Built an outbound research agent that doubled SDR meeting bookings without adding headcount.

The story

Projectworks sells professional-services-automation software into consultancies, agencies and architecture firms across New Zealand and offshore, a market where a good outbound conversation lives or dies on whether the rep actually understands how the prospect bills, staffs projects and recognises revenue. A generic pitch lands flat with a firm that runs fixed-fee architecture work, and lands differently again with a consultancy juggling time-and-materials retainers, so the difference between a booked meeting and a hang-up was almost always the quality of the homework the SDR had done first. The problem was that homework did not scale. Their SDRs were spending more of the day digging through LinkedIn, company sites, job ads and funding news than they were actually having conversations, and that manual prep was the real ceiling on how many qualified meetings each rep could book. Adding headcount was the obvious lever, but it was expensive and slow to ramp, and it did nothing to fix the underlying issue that the firm's best researchers were burning their best hours on lookup work a machine could do. Projectworks wanted to lift output per rep, not just add more bodies to an inefficient process.

What we built

1. 01

   Built an outbound research agent that compiles a one-page brief per target account, distilling scattered public signals into the few facts a rep can actually open a call with

2. 02

   Pulled firmographics, recent hiring patterns and tech-stack signals to flag genuine PSA fit and quietly deprioritise accounts that were never going to convert

3. 03

   Drafted tailored opening lines and discovery questions grounded in each brief, so reps led with the prospect's billing model rather than a generic script

4. 04

   Synced briefs and call disposition back into HubSpot automatically, so every rep started warm and the next touch built on what the last one learned

5. 05

   Pushed each finished brief into Slack the moment it was ready, letting reps queue their day around accounts the agent had already qualified

“The agent does in two minutes what used to eat a quarter of the rep's day. They walk into every call already knowing how the firm bills, who they just hired and exactly where we fit, so the conversation starts at a completely different level. We doubled meetings without adding a single person, and the reps actually enjoy the job more now that the grind is gone.”

Results at a glance

• SDRs opened conversations with sharp, relevant context instead of cold scripts, and prospects noticed the difference
• Research time per account dropped from roughly 15 minutes of manual digging to under two, freeing the calendar for actual selling
• Reps reinvested the saved hours into more dials and sharper follow-up, lifting booked meetings without a single new hire
• Newer SDRs sounded as informed as the firm's most experienced reps from their first week, because the prep no longer depended on individual research skill