Inbound marketing has always had a ceiling: human capacity.
No matter how well your campaigns perform, leads can only be worked as fast as your team can get to them. Events go unfollowed. Old leads go cold. High-intent visitors drop off your site without ever hearing from you.
Maura Rivera, CMO at Qualified, joined Lindsey Groepper on SaaS Half Full to talk about what happens when you remove that ceiling by deploying an AI SDR (sales development representative) agent to work your entire inbound funnel 24/7.
The chatbot box is too small
Most marketers hear “AI SDR agent” and picture a chatbot handling inbound form fills. Rivera says if you think about it that way, you’re leaving a lot of pipeline on the table.
“Look at your whole inbound funnel and ask, ‘Where do I have opportunity to be squeezing more pipeline out of those touch points?’ Then deploy an agent there,” she said.
We’re talking top-of-funnel leads who are barely scratching the surface with your content, mid-funnel leads from events, and high-intent leads who filled out a form. An agent can work all of them simultaneously while never running out of capacity.
The event follow-up no one was doing
Rivera’s favorite use case is one most marketers silently dread: event follow-up.
“You could spend $150,000 on an event and then not give the follow-up the attention it deserves,” she said.
The problem isn’t that teams don’t care. It’s that traditional marketing has always been built around scarcity. Humans can only work so many leads, so the “worthiest” ones get attention and everything else quietly slips. Event leads, almost always, are everything else.
Instead, Qualified put an agent on the job. This year, it spent 90% more on events and got 352% more pipeline from them, compared to the prior year when humans worked those leads. Rivera then redeployed her 10 human inbound SDRs to outbound prospecting — where human judgment and relationship-building matter significantly.
Other use cases worth putting on your radar:
- Reactivating dormant leads: An agent can scan tens of thousands of cold contacts, detect fresh intent signals, and send a relevant outreach email automatically.
- Website drop-offs: Someone gives you their email but leaves before booking a meeting? The agent follows up.
- Pre-event outreach: Hook the agent into your CRM, and it can send personalized emails on behalf of your AEs before the event even starts.
Meet the bot manager
One of the more unexpected takeaways from the conversation was that agentic marketing is creating entirely new roles.
Rivera’s team now includes a GTM AI Operations Manager named Ryan — a former top-performing human SDR who now wakes up every day asking whether the agents are on-message, well-fed with content, and behaving correctly.
This role didn’t exist a few years ago. As more teams put agents into production, Rivera expects it to become a standard part of the modern marketing org.
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Transcript
Generated by YouTube and cleaned up with ChatGPT.
[0:00] Maura Rivera:
When we talk to our customers, I always ask: where do you have headaches in your funnel? You could start an agent with bottom-of-funnel MQL follow-up, but don’t stop there. One place I really struggled was getting our team to do proper event follow-up. They would ignore those leads — “it’s not worth my time to follow up with all those people.” So look at your whole inbound funnel, identify where you have opportunities to squeeze more pipeline out of those touchpoints, and deploy an agent there.
[0:33] Lindsey Groepper:
Welcome back to SaaS Half Full, the only show serving B2B SaaS marketers. I’m Lindsey Groepper, EVP at PANBlast, and I’ll be both your host and bartender today. I had an awesome conversation with Maura Rivera, who is the CMO at Qualified. We’re talking all things agentic marketing and how you might be undervaluing what an SDR agent can bring to the table. So grab a drink and join me as I speak with Maura. Hey, Maura, welcome to SaaS Half Full!
[0:58] Maura Rivera:
Hi, Lindsey. Thank you for having me.
[1:00] Lindsey Groepper:
I am so excited that you agreed to come on. We’ve known each other for a couple of years, always in person. I was recently on a webinar that you hosted—you had champagne sent to me and we talked about SDR agents. You had the CMO from Amplify on, and it got me thinking that the way I think about SDR agents and agentic marketing is very narrow, very in a box. And I thought there are probably other people who look at it the same way I do. So I invited you to come on and talk to us about this today. Did we get you a cocktail kit for the show?
