An AI sales agent that prospects and emails for you
By the Yirlo team · Product details checked against the app
An AI sales agent is software that handles the repetitive parts of selling without a person driving each step. The outbound kind finds companies that fit your offer, picks the right contact at each one, writes the first email, and sorts the replies. Yirlo does this for B2B companies: give it your website and it runs prospecting and email around the clock, then forwards interested replies to you as hot leads. Below you will find the types of agents, how outbound works step by step, example costs, the limits, and the mistakes that waste budget.
What an AI sales agent covers, and which kind you need
The label covers several different tools, and picking the wrong type is a common way to end up disappointed. Some agents answer website visitors, some talk on the phone, some sit inside a CRM, and some go out and start conversations with strangers. Only the last group helps if your problem is that not enough of the right people know you exist.
Decide first whether your gap is demand or follow-up. If leads already arrive and go cold, an inbound chat or voice agent fixes that. If the pipeline is thin because nobody is contacting the companies that should buy from you, you need an outbound AI sales agent.
| Type of agent | What it does | Fits when |
|---|---|---|
| Inbound chat agent | Answers site visitors and qualifies them | You have traffic and slow follow-up |
| Voice agent | Calls or answers calls with leads | Leads expect a callback within minutes |
| CRM assistant | Summarizes calls, scores deals, suggests next steps | A sales team already lives in a CRM |
| Outbound email agent | Finds prospects, writes and sends first emails, sorts replies | You need new conversations with companies that have not heard of you |
| Forecasting and coaching tools | Analyze pipeline and recorded calls | You have a team and enough deal volume |
What an outbound AI sales agent does, step by step
A working outbound agent replaces a chain of jobs that normally belongs to a founder, a marketer, an SDR and an operations person. Here is the chain, in order.
- Reads your site and works out what you sell, who buys it and who competes with you.
- Splits the market into audiences, for example by industry, company size and buyer role.
- Matches companies to each audience, then locates the right decision maker inside each one.
- Checks that every email address is valid before anything is sent.
- Drafts an opening email for every contact that speaks to their own company.
- Outgoing messages leave from sender addresses that Yirlo prepared and built up a sending reputation on before your first campaign.
- Sorts every incoming reply by intent, so interested people stand apart from unsubscribes.
- Drafts an answer that moves the person toward a booked call, demo, trial or resource.
- Shifts effort toward audiences that get replies and drops the ones that do not.
How Yirlo runs this for you
You enter your website address and Yirlo studies your offer and your competitors, then proposes campaigns. Each campaign is an audience, such as heads of operations at regional logistics companies. You can accept the proposals, edit them or add your own.
Yirlo draws on a B2B database with more than 80M decision makers. For every matching company it picks one person to write to, so nobody's coworkers receive overlapping pitches. The mailboxes and domains are already prepared and maintained, which means a campaign can go live right away. Connecting domains you own is coming soon.
The app's inbox lets you read each conversation whenever you like. A prospect who responds with interest triggers an email alert to you straight away. Drafted answers aim at the result you chose, like a booked meeting or a demo, and a setting decides whether they go out automatically or wait for your sign-off.
You get an emailed recap of results three times weekly. Every campaign, audience and individual message can be edited by you at any time. Daily budget shifts toward the campaigns that draw replies, while campaigns that stall get paused and replaced with new ones.
Audiences and first-email angles, with examples
The quality of an outbound agent shows up in how specific the audience and the opening line are. These are examples of the kind of campaigns an agent would propose and the angle a first email might take. They are illustrations, not results.
- A payroll platform selling to HR directors at companies with 50 to 300 employees. The email talks about the extra work of running payroll for staff in more than one state.
- A maker of fleet maintenance software that sells to operations managers at regional trucking firms. Emails would center on unplanned downtime, showing how one missed service interval can leave a truck off the road for a full day.
- A security consultancy selling to IT managers at law and accounting firms. The email centers on client files and what an auditor or client will ask after an incident.
- A restaurant inventory app selling to owners of multi-location groups in Mexico. The email is written in Spanish and talks about food cost swings between locations.
