Prospecting Agent does different work at Seed than it does at Series A. Here's how to set it up, what to track, and where to start based on your stage.
Written by: Drue Stinnett Maybell
Outbound at a four-person startup and outbound at a 20-person startup are completely different problems. They don't look the same, they don't break the same way, and they don't need the same solution.
At Seed, you're not looking for a system. You're looking for time. You need to get into rooms with the right people without outreach becoming a second full-time job you didn't sign up for. At Series A, you're past that. You have (or are about to have) a first sales hire, and the problem isn't doing outbound anymore. It's making outbound work when you're not the one doing it.
Prospecting Agent handles both. But how you set it up, what you track, and what "working" actually looks like depends entirely on your stage. Setting it up the same way at Seed and Series A is how startups waste the tool entirely.
Yes, you’re reading this on a HubSpot blog. Yes, I'm about to tell you about a HubSpot product. But I'm writing about this one because it's the tool my revenue team actually needed when I was at a Series A startup, trying to manage $50M in pipeline with two AEs and zero budget for a BDR. We didn't need another pretty dashboard. We needed something that could do the research and the outreach prep so our sellers could spend their time, uh, selling. That's what this does.
Prospecting Agent watches your target accounts for buying signals. Things like website visits, funding announcements, job changes, research activity. When something triggers, it finds the right contacts at those companies, researches them using your CRM data and the web, and drafts personalized outreach on your behalf.
You review it, you send it, and then you show up to conversations. All the research and first-draft writing happens before you touch anything.
Here's the part that actually matters for setup: the agent works through plays. A play is a specific prospecting motion (say, monitoring your top target accounts for intent signals, or following up on inbound leads who downloaded something from your site). Each play runs independently in the background once you publish it. You can have one running or several, depending on how many motions your startup actually needs right now. You're not building out some massive outbound operation on day one. You're starting one play and seeing what happens, which is a way less intimidating place to begin.
You're doing everything. Sales, product, hiring, ops. Probably customer support, too. Outbound isn't something you've been ignoring because you don't believe in it. You've been ignoring it because the day only has so many hours, and prospecting keeps losing to whatever's on fire right now.
The referral pipeline got you here. But you already know it won't get you to the next stage.
This is where Prospecting Agent earns its keep. You don't need a sales system yet. You need to get into rooms with people who should know about what you're building, without turning outreach into a second full-time job you didn't sign up for.
Here's what your week looks like with it running. Monday morning, you open HubSpot and the agent has already surfaced companies showing intent. It's found the right people at those companies and drafted emails in your voice. You spend 20 minutes reviewing and sending instead of two hours researching and writing from scratch. By Wednesday, you have replies. By Friday, you have meetings on the calendar that you didn't spend your whole week engineering.
And the fear that you'll "do outbound wrong" starts to dissolve when the agent handles the research and the drafting and all you have to do is show up and talk about the thing you built.
Where to start. One play. One segment of companies you want to reach. If you're not sure which play, go with in-market target accounts. That's the one that watches companies matching your ICP for buying signals and surfaces the ones worth reaching out to now, not just eventually. It's the highest-signal play you can start with when you don't have a high volume of inbound to work from yet.
Set up your selling profile. This is where you tell the agent what your startup does, who you're selling to, and what problems you solve. The agent pulls from your website to pre-fill this, so it takes minutes, not hours. The better you dial this in, the better the outreach reads. (Think of it as the pitch you'd give over coffee, not a product spec.)
Keep it on review-before-sending. At Seed, you want your eyes on everything going out. Partly for quality control, partly because you'll learn a ton about your own messaging by reading what the agent drafts and editing it. That feedback loop is incredibly useful when you're still sharpening how you talk about what you do.
What to track. Meetings booked per week. That's it. At Seed, you're not optimizing a funnel. You're filling a calendar. If the agent is getting you into two or three conversations a week that you weren't having before, it's working.
You've raised your A. You've hired (or you're hiring) your first sales rep. And that rep needs to run outbound without having your context, your relationships, or your six months of pattern recognition about who responds and who doesn't. Right now, most of that knowledge lives in your head and your sent folder. It doesn't transfer in an onboarding doc, and it definitely doesn't transfer when you just forward them a list of accounts and say "start emailing."
Prospecting Agent closes that gap by becoming the system, not just the shortcut.
Set up your selling profile with your full context. Value prop, pain points, target personas. Now the agent researches and drafts outreach the same way whether it's you or your new rep on the other end. The rep isn't waking up every morning trying to figure out who to email and what to say. The institutional knowledge about who to target and how to talk to them lives in the system, not locked in your head.
Build multiple plays for different motions. Set up an inbound follow-up play so warm leads get a response fast, and pair it with an in-market target account play for outbound. If you have closed-lost deals that might be coming back around, add a re-engagement play for those too. Each one runs independently in the background. Your rep logs in to a queue of recommended companies, suggested contacts, and drafted emails, and spends their time sending and selling instead of building lists and doing research.
Use multiple selling profiles if you sell to different buyers. If your startup has more than one product or targets more than one persona, set up separate profiles so the outreach actually matches the audience. You can create up to 85 (you won't need 85), and each one shapes the agent's tone, positioning, and messaging for that specific segment.
Consider switching to autonomous mode. At Series A, once you've seen enough drafts to trust the output, you can let the agent send on its own. The agent still respects your guardrails (send windows, frequency caps, business-days-only settings), and it caps cold outreach at three emails per contact within a 90-day window to protect your sender reputation. You set the rules. It follows them.
What to track. The success metric shifts here. You're tracking consistency and system health, not just your own calendar. Are emails going out on a regular cadence? Is your rep actually engaging with the queue, or are recommendations piling up unreviewed? Are response rates holding as you scale volume? The Analyze tab in Prospecting Agent shows total enrollments, emails delivered, opened, replied, and meetings booked, so you can catch problems before they become patterns.
You're not just filling your own pipeline anymore. You're building the machine that fills it whether you're in the room or not.
This is the question that comes up a lot, especially at Seed when headcount isn’t necessarily in the budget. And the honest answer is: that's not what it's for. Prospecting Agent handles the research, the contact sourcing, and the first draft. The work that eats hours before a single conversation happens. But someone still needs to review that outreach, get on the call, read the room, and close. That's the part that actually requires a human, and it's the part most founders and reps should be spending way more of their time on.
The agent doesn't replace the person. It gives the person back the hours they were losing to prep work so they can focus on the conversations that actually move pipeline. At Seed, that person is you. At Series A, that person is your rep. Either way, the goal is the same: more time selling, less time researching.
Here's the part where I tell you it takes 20 minutes, and you don't believe me, and then it actually takes 20 minutes.
Pick one segment of target accounts. Set up one selling profile with your value prop and who you sell to. Choose one play. Set the agent to review-before-sending so you can see what it drafts before anything hits an inbox.
Connect a contact data provider (HubSpot integrates with ZoomInfo, Apollo, and Surfe) so the agent can find contacts outside your CRM when it surfaces a recommended company. This is the step people skip and then wonder why the agent isn't sourcing net-new leads.
Give it two weeks. Track meetings booked, response rates, and how many hours you're not spending on manual research and outreach. That's your proof of concept. Two weeks is long enough to see signal. Short enough that you haven't over-invested if you need to adjust your targeting.
You don't need to overhaul your sales process to start. You need one play, one segment, and 20 minutes to set up a selling profile. Eligible startups get white-glove onboarding and discounted access (up to 90% off) through HubSpot for Startups.
