Sales Email Agent for SDR Teams

The Challenge

Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) at a fast-growing B2B SaaS company were spending 6-8 hours daily writing personalized outreach emails. Despite the effort, conversion rates remained low at around 2-3% reply rate. The team needed to scale outreach without sacrificing quality.

Solution Architecture

Built an autonomous AI agent system that:

1. Enriches lead data from CRM with LinkedIn profiles, company news, and tech stack information
2. Generates personalized emails using GPT-4 with custom prompts and templates
3. Stores persona insights in vector database for context-aware messaging
4. Implements human-in-the-loop approval workflow before sending
5. Tracks engagement and learns from successful patterns

Technical Implementation

The system uses n8n for workflow orchestration, connecting multiple services:

• Data Enrichment: Clearbit API for company data, LinkedIn for professional context
• AI Layer: LangChain tools with OpenAI function calling for structured email generation
• Knowledge Base: Pinecone vector database stores successful email patterns and persona notes
• Delivery: SendGrid with rate limiting and bounce handling

Measurable Impact

After 3 months of deployment:

• 70% reduction in time spent on email drafting
• 28% increase in reply rates (from 2.3% to 3.1%)
• $120K annual savings in SDR productivity
• SDRs now spend time on high-value activities like qualification calls

Key Learnings

1. Human-in-the-loop is essential - keeping humans in the approval loop maintained quality and team trust
2. Context is king - vector search for past successful emails dramatically improved relevance
3. Prompt engineering matters - iterating on prompts with A/B testing yielded 40% better results
4. Rate limiting prevents issues - gradual rollout prevented deliverability problems

The system continues to learn and improve, with the team now exploring expansion to LinkedIn outreach automation.