[1:42] Maura Rivera:
I have my mocktail—it’s 11am here, so I’m having a fruity San Pellegrino with lemon. In a couple of hours, I’ll be having a real cocktail.
[1:52] Lindsey Groepper:
Love it. I’m on the East Coast, it’s 2pm on a Friday, and it is a solid four degrees outside in Indianapolis, so I am having a glass of red wine. Cheers! Thank you so much for joining. Before we dive into agentic marketing and AI SDRs, I’d love to hear a bit about you, Maura—your background, and then the elevator pitch for Qualified. How did you get into B2B SaaS marketing in the first place?
[2:44] Maura Rivera:
My name is Maura, I’m the CMO at Qualified, and it’s been fun getting to know you over the last few years, Lindsey. I live in the East Bay, I have three kids—ages three, five, and seven—so they keep me quite busy. I’ve been at Qualified for about seven years. I was the seventh hire when I started; we were a small team with a big dream of transforming pipeline generation. Today we’re about 300 employees with a real, tangible brand and a ton of customers using our agentic marketing platform in production. It’s been a highlight of my career. Prior to Qualified, I worked at a few startups in the Salesforce ecosystem, and before that I was at Salesforce itself—right out of college. I probably had a five- or six-year run there, and I kind of just landed there by luck. I had no idea the doors it would open for me. I landed early in my career as an executive assistant to the CMO at Salesforce, and my eyes just widened. I thought, wow, B2B marketing can be incredible—you can be storytellers, put on events, build community. In retrospect, I didn’t fully appreciate landing at such an incredible company right out of college. I thought that must just be what it’s like to work in technology. But it set a trajectory for my career, and most of the folks I met in that first role—15, 16 years later—I’m still working with the same group of people. All of our founders at Qualified are former Salesforce executives. So it’s created this awesome career path, going from a big company to smaller startups to a true startup, and now we’re in scale mode, which is really, really exciting.
[3:49] Lindsey Groepper:
I did not realize you served as an executive assistant to the CMO. So you know where all the bodies are buried!
[4:48] Maura Rivera:
When I was thinking about taking the role, I wasn’t sure—EA wasn’t where I pictured myself. But my dad said, ‘Consider this an MBA in marketing. You get to see how it’s run from behind closed doors. Just absorb everything.’ That was the best advice I ever got. In terms of who we sell to and what Qualified does: we sell to CMOs and VPs of Demand Gen, and we’re focused on helping them generate more pipeline. We have an agentic marketing solution—there are a lot of new words there, so let me break it down. We have an AI SDR agent named Piper, because she generates pipeline. The idea is she works on your website to engage visitors when they arrive, she works in the email inbox to follow up with all your marketing leads, and she gives the marketing leader more control over the entire inbound funnel. That’s our core solution. One thing worth noting: we have tons of customers who personify their agents to match their brand. Brex has Brexton, Amplify’s agent is Emmy, Lattice has Laddie. We’re giving CMOs agents that work their inbound funnel 24/7/365—and it’s been really cool to see what all of our customers have done with those agents in production.
[6:25] Lindsey Groepper:
When I was listening to Susan from Amplify on your virtual event—you called it a ‘Taste of Qualified,’ right? Sip champagne, see some product demo. That’s really what opened my mind. Because when I hear ‘SDR agent,’ I think chatbot for inbound leads, full stop. What I learned was there are so many other use cases where an SDR agent adds tremendous value. Do you feel like most marketers think about SDR agents the same narrow way I did? And where do you see them leaving the most value on the table?
