What happened overnight?
This is an illustrative scenario, not a customer account. The people and the company are invented; every event in it maps to a real mechanism on ftes.ai, named as it happens.
The company is a software business with a small sales team and a steady flow of inbound sign-ups. The SDR FTE, connected to the CRM through a dedicated scoped account and to the sign-up feed, qualified each overnight lead against the criteria the head of sales wrote: company profile, role, stated need, timeline, each scored with the evidence from the sign-up and from public sources, and each unanswered criterion marked unanswered rather than guessed. Qualified leads were routed to the owning rep with a summary. One lead was from a company on the protected account list, an existing customer; the FTE routed it to the account owner and did nothing else.
It also researched the next batch of prospects against the ideal customer profile and drafted first-touch outreach for each, with the public sources named in the draft, queued for approval. And it proposed CRM hygiene: stage corrections, duplicate merges, and next-step fields, each with the activity that justifies it, grouped by rep.
What does the rep see in the morning?
The morning brief, first person, waiting-on-you first: the rep's qualified leads with summaries, the outreach drafts, and the rep's hygiene proposals. The rep opens a qualification and disagrees with one score: the criterion about timeline was scored from a phrase the rep reads differently. The rep challenges the criterion with a reason; the lead is still routed, and the reason goes to the send-back log where the head of sales will read it on Friday. Then the hygiene proposals: a minute of yes and no, each with the email or call behind it, and the CRM is honest for the day.
The rep used to do the hygiene after a long day, badly. Now it is a list of questions with evidence.
How do the outreach drafts go?
Each draft shows the prospect's fit with the criteria scored, the public sources the research came from, and a message in the team's voice referencing something specific and sourced. The rep approves most, edits two for a phrase, and sends back one because the source the FTE cited is a year old and the prospect's situation has changed; the reason is a facts item and the FTE will re-research before re-proposing. Cold first-touch outside the protected list is still gated at Level 0 this cycle; the head of sales will consider it under the Promotion Standard at the second review, and most of the reps prefer the edit step anyway.
No draft mentions a price, a discount, or terms. Those are on the Never list, and the fact gate would flag a claim about the prospect's business that lacked a source.
- Approve: drafts with sources, edited where the rep wants
- Send back: one, stale source, re-research
- Never: price, discount, terms, protected accounts
What happens when a prospect replies?
Mid-morning a prospect from last week's approved outreach replies with a question about integration. The reply goes to the owning rep with the full thread attached and a note in the brief; the FTE does not answer, does not draft an answer, and does not continue the thread. The conversation is the rep's from the first response, at every autonomy level. The rep answers, books a call, and the FTE, seeing the calendar event through the connection, proposes a stage change and a next step in the CRM, which the rep confirms.
The prospect never receives a message the rep did not send.
What does the head of sales do with the day?
Reads the workforce view. Notices that the timeline criterion has been challenged by two reps this week, which is a wording problem in the criteria, and notes it for Friday. Checks that the lead from the protected account went to the account owner and nowhere else; the audit trail shows the routing and no outreach. Reads the pipeline diagnostic the FTE ran overnight as a mission, which lists ranked hypotheses with evidence for why one stage slowed this month, and forwards the top hypothesis to the team as a question rather than a conclusion. Reads the spend line and moves on.
The forecast meeting, later, is shorter, because the CRM's next-step fields are current.
What does the record show at the end of the day?
The audit trail: every qualification with its evidence, the criterion challenges with reasons, the outreach approvals and edits with the reps' names, the send-back, the protected-account routing with no outreach, the prospect reply routed to the rep, and the hygiene confirmations. The Performance tab: qualified pipeline created with the criteria approval rate beside it, time from lead arrival to first rep touch, next-step coverage, and selling hours recovered from the baseline sheet. At the second review, after a full sales cycle, the head of sales will read all of it against the baseline and decide about cold first-touch.
The library's piece on how an SDR FTE works describes each mechanism outside the story; the CRM hygiene piece describes the proposal loop the reps confirmed.