SalesTechStar Interview with Dan Lee, CEO of Nooks

Dan Lee, CEO of Nooks talks about the benefits of AI powered sales agents in this SalesTech catch up:

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Hi Dan, tell us about yourself and more about Nooks

I’m CEO and co-founder of Nooks. We’re building the AI Sales Assistant Platform powering pipeline for every B2B company. We help sales teams deliver more value to their prospects by automating their busywork and letting them focus on the human parts of selling.

We started Nooks because we saw a significant gap between how sales reps spend their time and where they add the most value. Most sales development reps (SDRs) spend hours each day on repetitive tasks like finding contact information, logging calls, and researching leads, instead of actually selling.

Nooks uses AI to handle this busywork. Our platform is built around AI-powered assistants that work alongside reps, helping them multiply productivity while focusing on the human touch.

Why are AI sales agents becoming more crucial in today’s sales and marketing process?

Sales reps should spend their time on the “human” aspects of the role—the parts that truly make a difference in the sales process. This means engaging deeply with prospects, building relationships, and showing genuine empathy for the customer’s challenges and needs. It’s about listening carefully, understanding pain points, and thinking strategically about how to navigate complex accounts and build multi-threaded connections within organizations. These tasks tap into the rep’s expertise, insight, and personal touch, which are essential for fostering trust and creating meaningful client relationships.

However, most reps find themselves bogged down by routine tasks that don’t make the best use of their skills. Drafting emails, researching potential leads online, logging calls, and scheduling follow-ups—these are essential but repetitive activities that don’t require the rep’s full attention or creativity. This “busywork” not only limits the time reps can dedicate to connecting with prospects but also drains their energy and focus, making it harder to engage meaningfully in the conversations that drive real results.

We believe AI assistants can greatly help accelerate the sales process. We built Nooks’ suite of assistants precisely to automate all of the work mentioned above. The Dialing Assistant and Prospecting Assistant handle everything from contact research to notes, allowing reps to get straight to meaningful conversations. Reps using Nooks have seen a 2-3x boost in productivity almost immediately, freeing them up to focus on building relationships instead of getting lost in admin work.

This productivity boost translates directly into measurable outcomes. With Nooks, SDRs can have more quality conversations with prospects, which leads to a higher volume of qualified deals entering the pipeline. Managers can reinforce their best practices with enhanced training and onboarding, supported by the Coaching Assistant. Reps can use the Coaching Assistant’s training bots to practice call scripts and perfect their objection handling.

This increased engagement means reps can focus on nurturing high-potential opportunities, accelerating the conversion rate from initial contact to pipeline. In fact, companies are seeing a significant increase in pipeline generation, with some attributing over 70% of their sourced pipeline to Nooks, helping teams consistently exceed their targets.

Can you talk about how some leading B2B tech teams have used AI sales agents strategically to boost ROI?

Many Nooks customers are seeing remarkable ROI by integrating our platform into their sales workflows. To give you concrete customer examples, global sales enablement platform Seismic saw 80% of its meetings come from cold calls after adopting Nooks’ AI parallel dialer, driving millions in pipeline. Instabug doubled its booked meetings thanks to quality prospect data and AI-powered dialing. Modern Health, a mental well-being unicorn with over 800 employees, boosted its cold calling culture by switching to Nooks’ virtual salesfloor and parallel dialer, leading to a 5x increase in daily dials—from 10-20 calls to 100-200 per rep.

And that’s just scratching the surface.

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How can modern sellers make better use of AI to ensure a balance between automation, AI, and the human element?

AI can transform the SDR role by eliminating the manual, repetitive work that prevents these sellers from higher-leverage activities. We’re freeing them to work on and showcase more strategic selling and relationship building with their prospects.

With AI handling the tedious tasks, SDRs get to spend their time connecting with prospects and building additional sales skills. Companies that help their SDRs to become more strategic are going to win the talent wars – SDRs will want to work at and grow with these businesses.

I’m also convinced that AI-driven coaching is going to be a game-changer for developing reps. That’s why we built an AI Coaching Assistant into Nooks—to help reps bring their best to every conversation. The assistant transcribes, scores, and gives feedback on prospecting calls, while our AI Roleplay feature allows reps to practice tough sales scenarios, refine their pitch, and prepare for objections. It’s tools like Nooks that help reps approach each call with confidence, empathy, and real skill. Looking ahead, I think the most successful teams will be the ones using AI to make reps more authentic and human, not less.

What future features can end users expect from Nooks?

Nooks today is all about bringing together powerful AI assistants that work seamlessly to simplify the daily grind for sales reps and let them focus on what really matters: connecting with prospects. Our platform features a team of assistants—Dialing, Coaching, and Prospecting—each designed to take on specific tasks, but they all work together to create a unified, streamlined experience to help reps focus on the thing that matters—the prospect. For example:

• Buying signals, account summaries, and emails drafted by the Prospecting Assistant show up directly in the dialer to inform a rep’s talk track;
• The Dialing Assistant automatically detects follow-ups and referrals in calls so the Prospecting Assistant can target the right prospects at an account;
• The AI roleplay is trained directly on calls from the dialer. After a real call, reps can even “try again” on a simulated AI version of that prospect;
• Prospect personas are shared across each of the assistants, providing a unified experience for analytics, battlecards, roleplay, and targeted campaigns.

What makes Nooks special is that these assistants aren’t just separate tools—they’re all tightly integrated, creating a single, cohesive system. Reps don’t have to jump between different apps or remember where to find information; everything they need to have a great prospect conversation is right there, organized around each prospect. This setup doesn’t just make things easier—it lets reps focus on strategy, build relationships, and engage with empathy. With Nooks, AI is there to support reps, not replace them, helping them bring a more human touch to every interaction.

For the foreseeable future, we’re laser-focused on enhancing these features to make them smarter, richer, and more valuable for our customers and prospects. As we introduce new assistants to ASAP, you can expect the same attention to detail, seamless integration, and impressive productivity gains.

Five predictions on AI and salestech you’d leave us with before we wrap up?

• AI will redefine the SDR role, making it a more strategic and desirable position.
• AI-driven coaching will be transformative, equipping reps with real-time feedback and roleplay scenarios to build their skills.
• AI will make sales more human by automating routine tasks, allowing reps to focus on empathy and connection.
• The phone will be the most effective outbound channel. Live conversations are the best and quickest way to connect with prospects, especially as noise increases in other channels.
• Sales will shift towards relationship-building and long-term engagement, as AI allows reps to dedicate more time to understanding and connecting with clients.

And we expect that the sales tech stack will consolidate. Since AI will be doing a lot more of the work, we can no longer rely on human glue connecting data & workflows between fragmented tools. We’re building this future with Nooks.

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