[7:27] Maura Rivera:
That’s a great question. And yes, starting with an SDR agent doing the work your human SDRs do—following up with high-intent inbound leads from contact us or demo request forms—that’s the natural entry point. But what we’re excited about is looking at your entire inbound funnel: top-of-funnel leads just starting to engage with your content, mid-funnel engaged leads, and those high-intent leads at the bottom, and having an agent work all of them. When I talk to customers, I always say: where do you have headaches in your funnel? One place I really struggled was getting humans to do proper event follow-up. They’d ignore those leads. It was always pulling teeth—our SDRs would say it’s not worth their time. So look at your whole inbound funnel and ask where you have opportunities to squeeze more pipeline out of those touchpoints, then deploy an agent there. A lot of what we talk about in our community is this: don’t just use an agent to replace what the human was doing. Figure out where there are other opportunities. The traditional inbound funnel is reliant on marketing automation—rules-based journeys, branching logic, ‘if this then that’—and it’s entirely reliant on human capacity. Once leads hit a certain threshold, you have humans work them. In the agentic world, you realize: I could have an agent work all of those leads. The ones marketing automation is touching, the ones humans are working—an agent can work the whole funnel. So an AI SDR agent is maybe even more than meets the eye. It’s an agent to work your entire inbound funnel.
[9:38] Lindsey Groepper:
Absolutely. And while we’re mostly talking about marketing owning this, there’s overlap with sales—working leads, replacing some of what a traditional SDR would do. How do you think about marketing-owned versus sales-owned? Who should own the agent and when?
[9:59] Maura Rivera:
The distinction I like to make is inbound versus outbound. Everything marketing does to drive campaigns, bring people to your website, host events—marketing can really own the agent doing that follow-up, nurturing leads, and moving them into pipeline. Then there’s a whole other world of outbound prospecting, which typically rolls up to the CRO and sales—identifying contacts, building buying groups, doing account research. So an inbound AI SDR agent works for the CMO; an outbound prospecting agent usually rolls up into sales. That said, sales and marketing both own the pipeline number, so you need buy-in from your counterpart. ‘Hey, I’m going to try this—are you down for me to test it? I think I can commit to this much more pipeline.’ And if sales is trying a new outbound agent, make sure marketing is bought in so it stays on-message and on-brand. We see a lot of companies with revenue operations teams orchestrating agents across functions so you’re not deploying them in a totally siloed way. But inbound versus outbound is a clean way to start.
[11:26] Lindsey Groepper:
That’s a good delineation. In terms of signals—from a human standpoint there’s signal overload. Do you find it’s easier for an AI agent to prioritize signals, or does it approach them differently than a human would?
[11:51] Maura Rivera:
You have the same infrastructure—signals coming in from everywhere, whether you’re using 6sense, Demandbase, or Qualified’s own signals. That’s what fuels the agent’s behavior. The agent can see all your leads and accounts, understand who’s showing intent, and go after them. But the beauty of agents is they don’t really have to prioritize, because they can go after all of them at once. They don’t just have to focus on the hottest, highest-intent accounts—they can simultaneously work accounts just entering research mode. Signals are foundational, but the prioritization piece goes away, because an agent scales in a way a human simply can’t. It’s a weird concept to grasp.
[12:53] Lindsey Groepper:
It is a weird concept, because I feel that pain in our own org. We all know the list of things we should be doing, but it comes down to human capacity. Lower-priority initiatives always drop to the bottom or never happen at all. So I love that prioritization isn’t really a factor—it can just do all these things at a fast clip. Have you seen any really interesting use cases that might open people’s minds? Like, ‘Oh, I never thought about that’?
[14:04] Maura Rivera:
The events use case is far and away my favorite. As marketers, we spend so much money on events—driving registration, booking meetings, getting staff there. And when it’s time to follow up, it’s always this medley of marketing automation and mass email and human touch. You could spend $150,000 on an event and then fail to give the follow-up the attention it deserves. At Qualified, when we started doing pre-event outreach with an agent—hooked up to our CRM, understanding all the signals and data—we could send emails on behalf of AEs or CSMs, and then have the agent handle all the follow-up. This year, we spent 90% more dollars on events and got 352% more pipeline compared to last year, when humans were working all our event leads. This year, only our agent worked those leads. I used to have 10 inbound SDRs working all of our inbound funnel. Now I just have the agent—and we redeployed those SDRs to go outbound. Other interesting use cases: when someone comes to your website and gives you their email but drops off without booking a meeting, have the agent follow up. And one of my favorites is re-engaging old, stagnant lead lists—30,000, 50,000, even a million leads just sitting in a database. The agent can scan all of those, look for intent signals, and fire off relevant email campaigns. Maybe you’re in our leads database and haven’t visited our site in a while, but you start Googling ‘agentic marketing.’ The agent harnesses that intent data and reaches out with a relevant email, pulling you back into the funnel. That’s gold you might never have gotten without an agent always hunting for signals.
