GATE Documentation

Hand Sales CRM your leads and a sending mailbox, and let its AI SDR draft outreach, follow up, and book meetings — while you decide, action by action, how much of it runs on its own.

Who this is for

You're running outbound for a small sales team (or by yourself) and don't want to hand-write a fresh email to every lead, chase every follow-up, or manually triage every reply. You want an AI SDR working the pipeline for you, but you still want the final say on anything that goes out under your name until you trust it enough to let it run further on its own.

Before you start

Sales CRM turned on for your org. If your bot doesn't recognize pipeline requests, ask your org's admin to check Tool Access for Sales CRM.
A connected Gmail sending mailbox and Google Calendar. These come from your dashboard's Integrations page and unlock the two things Sales CRM can't do without them: sending outreach email and booking meetings. If you're not sure what's connected, ask your bot to check readiness — it tells you exactly what's still missing rather than failing partway through a send or a booking.
Some leads to work. A CSV export from wherever you're tracking leads today is enough to start.

Steps

Get Sales CRM turned on. If it isn't enabled yet, ask your admin to switch it on from the Tool Access page. Once it's on, your bot recognizes pipeline requests.
Connect your sending mailbox and calendar. From your dashboard's Integrations page, connect the Gmail account you want outreach to send from, and connect Google Calendar so booked meetings land where you actually keep your calendar. Ask your bot "Am I ready to run outreach?" and it checks both connections plus AI drafting, and tells you plainly what's still missing.
Import your leads. Upload a CSV from the Pipeline page in your dashboard, or hand the file to your bot and ask "Import these leads." Each lead gets an initial completeness score as it comes in — worth knowing up front that this is a scored read of how complete the lead's own information already is, not a live lookup that goes out and finds new facts about them.
Pick an autonomy preset. Ask your bot "Set the sales pipeline to copilot" (or manual, or autopilot). Manual means every action — enrichment, first touch, follow-ups, reply drafts, classifying a reply, booking a meeting — waits for you to ask for it individually. Copilot drafts outreach and follow-ups on its own but queues them for your approval before anything sends. Autopilot lets lower-risk actions like enrichment and reply classification run untouched, while sending an email or booking a meeting still queues for approval. You can also dial any single action type up or down instead of taking a preset as an all-or-nothing package.
Work the Today brief. Each morning, open the dashboard's Today view (or ask "What's on today's brief?") — it's your starting point: which leads need attention, what's queued for your approval, and what came in overnight.
Approve or reject what's queued. The Inbox is where drafted outreach and follow-ups wait for you. Read a queued email, then approve it to send or reject it to send it back. This holds no matter which autonomy preset you're running — approving a send is always something a human does; the bot that drafted the email can't approve its own send.
Set up a sequence for repeatable outreach. For a playbook you'll reuse — a cadence of touches with a consistent tone and angle — ask your bot to build it as a sequence, then enroll leads into it as they qualify.
Set your guardrails. Ask your bot to set a daily send cap, quiet hours, or to flip the kill switch if you ever need everything to stop immediately. These hold regardless of what any individual autonomy dial says.

What you'll see

In chat: readiness checks, import confirmations, the Today brief, and drafted outreach waiting on your decision.
In the dashboard: the Pipeline (leads and stages), the Inbox (approval queue), Sequences (your playbooks), and Settings (the autonomy dial per action, plus guardrails).
In your calendar: meetings Sales CRM books once a lead is ready, with the lead moved to a meeting stage on the pipeline.

Troubleshooting

Your bot says outreach can't send. Check that a Gmail sending mailbox is actually connected on the Integrations page — email outreach won't run without one.
Meetings won't book. Google Calendar needs to be connected the same way; booking reads free/busy off that calendar and fails loudly rather than guessing a time if it isn't there.
A lead's enrichment looks thin. That's expected today — enrichment is a completeness score based on what's already on the lead, not a live search that goes and finds new information about them. Fill in what you know and the score reflects it.
Nothing is happening even though you're on autopilot. Check the action's individual dial in Settings — a preset sets sensible defaults, but any action type can be dialed down (or up) on its own, and a per-action Off overrides the preset.
You need everything to stop right now. Ask your bot to hit the kill switch — it stops the AI SDR's actions immediately, independent of any autonomy setting.

Going deeper

Built-in tools — the concept page