#32 — Engineering sales pipelines to replace SDRs
October 8, 2024•3 min read
Why it matters: Now is the time to rethink the traditional SDR model and create automated pipelines that handle prospecting more efficiently and at a fraction of the cost of human SDRs.
The big picture: Instead of hiring a team of SDRs after ramping up, build automated systems that contact potential customers faster and more efficiently—treating prospecting like an engineering pipeline.
Essential Tools for Your Sales Stack
The toolkit: These key components power the automated sales machine:
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Website visitor identification: Koala (better for company-level) and RB2B (better for individual-level) to identify who's visiting your site
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Email sequencing: Apollo for managing high and low intent pipelines
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Data enrichment: Clay for personalizing outreach and connecting various tools via API
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Email finders: FindyMail (smaller batches) and LeadMagic (larger scraping jobs) to find verified email addresses
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Mass email sequencing: Smartlead for cold emailing across multiple mailboxes and domains
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Text generation: ChatGPT for personalized emails and data normalization
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Workflow automation: Zapier to connect tools through a low-code interface
Three Pipeline Strategy
By the numbers: The system divides prospects into three categories:
- High intent pipeline: Prospects who actively signal interest (benchmark: 90% open rate, 60% response rate)
- Low intent pipeline: Website visitors (benchmark: 40-60% open rate, 3-5% response rate)
- No intent pipeline: Cold outreach (benchmark: 1-2% response rate with tuning)
High Intent Pipeline: Speed Wins
How it works: When someone submits a Contact Us form, Zapier automatically notifies you and triggers a templated email in Apollo.
Why it matters: Response time is critical—startups get highest conversion rates when responding within five minutes.
The approach: Minimal personalization needed; focus on acknowledging their submission and setting up a conversation.
Low Intent Pipeline: Capture Website Interest
The process: RB2B identifies website visitors and sends their information to Clay for enrichment, then FindyMail validates emails before pushing profiles to Apollo for sequencing.
The message: Simple outreach acknowledging their website visit and offering assistance.
Reality check: This completely automated pipeline can achieve 50-60% open rates and 3-5% response rates with minimal effort.
No Intent Pipeline: Scaled Cold Outreach
Prospects in your no intent pipeline haven’t interacted with your website and might not know about you at all. This outbound is cold, so the pipeline here has to be more complex than the other two in order to be effective.
The workflow:
- Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator or Apollo to find targeted prospects
- Export profiles and enrich with contact information
- Load data into Clay for further filtering and tagging (keep going until you reach tens of thousands of people)
- Generate personalized intros with ChatGPT
- Sequence emails through Smartlead to avoid spam filters
The bottom line: This system costs $1,000-$3,000 monthly versus $70,200 annually for one entry-level SDR (including benefits)—making it 2-6x cheaper than traditional SDRs while scaling better.
Why founders should care: This approach allows one salesperson to accomplish the work of an entire team, with pipelines that improve as you iterate, creating more efficiency at a fraction of the cost.
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