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Shadow your best SDR, then turn every tab she opens into an agent step
Picked and checked by Olga Pearson, SalesUpLevel
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Reported by Vercel's COO: lead qualification went from a 10-person SDR team to about 1 person (plus 20% of a person for EU and APAC), at about $5,000 a year to run, with a 32x ROI. After the same method was applied to 30 SDR workflows, SDR quotas rose 30% that quarter.
Jeanne DeWitt Grosser had a GTM engineer sit with Vercel's best SDR and write down every tab she opened to qualify a lead. Each tab became one fixed step in an agent workflow. The agent ran in shadow mode for 6 weeks while that SDR checked every output, and a person still reviews the output; the agent does not act on its own.
By Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, COO at Vercel (her talk written up by Jason Lemkin on SaaStr) · SaaStr (saastr.com) ↗ · Jul 2, 2026
If you sell: write down your own tabs first
- Pick your best SDR and one workflow, like qualifying inbound leads.
- Have someone sit with her and record every tab she opens and why: LinkedIn, BuiltWith, the company website, the CRM, old Slack threads.
- Turn each tab into one fixed step the agent runs in the same order, every time.
- Run the agent in shadow mode for about 6 weeks. Your best SDR reviews every output and marks what is wrong.
- Go live with a person still checking the agent's output (it should not act on its own), and keep someone reviewing output 1 to 2 hours a day.
You are qualifying one inbound lead for [company]. Work through these steps in order and do not skip any: 1) Read the lead's LinkedIn profile: [paste]. Note title, seniority and time in role. 2) Read what their company runs on (from BuiltWith or similar): [paste]. 3) Read their website: [paste key pages]. Note what they sell and to whom. 4) Check our CRM history: [paste]. Note any past deals or open opportunities. 5) Check our past Slack notes on this account: [paste]. Then give: Qualified / Not qualified / Need more info, one line of reasoning per step, and a first draft reply under 100 words. If a step has no data, say so. Do not guess.
If you lead a team: roll it out
- Start with one workflow and your single best rep, not the whole team.
- Run 6 weeks of shadow mode before anything sends, and keep a daily human review after go-live.
Watch out for
- Vercel sells the infrastructure the agent runs on, so the talk also promotes Vercel's own products. The method works with any stack.
- The 30% quota lift came after the method was spread across 30 workflows, not from this one agent alone.
- Do not skip shadow mode. The 6 weeks of review is what made the output trustworthy.
Source: Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, SaaStr (saastr.com), Jul 2, 2026. Results are as reported by the source; we did not measure them.
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