Head of Growth & Customer Marketing Austin Sandmeyer from Sendoso shares how his team onboarded Piper, Qualified’s AI SDR, to scale inbound. After a fast, one-week train-and-test phase (using website content, PDFs, and tough SDR questions), Piper launched on key pages, then site-wide. Outcomes: faster first responses, pre-qualified handoffs to reps, time back for BDRs, and noticeable lifts in engagement, meetings, and pipeline.

Key Takeaways

• Fast onboarding: One week to train/test using site content, PDFs, and SDR “tough questions.”
• Front-line coverage: Piper proactively engages on high-intent pages (e.g., pricing), starts the convo, and books meetings.
• Better handoffs: Reps enter with context from transcripts; conversations are “pre-baked.”
• Time savings: BDRs get ~15–20% of their time back to focus on higher-value outbound and events.
• More pipeline: Higher engagement → more leads → more meetings → more closed-won vs. rule-based bots.

TRANSCRIPTION

Dan Darcy:

Hi, everyone. I'm excited to speak with another qualified customer using Piper the AI SDR to scale all of their inbound pipeline generation efforts. With us now is the head of growth and customer marketing at Sendoso, Austin Sandmeyer. Welcome, Austin.

Austin Sandmeyer:
Hey, Dan Darcy. It's great to be here.

Dan Darcy:
Excited to chat. Well, thank you for being here. And and Sendoso, like I was just talking about, has been a long time customer qualified. Can you share with us why you hired Piper to join your team?

Austin Sandmeyer:
Yeah. I mean, I think our strategy has changed quite a bit over the years of using Qualified and thinking about what what is the best use case for everybody. And then, you know, we heard about Piper, and we thought, okay. Amazing. This is perfect for the scale that we have and where we wanna go.

Dan Darcy:
Well, tell us a little bit about the onboarding experience and, what your current use case looks like at Sendoso.

Austin Sandmeyer:
Yeah. So onboarding was super easy. We gave Piper our website and scraped it. They reviewed it.

I kind of went back and forth. We, you know, fed additional content. We added some PDFs around, like, some of our, you know, decks and things like that to help build up her knowledge. Went through about a week of testing.

So, you know, quite honestly, really fast in my opinion. So we went through a week of testing where I was challenging her individually, like, going back and forth in the chat. I also asked our entire team to come on and I asked the SDRs, like, throw your toughest, hardest questions at Piper and, like, let's see how she responds. Like, I wanna know, you know, what what they get on a daily basis, how Piper's able to respond.

And so we went through that. I was able to give some coaching responses and, you know, respond this, respond that. We like this, you know, save this instead of that. And then surely but surely, like, once we felt that that responding was just great, if not better than some of, like, the human SDRs in the manner of just, like, they are stressed for time and so they can't always get the perfect response out either, we put her into a few experiences.

So we started launching her on, you know, certain pages of our site. And then after we got some public traffic on it, I was like, okay. Well, let's just roll this out more widely. It also is super impactful because the SDR is walking into a conversation that's prebaked.

And so you already know a little bit. They can look back at the transcript. They know, like, what the challenges are, where the like, Piper's already answered some of the great questions, for them. And so they're just coming in, you know, like, the ball is halfway down the court, and so now it's just going into the goal.

Dan Darcy:
Can you share some of the results that you've seen specifically with Piper?

Austin Sandmeyer:
Yeah.

So our goal with Piper, as you may be able to pick up, is to help scale all of our efforts, specifically our inbound efforts, but we're, like, absolutely seeing that today, specifically as people come to our website. Like, being that front line of engagement has been incredibly impactful.

And so that has been, you know, incredible for getting that con the conversation started and, you know, getting that into Salesforce, getting that book meeting booked.

That's been massive impact out the door. And then next is kind of that time saving component. So we're definitely freeing up our BDR sign. You know, I would say fifteen to twenty percent of the time previously was responding to stuff, you know, being that frontline, being that prompt, you know, pouncing, on, you know, vendor or visitors as they, you know, visit the website.

And so they were doing that right away, but that has now allowed them to be that second in command and kind of, like, get the insight that allows Piper to go do that. And they're able to spend more time on other high value pipeline activities. Kind of like I was talking about, like, outbounding, you know, addressing, you know, certain event invites as we think about upcoming events coming into it and just allowing them more time to focus on, you know, a little bit more personalized challenge things that they need to do and get a little bit more effort on it. So that was super impactful.

And then, you know, secondly or thirdly, in theory, Piper is super it's just, like, way more effective than any rule based chatbot that I've ever worked with. And I've used a lot of different chatbots in my time. This is, like, my seventh startup. I've been playing around for a while.

And one of the best things that I like to think about is, like, she's proactively there, actively engaging, and can really, like, kick start the conversation. You're on our pricing page. She knows you're on our pricing page. She's very you saw where you visited other pages.

She can take all of that context and give a great, you know, pounce or a great first response. We're, like, I love our BDRs and I love our SDRs, but it's hard for them to know where you know, follow every single visitor all the time and get that perfect response. So, that's been another massive, like, impact that we've seen, increasing engagement, increasing leads, increasing meeting with books.

Like, all in all, all of this has really increased our overall pipeline numbers and, you know, more closed won, more meetings look, which is at the end of the day what we're all trying to get to.

Dan Darcy:
Austin, this is music twenty years. Love hearing how it's scaling your team, giving your team time back, and then obviously, also increasing the engagement, the leads, and all the meetings booked. So Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing your success with Piper and with all of us.

Austin Sandmeyer:
Thank you. Of course.