[17:10] Lindsey Groepper:
Is the outreach from agents mostly email-based?
[17:15] Maura Rivera:
With our product, yes—mostly email. There are other, more outbound-focused products that can do social messaging and similar things, but we’re really focused on the key marketing channels: email and website.
[17:27] Lindsey Groepper:
At PANBlast, we’re a PR and marketing services firm for SaaS and AI companies, so our lead volume is different from most of your listeners. We don’t have an inbound SDR agent, but we do use an AI outbound tool. How’s it going? It’s going—but what I’ve found is you really have to put in the work on accurate inputs and targeting. The targeting available is shaky at best. I asked my rep whether most people just run a blind search, accept the AI-generated list, let AI write the messages, and hit send. She said, ‘Yeah, pretty much.’ I thought, that’s horrible. I did a test on literally 10 people, let AI write the messages based on their LinkedIn profiles, and the personalization was awful. I actually followed up with those people and said, ‘I’m so sorry—I was testing a new outbound AI tool and clearly we have some work to do.’ Almost everyone responded saying, ‘No problem, thanks for the transparency.’ So talk to me about personalization with Piper. Where is that information being pulled from, and how detailed do you try to get? Because in my experience, the more detailed the agent tried to be, the worse it got.
[19:26] Maura Rivera:
Yes, and that’s exactly why outbound and inbound are such different beasts. With outbound, you’re trying to do blind research and break into cold accounts. With inbound, they’ve already told you they have some interest in your brand—whether it’s downloading an ebook, attending an event, or filling out a form. They’ve started building familiarity with you, so you’re not going to scare them as much when you reach out. The foundation of a great agent is the platform it’s built on. First, it has to be hooked up to all your systems. Your CRM is the heartbeat—it needs to know your leads, your accounts, open opportunities, which product lines they’re interested in. Then your marketing automation platform layers in scoring and intent data, cookied site visits, and so on. ABM platforms tell you if they’re a target account and what intent they’re showing. All of that integration is critical. Then the agent needs to understand your business segmentation, your routing logic, how your sales team is structured. And then—this is key—you need to onboard it and coach it just like you would a human SDR. Here’s how we position ourselves. These are your guardrails: don’t talk about pricing, route support inquiries this way. Having that robust foundation is what makes the agent a sophisticated, on-brand touchpoint instead of a total failure—which, based on your experiment, is very easy to end up with if the platform isn’t solid.
[21:33] Lindsey Groepper:
Definitely. I want to switch gears a little and talk about team design and talent. Not the ‘will AI replace jobs’ conversation—everyone talks about that enough. Where do you see an SDR agent lifting up the people around it?
[22:04 Maura Rivera:
First and foremost, it’s this awesome new tool in the marketing operations, growth, and demand gen toolkit. All of a sudden, there’s a scalable way to generate pipeline and work all of your leads—so that team looks good because they can hit their pipeline numbers. It’s also inventing new roles. I have a person on my team in GTM AI Operations—he oversees our agents. He wakes up every day asking: Are the agents well-fed with content? Are they on message? He coaches them, tests them. His name is Ryan; he was actually one of our best SDRs who said he wanted to get into marketing. We said: perfect timing, do you want to oversee our agent operations? It’s creating really cool new career paths. It also eases the marketing-sales relationship because you’re feeding sales more pipeline. For humans doing outbound, they feel like they have new muscle to flex—they’re not just fielding all the inbound, which can get repetitive. And it lifts the enablement function, because the SDR role has such a revolving door—you’re constantly onboarding, making sure people are on message and can answer complex product questions. With an agent, it’s essentially a one-time onboarding you iterate on over time. So it feels like a win-win across the board, and the hope is the CMO has more pipeline to report on at the board meeting.
