The AI Email Use Case I Keep Coming Back To: Vendavo

Nicole Lesher

I work in customer marketing at 6sense, which means I spend a lot of time inside our customer stories. This is one I come back to when someone asks: "What do you do when your SDR team is new and your TAM is huge?" 

Vendavo didn't wait for reps to ramp. They gave them a head start. 

The problem: Vendavo had a small SDR team — five in the US, three in Europe — with an average tenure of about five months. Their ideal customer profile is manufacturers and distributors generating over $1 billion annually. That's a massive TAM, complex software to learn, and new reps trying to develop messaging while managing hundreds of contacts each. Leads were coming in and sitting untouched for days or weeks. 

What they did: They joined the 6sense Email Agents beta in summer and named their AI agent "Lisa." She handles the full outreach cycle for MQL follow-up — a seven-day waiting period after a content download, then Lisa takes over. SDRs focus on 6QA accounts; Lisa covers everything else. The team can see exactly which accounts are hot or not, which helps reps prioritize without guesswork. 

What happened: 

In just the first six weeks of the pilot, Lisa delivered the same results as three human SDRs: 

• 24 qualified contacts 
• 9 meetings booked 
• 2 opportunities 

By year-end, the results had scaled to: 

• 66 qualified contacts 
• 19 meetings booked 
• 10 opportunities 
• $3.3M in generated pipeline 
• 3x return using AI Email versus BDRs 
• 10% increase in meetings booked 

Rich Fong, Senior Manager of Sales Development at Vendavo: 

"It started as a solution to just generate emails. But now, Email Agents are fully executing campaigns and following up with leads that our SDRs didn't have the bandwidth to go after. Leads would come in, and they would just sit there for days and weeks or were ignored completely." 

Steve Hastert, Director of Marketing at Vendavo: 

"The most impactful thing is reaching out to those folks we had talked to and then moved on from. Getting those back in the sales process has been the biggest win." 

Worth reading if: You have a lean or early-tenure SDR team, a large contact database, and leads that aren't getting touched fast enough. Vendavo's use of AI to bridge the execution gap while reps ramp is one of the most practical applications I've seen. 

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Nicole Lesher

The "compass" framing in Vendavo's story has always stuck with me. Using AI Email not just to send messages but to surface which accounts are actually worth attention. How is your team using AI agents to inform prioritization, not just automate outreach?