Prospecting agent for small industrial manufacturers selling B2B on Salesforce

What The Prospector does

The Prospector works for a sales team of a few reps at an 11 to 50 person industrial manufacturer that sells equipment, components or services to other manufacturers. It owns the top of the funnel: maintaining the ICP and persona definitions, monitoring buying signals, researching target accounts, finding and verifying contacts, drafting personalized multi-step outreach, and logging everything cleanly in Salesforce. It does not close deals or negotiate. When a prospect replies with interest, books time or asks a technical or pricing question, the agent hands the conversation to the owning rep with a short research brief. Because the team wants it built and kept running, the agent is operated as a managed service with weekly tuning of signals, messaging and deliverability.

Custom build

The team runs Salesforce, so HubSpot Breeze agents are not a fit here. A custom Claude build orchestrated with n8n gives the best mix: Claude handles the research, account briefs, persona-specific drafting and reply classification well, including the technical language of industrial buyers, while n8n connects Salesforce, the data providers and the sending tool without forcing a new CRM. Data and sending stay in specialist tools (Apollo and FullEnrich for contacts, Leadfeeder (Dealfront) for visitor signals, Instantly for deliverability-safe sending), and Salesforce remains the single system of record. For a small team this avoids buying a heavy enterprise sales platform while still getting a controllable, auditable agent that can be tuned as the market changes.

What starts it

• A target account shows a buying signal such as a plant expansion, capex announcement, new facility, acquisition or hiring for plant manager, maintenance, quality or process engineering roles
• A known or newly identified company from the ICP visits high-intent pages such as product specs, application pages, RFQ or contact pages
• A rep adds an account to a Salesforce target list or marks a closed-lost opportunity as ready for re-engagement after a set period
• A champion at a past customer or active opportunity changes jobs to another account that fits the ICP
• A scheduled weekly run that refreshes the ICP account list and fills each rep's prospecting queue to an agreed capacity

What it reads

• Salesforce (accounts, contacts, opportunities, closed-won and closed-lost history, rep ownership and activity)
• Apollo for firmographic search, industry codes, headcount and job title data
• FullEnrich for waterfall verification of emails and direct dials before any contact is sequenced
• Leadfeeder (Dealfront) for company-level website visitor identification, which suits industrial buyers who research quietly before calling
• Public signals: company news, press releases, job postings, trade show exhibitor lists and permit or expansion announcements gathered through web search and APIs
• An internal knowledge base of products, applications, case notes, certifications and approved messaging maintained by sales and engineering

When a person takes over

• Any positive reply, meeting request or referral goes to the owning rep within the same business day with the account brief attached, because the first live conversation should come from a person who can speak to the application.
• Technical questions about specifications, tolerances, materials, certifications or compatibility are routed to the rep and, if needed, an applications engineer, since a wrong answer can cost the deal or create liability.
• Pricing, lead time, quote or RFQ requests are never answered by the agent and go straight to the rep to open an opportunity in Salesforce.
• Accounts that are strategic, named by leadership, or flagged as sensitive (existing distributor territories, competitors' customers under contract, current customers' sister plants) require rep approval before any outreach is drafted.

Rules it follows

• The agent only states facts found in a cited source or the approved knowledge base; if it cannot verify a claim about the prospect or the product, it leaves it out and flags the gap.
• Hard suppression rules: never contact existing customers, open opportunities, distributor or partner-owned accounts, or anyone who has opted out, and honor regional rules for cold email such as consent requirements in certain countries.
• Sending limits per mailbox, warmed secondary domains, verified emails only and automatic pause if bounce or spam complaint rates rise above agreed thresholds, protecting the main company domain.
• All copy follows a written style guide: short, plain English, no exaggerated claims, no invented results, no mention of competitors by name, and rep approval required on every message during the pilot.
• Every action is logged in Salesforce with the signal, source and agent version so managers can audit why an account was contacted.

How you know it works

• Qualified first meetings booked per rep per month
• Pipeline created in Salesforce from agent-sourced accounts, tracked by opportunity source field
• Positive reply rate by persona, signal type and message framework
• Share of agent drafts approved by reps without major edits
• Deliverability health: bounce rate, spam complaint rate and inbox placement across sending domains

From pilot to live

1. Pilot (first 4 to 6 weeks)Build the ICP and personas from Salesforce history, connect Apollo, FullEnrich, Leadfeeder (Dealfront), Instantly and Salesforce through n8n, and warm sending domains. Run with one or two reps on a single segment and 2 to 3 signal types, with every account brief and draft reviewed by a rep before sending.
2. Expand (next 6 to 8 weeks)Add the remaining segments, personas and signals such as job changes and closed-lost re-engagement. Move high-performing frameworks to light-touch review where reps approve in batches, and add booking links through a scheduler so interested prospects can book directly on rep calendars.
3. Full rollout and ongoing operationAll reps receive a daily prioritized queue. The operator reviews performance weekly, retires weak messages, adjusts scoring thresholds, refreshes the knowledge base with new case notes and certifications, and reports meetings and pipeline to the sales lead monthly.