Discover how Active Reality tripled sales and expanded to 12 locations by implementing SalesApe's AI-powered solution to handle inbound leads, achieve a <60-second reply rate, and boost ROI by 10x.
This is the next installment in our ongoing series, which recaps our recent webinar on inbound sales optimization. If you're just joining us, welcome! If you’ve been following along, welcome back. Over the last five articles, we've been breaking down the key strategies to fix a leaky sales funnel and drive more revenue.
Our discussion features two industry experts: Frank Sondors, the founder of Salesforge, a company that helps businesses build pipelines with AI-powered outbound tools, and Dom Chiarenza, the Head of Sales at SalesApe. Here at SalesApe, we offer an AI-powered solution that acts as a virtual sales agent, handling inbound leads to qualify them, answer questions, and seamlessly hand off qualified prospects to a human sales team.
So far, we've covered the critical importance of speed to lead, the ideal response times for different industries, and the common human-centric bottlenecks that prevent businesses from achieving optimal efficiency. Now, we're shifting from theory to reality with a real-world case study that shows just how powerful a blended AI and human approach can be.
Stay with us as we dive into the details of a business that leveraged this model to get incredible results.
Meet Active Reality, a company in the VR fitness and leisure space and a SalesApe customer. Their team was facing a common issue: leads were pouring in from their website, but their staff were often too busy running live sessions or handling other tasks to respond quickly. This created a massive inbound bottleneck. Leads were waiting for hours, and the team had no quick way to tell which ones were serious about booking a large group or corporate event. It wasn't just an inefficiency—it was a direct hit to their bottom line.
Instead of hiring more staff, Active Reality implemented a blended model with an AI agent. They trained the AI on past successful conversations and plugged it into their website and email channels. The results were staggering and came quickly, within just 30 days.
This wasn't just a minor efficiency gain; it was a fundamental driver of revenue. As a result, Active Reality was able to expand from one to 12 locations without needing to hire a huge team of new SDRs. They just continued to manage their AI agents, demonstrating how a lean team can achieve incredible growth with the right tools.
The benefits of the blended model go far beyond the hard metrics. It addresses some of the most common frustrations in a sales team. When you have a lean team, people are often spread thin—one person is on vacation, another is filling out an RFP, and a third is in a demo. Those hours of no coverage can cost you a deal.
This isn’t just about the big, long-term issues, either. It’s about the simple, everyday problems that cause internal friction. Frank mentioned a common frustration from his time as a VP of Sales:
"What happens when everybody goes to lunch? Who's looking after the leads?"
Leads don’t stop coming in just because your team is on a break. With an AI agent, you don’t have to worry about a "lunch bottleneck" or any other time of day when a human isn't available.
Ultimately, these systems make life better for everyone. By automating the repetitive, low-value tasks like initial follow-ups, you're freeing up your sales reps to focus on what they do best: building relationships and closing deals. It's a win-win: the business gets to be more efficient and profitable, and the sales team gets to be more productive and hit their targets more easily. It also eliminates problems like "cherry-picking," where reps might only focus on the hottest leads, making the lead distribution process more fair for everyone.
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