Today’s plays › All plays › Call prep
Run call research overnight and drop it into the tools reps already use
Picked and checked by Olga Pearson, SalesUpLevel
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Reported by Owner.com's CRO: built with about 2 weeks of one engineer's time. 15 BDRs now book 85% more opportunities, and the BDR team averages $100K+ in closed-won ARR per BDR per month.
Kyle Norton's team batch-researches every lead overnight and puts the notes inside Salesforce and Salesloft before the morning cold calls. Reps do not run any agents themselves, and a central data team owns list building. Kyle keeps chains of AI steps short and puts a person in the loop: for enterprise reps, a person picks which scored accounts go into outreach.
By Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner.com at the time (now CRO at Lassie), at SaaStr AI 2026 (written up by SaaStr) · SaaStr (saastr.com) ↗ · May 26, 2026
If you sell: batch tomorrow's research tonight
- Move list building to one central person or team, not each rep.
- Every night, run AI research on the next day's call list in one batch.
- Put the research where reps already work (CRM record, sequencer task), not in a new tool.
- Keep the chain of AI steps short, and put a person or a fixed rule in before output goes out. Owner has a person pick which scored accounts go into the prospecting engine.
- Track opportunities booked per BDR before and after.
Research this business before a cold call tomorrow. Company: [name], website: [url], location: [city]. In under 120 words give: 1) what they do and roughly how big they are, 2) one thing that looks like a problem we solve ([our product's job]), with where you saw it, 3) one opening question for the call, 4) anything that says do not call (closed, already a customer, wrong fit). Only use what you can find. If you are not sure, write "unknown".
If you lead a team: roll it out
- Give one engineer 2 weeks and one BDR pod as a pilot.
- Compare opportunities booked per BDR against the pods that did not get it.
Watch out for
- The 85% and $100K figures are for Owner.com's restaurant-focused team; your numbers will differ.
- Keep a checkpoint. Kyle's point is that every AI step in a chain adds error, so stacked steps with no person or rule in between produce slop.
- Kyle has since moved from Owner.com to Lassie; these results are from his time at Owner.
- This is separate from our other Kyle Norton plays on BDR targeting and call scoring.
Source: Kyle Norton, SaaStr (saastr.com), May 26, 2026. Results are as reported by the source; we did not measure them.
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