As a Sr. Director of Customer Success at Qualified, I get a ton of questions about our recommended approach to onboarding Piper the AI SDR Agent. Here, we break it down into three simple steps to help jump start your autonomous inbound pipeline program with an AI SDR agent.

Before we dive in, it’s important to note that the foundation of your program starts with Piper Spotlight. This is how Piper is able to make intelligent decisions that activate the right experiences for each visitor. She analyzes robust data sets across your go-to-market systems, including the website, then builds unique buyer profiles and selling strategies. This is what makes Piper such an effective AI SDR agent.

The Crawl Phase: Simple set up with immediate value

First up is the Crawl Phase, this is all about speed to value. Here we focus on Piper’s capabilities that are easiest to activate so you can capture leads and book meetings with qualified visitors on the website in real time.

To do this, we start with Piper Offers. This is where Piper will work your top-of-funnel visitors by surfacing relevant marketing offers on the website. This helps you maximize your marketing content to drive engagement and generate leads. 

With Piper Meetings, Piper will also use her rich knowledge to work your bottom-of-funnel visitors by booking meetings with qualified buyers when triggered off a webform or button. This is incredibly powerful because it accelerates speed-to-lead by getting meetings booked with the right sales rep, instantly. 

A few considerations for the Crawl Phase:

• Ensure Piper Offers is an included deliverable for upcoming marketing launches and events.
• Select your Offer design thoughtfully. Prominent styles like Side Pops or Exit Intent Pop-ups should be used strategically for smaller, tailored audiences with relevant content offers for that specific audience; whereas minimal styles, like header banners, can be applied for general content to all visitors. 
• When building Meetings experiences, it’s just as important to think through your exclusion criteria for who shouldn’t be offered a meeting. Exclude segments like partners or customers if those visitors shouldn’t be booking time with your sales team.

‍The Walk Phase: A hybrid approach to make human SDRs more efficient

Next, is the Walk Phase where we’re going to expand Piper’s capabilities with email and live chat on the website. This will help your human SDRs operate more efficiently. 

With Piper Email, Piper will identify your inbound channels that require email follow-up and begin triggering email campaigns with a goal of booking a meeting. A great use case to get started with in this phase is the abandoned meeting booker. This has proven to be a really successful use case because it gets a meeting booked that would otherwise fall through the cracks. 

Piper is also a sales rep who sits on the website 24/7. With Piper Conversations, she engages buyers, answers questions, identifies buyer intent, qualifies visitors, and books meetings in real time. In this phase, Piper can start with lower intent visitors that your human SDR team doesn’t have time to connect with today. 

A few considerations for the Walk Phase:

• When identifying initial email use cases, find the inbound use cases that aren’t being handled by SDRs today, like abandoned meetings or upcoming events.
• As you’re preparing Piper to handle real-time conversations with your website visitors, identify your top 20 sales FAQs and ideal responses. You’ll use this to train Piper and evaluate her responses, which will help assess her readiness to engage on the website. 
• Introduce Piper on the website initially to lower priority visitors as you gain confidence in her performance. You can selectively add Piper to low intent pages or visitors, or only when your human SDRs are unavailable, until you gradually build up her scope of responsibilities and your confidence.

The Run Phase: Your entire inbound motion on autopilot

Lastly, we have the Run Phase where Piper’s capabilities expand across your entire inbound motion. Here, you’ll expand your Piper Email campaigns across other inbound conversion points. Any activity that requires inbound email follow-up, like content downloads, Piper will handle in real time with tailored email campaigns.

Piper will also offer a totally omnichannel experience from website to email and back again. Because Piper knows everything about your buyers, she can consistently deliver a relevant and personalized experience that’s optimized for conversion every time they land on the website. 

A few considerations for the Run Phase:

• Slowly expand your email use cases until Piper handles all inbound follow-up. The goal here is to free up your inbound team for other high priority tasks, like initial qualification meetings or outbound efforts.
• Since Piper can speak over 20 languages, you can expand Piper to all regional markets on the website with strong traffic and ICP fit. This is great for global teams.
• For enterprise companies with subsidiaries that have separate marketing websites, you can build multiple Piper profiles to create separate AI SDR agents that are configured uniquely for each business unit’s content and sales methodology. 

And that covers your Crawl, Walk, Run strategy for implementing Piper the AI SDR Agent. If you have questions, the Qualified team is standing by so be sure to reach out anytime.