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The Background
When businesses across the U.S. find themselves dealing with a ransomware attack, a data breach, or a failing IT infrastructure, they need a partner who already knows what to do. Cyber Advisors has been that partner for nearly three decades.
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Founded in 1997 and headquartered in Maple Grove, Minnesota, Cyber Advisors is a managed IT and cybersecurity company serving more than 1,800 clients nationwide. Its 330-plus credentialed professionals deliver managed security services, penetration testing, virtual CISO advisory, 24/7 service desk support, and cloud solutions to organizations ranging from small businesses to enterprise clients across the country. The company runs on a simple principle: do right by clients, do right by employees, and good things follow. That commitment has made Cyber Advisors the top-ranked provider for specialized security talent in Minnesota and a go-to partner for any organization where a single breach could bring operations to a halt.
Growth has defined the last several years. Backed by private equity and executing an aggressive acquisition strategy, Cyber Advisors absorbed more than ten companies in two years. The team grew from roughly 86 employees to more than 400, with offices now in Minneapolis, Chicago, North Carolina, Virginia, Utah, and beyond. Each acquisition added new service lines, new markets, and more complexity. The product catalog alone grew to over 7,500 SKUs. The company had built something formidable. But the internal systems supporting the revenue side had not grown at the same pace. Leads were coming in. The follow-up was not.
The Challenge
Prospects Were Reaching Out. Nobody Was Getting Back to Them
The businesses contacting Cyber Advisors were not browsing out of curiosity. They had a specific, urgent problem, and they were actively looking for help. A mid-market manufacturer weighing whether to outsource its IT security entirely. A professional services firm that had just received a phishing alert and needed to act fast. A growing company that needed a managed security partner in place before its next compliance audit. These were high-intent prospects, many of them arriving through Google Ads, SEO, or AI-driven search channels, filling out a form and expecting someone to respond quickly and knowledgeably.
Cole Goebel, Director of RevOps at Cyber Advisors, had built the inbound engine that was bringing those leads in: the ad campaigns, the SEO strategy, the content approach that was already generating AI-referred inquiries through early AEO signals. Demand was flowing exactly as planned. What happened to that demand after a lead arrived was a different story entirely.
Leads Were Disappearing Into the Process
Before Prospecting Agent, every inbound lead went straight to a sales rep. What happened next was completely invisible. A rep might make one call and stop. They might wait twelve hours before trying again. They might not follow up at all. There was no system to detect any of this. Leadership had no way to see how many times a specific lead had been contacted, whether an outreach sequence had ever been completed, or whether a prospect had simply been forgotten after the first attempt. The CRM recorded when a lead arrived, but it showed nothing after that.
"We were getting the leads, but we were fumbling them. I fixed the one thing and it bottlenecked at the next step," Cole said.
The question was not whether to use AI. It was how to use it without putting client data at risk.
The numbers reflected it. Roughly one in ten prospects picked up the phone, and even then it took ten live conversations to close two or three deals. Every lead that went cold without proper follow-up was revenue the company had already paid to generate and then let walk away. At the same time, Cyber Advisors was restructuring its entire sales organization, creating clear, separate roles for account executives, BDRs, account managers, and customer retention teams. Making that structure work required a reliable, fully trackable way to ensure every inbound lead was followed up consistently. Accountability was not a nice-to-have. It was the missing piece Cole had to build.
The Solution
What Prospects Needed Before Anyone Picked Up the Phone
The businesses filling out forms on Cyber Advisors’ website were not looking for a generic, automated response. They were evaluating a cybersecurity partner, which meant they were already forming opinions about which companies were worth their time. They expected the first outreach they received to demonstrate that someone had actually done some homework: understood the industry they operated in, thought about the type of problem they were likely facing, and reached out with something relevant. That is exactly what they started receiving.
Cole discovered Prospecting Agent at HubSpot’s annual conference through a session that caught his attention. A self-described "learn by doing" type, he stepped away from the main floor to find some quiet, opened his laptop, and started building. By the time he left, he had created two agents: a Prospecting Agent workflow to handle every inbound lead automatically, and a complementary AI sales coach to help reps navigate the company’s 7,500-SKU product catalog in real time. The setup was straightforward. The quality of the output was not what he expected.
Doing the Research Sales Reps Would Never Do
Within weeks of returning from the conference, Cyber Advisors had Prospecting Agent running on every inbound lead. The moment a prospect submitted a form, Prospecting Agent began working: enriching prospect data through ZoomInfo, surfacing relevant context about their company, and drafting outreach that acknowledged exactly who the prospect was and what they were likely dealing with. Integrated with ZoomInfo, the agent also layered in firmographic data, giving every message the specificity of something written by someone who had spent time understanding that particular company before hitting send. "It sends really well-tuned emails. It’s doing more research on the lead than my sales reps would. It’s doing the stuff that all of my sales reps are way too lazy to do," Cole said.
The workflow also gave Cole the accountability layer he had been trying to build for months. Prospecting Agent logged every touchpoint automatically. Leadership could now see, at any point, how many times a specific lead had been contacted, whether the outreach sequence had run its full course, which prospects had responded, and which had gone quiet and needed a different approach. The black box that had swallowed leads for years was replaced with a live, transparent record of every inbound interaction. Cole assigned Prospecting Agent to handle all prospecting outreach by email. His new BDR focused entirely on calls. The roles were clear, the process was measurable, and the whole system was finally built to scale.
The Transformation
Prospects Were Booking Meetings Before Anyone Had Dialed
The businesses that had submitted a form and were expecting a routine follow-up call were instead receiving fast, specific outreach that referenced their actual situation. Some of them were scheduling meetings before Cole’s team had made a single call. He would be mid-process, drafting an assignment email to hand a new lead to a rep, and discover the prospect had already chosen a time on their own. "I’m getting appointments set before she calls them sometimes. The meeting gets set before we ever dialed the phone," Cole said.
Within a single month, 51 prospects moved through Prospecting Agent workflows. The inbound lead reply rate reached 22 percent, which was well above anything the team had achieved through manual outreach. The volume and the quality of conversations were improving at the same time, which had never happened before.
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Revenue Visibility: Tracked, Attributed, and Real
The financial picture came into focus quickly. Cole opened his Prospecting Agent dashboard and found $700,000 in closed revenue directly attributed to the tool, including individual deals as large as $320,000. Total pipeline tied to Prospecting Agent outreach had grown to nearly $2 million. These were not estimates or projections. They were deals that closed because a high-intent prospect received a thoughtful, personalized email within minutes of submitting a form, rather than a call three days later from a rep who had not read what the prospect had actually written.
The change ran deeper than the pipeline numbers. Cyber Advisors had restructured its entire go-to-market motion around distinct, non-overlapping roles and a retention team protecting the customer base. Prospecting Agent made that structure work in practice. BDRs stopped splitting their time between researching prospects, drafting outreach, and making calls. They called. The agent handled everything else. Leadership stopped guessing whether follow-up was happening and started making decisions based on what was actually showing up in the data.
A Foundation Ready for What Comes Next
Adoption landed differently than Cole had expected. ZoomInfo had been available to his sales reps for months; most had not logged in for over half a year. Prospecting Agent took hold because it required nothing extra from the team. It was embedded in the workflow from the first lead, and the results were visible fast enough that no one resisted it. As Cyber Advisors continues acquiring companies and expanding into new markets, the inbound infrastructure is ready to keep up. The next prospect who fills out a form on Cyber Advisors’ website will hear back within minutes, with a message that feels like it was written specifically for them, before any human has picked up the phone.
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