A 4-person SDR team costs $200,000 to $400,000 a year. An AI SDR stack costs $2,800 to $5,000 a month in operating expenses plus a one-time build fee of $5,000 to $15,000. The output is not identical to a great human SDR team, but for top-of-funnel prospecting the economics become clear.
Every email in this system is approved by a human before it sends. We do not build autonomous outbound. That approach damages domain reputation and carries legal risk. This system drafts everything and sends nothing without a human reviewing it first.
Who this is for
SMB to mid-market B2B SaaS and services founders running outbound. Sales leaders who need to scale pipeline without proportional headcount growth.
What you get
- ICP definition and signal-based prospect list built from Apollo or Clay.
- An enrichment pipeline that adds hiring signals, funding events, and tech stack data per account.
- Personalized first-line generation per prospect, referencing a specific real signal.
- Multi-step email sequence managed in Smartlead or Instantly.
- A human approval gate so no email leaves the queue without a person reviewing it.
- A reply triage agent that classifies responses and books qualified meetings on your calendar, with a human confirming any irreversible calendar commitments.
- Daily KPI dashboard with open rate, reply rate, and positive reply rate.
How we work on this
We define the ICP in week one, then configure tooling, launch a first cohort of 200 contacts with close monitoring, optimize copy and targeting, and hand over. Most setups reach full operating rhythm in four weeks.
Tech stack
Apollo for the prospect database. Clay for enrichment when you need data from multiple sources. Smartlead or Instantly for sending. GPT-5 for first-line personalization. Claude Sonnet 4.6 for reply classification and triage.
When this is the wrong choice
If your offer requires significant product discovery before a prospect would agree to a meeting, outbound is the wrong top-of-funnel motion regardless of how automated it is. We will tell you this on the discovery call.
Pricing
Build fee: $5,000 to $15,000 one-time. Monthly operating cost: $2,800 to $5,000 covering tool subscriptions and sending infrastructure, billed directly to you at actual cost.
FAQ
What reply rates should we expect? Well-personalized AI outbound typically achieves 3 to 5% reply rates on engaged lists. Below 2% usually indicates a targeting or messaging problem, not a tool problem. We benchmark for 30 days before making changes.
How do you handle deliverability? We set up 3 to 5 sending domains, not your primary domain, warm them for 4 to 6 weeks before the first prospect email goes out, and cap volume per inbox at 40 to 50 emails per day. Skipping this step is the most common reason outbound fails.
Is this GDPR compliant? For US and APAC targets, yes. EU outbound requires “legitimate interest” documentation and carries more risk at scale. We document the compliance approach before building.
How long before we see meetings booked? The first approved emails go out in week 2. Replies start arriving in weeks 2 to 3. Meetings typically book in weeks 3 to 4 as the reply triage agent routes positive responses.
Can we scale this later? Yes. The system is built on tools with generous volume tiers. Scaling means adding sending domains and increasing the weekly prospect count, not rebuilding anything.