Outbound: target account to accepted meeting

Target account list
ICP filter on the territory; tiered by potential; refreshed quarterly

Research and contacts
buying group mapped; AI drafts the first touch

Sequence
email, call, social over 2 to 4 weeks; a human runs the conversation

Engaged
a reply or a meaningful interaction, not an open

Meeting booked
scheduled; not yet pipeline

Recycle
no reply, not now, wrong contact; back to the list with a cool-off

No-show or not accepted
a no-show is rebooked once; a meeting the AE turns down goes back with a reason

owner · Sales Development, mapped to AEs. measured by · meetings held, held-to-SQL conversion, pipeline sourced, outbound win rate vs. inbound

TWO MODELS

SDR pod feeding AEs
Two or three SDRs mapped to a group of AEs, working contacts inside those AEs' accounts. The AE owns the account; the SDR owns the sequence; sourced credit is a field on the opportunity. Fits mid-market and enterprise, where a prospecting specialist is worth the handoff cost. Typical ratio around one SDR per two to three AEs.

Full-cycle AE
The AE prospects their own book and closes what they source. No handoff, no credit dispute, and the person who found the pain is the one who sells to it. Fits SMB and velocity motions, and is where many mid-market teams have moved as AI takes over research and first drafts. The cost is prospecting time competing with closing time, so the capacity model has to account for both.

Where AI sits in 2026: research, list building, contact mapping, and first-draft messaging are largely automated; the conversation after a reply is still human. Fully autonomous outbound agents were tried widely in 2024 and 2025 and mostly pulled back to a draft-and-review model.