Kristina Finseth from Greenhouse joins Claire Ebben to share how her team brought on Piper, the AI SDR. Using a phased rollout (“stomach scoot, crawl, walk, run”), they trained Piper with common SDR questions and slowly expanded her responsibilities. The results: faster inbound conversions, hundreds of extra meetings, and a big boost in efficiency for the SDR team. Kristina also shares why she’s excited to extend Piper into email follow-up next.

Key Takeaways

• Rollout strategy
  • Started small: target accounts only.
  • Used 80+ SDR FAQs to train Piper.
  • Expanded responsibilities step by step (“stomach scoot, crawl, walk, run”).
• Proven impact
  • 50–70% of inbound chats converted to meetings (vs. ~20% by humans).
  • 130% lift in booked meetings QoQ.
  • 500+ meetings sourced from Qualified + Piper in Q3 alone.
• Team benefits
  • SDRs freed from monitoring site 24/7.
  • Confidence in AI as a complement, not a replacement.
  • Faster stakeholder buy-in thanks to clear early wins.
• What’s next
  • AI email to follow up with leads SDRs don’t touch.
  • Extend Piper’s context from web into inbox.
  • Scale personalization and efficiency without additional headcount.

TRANSCRIPTION

Claire Ebben:
Hi, everyone. I'm Claire Ebben, Director of Product Marketing here at Qualified.

I'm here now with an awesome Qualified customer who's seeing massive success with Piper the AISDR.

With us now is Kristina Finseth, Senior Manager of Growth Marketing at Greenhouse. Welcome, Kristina.

Kristina Finseth:
Hey, Claire. Great to be here. Nice to see you.

Claire Ebben:
Awesome. You too. So I'm sure folks are familiar with the Greenhouse brand, but can you first just share a little bit with us about Greenhouse and your role?

Kristina Finseth:
Yeah. So just simply put, Greenhouse is a leading hiring platform.

Chances are if you've ever applied to a job with a company in the last decade, you might have been going through a Greenhouse user experience as a job applicant. So it's just an easy way to say we're in the applicant tracking system space.

As far as my role here at Greenhouse, I am a growth marketing manager, and I lead a small but mighty team of growth marketers focused on all things ABM, life cycle marketing, prospect email marketing, and strategic shared tech stack with our SDR team. So things like Qualified, and Sixense and UserGems, are a few of the pieces of tech that we share with our SDR team.

Claire Ebben:
Awesome. We're so excited to have you. So let's chat about why you and the team at Greenhouse hired Piper. Can you tell us a little bit about why having an AI SDR appealed to you?

Kristina Finseth:
Yeah. I mean, so we've been, like, qualified for, gosh, just over a year now. We've been really enjoying using the full platform. We've gotten a lot of, great functionality out of it just for our SDR teams and really just getting more meetings booked and converting site visitors.

And we just really loved the qualified team. I think one of the areas that we saw as kind of a pain point, and I think most organizations will probably be able to relate to this if they have a an SDR team in place, is that we can't expect our SDRs to be on the site twenty fourseven.

Just because their target accounts are visiting the site doesn't mean that they're gonna be available to just jump in and have conversations, you know, right then and there. And so I think the most appealing thing about bringing AI SDR onto our team is to let her catch those dropped balls. Right? We're gonna enable her to kind of, be able to have those conversations very quickly, with all the context on what, you know, what content that site visitor has been consuming, what activities they've been taking, whether or not they are a target account or part of a six cent segment or whatever the case may be, and be able to convert at maybe a higher clip than our SDR team can because they can't just feasibly have all that information at the tip of their fingers. Right?

Claire Ebben:
Makes total sense. Yeah. Just using Piper to help scale what you were already doing with inbound on the website. And you're right.

Like, SDRs are handling many things at once. They're in Salesforce. They're in LinkedIn sales navigator. And so using Piper to help kind of scale additional efforts there, was why you you were interested.

Tell us about rolling Piper out alongside your SDR team. What does that look like, for Greenhouse today?

Kristina Finseth:
Yeah. So when we decided to sign on with AI SDR functionality, we were really intentional about the plan that we wanted to put into place. One, just to build confidence internally with, you know, adoption that AI SDR can operate and do what we need her to do in order to add value to, you know, how we're getting use out of qualified and, the opportunities that we would be driving for our SDR team.

And we wanted to also build confidence in her abilities. Right? And so I think similar to when you're onboarding a new employee, you don't give them a full well, hopefully not, unless you're getting thrown to the fire. You don't give them a full set of responsibilities where they're just diving in head first and handling soup to nuts. Right? You're gonna give them kind of, over time, increasing responsibilities, and that's kind of the approach we've taken with AISDR. So we have what we call a stomach scoot, crawl, walk, run approach.

I will not take credit for the stomach scoot term. That was actually something that Danielle, our qualified success architect, brought into play when we were crafting this plan. So shout out, Danielle.

But we really wanted to be super intentional. So we started out with, you know, hey, let's let her just do owned accounts when they have an inbound conversation on this site. And let's make sure that we feel really good about the way she's answering those questions.

And one thing that I'll speak to too as far as, like, the training and onboarding process, easier than I thought it would be.

I was able to connect with an SDR from each of our teams. So think inbound SDR, SMB SDR, enterprise SDR, mid market SDR, and kind of figure out, like, what are the main questions that you usually get when you're initially talking to prospects. And that's what we use to train AISDR for us. Right? Eighty plus questions, graded her, made sure that we had the right snippets if she wasn't answering exactly how we wanted to, and really just let her run.