[23:57] Lindsey Groepper:
That is really interesting—this idea of a bot manager. We’ve talked about this with clients. We’ve all seen over our careers that some people are great managers but not great leaders, and some are incredible individual contributors who don’t have the skill set to manage humans. But this creates a new layer: you might not have the skill set to manage humans, but you could be a fantastic person to manage bots. I feel like that’s going to become more and more prevalent, and it would be irresponsible for companies deploying a lot of AI not to have someone overseeing it. A lot can go wrong. I love that you already have that role internally. I want to talk about MQLs as they exist today and where they’re headed. Do you think MQLs, as we know them, will fundamentally become obsolete?
[25:12] Maura Rivera:
I think they will become obsolete. We’ve relied on the traditional playbook for 20 years because it was the best option we had. You have limited human capacity, so you set a threshold for who those humans work—that’s why we created the MQL: these are the ones we deem sales-ready. Everyone below that threshold gets marketing automation. In the agentic world, the agent can work top to bottom of your inbound funnel. They might engage with MQLs differently than with cold leads—working toward booking a meeting and looping in an AE as fast as possible with the hot ones, while dripping content and keeping the cold ones warm. So you still need a way to educate the agent on the right behavior for different lead types. But I do think the word ‘MQL’ is going to vanish from our vernacular. I was talking with Wendy Worthy, CMO of Comply, and she said, ‘It’s not a funnel, it’s a pinball machine—everyone’s going all over the place.’ We’ve been calling it the ‘GenTech marketing funnel.’ It’s much less linear. We’ve got to throw some of that old stuff in the trash. It served us well, but it’s time to say goodbye.
[27:00] Lindsey Groepper:
So goodbye to MQLs—and it sounds like maybe goodbye to ‘marketing automation’ as a term too, replaced by agentic marketing?
[27:03] Maura Rivera:
That’s what we’re betting on. We’ll see!
[27:05] Lindsey Groepper:
What else haven’t we covered that you want to make sure we talk about?
[27:18] Maura Rivera:
I think we’ve covered the crux of it—this whole new world. You and I have talked about this at our in-person CMO community retreats: 2025 was the year of putting agents into production, and 2026 is the year where people are really going to figure out what’s working, what’s not, and cut use cases that weren’t impactful. There are hundreds of B2B CMOs who have agents producing pipeline results for them, so it’s a little less scary now—it feels tangible. And a quick plug: if you want to see agents in production, go to Qualified.com. You can talk with Piper—she’s real. We just launched a multimodal version of her, so you can interact over video or voice, whatever modality works for you. It’s a pretty exciting time. We can all look like heroes at our board meetings if we bring this agentic layer to the marketing org, and it feels very tangible right now.
[28:16] Lindsey Groepper:
You’ve created serious FOMO with me. Everything you’ve described—the pain points this solves—those are all pain points we’re experiencing. Even a company like ours could benefit from this, and I’ll definitely be looking into it more seriously. As I end every episode, I ask my guests if they have a signature toast to send us out.
[28:44] Maura Rivera:
I always just say health, wealth, and happiness—but that’s so boring and basic.
[28:56] Lindsey Groepper:
Are you kidding? I just say ‘cheers,’ so health, wealth, and happiness is way better than mine. Maybe we need to workshop mine a little bit. But I’ll drink to that—cheers! Thanks again to Maura for joining me. I love that conversation—it really opened my mind to what SDR agents can do and how they can help maximize your inbound engine. Hopefully you took a couple of things away from it as well. We always appreciate the listen, and until next time—bottoms up.