Sales outreach is the work of contacting a possible buyer and turning their name into a meeting. In B2B sales, it is usually a planned series of emails, phone calls and messages, sent over two or three weeks. The industry calls this series a sequence, or a cadence. Each contact in it is called a touch.
A typical sequence has five to eight touches. It begins with a first email. A follow-up email comes three days later, then a phone call and a message on LinkedIn. It ends with the break-up email, a short last message that says the salesperson will stop writing. The goal of the whole sequence is one reply that leads to a meeting.
This first job usually belongs to a sales development representative (SDR), the most junior role in a sales team. The SDR researches each account, writes cold emails and books meetings. A cold email is an email to a person who has not asked to hear from the company. Once a meeting is booked, the deal passes to an account executive, the salesperson who runs the deal and closes it.
Three products in this zone do this work. A sales engagement platform runs every salesperson's sequences, logs every reply in the CRM and tells each salesperson what to do next. An AI SDR is an AI agent that does the SDR's first job itself. It researches the account, writes the emails, sends them and books the meeting. AI lead qualification handles the opposite direction. It answers the people who contact the company first, through the website or WhatsApp, and checks whether they are likely to buy.
Say a Thane company that sells canteen management software to factories gets 120 new names in a week. Its sales engagement platform starts a seven-touch sequence for each one. An AI SDR writes the first email for each factory, and mentions the factory's location and size. Separately, 15 factory managers fill in the website form or send a WhatsApp message. The lead qualification agent replies to each of them within a minute.
The open question in this zone is volume. AI agents can send far more emails than people can. If every seller does this, buyers may stop reading cold emails at all. Messaging apps add another route to the buyer. The page on conversational commerce covers selling through chat.