The promise of AI transforming outbound sales is everywhere, but the reality often disappoints. Many sales teams grapple with expensive automation tools that underdeliver, are hard to use, or simply automate the wrong tasks, leaving reps wondering if AI is more hype than actual help.
But the landscape is changing. Real, practical AI solutions are emerging – not to replace your salespeople, but to free them from manual data entry and research so they can focus on conversations that close deals. The smartest companies are figuring out how to use AI as a powerful assistant for their teams, enhancing their skills rather than aiming for replacement.
This guide shows you how intelligent outbound sales automation boosts pipeline, increases efficiency, and frees your reps to focus on selling.
Why traditional outbound prospecting fails
Traditional sales prospecting for most SDRs means hours spent hunting for leads on LinkedIn, manually researching decision-makers, and copying details into spreadsheets.
Often, it boils down to hours spent hunting for potential leads on LinkedIn or company websites, manually digging through decision-makers’ profiles, and painstakingly copying details into spreadsheets.
Finding contact information, using a data enrichment tool to find their email and phone number, then crafting that first cold email: it's a cycle heavy on manual research and data entry.
This turns skilled SDRs into data entry clerks, spending most of their time on repetitive tasks like scraping info and copy-pasting data – work computers handle faster and more accurately.
Your reps are smart, creative, and capable of building real connections. Manually managing spreadsheets wastes their talents and your budget.
When this manual grind forms the core of your outbound strategy, it inevitably leads to significant problems:
Your outbound pipeline growth is slow. If you want to scale up, the main option seems to be hiring more SDRs. This directly increases costs, but your results don't necessarily grow at the same pace. Plus, there are only so many truly great reps out there, and you can't just clone your best one.
Your cost of sale gets out of control. Considering how much time is spent on leads that go nowhere, even with top reps, the cost to acquire each qualified opportunity and new customer can skyrocket. This is especially true for companies with lower average contract values (ACVs), where the SDR team can quickly become a major budget expense.
Your team is stressed and burnt out. Doing the same manual grind day after day is tough on anyone. Combine that with high pressure to hit targets and having little control over whether a prospect even responds, and manual prospecting becomes a recipe for stress and job dissatisfaction. Automation frees up your team to focus on more engaging, valuable work (like actually talking to interested prospects or handling warm inbound responses) and also helps your Account Executives by keeping their calendars clear of meetings that go nowhere.
How AI is changing outbound sales automation
It's easy to claim that "AI" will fix everything and that sales teams using it see dramatic improvements. But AI hype is everywhere, and most of it is empty.
So, what does AI actually do for your sales team?
Classic outbound sales meant cold calls, manual research, and generic outreach that rarely hit the mark. There wasn't an efficient way to target the right prospects. Sales reps spent tons of time on cold calls, manual research, and sending generic outreach messages that rarely hit the mark. There just wasn't an efficient way to accurately target the best potential prospects.
AI-powered outbound sales removes the guesswork. It automates repetitive tasks, identifies and prioritizes accounts using data analysis, and handles lead management accurately. AI automates the repetitive parts of sales outreach campaigns, identifies and prioritizes accounts using smart analysis, handles lead management flawlessly, and uses its ability to understand language to help with the optimization of your sales strategies.
AI handles the time-consuming tasks so your team can focus on conversations that close deals. Reps spend more time talking to interested prospects and less time on data entry.
Areas of the outbound sales process you should automate
Not every part of outbound sales benefits equally from automation. Here are the key areas where it makes the biggest impact.
Lead generation and scoring
Finding and qualifying leads in B2B sales is slow, repetitive work that wastes skilled reps' time. It's easy to make small mistakes (like typos) that can derail your efforts. Automation software handles this work well.
Automation handles data entry accurately and consistently. Outbound sales tools can sift through huge amounts of data, pull out lead details, and score them based on your criteria – much faster than any human team could.
While just getting rid of this chore is valuable in itself, the speed advantage is enormous. Simply set up the criteria, and the software will tirelessly generate lead lists for you (accurately!).
Drafting and sending outreach messages
Generic template emails are easy to spot, especially for people in sales and marketing.
