Six criteria, how to verify each one in a single demo, and an honest account of when a done-for-you provider is the wrong answer.
How do you choose an AI Sales Agent vendor? Providers fall into four groups — build in-house, a generic chatbot, a self-serve SaaS tool, or a done-for-you provider that builds and operates the agent for you. Judge them on six things: who runs it after launch, whether answers are traceable to your own documents, whose accounts and data these are, quality in the languages you actually sell in, how it escalates to a human, and how the pricing model behaves at your inquiry volume.
Feature lists look identical across vendors. These six questions do not — and each one can be settled inside a single demo.
Decide first whether you are buying software or an outcome — that single choice explains most of the price difference between vendors.
A tool vendor hands you a console and a login; from then on, writing the prompts, maintaining the knowledge base and fixing wrong answers is your team’s job. A done-for-you provider does that work for you, month after month. Most projects that stall never stalled on the model — they stalled because nobody owned the upkeep.
Traceability to your own documents is the one hard quality bar for this category; everything else is a preference.
A scripted chatbot guesses when it is unsure, and a guess about MOQ, certification or lead time costs you a buyer. A properly built agent answers only what it can verify against your catalogue, price rules and documents, and says it does not know rather than inventing an answer.
The accounts and the conversation history should both stay on your side — otherwise you are renting your own customer relationships.
Some vendors host the WhatsApp number, the site widget and the CRM record on their platform. It works until you want to leave, at which point the leads, the chat history and the tuned knowledge do not come with you. Running on your own accounts keeps the relationship, and the knowledge asset, yours.
“Supports 100+ languages” means nothing; what matters is whether your product terminology survives translation into Spanish, Arabic or Russian.
General translation quality is a solved problem. Industry terminology is not: tolerances, material grades, certification names and part numbers are exactly where a generic model drifts, and exactly what a buyer uses to judge whether you are a serious supplier.
The most important thing a sales agent can do is know when to stop talking — ask to see the escalation rules, not the demo script.
Price floors, exclusive distribution, payment terms and contract language are not places for an agent to improvise. A well-designed one recognises those topics, captures the context, and puts a named human in the conversation with the full history attached.
Per seat, per conversation and per project each shift the risk somewhere different — run your own inquiry volume through all three before comparing.
Per-seat pricing gets expensive as your team grows even if inquiry volume does not. Per-conversation pricing punishes you exactly when a campaign works. Project or retainer pricing is predictable but should state precisely what ongoing operation includes. None is inherently better; the wrong one for your volume shape is.
The four options differ far less in what the agent can say than in who keeps it accurate after launch, and where your accounts and data end up.
| Build in-house | Generic chatbot | Self-serve SaaS tool | Done-for-you provider | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who does the ongoing work | Your engineers | Nobody — it is scripted | You configure it | We do, monthly |
| Trained on your catalogue and prices | If you build it | No | You upload and maintain it | We build and maintain it |
| Answers traceable to a source | Depends on your build | No — guesses | Varies by tool | Yes, to your documents |
| Quotes price, MOQ and lead time | Possible, costly | No | Usually limited | Yes, from your rules |
| Escalation to a human | You design it | Rare | Basic routing | Rules agreed with you |
| Accounts and data | Yours | Often theirs | Often theirs | Yours, exportable |
| Time to a working agent | Months | Days, but shallow | Weeks of your time | We stand it up and operate it |
| Typical cost shape | Headcount | Low, low value | Per seat or per conversation | Priced like a hire |
This table describes the four categories of supply, not any named competitor. Judge any specific vendor with the six criteria above.
None of these are about the technology. Every one of them is about whether the vendor will still be accountable in month six.
A done-for-you provider is the wrong answer more often than the category likes to admit. If you are in one of these three situations, say so on the call and we will tell you the same thing.
Your team already answers all of them in time. An agent adds process, not value, until volume or timezone spread makes people the bottleneck.
The agent can still receive and screen, but it cannot quote. If screening alone is not worth it to you, say so early and we will tell you.
We are a done-for-you provider and do not sell a self-serve console. A tool vendor is a better fit, and cheaper.
Book a 20-minute demo — we’ll show it handling real inquiries in your language.