- A recruiting agency that places engineers, aiming at engineering leaders at Series A software startups. The email angle is a hiring plan that has grown past what the in-house recruiter can handle.
Replies and objections you should expect
Cold email produces a predictable mix of answers. Some people say they are interested, some say the timing is wrong, some are away, and some ask to be removed. A smaller group pushes back with an objection, such as already having a vendor, having no budget, or asking you to just send information.
Those objections are worth planning for before the first send. For example, if your product competes with an incumbent, decide whether your reply should offer a short comparison, a trial, or a call about one specific gap. Review the first batch of drafted answers and edit any that promise more than you can deliver. The agent handles the sorting and the first draft, and you decide what your company is willing to say.
What it costs, worked through with example numbers
Prepaid credit funds the sending, at about five cents per email Yirlo delivers. Costs scale with how many emails go out. That price already includes sourcing the leads and drafting the emails. Set a daily spending cap to control the pace, and turn on auto top-up from a saved card so the balance refills itself. Colleagues can be invited by email too.
The table shows what several daily budgets would mean over 30 days. These are example calculations at $0.05 per email.
| Daily budget (example) | Emails per day | Spend over 30 days |
|---|---|---|
| $10 | 200 | $300 |
| $20 | 400 | $600 |
| $50 | 1,000 | $1,500 |
Turning email volume into a cost per lead
Cost per email matters less than cost per conversation. For example, suppose 1,000 emails cost $50. If 1 in 100 emails gets a reply and a third of those replies are interested, that is about three interested people, or roughly $17 each. If your offer is weaker or the audience is off, those rates drop, and the same $50 buys fewer conversations.
Your results will vary and shift as the agent tests different audiences. A good habit is to compare the cost of each interested reply across campaigns, then weigh it against the value of a meeting. If a customer brings in $8,000 and one call in ten closes, plenty of quiet days are affordable.
AI agent versus a human SDR, and the salary question
An AI sales agent has no salary, so the comparison is against the cost of a person doing similar work. For example, if a junior SDR costs $6,000 a month once salary, tools and management time are counted, that same money would pay for 120,000 emails at $0.05 each.
The two do different things. A person can phone a prospect, read a room, adjust a pitch mid-call and build a relationship over months. The agent covers volume: researching companies, writing individual first emails, and triaging replies on weekends and at 3 a.m. Many small companies find the sensible split is the agent for first contact and a founder or salesperson for the conversations that follow.
Where Yirlo does not fit
Knowing the limits saves a failed trial. Yirlo is an email-based outbound agent for B2B, and some things are outside its scope.
- Email is the channel today. Phone calls, text messages and social platform outreach are coming soon.
- Pipedrive, HubSpot, Salesforce or whatever system tracks your deals can receive each interested prospect automatically. Yirlo sends an HMAC-signed event the moment someone replies or becomes a hot lead. You catch that event with the incoming-webhook step in Zapier, n8n or Make, then map it to a CRM record. If you would rather have rows in a spreadsheet, download the leads as a CSV.
- Outgoing email comes from sending addresses that Yirlo owns and operates. Connecting inboxes you already have is coming soon.
- Open Integrations > Team and send an invitation to a colleague's email address. They log in with that same address and work inside the shared project. The setup fits a single company handling its own outbound.
- It targets companies and decision makers, so it suits B2B offers better than consumer products.
Mistakes to avoid when using an AI sales agent
Outbound programs that fail usually trip over the same few problems, and an agent cannot make them disappear.
- Pitching a vague offer. If your site cannot say who you help and what changes for them, the first emails will be vague as well. Tighten the homepage first.
- Aiming too high with the goal. A cold prospect is less likely to agree to a long demo than to a brief call or a helpful resource. Pick the smallest next step that still tells you whether the person is a fit.
- Ignoring the replies. Interested replies go stale in hours. Check the hot-lead emails and respond fast when you review answers manually.
- Judging a campaign after one day. Give each audience a few days of sending before deciding it does not work.