Modern AI (like Large Language Models or LLMs) can write text that sounds completely natural, and it can use all the data gathered during lead generation to make the message relevant and informed. It can sound like it's coming from someone who really did their homework.
And it's not just basic company info – AI tools can analyze a prospect's online behavior, past interactions, social media activity, and even the technology they currently use. This research takes minutes rather than days. Automation also means follow-up messages can go out almost instantly, moving smoothly across different channels like email, SMS, or social media messages to keep the conversation going. This saves massive amounts of time and boosts effectiveness.
Automating repetitive administrative tasks
Data entry, scheduling meetings, updating the CRM, filling out spreadsheets – these repetitive tasks consume time without requiring creativity or complex decisions. Automation handles them better. With automation, you can avoid much of this drudgery.
These tasks don't require creativity or complex decisions; they're about following rules, which machines do perfectly. Unlike humans who make mistakes when overloaded, machines maintain accuracy regardless of volume. Without this busywork, your team can focus on what humans do best: building relationships, solving problems, and closing deals.
Why SDR automation simply works for outbound sales
The key advantage is scale. Modern outbound sales automation lets you dramatically increase your efforts without sacrificing quality. You can effectively multiply the skills of your best reps across a wider audience while maintaining your current team size. You get quality, personalized outreach at a volume human teams can't match.
For ABM teams running coordinated plays across multiple stakeholders, automation ensures every touchpoint—from marketing to SDR to AE—uses the same rich buyer context and signals. RevOps leaders get visibility into which signals actually drive pipeline, making it easier to optimize the entire revenue motion, not just individual rep activity.
Here’s how automation makes a difference:
Clever lead generation
Monitoring online reviews, job postings, and web activity reveals key insights about potential customers. Automation lets you monitor all these signals simultaneously across entire industries. Instead of relying on stale, generic data, you can spot key buying signals and understand pain points with pinpoint accuracy. Then, when you do reach out, you're contacting the right people with messages tailored specifically to them.
Democratized data
Good data fuels modern business, and the ability to get, combine, and analyze it is incredibly valuable. So valuable, in fact, that you're likely paying top dollar for access to data feeds right now. Automation can help here too. You can set up processes for "waterfalling" requests across multiple providers, aggregating the results, and controlling your data acquisition costs. This way, you can ensure optimal coverage while keeping costs down.
Automation also speeds up repetitive, manual research tasks, like analyzing company websites or identifying their current tech stack, making them faster and more scalable. This means that the moment you start focusing on a specific prospect, you can automatically enrich it with vital data that lets you be better in tune with your future client's needs and pain points.
Personalization at scale
Anyone who's worked as an SDR knows the job involves writing a lot of emails. The problem is, writing truly personalized emails takes time and doesn't scale easily.
There's only so much letter-writing a given SDR can do in a day, and handing it off risks inconsistency. As a result, many teams relied on generic email automation sequences, hoping that a well-written template could replace a personalized one.
These generic templates failed to deliver results.
Automation side-steps this problem. Modern AI tools can generate almost unlimited, natural-sounding messages. They seamlessly weave in the data you've gathered to create personalized conversations that feel authentic, as if crafted by your own team.
This frees up your skilled sales reps from spending hours on basic writing tasks. Instead, they can focus on overseeing the process, adding strategic insights, and ensuring unique prospect needs are addressed rather than acting like entry-level assistants all day.
Why so many sales automation tools disappoint (and cost a fortune)
The struggles of outbound sales are well known. Sales teams know it's tough and rightly look to technology for help. Many existing tools fall short. Companies invest heavily but find these platforms incomplete, ineffective, and expensive. Let's break down why they often fail to meet expectations, especially considering their hefty price tags.
First, let's talk cost. Nearly every sales automation platform locks you into a recurring subscription that vendors bill annually. Exact pricing is often hidden behind "contact sales" buttons, especially for higher tiers, but available data shows significant costs. Spendflo reports Outreach users might pay around $100/user/month just for a basic plan (on an annual contract). That quickly adds up to $6,000 a year for a small team before you even add the advanced features you likely need, potentially pushing annual costs to $20,000-$50,000 or more.
