A prospect responds to a cold email or LinkedIn message asking for more information. It’s exactly the kind of reply a lead generation agency or an outbound SDR team has been working to generate.
But what happens next isn’t always straightforward.
The response lands in an outreach platform. Someone needs to notice it, find the prospect’s phone number, transfer their information into a dialer, and assign an SDR to follow up. By the time someone finally calls, the prospect may have moved on.
It’s a problem Justin Devries has encountered repeatedly throughout his career in B2B lead generation, and one he set out to solve with LeadHero.io, a calling platform built to help outbound teams turn interested prospects into actual conversations.
Built From Years of Cold-Calling Experience
Before founding Lead Hero, Devries spent years working directly in outbound sales, personally booking thousands of appointments and training hundreds of sales development representatives (SDRs).
He also built GrowthGiants.org, an outbound B2B lead generation firm that grew to serve 60 enterprise B2B clients. Working closely with agencies and SDR teams gave him a firsthand view of where their time was going.
One recurring frustration was that SDRs were spending too much time preparing to make calls rather than speaking with prospects.
Agencies would invest heavily in building targeted lead lists, writing personalized cold emails, and generating interested responses for their clients. But once someone replied, the process of actually reaching them was often surprisingly inefficient.
The problem wasn’t necessarily a lack of leads or capable SDRs. It was the number of disconnected steps required to turn interest into a conversation.
In 2024, Devries and his team began building Lead Hero to eliminate much of that work.
Closing the Gap Between a Reply and a Conversation
Most lead generation agencies already use several platforms to run outbound campaigns. Prospecting and enrichment might happen through Clay, email outreach through Instantly, Smartlead, High Volume Sender, or PlusVibe, and LinkedIn outreach through tools like HeyReach or Aimfox.
For agencies managing multiple clients and SDRs, moving interested prospects between these platforms can become a significant operational challenge.
Traditionally, getting a positive reply into an SDR’s calling queue requires manual work or a collection of third-party automations.
Lead Hero connects directly with outreach platforms, including Instantly, Smartlead, and HeyReach. When a positive reply comes in, the contact can automatically enter an SDR’s calling queue, along with the context of the original conversation.
The platform can also find and verify mobile numbers through more than 100 data providers, reducing the time SDRs spend researching contact information.
For agencies managing multiple clients, Lead Hero also supports separate workspaces, lead assignments, and configurable calling queues, allowing managers to organize outreach while keeping each SDR focused on the right prospects.
Instead of switching between applications, finding numbers, and manually preparing calls, SDRs can spend more time having conversations.
The goal isn’t to replace the SDR. It’s to remove the administrative work that delays the conversation.
Speed is only part of the equation. Someone requesting pricing may need a different follow-up from someone asking to book a demonstration. Keeping the original reply visible helps the SDR understand why the prospect was interested in the first place.
Why Having a Phone Number Isn’t Enough
Devries identified another problem through his experience managing outbound callers: even when SDRs had the right contact information, getting someone to answer was difficult.
A number could be outdated, belong to someone else, lead to voicemail, or have call screening enabled. Meanwhile, the numbers SDRs were calling from could be flagged as spam without anyone realizing it.
Lead Hero addresses both sides of that problem.
Its Phone Intent technology analyzes prospects’ phone numbers and categorizes them based on the likelihood of reaching the intended person. Rather than treating every number equally, it can identify likely answers, voicemail, call screening, and potentially incorrect numbers.
This gives SDRs a way to prioritize contacts more likely to answer instead of working through large prospect lists blindly.
The platform also monitors outbound caller ID reputation across major North American carriers. When a number is identified as spam-flagged, LeadHero can automatically retire and replace it.
According to the company, some customers using its Phone Intent and calling tools have achieved human pickup rates of 25–28% on cold lists, although results vary depending on the audience and quality of the data.
For Devries, the distinction matters. Making more calls isn’t necessarily productive if most of those calls never reach the intended person.
For lead generation agencies, improving the number of real conversations an SDR can have each day can be more valuable than simply increasing dialing volume.
What Happens After Someone Answers?
Improving pickup rates solves only one part of the problem.
An SDR still needs to understand the prospect’s needs, ask appropriate questions, and move the conversation forward.
That’s why LeadHero also includes call recordings, personalized scripts, follow-up scheduling, and tools for managers to monitor SDR performance.
The platform supports automated callbacks, helping representatives follow up with prospects across multiple days without manually rebuilding their calling lists.
For agencies managing SDRs across several client accounts, these features can help standardize follow-up processes while giving managers visibility into calling activity and results.
The company points to several customer examples. In one case published on its website, 73 Media increased its monthly booked appointments from roughly 20–30 to 100 after introducing a dedicated warm caller using Lead Hero.
That is a company-reported outcome rather than a result every business should expect. Still, it illustrates the potential impact of combining timely follow-up with a dedicated SDR whose responsibility is turning interested responses into booked conversations.
And when a prospect doesn’t answer, the process doesn’t necessarily end there. Lead Hero supports scheduled callbacks, voicemail drops, and messaging follow-ups so SDRs can continue working a lead without manually managing every step.
Rethinking How Outbound Teams Measure Productivity
Lead generation agencies often evaluate SDR performance by looking at calls made, conversations held, and qualified meetings booked.
Those metrics matter, but they don’t always explain where opportunities are being lost.
An agency might generate hundreds of positive replies across its clients while taking hours to contact them. Another might have SDRs making hundreds of calls using numbers that rarely reach the intended prospects.
Devries’s approach encourages agencies and outbound teams to look more closely at what happens between those activities.
How quickly does an SDR follow up after a positive reply? How much time is spent finding phone numbers? How often do calls reach the right person? And how many of those conversations turn into qualified appointments?
These are the operational problems Lead Hero was built to address.
The same challenges are relevant to companies building sales engagement platforms. Integrating prospecting, calling, and follow-up into a single workflow can reduce the number of disconnected tools an SDR needs to manage.
For agencies and GTM teams already investing heavily in outbound prospecting, the opportunity may not be sending more emails or increasing call volume. It may be making better use of the interest they’re already generating.
A positive reply is a great start. But what really matters is whether an SDR can turn that interest into an actual conversation.
