AI Sales Agent Setup

One of the most exciting releases that Instantly has had over the last couple of months is the AI Sales Agent. What the AI Sales Agent does, it takes your outbound and it puts it on autopilot.

It simply looks at your website, learns about your business, and it will know exactly who it should be targeting, what to say to them, and when to target them, and it will do all of that automatically all day, every day. You set it up once, you maybe add some guidance on how you think your sales rep should behave, and then going forward, all outreach will be done for you and you just have to sit back, relax, and watch meetings roll in being booked into your calendar. That is what the Instantly AI Sales Agent is, and today we're going to learn exactly how you can set it up. It will be a short tutorial because the setup is very easy, very straightforward. Let me show you what I'm talking about. So if you're here within instantly, on the left hand side, can see the AI agents view.

When you click into that, you will see an empty view and you can then start selecting your AI sales agent. We have the AI reply agent. If you're not familiar with that, that is very helpful as well. But the AI sales agent takes things a few steps further and will actually do outreach for you. As you can see, it will find ICP Meds leads automatically, write the emails, build multi step outreach sequences, self optimizes based on reply patterns, meaning that if there's a specific sequence that is performing really well, going forward, it will lean more towards that type of messaging rather than coming up with new messaging.

And all of that will help fill your pipeline on autopilot. It will cost five credits per lead, and a lead is a lead that is processed from, let's say, to finish. So we find the lead, we enrich it, we write and send the email that will cost you five credits. So we're going to select the AI sales agent, and then the input could either be a URL, so that is my website, straightforward, or manual instructions.

In here, you can describe your product. Maybe you have a document that you're using for your go to market. You'll paste that in here. Or maybe you're saying, okay.

Listen. We have just one specific product within our company that we wanna use this for, then write a description, you drop it in here, and that's everything. Me, I'm going to use a URL, so I'm going to use instantly dot ai naturally. You hit accept the AI sales agent terms, and then you create your AI sales agent.

And it's already going to work finding leads for me. Now whenever you're curious what the AI sales agent is up to, you can look in the activity feed right here.

Right now what it's doing, it's understanding my business, meaning that it will look at the website, in my case, instantly dot ai. It will scrape that website and it will look, okay, who do we target, who do we sell to, which case studies do we have, what is our unique value proposition, so what do we bring to a business.

And once it has that, it's able to start preparing initial campaigns and find initial prospects as well, which is where a lot of the magic happens. It basically looks, okay, what does this business do? And let's find some leads for that. Now, let's see how that works under the hood because we obviously want to know a little bit what's going on because if we know what's going on, we can actually steer it as well. So what we're going to do first is we're going to start looking at memory.

So as you can see and if you've used Copilot in the past, this is the same, let's say, engine that powers it, where it looks at the website and based on that comes up with a business description. That's accurate.

As well as different business offers. So when I click into one business offer right here, you can see a longer description, whereas naturally us for instantly, we have multiple offers. Right? So we have Outreach CRM, we have our VIP team, and we have the lead finder. Now if I'm saying, okay, for this specific sales agent, I just want it to focus on the outreach part, then you simple simply toggle off the other business offers, and it will just use the in this case, outreach part, it will just use that one offer that you have toggled on, and it will use that for outreach. So with that, you could say, okay, I only want to try one offer and our other offers we will do with our sales team, or I wanna try this offer this quarter, or you could maybe say, okay, for this geographic location, we're running this offer.

A lot of different options that you have there, and it's important that you are aware that you do have that flexibility.

Then the same goes for customer profiles. So when you're here, you can see different customer profiles or add a new one.

In this case, for example, founders and sales leaders at marketing agencies, that is a great customer profile that we often go after it instantly. You can see the ICP name here.

But under that, it actually looks at, okay, instantly, which problems does it solve for founders and sales leaders at marketing agencies where now we help them scale client outreach, manage multiple email domains, etcetera, etcetera. Again, you could say this one, not that relevant, that one not that relevant. In this case, they're all relevant. Or you might say, hey, there's one that's missing. We found whenever we jump on a demo that this is the main reason that these people come on a demo, they convert. So I'm going to add that here, and then you can save an additional problem solved.