Other key tools add to the bill. LinkedIn Sales Navigator's advanced plans run close to $180/user/month, while Salesloft reportedly costs $125-$165/user/month. These costs stack up quickly, especially since data gaps often mean teams feel forced to subscribe to multiple platforms.
With prices like these, you'd expect flawless performance and incredible value. The reality often disappoints.
User reviews show common reasons why these expensive tools often disappoint.
Complexity
You pay a premium expecting efficiency, but older tools often present a confusing maze of features and tricky configurations. Instead of saving time, your team gets bogged down learning a frustrating system.
The time spent wrestling with the software often negates the promised benefits, making that high price tag feel unjustified.
Data accuracy
Reliable data is essential for effective automation, yet this is where many tools fail. Reviews often mention missing key information (especially phone numbers) or, worse, data that's just plain wrong.
One analysis reportedly found that Seamless.AI only had mobile numbers for 70% of prospects, and only 17% of those were accurate. When you're paying premium prices for unreliable data, it undermines the entire purpose and makes true automation impossible.
Outdated solutions
Sales tech evolves incredibly fast, but many costly tools feel stuck in the past. Adding modern AI features to old architecture often results in clunky user experiences and rigid automation that relies on fixed email templates and playbooks.
This outdated approach disappoints users expecting modern capabilities and can even hurt sales performance if outreach sounds unnatural. Paying premium prices for outdated technology frustrates users and hurts performance.
Integration issues
Paying for multiple expensive tools is painful enough, but the added frustration (and wasted developer or operations time) trying to make them actually work together is a major source of disappointment.
Users commonly complain about glitches, data sync problems, poor lead routing between systems, and lack of seamless integration, which add hidden costs and headaches to the already steep subscription fees.
Data lock-in
The final disappointment: after investing significantly in a platform, you discover it's difficult or impossible to export your own data if you want to switch providers. This lack of portability appears commonly across SaaS products, including sales automation. Still, it's a real and common issue that leaves users feeling trapped, regardless of their satisfaction with the tool.
Most sales automation tools fail because they automate the wrong things. They send more emails faster, but without knowing which buyers are actually in market or why they might care. At UserGems, we start with a different premise: successful outbound begins with accurate buyer signals and transparent AI that shows you exactly why a prospect matters right now. That's why Gem-E combines precise contact data, clear AI scoring, and context-rich outreach that feels relevant—not just automated.
7 Outbound sales automation tools for saving SDRs time
Gem-E by UserGems
Breeze Prospecting Agent by HubSpot
Salesforce Einstein
Lavender
Artisan
Clari
11x.ai
1. Gem-E (UserGems)
Gem-E, from UserGems, acts as a smart assistant for your outbound sales team. This AI SDR tool leverages UserGems' powerful data to pinpoint high-potential prospects and buying signals that others miss, helps automate personalized outreach creation, and integrates smoothly into your workflow – helping you scale quality outreach without breaking the bank.
Top features
Past customer tracking. Gem-E keeps track of your former customers even when they move to new companies. This helps you connect with people you already have a relationship with, whether they serve as decision-makers or potential internal champions at their new roles.
Buying signals. Knowing when a company might be ready to buy is crucial for timing your outreach. Gem-E monitors key signals like:
New hires: Fresh faces often mean new needs and budgets.
New funding: A recent investment often signals growth and spending, potentially on solutions like yours.
Website visits: Tracks which companies are visiting your site, indicating they might be evaluating you.
Competitor insights: Puts information about a prospect's competitors at your fingertips – always useful for conversations.
Social media activity: Keeps an eye on relevant company and employee updates shared publicly online.
Prospect prioritization. Using its extensive data, Gem-E predicts how likely accounts and individuals are to become customers, guiding your team to focus on the most promising and valuable opportunities first.
Automatic outreach. Gem-E uses powerful generative AI for outreach. You can set it up flexibly, from simply helping your team write personalized emails faster, all the way to running nearly on autopilot: finding leads, ranking them, and adding them to automated sequences designed to engage them effectively without needing manual effort for every step.
Robust integrations. Gem-E knows it's probably not the only tool you use, so it's built to play well with others. It integrates smoothly with CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce, and works alongside other sales tools like Outreach or Salesloft.
Advantages of Gem-E
Why pick Gem-E? Its users explain its advantages best.
