How Clerk AI turned lemlist into the engine behind its AI-powered sales team
A chat with
Makenna DeGeronimo
SME Account Executive
100 cold calls a day
Clerk AI (formerly Clerk Chat) is a San Francisco company that builds AI agents for voice and messaging. Businesses use them to make and answer calls, leave voicemails, and send and reply to SMS, RCS and WhatsApp messages, at a scale no human team could reach.
Clerk AI’s own sales team works the same way: AI agents do the busywork, so people can focus on conversations. Inbound leads go into lemlist automatically and get followed up on LinkedIn and email. Reps ask AI agents in Slack to find new leads. And Makenna DeGeronimo, who started as an SDR and was recently promoted to Account Executive, has used lemlist through both roles for almost a year.
As an SDR, I was handling a lot of the outbound motion. I was doing 100 cold calls a day and making sure we followed up with every single one of those calls.
-Makenna DeGeronimo, SME Account Executive @Clerk AI
With that many calls, there was no time to manage follow-ups one by one. lemlist ran the email and LinkedIn steps, so Makenna could stay on the phone. When she was promoted, her workflow changed, but lemlist stayed at the center of it.
Watch the interview
From Salesforce to a lemlist campaign, without switching tabs
Her promotion also changed the kind of leads she works with.
When I moved from SDR to Account Executive, I went from cold calls and cold outreach to working mostly with warmer leads.
Those warmer leads live in Salesforce, Clerk AI’s CRM. So the faster a lead moves from Salesforce into a campaign, the sooner Makenna’s outreach can start. lemlist’s native Salesforce integration connects the two, and it’s now part of her day-to-day work.
I really appreciate lemlist’s Salesforce integration. I can pull a contact directly into lemlist and add it to a custom campaign I’ve created, without ever leaving Salesforce.
Here’s what the integration does for sales teams like Clerk AI’s:
Add any Salesforce lead or contact to a lemlist campaign from their record, without leaving Salesforce
Import whole lists automatically from a Salesforce list view or report
Send campaign activity back to Salesforce, so the CRM shows how each lead engaged
Match lemlist fields with Salesforce fields, in one direction or both
The CRM stays the main source of truth, and reps don’t have to export, clean and re-upload lists every time they start a new campaign. That covers the leads reps add themselves. For inbound leads, Clerk AI removed the manual step completely.
Every inbound lead gets enriched and followed up automatically
Clerk AI started using lemlist early, before AI agents and MCPs were part of the picture. One of the first things the team set up was an inbound flow that still runs today.
When inbound leads come in, we automatically add them to a lemlist sequence and enrich them. That triggers different flows: outreach on LinkedIn, outreach by email, and so on. It’s been working really well.
- Igor Boshoer, Co-Founder @Clerk AI
On LinkedIn, the team gets the most out of voice messages. In lemlist, a voice message is just another step in the sequence: reps can record it themselves or use an AI voice, and lemlist sends it automatically.
LinkedIn is one of our key channels, and leaving voice messages works really well.
Of course, enrichment only helps if the data is right. That’s why lemlist verifies contact details before a campaign starts, so the team doesn’t waste steps on emails that bounce or phone numbers that don’t work.
I like that lemlist checks every lead I add and confirms whether their email or phone number is legitimate.
90,000 emails, 98% delivered
That clean data shows in the results. Since the team started with lemlist, Clerk AI has sent 90,700 emails to 23,100 leads. 98% of those emails reached the inbox server, and only 2% bounced.
People also engage with them. 10,200 leads have interacted with Clerk AI’s emails, and 835 have replied, a 4.1% reply rate.
Email isn’t the only channel. From the same lemlist account, the team has also sent 1,844 LinkedIn invites and 298 LinkedIn messages, and visited 166 LinkedIn profiles.
A 98% delivery rate doesn’t happen by accident, though. It starts before the first campaign email goes out. Clerk AI has warmed up its 4 mailboxes with lemwarm, so inbox providers learn to trust them before any campaign starts.
Follow-ups that know when to stop
More replies also means more people saying “not interested”. Makenna doesn’t have to keep a list of them. lemlist stops the sequence for her, so nobody gets the same email again and again.
In each campaign’s settings, you decide when lemlist should stop sending to a lead. For example, you can set it to:
Stop when a lead replies, by email, LinkedIn or WhatsApp, whether the answer is yes or no.
Stop when a lead unsubscribes, and add them to your unsubscribe list, so they won’t get emails from any of your other campaigns either.
Once it’s set up, no one gets a “just following up” email after they’ve already said no.
For Makenna, respectful outreach and good results go hand in hand.
lemlist makes sure I’m not harassing people. I’m converting the leads I need to convert, and they’re coming in and converting quickly.
Ask lemAgent instead of searching for features
lemlist has a lot of features, and Makenna doesn’t always know where to find them. That’s when she opens lemAgent, lemlist’s built-in AI assistant, and types what she needs.
When I need help, I use lemAgent. It takes me to the right place in lemlist and helps me build on campaigns I’ve already created.
lemAgent is built into lemlist, so it works with your real campaigns and leads. Reps can use it to:
Describe their ideal customer and get a list of matching leads or companies
Build a full campaign (strategy, sequence and messages) from one conversation
Check domain health and spot email setup issues
Create or update contacts, manage lists and handle unsubscribes
Draft a reply to a lead before sending it
lemAgent brings AI into lemlist. Clerk AI’s team is also doing the opposite: bringing lemlist into their own AI agents.
AI agents in Slack, powered by lemlist
Slack is where Clerk AI’s team works and talks every day, so that’s where they put their AI agents.
We built a lot of internal AI agents that live in Slack and can use different tools behind the scenes.
Those tools include the lemlist MCP, a research tool and Clay. With the lemlist MCP, an agent can search for leads, enrich them, manage campaigns and pull stats, without anyone opening lemlist.
In practice, a rep tags the agent in Slack and asks something like “Can you find more leads for our ICP outreach?”. The agent searches the US for senior titles that match Clerk AI’s ideal customer, and replies in Slack with each lead’s role, company, email status and company size.
It’s a big shift in how the team works.
Our sales team is now starting to use those agents directly in Slack, instead of going into each tool and doing things manually. That speeds things up tremendously.
What’s next: signals and smarter LinkedIn steps
Next, Clerk AI is building outbound for a new part of its business. Here, Makenna relies on lemlist’s intent signals, which show when a company is likely ready to buy (for example, when it’s hiring for a key role or visiting your website), so reps can reach out at the right moment.
I’m also building custom workflows for our new outbound on the AI side of the business. Signals have been really useful there, especially for picking the exact ICP we need to target.
She’s also changing how she runs her LinkedIn campaigns.
If someone accepts your connection request or doesn’t, you can choose what message they get next in the campaign.
In lemlist, the sequence splits at that step. Leads who accept get LinkedIn messages, and leads who don’t can move to email, so nobody gets stuck waiting.
How Clerk AI’s outbound works
Put together, here’s what a lead’s path looks like at Clerk AI:
→ Reps find new leads by asking AI agents in Slack
→ Inbound leads are added to a lemlist sequence automatically and enriched
→ AEs add Salesforce leads to custom lemlist campaigns, without leaving Salesforce
→ lemlist follows up on LinkedIn (with voice messages) and email
→ When a lead replies or asks to stop, the sequence stops
→ lemwarm keeps the mailboxes healthy in the background
Curious to see what your team can achieve?
Try lemlist to connect your CRM, automate your follow-ups, and plug your outreach into the AI tools your team already uses.
Brought to you by: Ivona, Product Marketing Manager