Howdy Sales, led by founder Christi Loucks, is a pipeline generation agency for high-growth B2B companies. With a decade in tech sales, revenue operations, and enablement, Christi has seen outbound evolve dramatically—especially post-COVID and in the era of AI and cold email crackdowns. The old high-volume playbook no longer works, especially in industries like cybersecurity where buyers are naturally skeptical.

The Challenge

Many of Howdy Sales’ clients came in frustrated after blasting 30,000 cold emails a month and netting only a handful of low-quality meetings.
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Outbound was expensive, noisy, and yielded little return. Clients wanted a smarter, more focused way to reach high-intent prospects—and Christi knew the answer would involve pairing The Swarm’s network intelligence with her own signal stacking methodology.

The Approach

Howdy Sales created a signal stacking + network-first framework that merges AI-powered context with relationship mapping through The Swarm:

1. Person-level intent detection – Using Vector data to identify individuals showing in-market signals (visiting the client’s site, searching for relevant solutions offsite).
2. Custom contextual triggers – Going beyond firmographics to find hyper-specific signals (e.g., ethics monitorship for compliance software clients, backlink spikes for SEO agencies).
3. Swarm-powered warm introductions – The Swarm API is embedded directly into Howdy Sales’ Clay workflows. For every high-intent contact, The Swarm checks if a warm path exists, scores the lead higher if a connector is found, and surfaces the strongest relationship paths.
4. Targeted engagement – Outreach is run primarily through LinkedIn connection requests and follow-ups, avoiding in-mail and focusing on personal, relevant messaging informed by both signal data and Swarm network insights.

This workflow ensures every prospect is not only relevant, but also prioritized for connection through an existing trusted relationship when possible.

The Results

• 16% aggregate reply rate across LinkedIn campaigns in 2025—far above typical cold outreach benchmarks.
• Clients are booking fewer but far higher quality meetings:
  • 5 meetings in 4 months for one client, with strong downstream conversion to opportunities.
  • 3 meetings in 2 months for another, each from hyper-targeted, high-intent outreach identified via The Swarm.
• Deals sourced through The Swarm’s warm introductions show 3–4x higher meeting-to-opportunity conversion rates compared to cold channels.

Why It Works

• Quality over quantity – Prioritizing the right conversations over sheer volume.
• Trust through The Swarm – Leveraging mapped relationships to open doors that cold channels rarely can.
• Account tiering & density focus – For large, strategic accounts, Howdy Sales uses The Swarm to map the entire network, identify top connectors, and prioritize the most relevant relationships.
• Scalable relationship motion – By focusing on network density (how many ICP connections a person has) rather than breadth, The Swarm helps Howdy Sales’ clients scale relationship-driven pipeline without diluting quality.

Looking Ahead

Christi sees a future where AI agents increasingly sell to other AI agents, but believes this will make human-to-human connection even more valuable. Howdy Sales plans to expand its Swarm-powered lead scoring to more clients, deepen its account mapping capabilities, and continue proving that warm introductions, powered by The Swarm, consistently deliver the highest-quality pipeline.


Watch an interview of Christi on Go-To-Network Academy.