
Michael Berris
Head of Client Growth & Strategy
Building AI-Powered Outreach Inside Salesforce — Without Vendor Lock-In or Bloated Tools
Supercharge outbound without buying another platform. Learn how we built a Salesforce-native, AI-driven outreach engine that personalizes messaging for every prospect, costs only pennies per use, adapts to each company and persona automatically — and can be replicated inside any organization with the right blueprint.
Testing H! header
Outbound prospecting with AI seems to be everywhere and nowhere all at once — not because teams aren’t trying, but because the workflow is fundamentally stacked against them.
Vendors popping up daily selling new, often high cost SaaS solutions. Meanwhile, Reps are bouncing across LinkedIn, company websites, internal notes, Salesforce records, and “enablement resources” to craft a single message.
Leaders want personalization at scale.
Finance wants predictable cost.
Engineering wants to avoid yet another SaaS integration.
Everybody wants pipeline.
So we built something that solves all of it — inside Salesforce, driven by cheap OpenAI API, with zero reliance on expensive vendor contracts.
This post explains what we built, why it matters, and how any organization can replicate the approach with the right architecture and a few dollars in API usage.
High-Level Summary
We created a Salesforce-native AI engine that generates:
personalized outreach strategies
tailored messaging
persona-aware positioning
company-size-aware CTAs
industry-informed value props
…all from the fields already sitting in your CRM.
Cost per full outreach plan? Pennies.
Time-to-first-usable-message? Seconds.
Vendor lock-in? Zero.
This is how outbound should feel in 2025.
What Leaders Care About (TL;DR for Busy Executives)
For Sales Leaders
TL;DR: Reps get high-quality personalized outreach without slowing down.
No more generic templates or 20-minute research cycles before hitting send.
For CFOs
TL;DR: You get enterprise-grade personalization for the cost of spare change.
A few pennies in OpenAI usage per lead, no new SaaS contracts, no seat licenses.
For CTOs / VPs of Engineering
TL;DR: Clean architecture, no shadow IT, no brittle Zapier chains.
All logic in Salesforce, governed by your existing security and audit model.
For CEOs
TL;DR: You accelerate revenue motion without adding headcount or technical debt.
Outbound becomes more professional, more consistent, and more aligned with your brand.
Why We Didn’t Buy a Tool for This
You can easily spend six figures annually on “AI-powered sales engagement” platforms.
Most are:
rigid
opinionated
hard to customize
dependent on vendor uptime
priced per seat or per sequence
slow to adapt to your tone and ICP nuances
We wanted something different — something that acts like a seasoned operator writing bespoke messaging for each prospect:
grounded in business context
role-aware
industry-aware
respectful of company size
aligned to our brand voice
maintainable by us
practically free to run
So we built it ourselves.
And the truth? Any company can — with the right blueprint.
What the System Actually Does
Pulls in dozens of Salesforce fields:
industry, revenue, employee count, business model, department, management level, website, recent activity, etc.Analyzes the lead’s role, domain, and company size to infer likely pains.
Generates a tailored outreach plan with:
summary
strategy
a multi-step outreach sequence
subject lines
short, clean message bodies (no walls of text)
reasoning for each touch
Stores everything back on the Lead record.
No browser tabs. No manual formatting.Costs literally pennies per plan.
Runs entirely within your Salesforce governance model.
This isn’t “AI email writer” nonsense.
It’s role-driven, ICP-aware, contextually intelligent outbound strategy generation, done with the data you already own.
How We Tuned the Messaging to Fit Our Brand
We shaped the engine to reflect how we communicate:
straight to the point, respecting folks time
grounded in operational reality
no hype language or buzzwords
clear narrative based on our value proposition
CTAs that flex based on company size (enterprise ≠ SMB)
This is crucial:
AI is only powerful when the persona behind it is sharp.
And any company can define its own persona — operator, technical leader, sales strategist, industry expert — and embed it directly into the generation engine.
We simply encoded ours.
Why This Is Valuable for Different Personas
Sales Reps
Stop guessing what to say.
Stop copying templates.
Start sounding like someone prospects want to talk to.
Sales Enablement
No more maintaining long playbooks.
No content drift.
Everything stays inside CRM.
Revenue Leaders
Better messaging → better meetings → more pipeline.
Consistency without micromanagement.
Marketing Leaders
ICP alignment at the message level.
Clear feedback loop on tone, value props, and patterns.
IT & Security
No external data sprawl.
No new vendors to review.
Secure keys with Named Credentials.
Like technical details?
Some readers come for the business strategy.
Others come for the implementation details.
If writing Apex, building LWCs, handling malformed JSON, or wrestling with OpenAI’s response formatting sounds like a weekend you’d rather skip — feel free to stop here and click to schedule a discovery call with me so we can talk about outcomes instead of technical details.
If you're the kind of CTO who alphabetizes your AWS accounts or has opinions about schema registry patterns…
welcome to the fun part.
Technical Deep Dive (For Engineers, Architects & Admins)
Architecture Overview
We built a Salesforce-native system consisting of:
Apex service layer
builds a structured context block
enforces persona rules
makes OpenAI API call through Named Credential
normalizes malformed JSON
persists results on the Lead
Lightning Web Component (LWC)
surfaces summary, strategy, reasoning
formats messages into readable blocks
adds copy buttons for subject/body
auto-loads saved plans
OpenAI gpt-5-mini
cheap & fast
supports
response_format: json_object, which cuts down cleanup work
Contextual Intelligence
We feed in Salesforce fields such as:
Industry
Title / Department / Job Function
Revenue / Employee count
Ownership type (public/private)
Website
Recent tasks
Blank or unknown fields are ignored, preventing hallucinations.
Persona & ICP Logic
The prompt architecture handles:
role interpretation
industry-aware adjustments
company-size segmentation
CTA strength modulation
tone consistency and brand positioning
JSON Reliability Layer
We implemented a custom normalizer to handle:
missing brackets
extra commas
code fences
truncated arrays
unexpected type returns
This makes the system production-safe even with varying model responses.
LWC UX Details
The component renders:
summary
high-level strategy
omni-channel steps
copy-to-clipboard buttons
reasoning in muted formatting
It feels like a native Salesforce feature — because it is one.
Why This Matters for Forward-Looking Organizations
AI isn’t a replacement for authenticity.
But it is an accelerant for clarity, consistency, and context.
The real innovation here isn’t “AI writes emails.”
It’s:
using your own CRM data as the personalization engine
running the entire workflow inside Salesforce
giving reps operator-level messaging without operator-level headcount
empowering technical teams to expand, tune, or integrate however they want
doing it all at near-zero cost considering typical CAC/CPA spend
This is modern outbound:
data-driven, permission-aware, contextually intelligent, and infinitely scalable.
Want This in Your Org — Without Writing 800 Lines of Apex?
What we built for ourselves is repeatable — tailored to any industry, product, go-to-market motion, or leadership voice.
If you want:
personalized messaging that isn’t generic
outbound that respects ICP nuance
AI integrated safely inside Salesforce
extremely low operating cost
no dependence on external outreach vendors
an architecture your engineering/security teams actually like
Proksel Consulting can build the entire system for you — or help your technical team do it themselves.
Curious what this could look like inside your org?

