Adaptive Security Consolidated Their Outbound Stack and 4x'd Email Response Rates with Nooks AI Sequencing

About Adaptive Security

Adaptive Security is a fast-growing cybersecurity company. With a highly driven team of 40 Business Development Representatives (BDRs) spread across New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, their outbound engine is critical to their pipeline generation.

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The Challenge: Disconnected Tools and "The Manual Tax"

Before fully adopting Nooks, Adaptive Security was suffering from severe tool sprawl. Their tech stack was disjointed, forcing reps to constantly jump between their CRM, their Sales Engagement Platform (SEP), and external research tools.

"We were frequently running into issues with things like our CRM syncing to our SEP and lag times there," explains George Cunningham, BDR Manager at Adaptive. "It just really prevented us from moving as fast as we wanted to move."

For the frontline BDRs, this disjointed workflow resulted in a massive "manual tax." Drafting a single personalized email required clicking through three or four different tools just to gather relevant context. "We couldn't see what was going on at the account level or the prospect level in a very efficient manner," notes Madhav Raja, New Business - APAC.

Adaptive Security needed to scale their output, but they knew they couldn't just tell reps to work harder in a broken system. They needed to consolidate their stack and modernize their approach.

The Solution: A Unified, AI-Powered Workspace

Adaptive Security was already using the Nooks dialer with great success. When it came time to consolidate their stack, moving their sequencing and AI research into Nooks was the logical next step.

"We saw it as a great opportunity to decrease the size of our tech stack and move reps from clicking through three or four different tools every day to being in two or maybe three," says Cunningham. "The ideal end goal is that they can live solely in one tool for most of their work."

1. AI-Powered Context and Research

Instead of manually Googling prospects or using external AI chatbots, reps now use the Nooks AI Assistant directly within their workflow. "I use it for every single email that I send out," says Senior BDR Itai Afriat. "It makes it extremely easy to look like you did hours of research without doing really much of that."

Nooks AI Assistant consolidates research from internet analysis, CRM data, and even call transcripts. Giving the team rich intelligence that leads to more engagement. Intelligence that no competitor has access to. 

2. Synchronized Multi-Channel Execution

By having their dialer and their sequencer in the same platform, reps now have perfect visibility into a prospect's history. "If I am calling someone through Nooks, I know what is going on with this account because it's easy to see everything right there in one place," says Raja. "It makes you feel calmer when you're calling someone. It makes you feel more confident."

3. The Virtual Salesfloor

For a distributed team across three major cities, the Nooks Salesfloor brought the energy back to cold calling. "I would probably tell you there's probably 20 BDRs in a room dialing on Nooks," notes Afriat. "It has made a very difficult part of the role much more fun and gamified."

The Results: Record-Breaking Output and Pipeline

By consolidating their tools and leveraging AI for research and sequencing, Adaptive Security saw an immediate and massive spike in their outbound performance.

• 4x Increase in Response Rates: "We were at about a 1% response rate before we moved onto Nooks sequencing," states Cunningham. "Since we've moved across, our response rate is up over 4% now, so a 4x improvement."
• Massive Volume Increase: Because reps no longer have to spend precious minutes researching a single prospect, email send volume has increased "three to four fold."
• Zero to Twenty: The quality of the AI-assisted outreach completely changed the game for inbound replies. "Email bookings prior were non-existent, and now there is call it 20 email bookings a day," says Afriat.
• Record-Breaking Bookings: After fully deploying the Nooks SEP in January, Cunningham notes that the first two weeks in February were "two of the best weeks that we've ever had in terms of outbound bookings."

The Bottom Line

"If the CFO walked in and asked me to justify the purchase, I think it essentially gives us another lever for growth," concludes Cunningham. "We can coach our reps up... or we can hire more reps. I think adding Nooks has given us a lever to make our per-rep efficiency and the rate at which they are booking much greater. It's just a more steep upwards curve."