Warmly

Company Background

Warmly is a signal-based revenue orchestration platform founded in 2023 and headquartered in San Francisco. With a team of 60+ employees and 25+ active users on the sales team, Warmly helps B2B companies identify and engage website visitors in real time by combining de-anonymization technology with buying signal intelligence. The platform enables revenue teams to see exactly who is visiting their website, understand their intent, and trigger personalized outreach at the moment of highest engagement.

As a company that sells to sales and marketing leaders, Warmly's own outbound motion needs to reflect the modern, signal-driven approach they advocate to their customers. Their go-to-market team recognized early that the days of high-volume, low-quality cold outreach were over — and that their sales process needed to match the sophistication of the product they were selling.

The Challenge

Warmly's sales team was struggling with the fundamental limitations of manual outbound, which was creating a bottleneck on three fronts that directly threatened pipeline growth.

Low response rates from traditional cold outreach. Warmly targets VP-level and C-suite buyers at B2B companies — an audience that is heavily prospected by dozens of sales tools competing for their attention. The team found that generic cold outreach, even when well-targeted, was not generating enough engagement to sustain their growth targets. Open rates were acceptable, but reply rates were consistently below where they needed to be. The core issue was not reach but relevance: prospects could tell when an email was templated, and they were ignoring it.

Excessive research time with inconsistent results. To combat low response rates, the team tried investing more time in manual personalization. SDRs were spending 8-10 hours per week on prospect research — scanning LinkedIn, reading company blogs, checking funding announcements, and looking for relevant triggers to reference in their outreach. The results were inconsistent. Some reps had a natural talent for finding compelling angles, while others struggled to produce messaging that felt genuinely personalized even after spending significant time on research. The quality gap between top performers and average reps was widening.

New rep ramp time and burnout. New SDRs joining the team took 4-6 weeks to reach full productivity. During the ramp period, they needed to learn Warmly's product positioning, understand the competitive landscape, develop familiarity with common buyer personas, and build the research skills necessary to write effective personalized outreach. This was a slow, manual process that relied heavily on shadowing experienced reps. Meanwhile, the repetitive grind of manual research was causing burnout across the team, leading to higher turnover and further exacerbating the ramp time problem as new hires replaced departing reps in a costly cycle.

"My CEO doesn't answer cold calls. I don't answer cold calls. So why are we training SDRs to make more of them?"

— Keegan Otter, Head of Revenue

Why Autobound

Keegan Otter, Warmly's Head of Revenue, evaluated multiple AI-powered outbound tools before selecting Autobound. The decision came down to three factors.

First, Autobound's Insights Engine aligned with Warmly's own philosophy of signal-based selling. Rather than generating emails from templates with basic variable substitution, Autobound starts with deep research — pulling from 400+ data sources to surface real-time buying signals, company events, and individual prospect context. This approach matched how Warmly's best reps already operated, just at a fraction of the time.

Second, Autobound provided the guardrails and auditability that Keegan needed to scale the team confidently. Every generated message could be reviewed, and the AI's reasoning — which insights it chose to reference and why — was transparent. This was critical for a company selling to sophisticated buyers who would immediately spot a poorly generated AI email.

Third, Autobound's messaging frameworks in AI Studio allowed Warmly to codify their best-performing approaches. Rather than relying on individual rep talent for personalization quality, the team could encode proven patterns that every rep — including new hires — could leverage from day one.

The Solution

Warmly integrated Autobound across their entire SDR team's workflow, replacing the manual research and writing process with an AI-assisted approach that maintained quality while dramatically increasing throughput.

The implementation focused on four capabilities:

• Automated prospect research via the Insights Engine: When an SDR identifies a target account — often triggered by Warmly's own website visitor intelligence — Autobound automatically pulls comprehensive research on the contact and their company. This includes recent funding events, leadership changes, hiring patterns, technology stack, competitive landscape, and individual professional milestones. The research that previously took 20-30 minutes per contact is completed in seconds.
• Signal-driven messaging generation: Using the surfaced insights, Autobound generates personalized email drafts that reference specific, timely, and relevant details about the prospect. The messaging is not generic "I saw your company is growing" filler — it references concrete events and connects them to Warmly's value proposition in a way that feels genuinely researched.
• AI Studio messaging frameworks: Warmly's sales leadership configured multiple messaging frameworks within AI Studio to match different outreach scenarios — first touch, follow-up, event-triggered, and competitive displacement. These frameworks encode the team's best practices, ensuring consistency across all reps regardless of experience level.
• Brand consistency guardrails: Every message is generated within configured guardrails that enforce Warmly's tone, positioning, and compliance requirements. The auditable workflow means sales leadership can review and refine the AI's output on an ongoing basis.

The Results

The impact of the Autobound deployment was measurable within the first month and continued to compound as the team refined their messaging frameworks.

The ramp time reduction from 4-6 weeks to 2-3 weeks was a direct result of new reps having immediate access to Autobound's research and messaging capabilities. Instead of spending weeks developing the research skills and market knowledge necessary to write effective outreach, new hires could produce quality personalized emails from their first day. Autobound effectively served as both a productivity tool and an onboarding accelerator — new reps learned what good outreach looks like by reviewing the AI's output, building their knowledge of the market and buyer personas as a byproduct of using the tool.

The jump from 25-30 personalized emails per rep per week to 100+ was transformative for pipeline generation. This was not a volume play with lower quality — reply rates improved alongside the volume increase because every email was backed by genuine prospect research rather than template-based variable substitution. The 40-meeting week represented the team's best single-week performance, driven by the combination of higher volume and better personalization quality.

Perhaps the most significant impact was on team morale and retention. The reduction in manual research hours freed reps to focus on the high-value activities they were hired for — having conversations, building relationships, and closing deals. The burnout cycle that had been driving turnover was broken, and the team reported significantly higher job satisfaction.

"With Autobound, reps are producing more output, faster, and without sacrificing personalization. It's like onboarding with cheat codes."

— Keegan Otter, Head of Revenue

What's Next

Warmly plans to deepen their Autobound integration by connecting it directly to their own website visitor intelligence platform. The vision is a fully automated pipeline where Warmly identifies a high-intent website visitor, Autobound instantly generates a personalized outreach sequence based on 400+ signals, and the sequence is triggered without manual intervention. The team is also exploring Autobound's API to power personalized messaging within Warmly's own product, helping their customers benefit from the same signal-driven personalization that has transformed Warmly's own sales motion.