Natural writing. Grace from Smartling finds it to be an excellent writer, and says that "If every SDR could write messaging as good as Gem-E does, they would hit quota with ease."
Signal aggregation. Kristin from Workramp likes how it combines multiple important signals into one unified message, and thinks it would make for a good teacher, too. "I want our BDRs to look at the message to actually learn from Gem-E, like how to build out messaging and understand what makes a good message."
Top tier data. Erik from SAP LeanIX is most impressed with the quality of the underlying data, and UserGems' data strategy, and finds that Gem-E is endowed with quality domain knowledge: "Finally, a sales tech company that understands what sales actually looks like."
Results. Pouyan from Scratchpad goes right for the numbers, finding an increased response rate, far in excess of other approaches: "[Since we started using Gem-E], we saw an immediate impact with response rates above 10%. That's much better than any regular outbound."
Learn how Sendoso used AI and signals to scale outbound.
UserGems pricing
Gem-E is included in all UserGems pricing packages, but the specific cost depends on your usage. UserGems aims for flexible pricing, so you don't pay for features you don't use. The cost varies based on factors like data consumption, the number of user seats, and the specific AI features you need.
The UserGems sales team is ready to help you figure out the best package and price point for your budget and needs.
2. Breeze Prospecting Agent by HubSpot
The Breeze Prospecting Agent is a part of HubSpot's offering, and in particular, their suite of AI tools. It serves to automate prospecting for quality leads, streamline workflows, and increase efficiency.
Top features
Prioritization. Identifies and prioritizes prospects based on data in your CRM.
Personalization. Uses data from CRM to craft personalized communications.
Automatization. Takes personalized communications and sends them automatically.
Pros
Ideal customers. The Agent finds companies in the CRM or in contacts that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) and target persona. [See review]
Efficiency and scale. The Agent is tireless and can be fully automated, thus having the potential to greatly increase sales efficiency. [See review]
Customer support. Support for the Agent is provided by HubSpot's premium account team, and is considered one of the industry's gold standards. [See review]
Cons
Lack of focus. A lot of the appeal of HubSpot tools is the huge ecosystem they slot in. But some users feel that features that are good are balanced out by features that are implemented poorly, or in a way that is not intuitive. [See review]
Data siloing. There have been serious complaints regarding the data siloing between various AI tools that are meant to form a seamless whole with Breeze Prospecting Agent, with the AI tools not really communicating at all. [See review]
Poor data quality and use. Some users have criticized Breeze Prospecting Agent harshly for its inability to use data that it should have access to as part of Hubspot's integrated system. [See review]
Pricing
While there is a free tier, and a $20/month/seat starter pack, true automation features only show up on the higher professional and enterprise subscription tiers.
These are, respectively, $100 and $150 per month, per seat.
3. Salesforce Einstein
Salesforce Einstein is a specialized AI layer integrated into the Salesforce Customer 360 platform. Its purpose is to deliver AI insights and improvements across all the tools and processes managed by the Salesforce platform.
Top features
Einstein copilot. A definite selling point is the Einstein Copilot, which is a conversational AI bot that follows you throughout the platform and offers a constant source of natural language-accessed help.
Einstein Copilot Studio. A low-code solution to assemble AI-powered applications for use in businesses. It can allow for everything from customized prompts all the way to using custom ML models.
Data privacy layer. Protecting the security and secrecy of proprietary data is a part of the basic infrastructure of the Einstein platform.
Pros
AI lead scoring. Einstein can use CRM data to predict the likely outcome of leads and can display this in an easy-to-grasp score. [See review]
User-friendly ease of use. According to users, the interface is easy to use and navigate and is great at showing the right tools to the right users. [See review]
Personalization. Users have praised the ability of Salesforce Einstein to offer personalization and predictive analytics tailored to the situation. [See review]
Cons
Cost. The price has been reported as a crushing burden for both licensing and implementation when it comes to small businesses, which find that the pricing model does not suit them. [See review]
Data integrity. Users have offered criticism for its lackluster data quality and integration into existing flows of data for the platform. [See review]
Poor support for customized instances. Given its integration into the overall Salesforce platform, users are worried that it only really "understands" completely stock setups, while most serious instances of Salesforce are heavily modified and customized. [See review 1, and 2]
Pricing
The pricing model varies dramatically depending on circumstances and adds significant complexity. By and large, according to official pricing information, the basic AI addition costs $75/month/user, billed annually, excluding the overall Salesforce costs, additions, and additional AI use credits.