Then there are problems that you solve, there are benefits that your product or service has, and there are unique selling points, so what is it that you do that no one else does, as well as what are the goals for those customers and what are success stories. I'm gonna stop right there. There's more under. I'm going to dive into that in just a second.

However, all of this naturally makes really good input for messaging. So whenever you're reaching out to a founder at a marketing agency with twenty five employees, for example, then you know these are the problems that you can solve for them, these are the benefits that your product has, and this is your USP, and these are their main goals. So for example, a marketing agency, they might say, okay, we're doing outreach for our clients, but we wanna obviously do better for them. And the solution that we're currently using is just not really cutting it for us.

So all of that, if you blend all of that together, that can make some phenomenal messaging because you have all that background, all that information, all that what we call context, and that will help you even more so if you combine it with actual specific insights on that business. Because before reaching out, the AI sales agent will actually enrich every single business. So we get the business description, it will look for specific signals. Maybe they're hiring, maybe they're not hiring, maybe they're growing, maybe they're not.

It will look at all those different things and combine that with the background that you see here, which again will lead to better messaging because, you know, we have relevance and context and that equals really, really strong messaging. So those are the things that you just quickly wanna skim through them. It usually gets them right the first go, but in the end, no one knows your business better than you do, so drop that in there and maybe add some additional context if you want.

Then under there, so under success stories, this is where the targeting starts. So the keywords is where targeting starts, meaning that we're targeting marketing agencies. Imagine that we don't want to target SEO agencies, for example, because they use it don't do cold email. Then here under exclude keywords, I'm going to add SEO. So this is targeting the businesses that the AI sales agent will start targeting.

Look at company size, so naturally twenty five to one hundred is the company size that we're looking for here because that's the ICP that we determined. The industry, all makes sense. Then founder, CEO, head of sales, yes, that all makes sense, and then exclude interns, etcetera. Location, in this case, it works.

We might say, okay, let's make it a bit easier, and we have two different agents or separate campaigns for the UK and for North America just to make schedule a bit more, you know, a bit easier. But those are small details that you can always just figure out as you go. I'm happy with it. I'm going to save it, and that's it.

So now we have business details and custom profile saved, and that was literally just one click, me plugging in my website. I made a couple tweaks, so okay, I'll take, you know, three clicks, but that's still very, very good.

Then we get to guidance. So under guidance is imagine you're hiring and onboarding a new sales rep, and you have different ways that you're going to market. You have different messaging. You have different, things that are important in your sales process, maybe specific questions about pricing that you prefer not to answer. It could be a specific template that you know works really well. It could be that you wanna reach out in different languages.

All of that goes under here. So you click new rule, and you could say, write all email messages in I'm Dutch. Let's say in Dutch, for example.

You save that, and then going forward, it will write email messages in Dutch. You can give it a specific template or writing style or maybe there's a re specific call to action that you would like to use. You could say, I just wanna have I don't want, you know, lead magnet campaigns. I just want demos, for example.

And you tell, Okay, just try and go straight to demo because I've seen in my market people cut straight to the chase. That's what they prefer. You add that here. All of that goes guidance.

Going to go back to guidance in just a second because there are a couple specific small tips and tricks that will help you get the most out of the AI sales agent. So putting a pin in guidance, this is where help guide the agent naturally. Coming back to that in just a second.

Then we have the settings. So under here, we see a little bit more.

We have two different modes for it. So there's autopilot mode and human in the loop. So when you select autopilot mode, it will go and by itself go after clients and just do its thing.

You usually use that after you're saying, okay. I'm happy with how things look.

If you don't configure autopilot mode, what the sales agent will do is it will find leads, draft messages, and it will store them for you to approve. And I will show you that in just a second.

And then the moment you say, okay, that looks good, you can click send and it will send them. Or you might be saying, not sure about that message. I wanna change it or not sure about that lead. Probably take that lead out. And then based on that, you update the guidance and you keep going. The moment you say, Okay, now it looks good, you can always flip that switch and say, Okay, let's go full autopilot. So that's what autopilot mode does.

Personally, I recommend to not start with it and just play around with the human in the loop mode until you're very happy with the output and you know that you've pointed it at the right direction and then you just let it go.

