Speed-to-lead prospecting agent for inbound demo requests at a small ecommerce software company on Salesforce

What The Prospector does

A 11 to 50 person company selling software to ecommerce and DTC brands gets demo requests through its website form, but a rep usually replies the next morning, and by then roughly half of those brands have stopped responding or booked with a competitor. The form is also noisy: shoppers looking for order status, existing customers with shipping or returns questions, agencies, and vendors all land in the same queue, which slows reps down even more. The Prospector works for the sales team and owns the first hour of every inbound request. It classifies the submission, enriches the brand and the person, scores fit against your ICP and personas, sends a personalized reply with a booking link, routes non-sales requests to the right team, writes everything back to Salesforce, and runs short follow-ups on prospects who do not book. Reps own every live conversation, every demo, and every pricing discussion.

Custom build

This team runs Salesforce, so HubSpot Breeze is not the right fit, and Salesforce's own agent tooling is heavy for an 11 to 50 person company that needs one focused workflow working fast. A custom Claude build orchestrated in n8n handles the hard part well: reading messy free-text form submissions, telling a buyer apart from a shopper asking where their package is, and writing a reply grounded in the brand's actual storefront. n8n connects Salesforce through its API (or an MCP connector), calls FullEnrich and Apollo, and triggers Chili Piper routing, all in one place that is easy to monitor and adjust. Because the team wants it built and kept running, this setup also makes ongoing tuning straightforward: prompts, scoring rules and templates live in version-controlled workflows rather than scattered across tools.

What starts it

• A new demo request form submission creates a Lead in Salesforce (24/7, including nights and weekends)
• A high-fit brand identified by website visitor tracking views pricing or integration pages without submitting the form
• A prospect who received a booking link has not scheduled after a set number of hours
• A booked meeting is cancelled or the prospect does not show
• A seasonal window opens (for example, the run-up to peak holiday trading) and the agent switches to its peak-season messaging and routing rules

What it reads

• Salesforce Leads, Contacts, Accounts and Opportunities, including past closed-lost reasons and existing customer records
• Demo request form fields and free-text message
• Contact and company enrichment via FullEnrich waterfall lookups, with Apollo as a fallback for firmographics
• Storefront signals gathered from the brand's public site: ecommerce platform, approximate catalog size, apps and tools in use, shipping and returns policy pages
• Warmly website visitor and intent data (pages viewed, repeat visits, company identification)
• Help desk system for checking whether the sender is an existing customer with an open ticket

When a person takes over

• A prospect replies with a pricing, contract, or custom integration question: the agent stops, tags the rep, and the rep answers personally, because commercial terms and technical commitments are never the agent's call.
• A multi-brand group, a large retailer, or an agency representing several stores submits a request: it routes to the head of sales or a founder for a personal reply, since these deals are worth more and need judgment on how to engage.
• The classifier is unsure whether the sender is a buyer, a shopper, or an existing customer: the submission sits in a human review queue with the agent's best guess, and a person decides within business hours.
• An existing customer uses the demo form, often to ask about an add-on or a problem: the account owner takes it so the relationship stays with the person who knows the account.

Rules it follows

• The agent never answers order status, shipping, refund, or returns questions, never asks shoppers for order numbers or payment details, and forwards these straight to the help desk with a short acknowledgment.
• No promises about go-live dates, implementation timelines, or readiness before peak trading periods. If a prospect asks whether they can be live before the holiday season, the agent books the call and flags the timing question for the rep.
• Every outgoing message uses only facts verified from the form, enrichment, or the prospect's public storefront. If a detail cannot be confirmed, it is left out rather than inferred.
• Messages come from the assigned rep's mailbox, follow your approved templates and tone, cap at three follow-ups, and honor unsubscribes and any data privacy requests immediately.
• Salesforce writes are limited to defined Lead fields, tasks and notes. The agent cannot convert leads, create Opportunities, change ownership outside routing rules, or delete records.

How you know it works

• Median time from demo request to first personalized reply, tracked separately for business hours, nights and weekends
• Demo request to meeting booked rate, split by fit tier
• Meeting held rate (booked meetings that actually happen)
• Pipeline created from inbound demo requests per month, compared with the same season last year
• Share of non-sales submissions correctly routed away from reps, measured by human corrections in the review queue

From pilot to live

1. Phase 1: Shadow mode on live inboundConnect Salesforce, the form, enrichment and Chili Piper. The agent classifies, enriches, scores and drafts replies for every request, but reps send them. Compare the agent's classifications and drafts against what reps would have done, and lock the ICP rules and templates.
2. Phase 2: Auto-reply for clear casesTurn on automatic replies and instant booking for high-confidence buyers and automatic routing for shoppers and existing customers, starting with nights and weekends where the delay hurts most. Medium-confidence leads still get rep-approved drafts. Review booking and misroute data weekly.
3. Phase 3: Full coverage and ongoing operationExtend auto-reply to all hours, add follow-up sequences, no-show recovery, and visitor-intent triggers from Warmly, and load seasonal playbooks for peak trading. A named owner monitors errors, reviews the weekly report, retunes prompts and scoring each month, and re-tests before every seasonal spike.