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The Background
For the manufacturers and distributors Vision33 serves, choosing an ERP partner is one of the most consequential decisions they will make. The software costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and will shape how they run operations for years. They expect whoever is calling on them to already understand their business.
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Vision33 has earned that trust for more than 25 years. Headquartered in St. John’s, Newfoundland, with offices across North America, the UK, and Ireland, Vision33 is one of the world’s largest value-added resellers of SAP Business One and SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Its 400-plus specialists serve over 1,500 active customers across manufacturing, distribution, and wholesale, delivering cloud ERP without enterprise-level complexity. With annual revenue over $100 million, Vision33 competes at the top of the mid-market ERP channel.
A Market That Rewards Whoever Arrives First
In the highly competitive ERP market, timing is everything. Gerard Duggan, VP of Marketing and Alliances, put it plainly: "We compete with other SAP VARs, in addition to alternative software products, so it’s imperative that we get in front of the prospect first. In some ways it’s similar to being a real estate agent. Your real goal is to get the listing. Once you get the listing, it’s very hard to get displaced by your competition." The challenge is that getting there first, with the right first impression, is becoming harder to do at scale.
The Challenge
The People Who Need ERP Most Are the Hardest to Reach
The manufacturers and distributors Vision33 sells to were already on guard. Macroeconomic pressure had many delaying technology decisions. AI disruption had others questioning whether any investment was safe. The last thing they wanted was a generic vendor email asking about their budget before learning anything about their business. They expected a partner who had done the work before reaching out.
Vision33’s inside sales team of 11 people was working hard. BDRs responded quickly to inbound leads. They ran their own prospecting sequences. They used ZoomInfo in North America and Cognism in the UK for contact enrichment, routing every intent signal into HubSpot as fast as possible. The infrastructure was solid.
Speed Was Not Enough Without Personalization
What the team could not do was personalize at scale. When a contact opened an email or downloaded an asset, the BDR would research their history, piece together what might resonate, and send a follow-up. That research was slow. The resulting messages were personalized to a segment, not to a person. They reflected what the prospect’s industry cared about, not what that individual had actually said or done.
The ERP space is crowded. SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft all have large partner networks competing for the same mid-market customers. Vision33 needed to reach the right people first, with something genuinely relevant. Doing that manually, at the volume required, was not realistic with the team they had.
The Solution
Reaching Prospects the Way They Actually Want to Be Reached
The manufacturers and distributors Vision33 targets want to feel understood before they say yes to a conversation. When an outreach email references the exact concern they raised two years ago, or connects a recent site visit to a specific product question, the reflex to ignore it disappears. That is what Frans van Staden, Director of Digital Demand Generation at Vision33, saw when his team first deployed HubSpot’s Prospecting Agent.
Van Staden had been watching the tool since it was announced at HubSpot’s 2025 INBOUND conference. Product updates were a bookmark in his browser. Within weeks, his team had requested beta access. What the agent could do changed how they thought about outreach.
The Research That Used to Take Hours, Done in Seconds
Prospecting Agent does not just send emails. It researches every individual contact before writing a word, pulling from company data, the contact’s role and history, prior email threads, call records, and every CRM signal. It then synthesizes that into a message specific to that person’s situation. The emails Vision33’s team sent were so precisely relevant that prospects responded as if the conversation had already begun.
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Van Staden’s team spent the first few months building trust in the output. Each BDR got their own agent configured with Vision33’s brand voice, the products they covered, and the pain points specific to their territory. Prompts were refined weekly. The team tested carefully, tightened what was not landing, and expanded only when the output consistently met the bar they had set. With the ZoomInfo integration in place, surfaced intent signals flowed directly back to the contact record in HubSpot. This additional intent data enabled Prospecting Agent to deliver more personalized outreach, helping the BDR team book meetings much sooner than with traditional outreach.
In a single month during the beta, the team reached more than 50,000 contacts. Prospecting Agent managed multi-touch sequencing across all of them, adjusting based on how each contact responded.
The Transformation
Prospects Who Thought They Were Getting a Personal Note
The manufacturers and distributors on the other side of Vision33’s outreach started responding differently. The emails felt personal because they were built on real context. When contacts replied, many did so as if they were continuing a conversation. More than 12 meetings were booked directly from Prospecting Agent outreach. Engagement rates outperformed Vision33’s traditional sales sequences. A channel that had returned generic results was now generating qualified pipeline.
Duggan described what the shift meant for measurement. "The cause and effect is a little clearer," he said. "We were able to see, once we adopted this, leads started to tick up." For a team that had always invested heavily in marketing technology and struggled to prove direct ROI, that visibility was its own kind of breakthrough.
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A Tedious Cycle, Broken
Before Prospecting Agent, Vision33 faced a classic constraint. More pipeline requires more outreach. More outreach requires more headcount. But without the pipeline, hiring is not funded. Prospecting Agent broke that loop. The same 11-person team now produced outreach volume and quality that would otherwise have required a meaningfully larger staff.
Ramp time for new BDRs shortened. Younger team members adopted the tool quickly. Duggan noticed something that surprised him: the BDRs who approached prompt configuration with real curiosity — who experimented and iterated — produced dramatically better results. The tool did not level the team. It showed clearly who the top performers were.
More Comfortable Spending, Because the ROI Is Visible
Vision33 had always invested more in marketing technology than most companies its size. But ERP marketing spend is notoriously hard to attribute. Prospecting Agent made the return visible. When credits are spent and meetings are booked as a direct result, the math is clear. Vision33 is now more willing to expand its AI investment than it has ever been with traditional marketing spend.
The team continues to refine its prompt strategy, add contacts to agent workflows, and explore what additional HubSpot tools can do alongside it. For van Staden and Duggan, Prospecting Agent is not a campaign they ran. It is how Vision33’s demand generation works now.
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