How Cursor Replaced Outreach and Booked 300 Meetings in 2 Months

The Friction of Legacy APIs and Context Switching

Cursor is a rapidly growing AI-native IDE platform that started as a fork of VS Code and has evolved into a comprehensive hub where developers can orchestrate agents across the entire software development lifecycle. While Cursor benefits from a heavy inbound motion, their SDR function is tasked entirely with generating outbound pipeline from the ground up.

To power that outbound motion, the team initially relied on Outreach, but the legacy platform created massive bottlenecks. Context switching between tools hindered rep efficiency, outbound effectiveness suffered, and traditional dialing yielded low connect rates. Most importantly, Outreach’s restrictive API limited Cursor's ability to integrate their own highly advanced internal AI research and email-writing tools.

"When I was an SDR, which feels like forever ago at this point, I was using Outreach and the tool literally hasn't changed. The core friction that we experienced was actually the API with Outreach... Outreach's API is very restrictive, whereas Nooks MCP … fit all of the criteria that we needed." — Cameron Nagel, SDR Leader, Cursor

Cursor needed a modern platform that could keep pace with their stunning growth and integrate seamlessly into their operations.

Building a Modern Outbound Stack From the Ground Up

SDR Leader Cameron Nagel decided to consolidate the outbound lifecycle into Nooks. By running their dialing and coaching through a single platform, Cursor built a highly efficient engine tailored for scale.

1. Eliminating Context Switching

Cursor realized that forcing reps to constantly jump between tools was a severe drain on productivity. By unifying the workflow inside Nooks, reps can execute their entire day without ever leaving the platform. This single-pane-of-glass approach makes reps substantially more productive while giving leadership better visibility.

2. Live Coaching and the Global Sales Floor

As Cursor scaled its SDR function from 4 reps to 16—with plans to hit 30+ globally by year-end—maintaining culture and coaching became paramount. The globally distributed team utilizes the Nooks Sales Floor to dial together, allowing reps in San Francisco and New York to collaborate in real time. During call blocks, managers use the live chat functionality to feed reps questions and objection-handling tactics mid-conversation.

3. AI-Powered Enablement

Rather than manually scoring individual calls, Cursor leverages Nooks' AI interface to query macro-level trends. Managers can ask the AI exactly where reps are struggling or what objections are blocking their meeting-booked rates, allowing them to design highly targeted, data-driven enablement sessions.

300 Meetings and an Undeniable ROI

The transition to Nooks produced staggering, immediate results for the Cursor team. During their initial pilot against the Outreach baseline, just four reps generated 1,500 calls and 20 meetings—a 4x increase in efficiency.

As the team scaled, the compounding value of the platform became even more evident. Over the span of two months, twelve ramped reps successfully booked 300 meetings. By leveraging Nooks Numbers and waterfall enrichment, reps bypassed bad data, lifting connect rates from the industry average of 4-5% up to 9%, with some reps achieving 12% to 13%.

Key Results:

• 300 Meetings Booked: Twelve ramped reps generated 300 outbound meetings in just two months.
• 9%+ Connect Rate: Nooks Numbers waterfall enrichment lifted connect rates from a 4% average to over 9%, with some reps hitting 13%.
• 4x Pipeline Efficiency: The initial pilot drove a 4x efficiency increase over their previous legacy dialer baseline.
• Unified Platform: Cursor replaced Outreach to bring dialing and coaching into a single workspace, solving restrictive API issues.