In today’s fast-paced outbound landscape, personalization at scale isn’t a luxury—it’s the difference between missed opportunities and booked meetings. In a recent webinar, Jeff Long from Snowflake, alongside Viet Huynh, pulled back the curtain on how their SDR team unlocked unprecedented efficiency and performance using Generative AI, RAG pipelines, and orchestration with Workato.
With a 6.2% outbound conversion rate and a 210% lift over traditional outreach sequences, Snowflake’s journey offers a blueprint for every sales and ops team aiming to scale smart.
From Manual Outreach to AI-Powered Scale
Snowflake’s transformation started with a question: How can we help our SDRs focus less on repetitive tasks and more on strategic conversations?
The Starting Point:
- Legacy emails were dense, impersonal, and ineffective.
- SDRs relied on copy-paste snippets and manual research.
- Performance suffered due to challenges in scaling personalization.
The New Reality:
- GenAI auto-generates context-rich, persona-specific outbound emails.
- Outreach is informed by real-time enrichment and customer case matching.
- Sellers remain in their native tools while orchestration happens behind the scenes.
Key Outcomes from Snowflake’s Pilot
Over six months, Snowflake tested GenAI-generated sequences with a pilot group and compared results against a control group using traditional methods.
Performance Results:
- 4x increase in reply rates
- 3x uplift in meetings booked
- 72% improvement in rep performance (vs. non-adopters)
- 6.2% outbound-to-meeting conversion rate (across 9,000+ prospects)
These improvements were made possible by removing friction in the SDR workflow while introducing AI-guided personalization at scale.
Inside the Stack: How Snowflake Uses Workato + GenAI
Snowflake’s outbound engine was built on orchestrating multiple data and AI layers:
Key Components
- ZoomInfo & Web Search: Real-time enrichment and news insights
- Customer Story Repository: Matched to prospects using RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
- Snowflake Cortex + LLMs: Powering prompt chains, enrichment, summarization, and message generation
- Workato Orchestration: Automating data flow, enrichment, parsing, validation, and deployment
- Outreach.io: Final delivery to sellers with ready-to-send drafts
The AI Journey: Crawl, Stand, Walk, Run, Fly
Jeff Long outlined a phased approach to AI adoption, allowing the team to learn and iterate without risking rep trust or system integrity:
- Crawl: Introduced dynamic fields in Outreach, prompting reps to add value manually.
- Stand: Incorporated basic automation using Workato to auto-fill standard fields and centralize prospect data—reducing manual entry and saving time.
- Walk: Used LLMs to generate snippets like value props and impact statements.
- Run: Enriched insights with ZoomInfo, and added RAG pipelines to recommend relevant customer stories.
- Fly: Generated full emails including personalized intros, relevant case studies, and tailored CTAs—with persona-aware prompt routing and validation loops.
Bonus: XML parsing ensured only the necessary outputs were extracted from LLMs, maintaining message clarity and control.
Lessons in Data, Trust, and Iteration
One of the biggest takeaways? “Garbage in, garbage out.” Clean, structured enrichment data was critical to producing accurate and relevant AI outputs.
Other key insights:
- Start small with GSheets and test output before moving to production.
- Segment prompts by persona for more accurate and modular control.
- Use feedback loops (scoring prompts, validation agents) to improve over time.
- Trust is built through transparency and pilot group feedback, not top-down rollout.
What’s Next for Snowflake’s GTM Ops?
The outbound transformation was just the beginning. Snowflake is now applying the same AI + automation principles to:
- Inbound personalization based on campaign and content engagement
- MEDDICC deal scoring and quality audits via GenAI
- Slack-based performance alerts to drive MQL follow-ups and rep accountability
Final Thoughts
Snowflake’s journey proves that the future of outbound isn’t about AI replacing sellers—it’s about augmenting them. With the right orchestration, even small teams can achieve massive scale without sacrificing quality.
If you’re looking to reduce manual grunt work, improve outreach relevance, and give your SDRs a performance edge, their framework is a must-watch—and now, a must-implement.
Want to see how your team can start? Let’s talk about orchestrating your outbound engine with GenAI and Workato.
Want to learn more? Check out the full webinar or request a demo today.