And what we found is we had that stomach scoot stage. We saw really good success. We didn't see any drop balls. We didn't see really any errors in the way she was messaging.

So we gave her increasing responsibilities. And now I will be happy to say that we are on stage about to launch stage four of five, which is our run stage or I'm sorry. Our walk stage, which will be basically letting AISDR just say, hey. How can I help you today?

And she's just gonna know what to do. And so it's just really wild to think that we're to that point, but we see her as a complimentary kind of motion to our SDR team. Right? We want her to book to meet book meetings and let the SDRs do what they do best, which is prequalify and turn into opportunities.

Claire Ebben:
I love that. So training her, you know, giving her all the content that, you know, an SDR would need, to obviously answer questions And then starting with that stomach scoot, crawl, walk, run approach of rolling her out to unowned accounts first, seeing how she does, and then owned accounts next, and you're continuing your journey with her just because you continue to see success with what she's driving. So that's a really good segue into my next question. It's really great to hear how just the use case, is is evolving just as she's joined the team. Can you share us just tell us a little bit about the impact of adding Piper, you know, as this kind of new AI motion on the website today?

Kristina Finseth:
Yeah. I will say that we've gotten through those phases, those first three phases, a lot quicker than I anticipated, which is not a bad thing. It's always nice when you set a strategic plan in place and tell stakeholders that, you know, you're gonna be launching something in q one and it happens months sooner. So that in and of itself is, you know, speed to kind of moving through those stages is been, like, I think, really impactful when I'm having internal stakeholder conversations with both our SDR and our demand gen leaders.

But we started seeing results in just the first week of using Piper, honestly. And I call her AI SDR just because we haven't given her a name here at Greenhouse yet. We're working on it.

But on, inbound conversations alone, Piper is, converting anywhere from fifty to seventy percent of those, conversations to a booked meeting. And just to kind of put that into perspective, when I think of our human SDRs, and trust me, they are great at what they do, they're batting more towards, like, twenty percent of converting those to booked meetings because they just can't research and bring all that context that, AISDR can do, like, instantaneously.

Right?

And we've also seen a hundred and thirty percent quarter over quarter lift in booked meetings. And I think, AISDR is a contributing factor here.

So I think the last time I checked in q three, AISDR and qualified alone was responsible for about five hundred plus of our booked meetings across our SDR team.

Claire Ebben:
I mean, that's huge. Like, just in terms of the efficiency that she's bringing, right, that on inbound conversations, she is anywhere from fifty to seventy percent of those converting to a booked meeting, comparing that to the SDRs. And, yeah, to your point, the reason she's so powerful is because she's not human, and she can analyze, you know, who the visitor is, all that context from the website, and use that to reach out instantaneously at scale. So that's huge.

And then hundred and thirty percent quarter of a per lift in general with meetings overall is just, like, yeah, I think a huge testament to the the entire platform on Greenhouse's site. That's so great to hear. I wanted to switch gears just last to talk about AI email. When we announced AI email, you were one of the first customers to raise your hand and say, I need this, and you're so passionate about the direction of the product.

Can you share why you're so excited to start using AISDR and Piper, not just on the website, but also through email?

Kristina Finseth:
Yes. I mean, one one thing that I didn't point out earlier and I wish that I would have is one of the problems that we were also trying to solve when we signed on with Qualified originally, and I think AI email is really gonna help us get there, is we pass on so many leads to our SDR team from different, events. I mean, obviously, we have a huge conference presence throughout the year. We have lots of webinars from thought leadership to lead you know, lead generation type of webinars.

There is no shortage of campaigns that our sixty person plus marketing team is running at a given time.

And what I found in kind of analyzing what's happening to these leads when they get into the SDR hands is, rightfully so, about sixty percent of them aren't getting followed up with. And that's because we're asking SDRs to follow-up with every single lead. And if I'm an SDR, which I've managed an SDR team before, I'm gonna work the hottest leads, the ones that I think have the most propensity to convert to an opportunity. Right? I'm not probably gonna care as much about no shows. I'm probably not gonna care as much about someone who fills out a demo request.

I'll care more about someone who fills out a demo request form is what I'm trying to say than someone who may have landed on the demo page and didn't fill out the form. Right? And so we're asking a lot of SDRs. And what I'm most excited about for for AI email capability is why don't we just continue to give the forty percent, the hot, hot leads to our SDR team and let AI email and Piper follow-up with the the other ones. Right? And even the people who are, again, bouncing off of our demo page or starting a conversation, getting to a booked meeting, and then not actually selecting a time.

I see this as a really great way and a great extension to having, her basically follow-up and try to get those folks to a meaningful action. Right? And I think, this will enable us to kind of have that full picture and take the context that she knows about what they're doing on the site, all of the different information from our CRM, etcetera, and use that to have a really, powerful follow-up strategy with email. So I just see this as, like, a very impactful thing. I've used other inbound email agents on the market and didn't really see a ton of success, but none of them were positioned this way, right, the way Call of Fade has it. And so I'm making a big bet here that we're gonna have a huge impact, and and I know the organization is excited about it.

Claire Ebben:
Yeah. I think you you articulated, you know, a problem that Greenhouse is is facing that a lot of marketing teams are, which is, you know, you're sending all of these leads to sales. And humans are humans, and they have a finite amount of time and hours in their day. And so AI is gonna be so great for, you know, scaling efficiency there and giving that personalized outreach through email, nurturing those leads. But then when those leads arrive back on the website, the AISDR is there to greet them as well too and knows exactly how the conversation has been going.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story with us, Kristina. We just can't wait to see your continued success with Piper and Qualified.

So thank you so much.