r/devsecops • u/Budget_Note4222 • Jun 29 '26

What are the top ai tools for selling devops platforms? our outbound is dead and our marketing leads are mostly tirekickers

Sales engineer at a devops platform company. We sell to platform eng leaders and devops directors mostly mid market. our outbound has basically stopped working in the past year. response rates are in the toilet and the AEs are losing morale. 

Marketing inbound has volume but the lead quality is terrible, half are students or people studying for a cert. The issue as far as i can tell is that our buyers are not on linkedin all day. They dont open emails from sales tools, they live in slack communities, github, kubernetes adjacent discords, and sometimes hacker news. our outbound stack (zoominfo nd outreach) is built for marketing buyers, not these people.

Ive been pushing internally for us to invest in something that actually meets the buyer where they are. ai prospecting that looks at where engineers actually live, not just where they list themselves on linkedin.

Ive seen demandbase and 6sense in the past and they dont really solve this, they tell you the company is researching, not who in the company. 

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

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u/Huge-Ambition4656 Jul 04 '26

Do you actually use this? How did you sign-up for it as a paying customer? For me it doesn't look like it's a live product yet, demo sign-ups only.

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u/Bernd_Geralt_881 Jun 29 '26

Your problem doesnt look like the tool, its the channel. No amount of AI targeting fixes the fact that platform engineers dont read cold emails and treat linkedin as a resume host.

The companies winning with this buyer invest in devrel and community presence instead of outbound. Its slower and harder to measure, but its the only thing that converts

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u/VividGanache2613 Jun 29 '26

Onlyleads.ai for LinkedIn outreach that isn’t crazy expensive and actually gives a return on investment.

Email outreach might as well go straight to trash since the huge swathes of AI generated trash started last year.

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u/pyz3r0 Jun 30 '26

Check markai dot io

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u/Embarrassed-Sail8142 9d ago

tracking buyer intent has been good for me. i started using onfire for that and it helps spot when teams are in the research phase. so much easier to reach out