AI Sales BDR

What is this? A concrete recipe for wiring an AI sales-development-rep (BDR) agent against Salty’s CRM. The agent researches prospects, logs outreach activity, and gets notified when leads change stage — all without humans clicking through dashboards.

The scenario

You’re a solopreneur running outbound. You have an LLM agent (Claude Desktop, Cursor, custom Python) that reads inbound leads from a form, enriches them, sends a personalized first-touch email, and tracks responses. You need a system of record for who you talked to, what about, what stage they’re in, and what to do next. Salty is that system of record. Your agent reads + writes via MCP or REST; signed webhooks notify your inbox or Slack when state changes.

What the agent does

Step	Tool	Salty object touched
1. Inbound lead arrives	(your form) → agent	—
2. Lookup or create company	`search_companies` → `create_company`	`company`
3. Create the person, link to company	`create_person` with `primary_company_id`	`person`
4. Add a deal in `prospecting` stage	`create_deal`	`deal`
5. Send a first-touch email (via your provider)	—	—
6. Log the email send as an activity	`log_activity` (type: `email_sent`)	`activity`
7. Move deal to `awaiting_reply`	`update_deal`	`deal`
8. When the prospect replies, your inbound webhook → agent updates stage to `engaged` + logs activity	`update_deal` + `log_activity`	`deal`, `activity`
9. If no reply in 5 days, your scheduler → agent logs follow-up activity	`log_activity`	`activity`

Driving it from Claude Desktop (MCP)

Once you’ve configured Claude Desktop with Salty MCP (instructions), you can drive the whole flow conversationally:

“A new lead came in: sarah@acme-corp.com. Search Salty for the company, create her, link them, and create a deal called ‘Acme Q3 expansion’ worth $40,000 in prospecting stage.”

Claude will:

Call search_companies with {filter: {domain: {equals: "acme-corp.com"}}}
If no result, call create_company with name=Acme Corp, domain=acme-corp.com
Call create_person with email, primary_company_id from step 2
Call create_deal with name, value_cents: "4000000" (string-encoded bigint), stage: "prospecting", primary_company_id, primary_person_id

Four MCP tool calls. One conversational prompt. No browser tabs.

Driving it from your own backend (REST)

If your agent is a Python/Node service running 24/7:

import httpx

API = "$SALTY_API"  # e.g. https://api.trysalty.com
H = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {SALTY_API_KEY}", "Content-Type": "application/json"}

# 1. Lookup or create company
r = httpx.get(f"{API}/companies?filter[domain]=acme-corp.com", headers=H).json()
company_id = r["data"][0]["id"] if r["data"] else httpx.post(
    f"{API}/companies", headers=H,
    json={"name": "Acme Corp", "domain": "acme-corp.com"}
).json()["id"]

# 2. Create person
person = httpx.post(f"{API}/people", headers=H, json={
    "email": "sarah@acme-corp.com",
    "first_name": "Sarah",
    "primary_company_id": company_id,
}).json()

# 3. Create deal
httpx.post(f"{API}/deals", headers=H, json={
    "name": "Acme Q3 expansion",
    "value_cents": "4000000",                  # string-encoded bigint
    "stage": "prospecting",
    "primary_company_id": company_id,
    "primary_person_id": person["id"],
})

React to deal state changes via webhooks

curl -X POST $SALTY_API/webhook-endpoints \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SALTY_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://your-agent.com/salty-hook", "subscribed_events": ["deal.updated", "person.created"]}'

The response includes a whsec_… signing secret shown once — store it; future deliveries arrive with a Salty-Signature: t=<ms>,v1=<hex> header. Verify with HMAC-SHA-256 over <t>.<body>. See Webhooks.

Custom fields specific to your funnel

Extend the schema on the fly — no migrations, no service restarts:

curl -X POST $SALTY_API/schema/deal/attributes \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SALTY_API_KEY" \
  -d '{"attribute_key":"source","display_name":"Source","data_type":"enum",
       "enum_values":["typeform","linkedin","referral","cold_outbound"]}'

Now every deal write can include custom_attributes: {source: "linkedin"} — and bad values get rejected with a clear 400.

Volume guidance

A typical BDR agent doing 100 outbound + 200 follow-ups per month makes ~1,500 API calls (3-5 calls per touch). That puts you on Solo ($20/mo, 100k calls) — Free (500 calls/mo) is a demo tier and won’t sustain a real BDR workload, plus it blocks the custom attributes and webhooks the pattern above relies on. At 10× scale, Solo’s 100k cap still has plenty of headroom.

MCP server — connect Claude / Cursor / ChatGPT to Salty
Webhooks — signed delivery, retry, signing-secret rotation
Schema engine — what validation does and doesn’t enforce
Custom Objects — when “deal” isn’t the right shape for your pipeline

Get Started

Use cases

Concepts

AI Sales BDR

The scenario

What the agent does

Driving it from Claude Desktop (MCP)

Driving it from your own backend (REST)

React to deal state changes via webhooks

Custom fields specific to your funnel

Volume guidance

​The scenario

​What the agent does

​Driving it from Claude Desktop (MCP)

​Driving it from your own backend (REST)

​React to deal state changes via webhooks

​Custom fields specific to your funnel

​Volume guidance

​Related

The scenario

What the agent does

Driving it from Claude Desktop (MCP)

Driving it from your own backend (REST)

React to deal state changes via webhooks

Custom fields specific to your funnel

Volume guidance

Related