Sales engagement platforms and AI SDRs

Reaching out, the sequence of emails, calls and messages that turns a name into a meeting

A company in Pune sells payroll software to hospitals. In Market Segment 14.2, B2B sales intelligence and ABM platforms, its salesperson found the right person to talk to: the head of HR at a hospital in Chennai. Now the reaching out begins. It is a sequence of touches, each one a contact with the buyer:

The first email.

A follow-up email three days later.

A phone call.

A message on LinkedIn.

The break-up email, the last one, which says the salesperson will stop writing.

The goal of the whole sequence is to turn a name into a meeting.

An outreach sequence runs from the first email through a follow-up, a phone call and a LinkedIn message to the break-up email, with the aim of booking a meeting.

Sales engagement is the software that runs this sequence. It schedules each step, logs each reply in the CRM, and tells the sales representative, or rep, what to do next. (More on CRM in Market Segment 14.1, CRM software.) In this Industry Vertical, this is the category that AI models have changed most visibly. The email can now be written, and the whole sequence run, by an AI agent. An AI agent is software that uses a language model, the kind of AI behind chatbots, to take actions on its own.

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.

This Market Segment has one sub-segment. It covers two established platforms, whose Indian centres build much of their product. Then it covers four young companies with engineers in Bengaluru, which sell the AI agent that does the first step of the job.

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The platforms and the AI sellers

The platforms and the AI sellers

Back to the head of HR at the Chennai hospital. The first two companies sell the platform in which the payroll company's sales team would build and send its sequence.

Outreach

with engineers in Hyderabad, has posted more jobs than any other company in this Market Segment. It is the company that named the category. On its sales-engagement platform, a team builds its sequences, sends them at scale, to thousands of contacts at once, and measures what works. It has grown into revenue intelligence and conversation intelligence. Revenue intelligence reads the deals to predict how much will be sold. Conversation intelligence records and analyses sales calls. Outreach's Hyderabad centre is one of its largest.

Salesloft

with engineers in Bengaluru, is Outreach's long-standing rival. It sells the cadence platform, cadence being another word for a sequence, with conversation intelligence and forecasting built in. Since 2024 it has been owned by Vista Equity, a private investment firm, and it has merged with Clari. (More on Clari in Market Segment 14.4, Revenue intelligence and sales compensation software.)

The rest of this sub-segment is the AI agent.

Regie.ai

with engineers in Bengaluru, sells AI prospecting agents. Prospecting means finding and approaching new possible customers. The agents research the account, write the sequence and send it, with the rep approving. In our example, the agent would read about the Chennai hospital and write the emails to its head of HR.

Leadgenerator.io

a seven-person Bengaluru company, sells autonomous sales agents and AI email outreach for small companies. Autonomous means the agents work without a person guiding each step.

Zigment

also in Bengaluru, sells conversational lead conversion. An inbound lead is a possible customer who contacts the company first, for example by filling in a form on its website. Zigment's agent follows up every inbound lead, in chat, email or messaging apps, until the lead is ready to talk to a person. (More on selling over messaging apps in Market Segment 13.2, WhatsApp marketing and conversational commerce platforms, in Industry Vertical 13, Martech.)

MetAntz

a product of Sprouts.ai, presents itself as an AI seller. It gives no detail about its product. (More on Sprouts.ai in Market Segment 14.2, B2B sales intelligence and ABM platforms.)

The AI seller.

The first job in sales is the sales development representative (SDR). The SDR writes cold emails, sent to people who have not asked to hear from the company. The SDR also books meetings for the account executive, the salesperson who runs the deal and closes it. The agents in this Market Segment were built to do the SDR's job. Within two years, the whole category has renamed itself around them. The open question is whether buyers will answer emails written by agents, when agents can send so many of them. (More on AI agents sold for other jobs in Market Segment 10.5, Enterprise AI agent platforms, in Industry Vertical 10, ERP and business automation.)

The sales development representative researches accounts, writes cold emails and books meetings for the account executive who closes the deal, and the agents here were built to do that first job.

That is reaching out: the sequence that turns a name into a meeting. A platform runs it, and more and more often, an AI agent writes it.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What CRM and sales tech companies hire for.

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