Founder-led sales + AI copilot: How Guide 3x'd reply rates while saving hours every week

Guide’s AI copilot story so far

• 3x replies on Duo leads
• 109% higher interest on Duo leads
• 280% higher interested rate on top Duo signal

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Background

Guide is an all-in-one, AI-powered platform designed to streamline interview scheduling and candidate experience management for recruiters.

As an early-stage company reliant on founder-led sales, Guide faced the classic startup challenge: how to consistently generate new opportunities while juggling existing pipeline and product development responsibilities. 

This is the story of how they managed to take the pain out of their outbound with Amplemarket’s AI automation and sales copilot.

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The challenge

Guide’s outbound sales operations are handled entirely by Co-Founder and CEO Troy Sultan. Like many founders doing sales, he found it impossible to manage time-intensive prospecting and outreach alongside his other responsibilities, but attempts to outsource these tasks failed to bring the results hoped for. He tells us:

“I was spending too much time on a hodgepodge of manual stuff, outbounding via LinkedIn, and list building which I then got really fed up of doing. Slightly against our own instincts, we bit the bullet and tried an outsourced SDR approach, which was okay, but ultimately the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.”

Troy was clear about what Guide’s ideal solution would look like if the team were to scale their outbound effectively and sustainably:

“We needed a solution that married a great data set, automation, and a level of nuanced configurability that would get us comfortable trusting the outbound process to automation.” 

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More specifically, Troy identified an all-to-familiar time management paradox when it came to managing the company’s sales funnel: the better they performed at generating opportunities, the less bandwidth they had for continuing that prospecting work.

"What's really challenging is prioritizing your time across active opportunities versus new opportunity creation. There’s only so much we can manage, and we almost always have to prioritize our active and warm opportunities, which means our prospecting and cold outreach gets neglected."

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The solution

Guide evaluated a number of sales platforms before finding their ideal combination of data quality, automation capabilities, and social selling capabilities in Amplemarket.

The LinkedIn extension and autopilot features proved particularly valuable for Guide, whose target customers (recruiters) spend significant time on the platform. Troy explains,

"The LinkedIn integration was just super compelling to me. If I can automate a lot of these tasks, that's like a game changer. I didn't see that in any other tools."

When it came to Duo, Troy describes how the process of onboarding and fine-tuning his personalized AI Copilot helped keep him accountable in his outbound.

“Honestly, I hate outbound like the plague, and at the same time, I know I can spend too much time editing and overthinking things when I’m doing everything from scratch. Sometimes perfect is the enemy of done."

“But with Duo running outbound in the background, and with the Amplemarket team and founders reaching out to me to make sure I’ve got things set up to best effect, it stops me becoming my own worst enemy.” 

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The results

Since implementing Amplemarket and its AI sales copilot, Troy is managing to sustain more consistent outbound processes while saving valuable time through automation:

• 50% higher open rates on Duo leads (compared to average across all leads)
• 3x reply rates on Duo leads (compared to average across all leads)
• 109% higher interested rates on Duo leads (compared to average across all leads)
• 280% higher interested rate on top Duo signal (reactivate closed-lost opps in CRM)
• 2+ hours saved per week on manual prospecting (compared to before Amplemarket)

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Troy tells us:

"Duo Copilot is saving me at least two hours per week, and I'm still in the 'feel it out' phase. The real value that I get from Duo is that outbound is happening that otherwise just would not be happening!"

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For Guide, these gains align with their broader philosophy toward AI implementation: 

"We leverage AI and increasingly feel it's a competitive advantage if we can utilize it effectively. We don't really like the idea of growing our team bigger needlessly, but we do like the idea of growing really efficiently with high punching power."

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Duo also helps Troy identify high-intent prospects on LinkedIn faster by surfacing signals like engagements with specific LinkedIn thought leaders or LinkedIn company followers. 

Another approach made possible with the AI copilot is the reactivation of closed-lost opportunities in Guide’s CRM, which has enabled Troy to maximize the potential of prospects already familiar with his solution.

With these insights, he’s able to scale his multichannel approaches, integrating both email and LinkedIn touchpoints to maximize his reach across the company’s ICP:

"I like to sprinkle in LinkedIn engagements throughout my email sequence. So we email someone, then I'll visit the profile, then I'll send a connection request the next day, then I'll email, etc. Amplemarket supports this perfectly because our customers are all on LinkedIn and spend a lot of time there, but email is really where we'll get a demo booked."

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Conclusion

For founder-led sales teams facing the constant struggle to balance new opportunity creation with pipeline management, Guide's experience demonstrates the value of finding the right automation partner.

“Our mantra is that automation plus control is the holy grail. We’re always looking for ways to gain automation level efficiency while still maintaining the human level quality.”

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Amplemarket’s steady rollout of new AI features has kept Guide engaged with the platform even during busy periods:

"All of the features that have been shipped since we started using the product are more or less center of the bullseye to what's getting me more likely to spend time on outbound. Duo and Duo Autopilot — these are exactly what I wanted to see in the product!"

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Troy offers this advice for other founders managing sales responsibilities: 

"What I wish I'd known earlier is that doing it myself for as long as humanly possible is going to pay dividends. To do that without the right tools is impossible."

With Amplemarket's help, Guide has cultivated a sustainable approach to pipeline generation that frees Troy up to focus more time on other key founder responsibilities: building relationships with active opportunities and keeping the product at the forefront of the market.

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Learn more about Guide's recruiting solutions here and follow them on LinkedIn here.

Are you a founder looking to scale your sales without burning out? Trial Amplemarket’s AI sales copilot today and turn your outbound into a sure win.