Then find these automatically, that should just be toggled on because it will automatically discover and enrich new leads based on your ICP. Under accounts to use, you can add your email accounts. So that is straightforward. You go into here, select, and you select the email accounts you wanna use for the AI sales agent. Maybe you wanna have dedicated accounts inbox that you wanna use for the agent. That is completely up to you. Then under schedule and limits, and this is where I'm going to jump back into guidance a little bit.

When you're saying, okay, daily sending limit, how that works or how you can use this is initially it will find ten leads. Great. You look at the leads. If you're happy with them, great.

You can keep going. But if you're not happy with the messaging or the leads, you jump back into memory, you update the guidance. You add a new rule. You say change this or that.

Change whatever it is that you would like to change.

Then you go back under here, schedule on limits, and you increase this number. So then you, for example, turn turn this into twenty. It will find ten more leads using the updated guidance.

Then you can see, okay, did it pick up correctly on my guidance? Am I happy with the output now?

If you are, great, then you can keep going. If you're not happy with it yet, go back into memory, guidance, update the guidance, change the number from twenty to thirty. Great. Now we'll find ten more leads with the updated guidance applied, and you can just keep playing around with until you're happy with it, and then it will start sending.

So that's how you can use a daily sending limit, and that's how you can use that to see how the guidance is applied. Then basic deliverability, these are things that I would recommend leaving all just toggled on. OpenTracking, we don't really wanna track these days. ESP matching means that if you have multiple inboxes, so if you have Gmail inboxes and Outlook inboxes, if your lead uses Gmail or G Suite, it will try and send from your G Suite inboxes to their G Suite inboxes and from Outlook to Outlook.

That usually it it varies a little bit, but that often means you have a higher chance of landing in the inbox. If you only have one type inbox, don't worry. Then it will just override this setting and will send with the inboxes that you have.

Prioritize new leads means that it will try and send the first email first and then the follow-up. So imagine you have a hundred leads in your campaign, it will first send your first email to all hundred and then send the follow-up to all one hundred. So that just means that you will contact all the leads as quickly as possible.

It's a personal preference of mine as it is from the AI sales agent as you can see, but you can always turn that off. The text based opt out means that you do not have to add a unsubscribe link, but instead you use a text line that usually helps with deliverability. We recommend you leave that on, but that again is completely up to you. And then under Slack integration, you can just add it to Slack and you can keep up with the activity in Slack. So the last view that we haven't looked at is the leads view. Now this naturally is very let's say there's a lot of rich information that you can see exactly who we're targeting.

You can see, as I said earlier, maybe specific company news, funding types, anything that happened to that company recently. And all of that is just used as context in the emails and the messaging that your AI sales agent will use. So we'll look at, let's say, the entire row, including company description, all of that, and it will then write an email as you can see here.

Again, if you're happy with those emails, you go back into memory, you update your guidance, then you go back to settings, schedule on limits, and you say twenty, hit enter, and then it will find ten more leads with the new is applied. So then as I jump back into the live feed, as you can see here, finding prospects, it will ask me to approve the finding prospects part because I updated the daily limit from ten to twenty. I hit approve. Activity is approved, and it will carry out the activity, that's it.

So whenever you're working with the agent and you don't have it set to autopilot, then you could always just jump into the activity feed here, and you can see exactly what's going on, what you need to do so you can, you can approve emails or you can try and rewrite them, etcetera. So all of that is under here. As you can see, I just approved the finding of new prospects. It goes out and it finds new prospects, and that's it.

That is honestly the entire tutorial for the AI sales agent when you plug in your website, and you just give it the context that it needs, and it will do everything for you. You can keep track of it with the activity feed, but if you're ever stuck, if you're ever not sure exactly what's going on with the AI sales agent campaigns, you have this little icon right here. There's the diagnostics icon. You click that, and it will run campaign diagnostics.

So in my case, it's outside of the scheduled sending hours, but I also don't have accounts connected. So we see both notifications. I can easily solve that, and then we're good to go to start sending again. And there's quickly looking at leads.

I can now see leads coming in with Dutch emails written all from just adding that one very simple line under guidance. And that's just one example if you want specific templates, anything else, that goes under guidance. The agent picks it up and will do cold outreach for you on autopilot so you don't have to learn all of these things from scratch and you can focus on actually doing your job. That is the AI Sales Agent.

If you have any questions, then you know where to find us. But go ahead and set up your first AI Sales Agent with instantly dot ai.