theory.”
“But I personally know about thousands a different CRMs. And at same time I do not know any CRM systems that could't be replaced by AI promtp+skills to get about 95% of the same result they do. Looks like the CRM niches is much overloaded than even this one. No?”
“start narrow: let it handle tracking, returns and basic catalog questions, keep your Shopify info current, then test the weird edge cases yourself before trusting it. i was skeptical too, but we use the BuyScout chatbot for that stuff, setup was genuinely about a minute, and i still answer the harder questions myself.”
“The first thing I’d do is use less AI to write your notes on first touch, unless English is not your first language. LI makes it pretty easy to build a list of targets who match backgrounds you’d seek as a partner and you can filter them by open to work if needed”
“The all-in-one approach sounds convenient, but I'm curious how the deep research quality holds up on smaller or niche companies. In my experience that's where most AI sales tools fall apart — they pull generic info or hallucinate because there's not enough public data. Have testers tried it on obscure accounts yet?”
“The failure mode is usually automating a messy process with no owner. I'd start with exception alerts and approvals: low stock, delayed shipments, weird order changes, support questions that need a human. StoreClaw is relevant if you want those ecommerce ops checks watched across tools, but I'd keep the first rollout narrow and measurable.”
“sure i can poke around for a few minutes, been meaning to look at something like this before i go kick tires at dealership the deal score thing seems useful if it actually pulls real data, hard to trust numbers from a simulation though you know one thing that jumps out is the fee scanner, every time i bought a car there was some mystery charge buried in the paperwork, if it catches those "documentation fees" that are pure markup that alone would be worth it”
“Thanks for such a thoughtful comment! We’d genuinely love to have you test it and share your professional feedback from real use. Signup is open now at app.kodlo.ai. Quick answers to your questions. The memory isn’t a cached summary. Account context is stored as workspace knowledge and the agent reads it fresh on every run, so it updates as you work instead of going stale. On the ICP part, it works best when you describe how you sell rather than company size. If it misreads your niche, you corre”
“Just like above which model, why, and how? Context: I just took on a new sales role where I have to hunt/prospect and use cold outreach (email and phone). Old role was inbound/in person sales. submitted by /u/Raylan_Senna [link] [comments]”
“Hey, this is actually very close to the kind of AI automation I'm working on. Instead of just scoring calls against a fixed script, you could build a system that analyzes the call/transcript, pulls the actual outcome from HubSpot, and then looks for correlations between agent behavior and results. For example, it could track things like confirmation timing, number of contacts before an appointment, questions asked, objections handled, follow-up behavior, and then compare those patterns again”
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“I manage a team of 35+ sales agents who mainly book appointments. We use HubSpot as our CRM and Ringover for calls , and they're integrated. I'm looking for an AI tool that can analyze our call recordings (MP3) or transcripts (TXT) and correlate them with the actual outcome in HubSpot. For example, I want it to understand that: "Signed" = very good "Appointment attended" = good "No-show" = appointment was booked but the customer didn't come "Not int”
Hopefully to get more feedback… submitted by /u/acvon [link] [comments]
I’d actually hire for the specific bottleneck instead of "VA".
“I wouldn’t put too much faith in polished video intros. Some people are amazing at selling themselves and pretty average once they start working. I’d rather see a messy Google Sheet they organized, a real process they improved, or hear them explain how they handled an actual problem.”
“The AI agent: https://imgur.com/a/Ko8ZqRL You are only complaining about the not interacting with your customers directly. You didn't really raise any other concerns.”
“My very simple test is whether delegating to this person reduces the number of things bouncing around in my head. After a month, am I checking less? Remembering less? Following up less? If I still have to mentally track everything they’re doing, they’re helping with labor but not really helping with the founder bottleneck. That distinction took me way too long to figure out.”
“https://preview.redd.it/ji0q0wfcx3mh1.png?width=1300&format=png&auto=webp&s=3348b3717a721cbcd8a915e4499a095d4f1cb49f I had to tell their own AI what the answer was!!!! Let me get this amazing technology for my business, my customers will love it!!! submitted by /u/redlinevue [link] [comments]”
“I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, the idea makes sense to me but I need different opinions on it so basically reps could practice before real conversations and train around the same process they already use, but what I’m still trying to figure out is how this works in practice for a real team, like how easy is it to take your current playbook or training PDFs and turn that into something reps can actually practice with? And more than anything I wonder if reps would use it enough for it”
“Exactly. Half the market seems to be waiting for agents to become expensive cron jobs with better branding.”
“how automated are we talking? like does it trigger texts/emails to customers asking for referrals, or is it more on the tracking/reward side? that distinction matters a lot for who your buyer would be”
“AI-answer monitoring is noisy unless the prompt set reflects real buyer language, country, and product comparisons - screenshots alone aren't a baseline. I'd only pay for an audit that leaves you with verified Shopify changes and a way to tell citations from traffic; my audit process is outlined at https://iurii.rogulia.fi/services/seo-geo-audit and focuses on those implementation gaps. Otherwise, a monitoring tool is probably enough.”
“Hi guys I watched a video markbuildsbrands. He had mentioned some AI prompts to use. In order to get the prompt, I had to follow his IG and DM him the word "prompt". I did that and got the prompt file. The next day, "he" started messaging me, "Hey Mike, how are you? What made you get into ecomm?", "Love the entrepreneurial spirit!" I didn't reply The next day, he messages me "???" as if he's expecting an answer. He dude is making bank wit”
“500 dials with 3 meetings isn't really a product problem yet, it's a targeting problem. Cold calling generic SMBs with "AI receptionist" drops you into the same bucket as every other reseller who called them last week, so the owner hangs up before you finish the first sentence. Two things that actually helped when I was selling automation work on my own: Pick one vertical where a missed call is obviously lost money - dental, HVAC, mobile mechanics, med spas. Then stop selling t”
“Cold calling with a category name in it is the hardest version of this. When I was selling something in the same shape the only thing that got a meeting was showing up with their own numbers already pulled, as in you had 240 dms last month and 61 of them got an answer, here are the ones nobody replied to. That took me about ten minutes per prospect so I could only do a handful a day, and the meeting rate went from zero to roughly one in five. The ones who bought were also already paying a person”
“I am trying to build an ai automation tool that’s supposed to cut time of sales agent in a company. Anyone having suggestions on what actually eats time in sales operations. Just trying to validate assumptions before sinking in. submitted by /u/Strong_Top_9631 [link] [comments]”
“Yeah, absolutely. I actually don't need you to already have an X account. If you're building AI voice receptionists for businesses, I'd first want to understand what you're selling, who you're targeting, and what you've tried so far. Then I can tell you whether X even makes sense for you and what I'd do with it.”