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When a past champion changes jobs, enroll them automatically and have AI draft the first email for the seller to edit
Picked and checked by Olga Pearson, SalesUpLevel
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Reported in Nooks' case study: after UserEvidence moved its SDRs to AI-drafted sequences and automated plays (the job-change play is one of them), email reply rates went from 0.5% to 2%, meeting rates from 10% to 20% across the team, and open rates from roughly 25% to 40%.
A champion who moves to a new company is one of the warmest leads you will ever get, and most teams lose them in a Slack ping nobody follows up.
Case study: UserEvidence (customer) and Nooks (vendor). Before, when a former UserEvidence champion moved to a new company, SDRs got a Slack alert, then had to open the CRM, research the person, check they were the right target, import them into Salesloft by hand and write the email. Now a play enrolls the champion in a sequence automatically and AI writes the first email. The SDR finds the task waiting, edits the email if they want to, and sends it. The team also fixed a quiet problem: separate "CRM Owner" and "Salesloft Owner" fields that rarely matched, so SDRs kept wondering whether they were even supposed to reach out.
By Amanda Newman (UserEvidence), in a Nooks case study, Senior SDR Manager, UserEvidence · Case study (Nooks customer story) ↗ · Apr 22, 2026
Run it before your 10am
- Pick one signal you trust: a past champion (a buyer or power user from a won deal) starts a new job.
- Turn it into a rule: when the signal fires, the person is enrolled in a dedicated sequence automatically, with no manual import.
- Have AI write the first email from what you already know: the past deal, your calls with them, and their new company.
- Put it in front of the seller as a task: read, edit if needed, send.
- Keep one owner field that matches your CRM, so no seller has to ask who owns the contact.
- After a month, compare reply and meeting rates with your old manual follow-up.
[Name] was our champion at [old company] and just started as [new title] at [new company]. What we know: [what they bought, why, the results they saw, notes from our calls]. New company: [what it does, size, anything recent]. Write a first email under 90 words: congratulate them, mention one specific thing from our work together, and ask one easy question about their new priorities. No pitch, no attachment, no meeting link. Then list two facts I should check before I send it.
If you lead a team
- Make the job-change alert start a sequence, not a Slack message.
- Fix ownership first: one owner field that matches the CRM.
Watch out for
- Vendor case study; Nooks is describing its own product.
- The reply and meeting numbers cover the team's whole move to AI-drafted sequences, not the job-change play alone.
- A 0.5% to 2% reply rate is a big jump from a low start; check your own baseline first.
- Check your company's rules before you put past customer notes into an AI tool.
- What I'd have my team try first: pull champions from the last two years of won deals, find who changed jobs, and have sellers edit and send the first 10 drafts.
Source: Nooks customer story 'How UserEvidence Achieved 4x Reply Rates with AI Sequencing' by Peter Mollins, Apr 22, 2026, quoting Amanda Newman, Senior SDR Manager at UserEvidence. Case study: customer UserEvidence, vendor Nooks. Results are as reported; we did not measure them.
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