- Starting with a huge budget. Begin with a modest daily amount, read the results, then raise it for the campaigns that earn replies.
- Buying domains and warming them yourself while also using an agent. That duplicates work the agent should absorb.
Free options, GitHub projects and build-your-own
Open-source projects on GitHub and free tiers can handle pieces of the job, such as drafting an email with a language model or scraping a list. The gap appears in the parts around the text: sourcing accurate contacts, verifying addresses, keeping sending mailboxes healthy, and reading replies reliably. Each one needs ongoing maintenance, and a single failure, such as a burned domain, can undo weeks of work.
Building your own makes sense if outbound infrastructure is your product or you have an engineer with spare time. Otherwise the cost of paid ai sales agent software is usually smaller than the hours spent assembling and repairing a homemade stack.
Get started in an afternoon
Setup is short because the agent does the research. Here is a sensible first week.
- Type in your website, then go through the campaigns Yirlo suggests. Delete any audience you wouldn't want as customers.
- Decide where replies should lead, such as your calendar link or a product demo.
- Load some prepaid credit and pick a daily spending limit that suits you, such as $20.
- Read a few of the drafted emails and edit the tone or the claims you want changed.
- Decide whether replies are sent automatically or after your approval.
- Three times a week you get a results email, and the inbox inside the app shows how prospects reply.
- After the first week, raise the budget on audiences that earn replies and rewrite the ones that do not.
Questions
Can AI agents do sales?
They can do large parts of the early sales process: finding prospects, writing first messages, sorting replies and booking meetings. Closing complex deals, negotiating and building trust still usually need a person. The practical approach is to let the agent create conversations and have you or a salesperson take over once someone is interested.
Who has the best AI sales agent?
It depends on the job. CRM vendors and conversation-intelligence tools suit teams that already work in those systems, voice agents suit phone-driven lead follow-up, and outbound email agents suit companies that need new prospects. Yirlo is aimed at the last case: it finds companies, writes personal first emails and handles replies, ready to start right away.
How much does an AI sales agent cost?
Market prices run from monthly plans with seats to pay-as-you-go. Yirlo bills by the email, around five cents each, from credit you load beforehand, so your cost follows volume alone. At a $20 daily limit, that works out to roughly 400 emails a day.
Can I make money selling AI agents?
Plenty of people earn money by configuring AI tools for other companies, typically charging for setup and outcomes instead of the software. Yirlo was built to run outbound for your own business, with teammates invited into your project, so check that it fits before planning an agency around it. The simpler route to income is using it to win your own customers.
Is there a free AI sales agent?
Free and open-source options exist, though each tends to handle just one task, like drafting copy or compiling a list. Verified contacts, sending infrastructure and reply handling remain your problem. Yirlo charges only for sent emails, about $0.05 each, and the research and writing are included in that price.
What is an AI sales agent salary?
An AI sales agent draws no salary, so the comparison is a usage fee or subscription instead. Yirlo costs around five cents per email from credit you load up front. Set that against the monthly cost of a human SDR, counting tools and management time.
Will an outbound AI sales agent replace my SDRs?
It takes over the high-volume work: researching companies, writing first emails and triaging replies. Phone calls, which many SDRs also make, are coming soon. Teams often keep people for live conversations and use the agent to supply them.
Do I need to set up domains, mailboxes or a sending tool?
Sending from mailboxes and domains you own is coming soon. For now, Yirlo handles that side itself. Its mailboxes are already warmed up, so you have no DNS records, warmup routines or sending software to set up.
Does it work outside the United States and in other languages?
Yes. Pick a whole country or just one state as your target area. When Yirlo covers a lead's language, the email goes out in that language. For any other lead, you select one of 30 languages yourself.
Does Yirlo connect to my CRM?
Interested replies land in the inbox inside the app. To push them into HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive or another CRM, connect Zapier, n8n or Make to the signed webhooks that fire on each new reply or hot lead. Developers can use the API with an X-API-Key header to run campaigns, read and answer conversations, pull hot leads and analytics, handle credit and billing, and keep suppression lists and webhooks up to date.