How Profound's post-sales team reclaimed 1,800+ hours per month with Dust
- Industry
- B2B SaaS
- Company Size
- 51-200
- Departments
- Customer SupportSales
Key Highlights
- 1,800+ hours reclaimed per month across the post-sales team
- Day-one new hires now productive immediately, with AI agents serving as single source of truth across 400+ customers
- Word-of-mouth adoption spread from small test to company-wide force multiplier in weeks
About Profound
Profound helps companies show up in the AI-powered search era, a generational shift in how buyers discover and evaluate products. With a customer base spanning Fortune 500 enterprises to early-stage startups, Profound's post-sales team needed to eliminate information silos and turn reactive admin work into proactive, strategic customer engagement.
Leading that transformation is Edgar Sze, GTM Engineer Lead, who saw an opportunity to live out Profound's own philosophy: insane inputs create insane outputs. By leveraging Profound's exceptionally clean data infrastructure, Edgar turned Dust into the engine powering the entire post-sales team.
Challenge
Profound's Engagement Managers (EMs) juggle an extraordinary level of complexity. Each EM manages relationships across vastly different customer profiles, requiring constant context-switching between technical implementations, business outcomes, and customer-specific nuances.
The result was a post-sales team drowning in admin work. EMs regularly worked past midnight preparing decks, hunting down data across multiple systems, and answering the same questions repeatedly. Onboarding new hires was particularly painful: without a central knowledge hub, new EMs spent weeks ramping up on tribal knowledge before they could contribute meaningfully.
The team had tried custom GPTs, but they fell short. Integrations were clunky, responses were slow, and the tools couldn't handle the depth and breadth of information Profound's EMs needed at their fingertips.
Profound needed a solution that could turn their biggest asset (exceptionally clean, structured internal data) into their biggest competitive advantage.
Solution
James Underhill, who leads Go-to-Market Operations at Profound, introduced Dust to Edgar and his Revenue Operations colleague Jack Gallo. The two immediately saw the potential and ran with it. They rolled out Dust to the post-sales team first, and within weeks, word-of-mouth spread organically as team members saw the impact firsthand.
As Kree Zhang, an Engagment Manager, describes it:
"Dust is a huge time-saver that instantly pulls up complex product info like exactly how our data sourcing works right when I need it. It also helps me flip those technical details into simple customer-ready messages, which lets me get back to clients way faster and with a lot more confidence"– Kree Zhang, Engagement Manager
Two agents, one system: EMBOT and EM Analyst
At the heart of Profound's Dust implementation are two complementary agents that transformed how the post-sales team works:
AI Agent #1: EMBOT serves as the team's single source of truth, synthesizing data across Profound's entire customer base (400+ customers, spanning startups to enterprises) and providing instant answers to complex questions. Need to know a customer's implementation history, product usage patterns, or past conversations? EMBOT pulls from Salesforce, Pylon, product analytics, and meeting notes in seconds.
AI Agent #2: EMAnalyst handles the heavy lifting of report generation. It automates the creation of quarterly business reviews, baseline audits, and comprehensive decks (30-35 slides) that used to take hours of manual work. What once required pulling data from multiple dashboards, building charts, and assembling narratives now happens automatically.
Together, these agents cover both the day-to-day ("quick, what's this customer's status?") and the high-stakes recurring work (QBRs, audits).
Extending Dust as a platform
Dust serves as the AI operating system connecting Profound's entire tech stack. Beyond standard integrations like Salesforce, Slack, and Google Drive, Edgar built custom extensions to unlock even more value: a custom MCP (Model Context Protocol) server to connect their internal customer data, Gamma MCP for presentations, and Firecrawl for web scraping.
The beauty of Dust's architecture is that these custom extensions plug directly into the existing agent system without requiring rebuilds. As Edgar describes it, adding these capabilities created "an even more exponential increase in efficiency" beyond what the core agents already delivered.
By treating Dust as the connective tissue and investing in robust data infrastructure, they automated work that their team simply didn't have the hours to do manually.
Results
The numbers tell the story: 1,800+ hours reclaimed every month and redirected to work that actually moves the business forward.
Here's how the math breaks down. Profound's post-sales team has 20 people. Before Dust, each person was spending roughly 3 hours a day on manual information searching and deck creation. Multiply that across a 30-day month and you get 20 people x 3 hours x 30 days = 1,800 hours. Now, that time goes toward proactive customer engagement, strategic planning, and relationship building.
The real result goes beyond the 1,800 hours. It’s a post-sales team that finally has the capacity to do the work they were hired to do. EMs now spend their time anticipating customer needs, identifying expansion opportunities, and delivering higher-value interactions instead of hunting for data and building decks.
Eliminating information silos for new hires
One of the most dramatic shifts has been new hire productivity. New hires who once spent weeks absorbing tribal knowledge now have instant access to the collective expertise of the entire team from day one. The ramp time has compressed dramatically. What used to take months now takes days.
As Jack describes it: "all of that information about our customers, about their use cases, about industries that we service, about product usage has now just been fully democratized across both the pre-sales team and the post-sales team."
Maintaining velocity at scale
For Profound, the measure of success isn't just time saved. It's velocity maintained.
As Jack explains it: "I would measure it as the velocity of the company. Does this allow us to keep velocity at 99%? Dust is now this enforcement that allows us to keep moving at 99%."
That's the real transformation. Without Dust, Profound's growth would have created bottlenecks—EMs drowning in admin work, new hires stuck in weeks-long ramps, sales teams unable to access customer insights fast enough. Velocity would have dropped.
Instead, Dust became the infrastructure that keeps Profound operating at full speed. EMBOT and EM Analyst handle the work that would slow the team down, absorbing the complexity that typically bogs down growing teams. The result is what Jack describes as 99% velocity: sustained performance that doesn't degrade as the company scales.
Interested in learning more about how Dust can help your team? Visit our solutions page or reach out to our sales team.
