Drips Killed Its Outbound Agency and Rebuilt Prospecting on Signals — Platform Usage Jumped 700%
ZoomInfo said on August 3 that Drips, an AI-powered conversational outreach company, increased its sales team's use of the ZoomInfo platform by 700% after shutting down an outsourced lead generation agency and rebuilding prospecting in-house around AI-assisted, signal-driven workflows.
Drips, based in Vancouver, Washington, built the "Conversations as a Service" category, running two-way conversations for enterprise brands via text, scheduled calls and voicemail across healthcare, financial services, insurance and education. To fill its own pipeline, the company had leaned on an outside agency — an arrangement it ended after, in ZoomInfo's account, the agency booked meetings that did not convert.
The replacement was not more headcount. According to the announcement, Drips gave its existing reps an AI assistant that recommends which companies and contacts to pursue, surfaces real-time buying signals such as funding rounds, leadership changes, mergers and new partnerships, and drafts first-touch outreach tailored to each prospect's specific problems. The company credits three things in combination: accurate contact data, so fewer messages reach the wrong person; signals that flag the right moment to reach out; and AI drafting that replaces the blank page with a working starting point.
The number worth reading carefully
A 700% increase in platform usage is an adoption metric, not a pipeline metric, and it is worth being precise about that. It measures reps choosing the in-house, signal-assisted motion over the old outsourced one. That is genuinely meaningful — sales tools die of non-adoption more often than of bad output — but it is not a claim about revenue, and ZoomInfo does not present it as one.
What makes the case interesting is the direction of the decision. Outsourcing outbound is usually a volume bet: someone else owns the sending capacity, and you pay per meeting. Bringing it back in-house without adding SDRs is a relevance bet: fewer touches, each one triggered by something that happened at the account. Drips moved from the first bet to the second, and the reps voted with their usage.
Why "in-house plus signals" keeps beating "outsourced plus volume"
The economics of agency outbound have been under pressure for two years, and the reason is not price. It is that agencies are structurally distant from the signal layer. An external team can buy your contact data and mirror your messaging, but it does not see your product usage, your support tickets, your webinar attendance, or who engaged with your founder's post yesterday. It sells the only thing it can see: volume.
Meanwhile the signals themselves have gotten cheaper to capture. Funding rounds, leadership changes and M&A — the triggers cited in the Drips case — are now table stakes and available to everyone, including your competitors, which means they arrive at the account at the same time as five other vendors. The differentiated signals are the first-party ones: behaviour on your own content and properties that only you can see. We covered why that shift is happening in The Death of Cold Outreach: Why Warm Pipeline Wins.
The takeaway for teams weighing the same move
If you are considering pulling outbound back in-house, the Drips case suggests the sequence that makes it survivable:
Fix data accuracy first. Every downstream gain assumes the message reaches the right person.
Attach a trigger to every touch. If a rep cannot name the reason for the outreach, it is volume wearing a personalization coat.
Judge the change on adoption, then on conversion. Reps abandoning the new motion is the earliest failure signal you will get; declining meeting quality is the slowest.
Public triggers like funding and leadership changes get you to parity. What gets you ahead is the engagement happening on your own content right now, which no data vendor sells because it is yours. traxy tracks who engages with your LinkedIn posts, scores them against your ICP, and routes the qualified ones to Slack or your CRM — the first-party layer that sits on top of the public signals everyone else is already buying.
Source: ZoomInfo announcement via VentureBeat/Business Wire, August 3, 2026.