Revenue Agent Configuration Overview

Overview

The Revenue Agent automates and enhances your team’s selling efforts by using AI to source, enrich, and engage accounts and prospects based on predefined criteria.

Set up by admins or authorized users, the Agent follows custom targeting guidelines to enrich accounts and existing prospects using third-party data, identify new prospects within your ICP and engage them with personalized messaging.

Agents can support both fully automated and semi-automated workflows, allowing reps to stay focused on high-value accounts while the Agent handles time-consuming research and outreach for lower-priority or uncovered accounts. By mimicking a rep’s prospecting behaviour at scale, the Agent ensures consistent pipeline generation without disrupting the existing rep experience.

Introduction

This document is intended to provide step-by-step instructions on how to build out an AI Revenue Agent in Outreach

Key parts of Revenue Agent configuration

1. Pre-requisites for setup
2. Defining your target accounts
3. Identifying your target prospects
4. Setting up sequences and sequencer

Pre-requisites for setup

1. Amplify SKU: This feature is included as part of the Amplify SKU.
2. Data enrichment: Record enrichment through a third-party provider must be set up and enabled. For now, the Agent depends on enrichment being active, but it will soon be able to function even without it. Read more about Data enrichment.
3. Domain: The accounts you are syncing into the system need to have correct domains associated. If the account uses the subdomain, then the subdomain should be filled in. This is how the third-party vendor identify and match the account records with any data. If the account does not have a domain associated, it will not be able to match the two records and enrich the records.
4. Access control: Access to Agent is granted to specific user profiles that you designate . Administration > User management > Access control > Specific profile > Prospecting Agents. Available options:
5. Can view prospecting agents
6. Can create and edit prospecting agents (recommended for admins) 

Create Revenue Agent

This is a multi-step workflow that only works well if you have set up all the prior steps. How you target accounts for the Agent should follow your sales strategy.  In the upper right corner, hit +Revenue Agent– this allows you to set up a new Agent in the system. 

Identify Accounts and Prospects

Target accounts

The first step in defining your agent strategy will be to determine which accounts you would like the agent to target for the given sales use case. Knowing which accounts, you will be going after will help inform the content strategy that you use in later steps.

Account filters: Determine the specific account-level field(s) in Outreach that can be used to help the agent identify the right accounts. It can be helpful to play around with available filters in the Outreach account list view to determine which the AI Revenue Agent should use. If you have a saved view on the account page, you can apply the same filters in this step.

Example: 

[Functionality available only if Enrichment is enabled for your organization] 

Targeting signals: you can choose to further filter down your account list by layering on specific third-party signals. This is only necessary if you want to ensure the agent only engages with an account if a particular signal is detected. If you add multiple signals, an account only needs to match one of them to be picked up by agent,

If you're using targeting signals, the Agent will first try to enrich all the accounts shown in the preview. (How fast this happens depends on your enrichment speed, which you can set in the Administration > Integrations > Data Enrichment > Account enrichment limits.) After that, the Agent will only pull in accounts that match at least one of the signals you chose in the filter. 

Please note that adding signals won’t immediately update the account preview in the Agent setup. This is because accounts must first go through the enrichment process to determine whether they match the selected signals. Only accounts that meet at least one of the signals after enrichment will be included in the Agent.

Advanced settings – Throughput settings provide you with control over the Agent’s pace regarding the number of accounts that should be targeted daily. The default value is 30. 

What the agent will do: Accounts matching your criteria that have their domain filled in will be added to Agent’s target list. In case you have enrichment enabled in your organization, accounts will get automatically enriched by the third-party provider’s data. The rate at which accounts are picked up by the agent will depend on your throttle settings.

Target prospects

Once you’ve established which accounts the agent should be going after, the next thing you will need to define is specifically who it should target within those accounts.

When configuring your agent, you will be able to tell it whether it should:

1. Target existing prospects – prospects that already exist in Outreach
2. Find new prospects [Available only if enrichment is enabled for your organization] – identify new prospects via your third-party data provider that meet specified criteria and bring them into Outreach
3. Do both

Target existing prospects

If you plan to target existing prospects, you will need to identify the specific prospect-level field(s) in Outreach that can be used to help the agent identify the right people. It can be helpful to play around with available filters in the Outreach prospect list view to determine which the agent should use.

You can preview the prospects that match these filters and belong to the targeted accounts on the right side of the filter configuration. Note: At least one prospect filter is required.

What the Agent will do: Existing prospects that match your targeting criteria will be picked up by the Agent. If the enrichment is enabled for your organization, the agent will search for a record with a matching email in the third-party database, and if one is found, they will be enriched. Regardless of the enrichment outcome, the Agent will add them to a sequence.

Target new prospects 

[Available only if enrichment is enabled for your organization]

Revenue Agents can also discover new prospects based on the criteria you set. Use filters from the third-party data provider to define your ideal prospect profile. Available filters:

• Department – should the agent focus on prospects from specific departments?
• Seniority – should the agent target prospects at certain seniority levels?
• Location – are there certain countries that the agent should focus on?
• Time in current role – should the agent look for prospects that have been in their current role for a specific amount of time?
• Total work experience – should the agent look for prospects that have a certain amount of total work experience?
• Include only prospects with known phone number and/or known email – these options help to ensure that only Prospects with the needed contact information are enrolled in Sequence.

Notes:

• New prospects are identified using the third-party data provider’s Account ID, which is retrieved during account enrichment, to determine if the prospect belongs to the account.
• In order to ensure smooth automation, required fields or required field validation can be bypassed when prospects are created by Agent.