4. Lavender
Lavander is an AI-powered sales email assistant. It integrates directly into the inbox, and does real-time coaching, personalization suggestions, and email scoring. All this is meant to boost reply rates from email campaigns and increase efficiency.
Top features
Real-time email scoring and coaching. Lavender automates and teaches you to improve your outreach by offering real-time constant coaching and scoring of emails.
Personalization assistant. If you are ever stuck for a way to personalize the email you are writing, Lavender will put personalization data at your fingertips, and will even offer personality profile data to simplify making a connection.
Deep email platform integration. Lavender integrates with a broad spectrum of email and outreach platforms including Gmail, Outlook, Outreach, Salesloft, HubSpot, Apollo, Groove, and Gong.
Pros
Increased open and reply rate. Users have noted that Lavender is a good tool to format email and that this ability has increased both open and reply rates. [See review]
Effective teaching. Another user felt that Lavender has improved their skills at email writing, especially when it comes to mobile formatting, and tuning the reading level. [See review]
Ease of use. Some users have highlighted the extreme ease of use of Lavender, and how quickly it delivers results. [See review]
Cons
Limited AI functionality. Some users have criticized Lavender harshly for its lackluster AI performance especially when compared to general-purpose heavy-hitters like ChatGPT. [See review]
Bugs and glitches. There are reviews by users who highlight that Lavender's interface is plagued with glitches, bugs, and general software quality issues. [See review]
Limited value. Numerous comments by users have indicated that the software is, at best, nice-to-have rather than a critical tool and that it functions mostly like a "slicker Grammarly." [See reviews 1, 2, 3]
Pricing
According to the data collected by G2, Lavender AI has a free tier, but with limitations that effectively make it only a demo tier.
The Starter tier is $29/user/month and contains the bulk of the really important features.
For good support, integration, and team features, however, the Pro ($49/user/month) and Teams ($69/user/month) tiers are required.
5. Artisan
Artisan is an AI-based startup that promotes its AI-based "virtual employees," which it calls "Artisans," as more or less straight replacements for human workers. Of particular relevance here is Ava, which is meant to be a fully functional AI sales agent.
Top features
Ava. Ava is an AI SDR and sales agent that is meant to be used for all research tasks, personalization, and multichannel outreach. It is meant to operate fully autonomously, producing, on its own, qualified leads delivered to the inbox.
Consolidation. Artisan is meant to be a fully integrated platform that contains all the tools that a business needs, which improves the efficiency of data flows and helps control cost.
Integrated B2B database. Artisan and Ava boast a database of B2B contact details that includes 300 million contacts in over 200 countries, ensuring a high-quality data source for the AI tool to operate on.
Pros
Time saving. Some users find it to be a great time-saving aid which lets them reduce time and resources taken by top of the sales funnel marketing. [See review]
Great UI/UX. There are reports by users of finding the overall interface and user experience to be very intuitive and easy to use. [See review]
Good support and smooth setup. Users have reported that the initial setup of the tool is fairly smooth and easy and that the support team is responsive. [See review]
Cons
Bad, brand-damaging performance. Some users have offered very harsh criticism regarding the quality of the AI output, calling the messages 'worthless' and 'worded terribly' and cautioning that letting it communicate with prospects may damage the integrity of your brand. [See review]
Misleading marketing. Users have reported finding the marketing and promises made by the Artisan team to be misleading and ultimately as a letdown, as the promise of the fully AI employee has not been delivered on and the resulting technology doesn't work right and won't interface with an existing mature tech stack. [See review]
Lack of scalability and automation. There is criticism in user reviews regarding the ability of Ava to work in a truly automated fashion or for its operation to scale to the operations needed by even a small business. [See review]
Pricing
Artisan does not make their pricing public, as its pricing varies based on individual requirements. Contact their sales team for details.
