SUSE turns 70% of qualified conversations into meetings with Piper the AI SDR Agent
SUSE turns 70% of qualified conversations into meetings with Piper the AI SDR Agent
An industry-wide shift changed the rules for everyone
Website traffic was falling across the industry
Like most B2B enterprises, SUSE watched website traffic decline as buyers increasingly did their research anywhere but a vendor's own site. The visitors who did arrive were already deep into their evaluation, closer to deciding than discovering. A funnel built around volume and top-of-funnel forms no longer reflected how the highest-intent buyers were actually behaving.
Buying groups spanned developers, architects, and the C-suite
SUSE's open source model meant its real influencers were developers writing code in the community, while the actual buyers were architects, CIOs, and platform engineering leaders. Marketing had to speak authentically to a technical community that didn’t control the purse strings, then still convert an entirely different, more senior buying group.
Gated content couldn't keep up with modern buyers
As SUSE moved to an ungated content strategy to keep up with the way modern buyers are interacting with content, it lost the built-in signal that used to tell the team who was on the site and why. Without gates, SUSE needed a new way to identify visitors and understand intent in real time. Traditional forms and static chat weren't built for that kind of immediate discovery.
Global, multilingual demand outpaced a human-only team
With visitors arriving from Europe, the Americas, and Asia Pacific, SUSE needed to meet buyers in their own language and time zone. No human team, however large, could staff that kind of always-on, multilingual coverage.
The problem is everyone's website traffic has fallen off. If you're lucky, 30%, but some companies are closer to 70 or 80%.
Hiring an AI SDR Agent to own the inbound conversation
While much of the industry was still figuring out how to respond to the shift, SUSE moved early, hiring Piper the AI SDR Agent (renamed Liz by the SUSE team) to own the moment a buyer actually shows up.
Real conversations at the exact moment of intent
Liz engages every visitor the second they arrive, no matter which page they land on. She asks the kind of discovery questions a great SDR would and adapts in real time based on the answers.
Deep discovery, tailored to architects and CIOs alike
Liz recognizes the difference between a developer exploring documentation and a CIO evaluating a platform decision, and adjusts accordingly. She surfaces the right case study or competitive comparison for whoever she's talking to, without a human needing to triage first.
Every piece of content, remembered and served instantly
Liz has access to SUSE's full library, from campaign assets to deep product documentation, and can find the right piece in seconds. When a visitor from a specific account drops off, Liz already knows who they are through SUSE's Salesforce and 6sense integrations, and follows up by email automatically.
Global engagement in 200+ languages, no new headcount
Liz responds in whatever language a visitor types in, without SUSE staffing a single additional region or time zone. That has SUSE's team rethinking its entire digital footprint, questioning whether it even needs separate localized websites when the underlying content can simply be delivered in the right language on demand.
The AI SDR does an amazing job of just getting them deeper and deeper, all in a very natural way that you literally forget you're talking to anything that is not human, right? Because it's just such a natural flow. I wish I could train humans to do those discovery questions the way the qualified AI SDR does.
A strategic partnership, not a one-time rollout
SUSE's rollout hasn't been a single hand-off. It's been an ongoing collaboration with a dedicated Qualified success architect (QSA), from roadmap workshops to ongoing collaboration.
A digital workshop turned into a roadmap session
SUSE's team sat down with their QSA for a two-day digital workshop and walked out with decisions made, not just discussed. Pinned Mode, multimodal engagement, and voice testing were all greenlit to start implementing.
Piper connected straight into SUSE's existing stack
SUSE plugged Piper directly into Salesforce, so sellers kept working from one source of truth. The team also connected 6sense intent data, so Piper could recognize a returning visitor's account and pick up the conversation with real context.
New capabilities tested in real time, guided by data
As SUSE leaned into new capabilities like Multimodal and Pinned Mode, the team let performance data, not gut feel, decide what stuck. They ran real tests, watched how visitors actually engaged, and adjusted quickly. That same test-measure-expand approach is what's giving SUSE the confidence to keep rolling Piper out further across the website and inbox.
An AI SDR reviewing SUSE's own human-written emails
SUSE also put their AI SDR to work reviewing the nurture emails its own team had written by hand. In one review pass, Piper caught broken links, outdated addresses, expired copyright dates, and a misspelling of the company's own name.
Our customer success and solution architect is off the charts. It's probably the best customer-facing partner I've ever had at any vendor.
Piper is converting conversations into meetings better than a human ever could
- Piper turns 70% of qualified conversations into booked meetings
- Piper Email has influenced over $10M in pipeline
- Marketing-sourced meetings now move straight into pipeline, cutting the weeks SUSE used to spend in manual nurture streams
Handing Piper the entire inbound funnel
Margaret's vision is for their AI SDR to eventually own virtually all of SUSE's top- and mid-funnel engagement, not just the visitors who happen to show up on the website. That includes feeding Piper the hundreds of thousands of contacts and leads already sitting in SUSE's database, rather than routing them through separate, manually built nurture streams. The goal is a single, dynamic engine that's always on and always learning, freeing SUSE's human team to focus on deeper customer relationships and the work that actually drives revenue.
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