How a founding SDR went from stack sprawl to a single outbound engine

Clear product-market fit, no outbound engine to match

CandorIQ was gaining traction. Product-market fit was clear and inbound was building. Leadership knew outbound was the next step, so they brought in Zach Dettlinger as their Founding SDR to build the entire motion and infrastructure for scale.

When he joined, Zach inherited an early stage stack: Apollo for list building and sequencing, LinkedIn Sales Nav for one-off contact lookups, Factors.ai for web intent, and email writing in Claude. Across the board, needs weren’t being met: 

• Basic sequencing with Apollo: Zach was able to build lists and sequence them in Apollo, but the tool was doing the bare minimum. "It's really just a basic sequencing tool. It's going to get your emails out, but everyone does that now."
• Messy intent data with Factors.ai: Zach was spending time manually cleaning web intent leads before he could even take action. By the time he’d mapped the signals, the window had already closed.
• Tab-by-tab prospecting in LinkedIn Sales Navigator: While Sales Nav made finding the right people possible, it still required a series of tabs and hours of work to get value. 
• Email copywriting in Claude: While Claude could give him copy quickly, Zach had to repeatedly drop in business context. This on top of tool switching each time made this approach a burden. 

"These were bare minimum tools that were loosely stitched together. Outbound felt like shooting arrows in the dark for the most part." 
- Zach Dettlinger, Founding SDR

CandorIQ had the demand. What it needed was a system that could actually capitalize on it.

One agentic outbound solution to rule them all

It wasn’t long after joining CandorIQ that Zach started evaluating new tools. He explored CommonRoom for signals, but it still relied on piping data back to Apollo for sequencing. "It felt almost like a bandaid." The stack problem was reorganized, not solved.

Leadership introduced Zach to Unify, but he came in fairly skeptical. "I thought it was probably just another trigger tool. I had no idea about the engagement piece. It all seemed too good to be true."

After seeing the full platform, Zach quickly built a business case and brought it to CandorIQ's CEO. He was bought in immediately, and within 12 days, they were onboarding the tool. 

What Zach found wasn't a better signal tool. It was a replacement for everything he'd been stitching together across multiple tools, collapsed into an agentic outbound engine that could handle his entire workflow from prospecting to outreach. 

With Unify, he was able to accomplish his core tasks from a series of prompts in Chat: 

• Business context understanding: After simply sharing his company URL in the onboarding flow, Unify fully understood CandorIQ’s ICP, persona, and value props, making everything downstream easier. 

"Unify already knew the personas we target and our ICP. I thought I was going to have to teach it all of that. That alone saves a lot of time."

• Prompt-based list building: Zach would simply describe a target audience or upload a list in Chat, and rely on Unify to find persona-matched contacts, enrich emails and phone numbers, and create a list that he can click to enroll in a sequence. 
• Claude-like sequence copywriting: From a simple prompt, Unify writes full sequences for Zach using CandorIQ's ICP and personas, with no re-prompting required. 

"I'm not doing any of that in Claude anymore. It's all in Chat in Unify. And for at least 90% of the sequences, I feel good about what it spits out. All I have to do is hit send."

• ‘Ask me anything’ performance reporting: Every Tuesday, Zach asks Chat for last week's opens, clicks, replies, and active campaigns for his leadership read-out. He gets immediate visibility into what’s working and what’s not, without the manual pull or analysis. 

Even when CandorIQ had a last-minute dinner to fill, Zach asked Unify to build the invite list (director-plus, 100 to 5,000 FTE, specific titles), enrich the contacts, and write the outreach sequence. One prompting session, start to finish. "It was literally a part-time job to do this before."

On top of the Chat workflows, Zach runs automated signal-based plays in the background across web visitors, new hires, and champion job changes. These surface signal-qualified accounts for him to prioritize each day, while giving CandorIQ full TAM coverage without adding SDR headcount.

Across the board, the manual workflow was replaced. Zach went from patching tools together to running an outbound program that worked the way he always wanted. He focused on execution while Unify did the rest. 

Impact: Going from prompt to pipeline in a repeatable motion 

Since bringing on Unify, Zach transformed what was a manual, fragmented workflow into a full-scale outbound engine that’s built around natural language chat. The results showed up fast and kept building.

The results speak for themselves, with performance hitting all facets.

• $1.8M+ in attributed pipeline: Unify-attributed deals span fast-growing startups to household names
• $121K in Closed Won revenue: Unify-attributed deals have already converted into over $100K in new business revenue
• 70% average open rate: Emails sent through Unify sequences consistently open around 70%, well above industry benchmarks
• 3.4% average reply rate: Replies land around 3.4% on average, with recent months reaching 4.5%
• Bounce rate down 87%: Unify’s deliverability team helped bounce rates fall from 15% to under 2% as mailboxes warmed over the first six months
• 95% reduction in time spent on manual tasks: List building, contact enrichment, and sequence writing that once took hours now takes minutes in a single Chat session.

“I’ve been able to find and book dozens of my target accounts, way faster. Being able to get from lists to sequences in a single chat makes it all possible.” 

Looking Forward: Consolidating the stack and scaling the team 

CandorIQ’s momentum is growing, and Unify is built directly into their plans.

Zach and team are planning on further consolidating their entire outbound workflow into Unify. With the new dialer on the horizon, they’ll be able to execute all touches directly in Unify. This also means spending even less time in Claude generating call scripts.

"You're taking my time out of Claude, which is a beautiful thing. When I signed up, I would have never thought about that." 

For a scaling team with one SDR running the outbound motion, the playbook is simple: do more of what's already working and keep embedding Unify deeper into the workflow.

"At this point, it'd be hard to go back to anything else."