What the Agent will do: Agent will continuously search for new prospects matching your targeting criteria in the specific accounts. Matching prospects are added to the Agent, enriched and engaged via the sequence.

Assign owner to the newly sourced prospects

• Account owner: Newly sourced prospects will be assigned to the respective account's owner. Prospects belonging to accounts without an owner will be assigned to the agent creator.
• Specific user: New prospects will be assigned to the selected user.

Engage Sequence

Tell the agent which Sequence to use for each prospect group (existing and new), and how many prospects to Sequence at a given account per day. Consider the size of your sales team, and your outbound strategy when establishing your throttles.

When selecting the right Sequence, it’s important to consider the types of accounts the Agent will target and the audience it will be reaching out to. Different prospect personas may require varying levels of automation, and your messaging may need to be more or less personalized depending on your overall strategy.

The best practice recommendation is to create a new Sequence that the agent can leverage and include “AI Agent” in the Sequence name. This will make it easier to report on the success of your AI Agent(s) in the future. To create this Sequence, you can either clone an existing Sequence, leverage a Sequence blueprint, or create one from scratch.

1. Assign the relevant sequence to each prospect group
2. Set up sequencing and sourcing limits at a given account per day. Consider the size of your sales team, and your outbound strategy when establishing your throttles.

These settings will determine how many new prospects are created and added to the Agent daily, as well as how many existing prospects are added to the sequence.

1. Define who the agent should Sequence prospects on behalf of:
   1. For Existing Prospects
      1. Sequencer Mailbox is Prospect owner’s Mailbox (selected by default)
      2. Sequencer Mailbox is Account owner’s Mailbox
      3. Sequencer Mailbox is a specific Mailbox by Job role (MUA or Account Team user Job role)
      4. Sequencer Mailbox is a Specific user with specific mailbox
      5. Sequencer Mailbox is a Mailbox by team (choose an Outreach team and the Sequencer will be assigned to a member of that team via round robin)
   2. For New Prospects
      1. Sequencer Mailbox is Account owner’s Mailbox (selected by default)
      2. Sequencer Mailbox is a specific Mailbox by Job role (MUA or Account Team user Job role)
      3. Sequencer Mailbox is a Specific user with specific mailbox
      4. Sequencer Mailbox is a Mailbox by team (choose an Outreach team and the Sequencer will be assigned to a member of that team via round robin)

Review and Launch

Review the Agent’s settings.

Once you have fully configured your agent you can choose to “Prepare for launch” if you are ready to activate the agent. 

Otherwise, you can choose to “Save & quit” and activate the agent later when you are ready from the Prospecting agent library.

Enabling the team

Once your agent is up and running, the day-to-day experience for your reps will remain largely the same, except that they will have an AI agent bolstering their sales activities!

Any manual Sequence tasks will be assigned to the end user for completion, including any manual emails. Reps will be able to easily detect if an email step was drafted with AI personalization by the “Personalized” label at the top of the compose window, and any personalized content will be highlighted in purple so that it can be reviewed and adjusted by the rep if needed.

Reporting on Agent performance

To assess Agent’s performance effectively:

1. Create dedicated sequences specifically for Agents and make sure you can distinguish them (AI Agent in sequence name, tag them or add these to a unique collection.)
2. In the Sequence Performance Report, use the identifier as a filter to evaluate the impact of sequences used by Agent.

The Sequence Performance Report provides valuable insights, including the number of prospects added, email engagement metrics, meetings booked, and opportunity attribution. By isolating Agent sequences in a collection, you can gain a clear view of their contribution to your pipeline.

Additional Information

Best Practices

1. For Target Accounts, it’s a good idea to organize them into smart views. In the smart view, you’ll see the list of accounts, perform the final cleanup, and you can easily replicate the same filters in the Agent setup. Alternatively, you can tag the accounts you want the Agent to pick up – Agent can use the tag in the targeting criteria.
2. It’s recommended to have the first step of the sequence set as a manual email so your reps can double check the AI personalized content and confirm the accounts and prospects are accurate. Once the Agent Play is active, you can see the accounts and prospects associated on the Prospecting Agents listview.
3. Always ensure that the sequence being used by Agent is Active and is shared with reps. Sequence settings > Ownership > Sharing – others can see and use it.
4. It’s recommended to review Sequence settings > Ownership > Throttle newly added prospects section to ensure sequence has expected settings. The following settings help you to set up throttling limits and choose whether Agent should put prospects automatically to the sequence or whether rep needs to activate them first. For more information read article describing How to configure Outreach Sequence Throttles.
5. Review Sequence exclusivity settings (Sequence settings > Ruleset > Safety settings) of your sequence before you launch the Agent. If a prospect is already active in an exclusive sequence, the Agent will not add them to its sequence and will not attempt to do so again once the exclusive sequence is finished. To prioritize the Agent's sequence, the existing exclusive sequence must be completed first, after which the prospect must be manually added to the Agent's sequence.

If the Agent's sequence is exclusive, and the prospect is already in a non-exclusive sequence when the Agent tries to add them, the Agent will not add the prospect to its sequence. The best practice is to run only one sequence at a time per prospect, though this may vary depending on the nature of your sequence.

1. Always preview sequence steps that have AI Personalization in them. This ensures the messaging is in line with the Agent Play and strategy. To preview, simply hit the “Preview” button, find a prospect and hit generate.