Founder-led sales + AI copilot: How Guide 3x reply rates while saving hours every week

Guide is an all-in-one, AI-powered platform built to streamline interview scheduling and candidate experience management for recruiters. As an early-stage company reliant on founder-led sales, Guide faced a classic startup challenge: consistently generating new opportunities while managing an existing pipeline and ongoing product development.

This is the story of how the team removed the pain from outbound by leveraging Amplemarket’s AI automation and sales copilot.

Guide’s outbound sales operations are handled entirely by Co-Founder and CEO Troy Sultan. Like many founders doing sales, he found it nearly impossible to manage time-intensive prospecting and outreach alongside his other responsibilities. Attempts to outsource these tasks also failed to deliver the hoped-for results.

Troy explains:

“I was spending too much time on a hodgepodge of manual stuff, outbounding via LinkedIn, and list building, which I eventually got really fed up with. Slightly against our instincts, we bit the bullet and tried an outsourced SDR approach. It was okay, but ultimately, the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.”

Troy was clear about what Guide’s ideal solution would look like if the team was to scale outbound effectively and sustainably:

“We needed a solution that married a great data set, automation, and a level of nuanced configurability that would get us comfortable trusting the outbound process to automation.”

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More specifically, he identified a familiar time-management paradox common in founder-led sales: the better they performed at generating opportunities, the less bandwidth they had to continue prospecting.

“What’s really challenging is prioritizing your time across active opportunities versus new opportunity creation. There’s only so much we can manage, and we almost always have to prioritize our active and warm opportunities which means our prospecting and cold outreach gets neglected.”

Guide evaluated several sales platforms before finding the ideal combination of data quality, automation capabilities, and social selling features in Amplemarket.

The LinkedIn extension and autopilot features proved especially valuable for Guide, whose target customers (recruiters) spend a significant amount of time on the platform.

Troy explains:

“The LinkedIn integration was just super compelling to me. If I can automate a lot of these tasks, that’s a game changer. I didn’t see that in any other tools.”

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When it came to Duo, Troy describes how onboarding and fine-tuning his personalized AI Copilot helped keep him accountable in his outbound efforts.

“Honestly, I hate outbound like the plague. At the same time, I know I can spend too much time editing and overthinking things when I’m doing everything from scratch. Sometimes perfect is the enemy of done.”

“But with Duo running outbound in the background, and with the Amplemarket team and founders checking in to make sure I’ve got things set up for success, it stops me from becoming my own worst enemy.”

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Since implementing Amplemarket and its AI sales copilot, Troy has seen notable results, including:

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Troy shares:
“Duo Copilot is saving me probably at least two hours per week, and I’m still in the ‘feel it out’ phase. The real value I get from Duo is that outbound is happening that otherwise just wouldn’t be happening!”

For Guide, these gains align perfectly with their broader philosophy on AI:
“We leverage AI and increasingly feel it’s a competitive advantage if we use it effectively. We don’t want to grow our team bigger needlessly, but we do want to grow efficiently with high punching power.”

Duo also helps Troy identify high-intent prospects on LinkedIn faster by surfacing signals like engagements with specific thought leaders or company followers. Another key benefit is reactivating closed-lost opportunities in Guide’s CRM, enabling Troy to maximize prospects already familiar with his solution.

With these insights, he scales his multichannel approach by integrating both email and LinkedIn touchpoints to maximize reach across the company’s ICP.

“I like to sprinkle in LinkedIn engagements throughout my email sequence. So we email someone, then I visit their profile, then send a connection request the next day, then email again, and so on. Amplemarket supports this perfectly because our customers are all on LinkedIn and spend a lot of time there, but email is where we’ll actually book demos.”

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For founder-led sales teams struggling to balance creating new opportunities with managing their pipeline, Guide’s experience shows the value of finding the right automation partner.

“Our mantra is that automation plus control is the holy grail. We’re always looking for ways to gain automation-level efficiency while still maintaining human-level quality.”

Amplemarket’s steady rollout of new AI features has kept Guide engaged with the platform even during busy periods:

“All of the features shipped since we started using the product have hit the bullseye on what motivates me to spend more time on outbound. Duo and Duo Autopilot are exactly what I wanted to see in the product!”

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Troy offers this advice to other founders managing sales responsibilities:

“What I wish I’d known earlier is that doing it myself for as long as humanly possible pays dividends. Doing that without the right tools is impossible.”

With Amplemarket’s help, Guide has built a sustainable approach to pipeline generation that frees Troy to spend more time on other key founder responsibilities, such as building relationships with active opportunities and keeping the product at the forefront of the market.