An AI SDR for inbound leads that never leaves one waiting.

What the SDR’s first touch should cover

An inbound SDR’s first job is simple: reply quickly, find out whether this is a real opportunity, and get the details to the right person. The first two are where most teams lose leads, because enquiries arrive at night, on weekends, and on WhatsApp while everyone is busy. Harvard Business Review’s research on the short life of online sales leads found most companies don’t respond nearly fast enough. An AI SDR is the part of a lead generation chatbot that fixes the reply time.

Write that job into the agent’s instructions. Set a Primary Goal such as “qualify commercial solar enquiries”, then list the three or four questions your reps ask first, like site type, monthly bill and timeline. Put the contact fields you need in the in-chat form. Every question you add is one more reason for someone to stop answering, so keep only the ones that change what a rep does next.

Route by what the lead says

The agent can’t read your CRM or see a rep’s calendar. What it can do is follow your rules. Tell it which enquiries deserve a person now, for example multi-site businesses or anyone with a deadline, and turn on Human Handoff with your working hours. Inside those hours the chat is queued in the Inbox and a rep claims it. Outside them the lead is saved and your offline message says when someone will be in touch.

Everyone else is saved to Leads as New with a rule-based score. Reps move each one through Contacted, Qualified, Converted or Lost, and the lead syncs to Freshsales so your pipeline stays in one place.

Review the conversations, not just the count

Read a sample of conversations each week. Look for enquiries the agent qualified badly, questions it couldn’t answer (these show under Unanswered Questions), and leads that sat as New for too long. Most fixes are small: a clearer instruction, a missing page added to Data Sources, or a faster follow-up from your team.

To set up the questions and scoring, see lead qualification. For the whole flow from first message to CRM, start with the lead generation chatbot guide, or see 24/7 automated lead capture in ZynfoAI.