How Beautiful.ai built an SDR motion without hiring a single SDR

A sales team with no top of funnel

Beautiful.ai is the AI presentation platform that turns a prompt, an outline, or a document into a finished deck. Its go-to-market team is built around account executives, with no SDR function to work the top of the funnel.

Breakout became that layer: identifying the companies on the site, answering product questions before they reached a human, and handing AEs real conversations with real buyers. Kathryn Brown, who runs lead gen, demand gen, and sales enablement, has been using Breakout for about six months.

Beautiful.ai’s sales org is weighted toward closers.

“Our sales team is more focused on account executives than an SDR team,” says Kathryn Brown, Senior Marketing Manager. “So we were looking for something to supplement those efforts in booking meetings and getting more leads, just trying to improve our lead volume and lead quality for the year.”

There was a second, quieter drain on the team. A meaningful share of inbound form fills weren’t buying signals at all. They were product questions.

“Instead of getting a lot of people inbounding through our lead form just to ask a product question, maybe we could decrease the number of those inquiries coming from that channel and answer their questions through an automated agent.”

Both problems had the same shape: the AEs were spending time on work that a top-of-funnel layer should have absorbed.

They found Breakout by using Breakout

The evaluation started in the most direct way possible.

“We found Breakout and used the actual tool on the Breakout website, and was impressed with the results we were getting in terms of what Breakout was and what it did.”

The product demoed itself. Kathryn came away thinking it could do both jobs at once: lift lead volume and absorb the product questions.

Try it on your own traffic first

Onboarding new software is usually where momentum dies. This didn’t go that way.

"It [Onboarding Breakout] was really simple. It was very nice because we had the ability to put the tracking signal on our website and actually get to test it out for a bit until we committed."

What Beautiful's trial with Breakout surfaced made the buying decision easy.

“We loved that we could see who was on our website, what companies were looking into us, as well as the ease of use of the product. It was very easy to understand and navigate, and to get other people at the company to understand how it works too. It’s very easy to explain the use case.”

Results in the first quarter

“Right off the bat, it was amazing to see that we were capturing a ton of new leads. We increased our lead volume in the first quarter using Breakout, and then we were able to close three new opportunities.”

Kathryn notes that the notable part is the timeline. “That is usually not the case when we bring on a new tool; it takes a really long time to see those kinds of results. So that was really encouraging.”

The impact in the first quarter:

• Lead volume up in the first quarter on Breakout.

• Three new opportunities closed, unusually fast for a newly adopted tool.

• Fewer product questions reached sales, freeing the team to focus on other opportunities.

• Target accounts were surfaced for AEs by revealing the companies visiting the website.

That last point closes the loop on the original problem. Without an SDR bench, Beautiful.ai’s AEs needed a list of accounts already showing interest.

The website was producing that list all along, it just wasn’t visible until now.

Live chat, and getting credit for it

The feature Kathryn singles out is live chat, because it puts AEs into conversations at the moment of interest, while the buying window was still open.

“It’s helped us capture leads in real time and have real conversations between prospects and our account executives right when the conversations are taking place.”

And it lands cleanly in the systems the team already runs on. “It was very seamless to connect to tools like HubSpot so that we could import our form and track our leads there, and be able to attribute Breakout as well.”

What’s next: industry-led ABM

The roadmap builds on the account data Breakout is already generating.

“We’re definitely looking at more industry-focused campaigns. It’ll be important to use the accounts we see visiting our website through Breakout, sort those by industry, and build industry lists based on those accounts.”

From there, a coordinated outbound motion: “In addition to just being able to do a multi-touch account-based marketing approach, using our Breakout visiting companies as a basis to do a LinkedIn campaign, an email outreach campaign. Just having more focus in terms of the accounts we’re reaching out to, and having some signal that those accounts are interested in presentation software as well as our product.”

In Kathryn’s words

“I love how Breakout is so easy to use. It’s already proven to have such a great return on investment just in half a year. And the Breakout team is always there to answer my questions.

It’s also nice to have a partner such as Breakout that helps me think about all the marketing initiatives I’m trying to run, and brainstorm with me how they can use their tool to support that. One thing that’s been really great specifically has been the live chat feature. It’s helped us capture leads in real time and have real conversations between prospects and our account executives right when the conversations are taking place.

It was very seamless to connect to tools like HubSpot so that we could import our form and track our leads there, and be able to attribute Breakout as well. Overall, it’s just a great, easy-to-use product.”

— Kathryn Brown, Senior Marketing Manager, Beautiful.ai