Wholesale and corporate gifting prospecting agent for small DTC brands on Salesforce

What The Prospector does

A DTC brand with 11 to 50 people sells mostly direct to consumers, but its growth plan depends on a B2B channel: independent retailers and boutiques who stock the product, and companies buying in bulk for employee and client gifts. Today the founder and a small team of reps spend Monday mornings in spreadsheets, searching marketplaces and directories, guessing buyer emails and pasting rows into Salesforce, then sell for what is left of the week. Their website gets heavy traffic, but nearly all of it is shoppers, and the inbox is dominated by order status, returns and shipping questions, so the occasional real wholesale buyer gets lost. The Prospector owns the top of the B2B funnel: it holds the brand's ICP, wholesale offer, proof (sell-through stories the brand supplies, reviews, press) and common buyer objections as context; builds and refreshes target lists of retailers and gifting buyers; identifies business visitors on wholesale and gifting pages while ignoring consumers; enriches the right buyer contacts; writes first touches and follow-ups; and routes interested buyers to the right rep with a booked meeting and a brief. It runs on a seasonal calendar so outreach lands when stores plan their buys and companies plan year-end gifting. It does not answer consumer support questions, negotiate wholesale terms or set pricing; those go to people.

Custom build

The brand runs Salesforce, so Salesforce stays the system of record for accounts, owners, suppression and pipeline, and routing uses Salesforce Flow plus Chili Piper so reps work where they already work. For a team this size, a custom AI build orchestrated in n8n fits better than a heavy native agent deployment: it can read the ecommerce order database to keep consumers out of outreach, combine Apollo sourcing with FullEnrich waterfall verification, apply the seasonal calendar, and write clean records back into Salesforce, all without extra admin headcount. Sending lives in Instantly on separate domains to protect the brand's transactional email, and a Databox dashboard pulls from Salesforce and the outreach platform for the leadership view. Because the team wants it built and maintained for them, every component is a standard, replaceable service with monitoring rather than a fragile one-off script.

What starts it

• Sunday night weekly build: the agent assembles each rep's list of new retailers and gifting accounts so it is ready before Monday
• A business-domain visitor views wholesale, bulk order or corporate gifting pages, or downloads the line sheet
• A wholesale or gifting inquiry form is submitted, or a reply lands in the outreach inbox
• A seasonal window opens on the brand's calendar (retail buying season for the next selling period, the start of Q4 gifting planning)
• A rep marks an account as lost or not now in Salesforce, scheduling a researched re-engagement date

What it reads

• Salesforce: accounts, contacts, opportunities, existing stockists, owner assignments and the do-not-contact list
• Ecommerce platform order data, used only to suppress existing consumer customers and flag retailers who already order wholesale
• Website visitor identification (RB2B for person-level visits, with company-level reveal as backup) on wholesale and gifting pages
• Contact and company data from Apollo, with FullEnrich waterfall enrichment to verify buyer emails and phone numbers
• The brand's context library: ICP definitions by segment (boutique, regional chain, corporate gifting), line sheet, minimums, proof points and objection answers
• Outreach platform engagement data (opens, replies, bounces) from Instantly

When a person takes over

• Interested retailer or gifting buyer: the owning rep takes over the moment someone books or asks a real question, with a brief covering fit, store details, pages viewed and the thread so far. The agent never continues selling once a human owns the conversation.
• Pricing, minimums, terms or custom orders: any request for wholesale pricing beyond the published line sheet, exclusivity, net terms, co-branded or custom gifting packaging goes to the founder or sales lead, because these are margin decisions.
• Consumer support that lands in the outreach inbox: order status, returns or shipping questions are forwarded to the customer support team's help desk (such as Help Scout) the same day, untouched by the agent beyond a brief acknowledgment.
• New segment or messaging approval: before the agent prospects a new category (for example, hotel gift shops or corporate wellness programs) or uses a new proof point, the founder approves the ICP definition and the message.

Rules it follows

• Never prospect consumers: personal email domains, anyone in the ecommerce order database as a consumer customer and visitors who only viewed tracking, returns or account pages are suppressed from B2B outreach, so a shopper waiting on a refund never receives a sales email.
• Seasonal volume rules: outreach ramps up ahead of retail buying windows and Q4 gifting planning, and pauses or slows during the brand's own peak consumer season when the team is absorbed by order and shipping volume and cannot work replies quickly.
• Protect the main domain: all prospecting sends from separate warmed domains with daily caps, bounce thresholds that automatically pause a sequence and deliverability monitoring (Warmy or the outreach platform's own checks), because the brand's order confirmations and shipping emails cannot risk spam folder placement.
• Claims stay factual: the agent only uses proof points, reviews and sell-through stories from the approved context library, never invents margins, retailer names or results, and never quotes pricing beyond the published line sheet.
• Respect existing relationships and opt-outs: current stockists, accounts with open opportunities, distributor-covered territories and anyone who has unsubscribed or asked not to be contacted are checked in Salesforce before every send.

How you know it works

• Rep hours spent on manual list building per week (target is near zero by the end of rollout)
• Meetings booked and held with wholesale and gifting buyers per week, by segment
• New wholesale and gifting pipeline created in Salesforce, by source (weekly list, website visitor, re-engagement)
• Positive reply rate and bounce rate per sequence and sending domain
• Share of website-identified visitors that were correctly classified as business buyers (spot-checked by reps)

From pilot to live

1. Pilot: one segment, one rep (weeks 1 to 4)Load the context library, connect Salesforce, Apollo, FullEnrich and Instantly, and set up suppression against order data. Run the Sunday build for a single segment (for example, independent boutiques) for one rep, with the founder reviewing every draft before sending. Warm the sending domains in parallel and validate visitor filtering in log-only mode.
2. Expand: all reps and website signals (weeks 5 to 10)Turn on the weekly build for every rep and add corporate gifting as a second segment. Switch visitor identification from log-only to live routing, add Chili Piper booking and reply classification with support desk forwarding, and move approved templates to send without per-message review.
3. Operate: seasonal calendar and dashboard (week 11 onward)Load the full seasonal calendar so volume ramps and pauses automatically, launch the full-funnel dashboard from list built to pipeline created, and run a monthly review of segments, messaging and deliverability. Ongoing maintenance covers data source changes, domain health, prompt updates and new segments as the founder approves them.