6. Clari
Clari is a SaaS solution whose primary focus is RevOps, i.e. revenue operations. It focuses on being a unified platform that allows the managing of all enterprise revenue workflows. This includes sales, marketing, customer success, and finance. AI is used for forecasting, providing actionable intelligence and automating repetitive, manual tasks.
Top features
Forecasting and revenue insights. Clari handles top of funnel activities and forecasts the success and risk of any planned deal, offering actionable intelligence, and overall data that lets organizations determine if they are on track or not to meet their revenue goals. All of this data is displayed on powerful virtual dashboards and can span multiple metrics.
Pipeline management. Clari tracks every step of the deal and offers real time updates when any changes are made. This also enables analytics on a per-deal or per-account basis, and tracking of all customer interactions and communications.
AI automation and intelligence. This is the unique addition to Clari's arsenal as a RevOps platform, and it allows things such as the automatic capture of relevant signals from all communications, calendars, sales calls, and so on, which reduces the need for manual data entry. Clari also offers AI-guided selling capabilities, allowing for constant feedback coaching to sales team members.
Pros
Intuitive interface. Users have found that the interface is simple, intuitive, and easy to use, which allows the adoption of this tool to proceed without delay and increases user satisfaction. [See review]
Easy improvement. There are reviews highlighting the tool's excellent sales pipeline visibility features that allow it to pinpoint sales flows that suffer from low sales engagement or other problems and then find ways to improve them. [See review]
Excellent integration. Some have found the integration that Clari has with other external services to be particularly noteworthy. They have singled out its CRM integration with Salesforce in particular as something that works remarkably well. [See review]
Cons
Overly optimistic predictive analytics. Some users of Clari have found that its forecasts and predictions are a little too optimistic and that it sometimes gives deals or leads a high score and a high probability for lucrative success when those deals have already failed. [See review]
Leaving reps out in the cold. There are those who criticize Clari for focusing too much on providing value for sales leaders and offering essentially nothing for the reps in the trenches. [See review]
Complexity. User reviews have complained of excessive complexity and an avalanche of features that they speculate may come from a relatively simple, robust tool groaning under the weight of additional features. [See review]
Pricing
Clari offers no public data regarding the cost of its service. Contact sales to get a quote.
7. 11x.ai
This is an AI and automation platform that creates autonomous digital workers for sales and revenue teams. Of these, "Alice" is the SDR, and it operates 24/7 across multiple channels doing research, outreach, and booking meetings.
Top features
Alice. Alice schedules meetings, sends follow-up emails automatically and qualifies responses on autopilot. This is done through humanlike conversations, as though with a real person.
Lead generation and qualification. Uses the ideal customer profile to automatically identify and qualify your best leads without manual database research.
Automated email and social outreach. The system sends fully automated, customized outbound email sequences and LinkedIn messages to prospects at scale without human intervention.
Pros
Good customer support. Some users have reported particularly good customer support with a smooth onboarding experience. [See review]
Surge in response rates. There are reports in reviews that, after some time investment to get the best out of the tool, it has managed to provide excellent service that helps increase response rates. [See review]
Time savings. Some users say that 11x helped them arrange meetings quickly that would have taken ages to do by hand. [See review]
Cons
Spam cannon. At least one user on Reddit has categorized 11x as a part of the group of tools that are "spam cannons." In general, there is worry that the tools tend to create a tsunami of low-quality, unwanted messages. [See review]
Complete lack of results. There has been strong criticism by users who find that the promise of the software has not been kept at all, and despite months of usage, the software has produced precisely zero meetings. [See review]
Difficulties managing subscriptions. There have been concerning reports about difficulty cancelling a subscription by users who found that they regretted signing up. [See review]
Pricing
11x does not disclose its pricing details publicly. For more information, book a demo with their sales team.
Gem-E: Smart outbound sales automation that delivers
Building outbound sales automation that works is hard. Many tools link a language model to an email client and CRM. But there's a difference between that basic setup and a solution that consistently delivers pipeline, protects your brand, and helps your sales team close more deals.
Gem-E is designed to bridge that gap. It brings together intelligent lead generation, data enrichment, and personalized outreach in a way that drives results.
Ready to see how smarter automation can transform your outbound sales efforts?
Book a personalized demo today and discover what Gem-E can do for your company.
