Breaking Into Technical Buyers That "Only Talk to Engineers"

Vespa is an AI search and retrieval infrastructure company serving enterprises with complex, consumer-facing search products. Their buyers are senior technical leaders - CTOs, heads of ML, search, personalization, and recommendations. Vespa had tried building an in-house SDR function, but it wasn't generating the outbound results they needed. Leadership was skeptical that anyone outside their engineering culture could credibly engage these personas - the assumption was that deeply technical buyers simply don't respond to outbound from SDRs.

Vespa needed outbound pipeline but hadn't been able to make it work internally. The personas they needed to reach are among the hardest in B2B - senior technical leaders who typically ignore traditional sales outreach. Past in-house efforts had underperformed, and the team's concern was that an external partner would lack the technical fluency to earn a conversation. Vespa agreed to a three-month pilot with a single SDR to test whether the model could break through.

Sellerate embedded one SDR under Vespa's brand, supporting two North American AEs. The SDR operated inside Vespa's HubSpot instance, followed their approval process, and communicated daily with the sales team. Results came fast - within the first month, the SDR was booking more qualified meetings than the previous in-house effort had delivered, and AEs flagged that both volume and quality had exceeded expectations. Vespa ended the pilot early and expanded to three dedicated SDRs, each supporting one AE exclusively: two in North America, one covering Europe. Beyond booking meetings, Sellerate contributed to data quality, targeting, lead scoring, and tightening the loop between outreach and Vespa's marketing assets.

Technical personas respond to the right outreach - not just technical senders.

‍Sellerate's SDRs successfully engaged CTOs and ML leads, disproving the assumption that only engineers can book meetings with engineers.

A controlled pilot de-risks the decision.‍

Starting with one SDR on a defined timeline let Vespa validate the model with minimal commitment before scaling.

Embedded SDRs plug into your systems, not around them.

‍Working inside Vespa's HubSpot and CRM processes meant outreach activity and feedback flowed directly into their existing marketing and sales workflows - no parallel systems.