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NORA — outbound research and activation
How NORA sources accounts, researches them into cited dossiers, sequences outreach across three channels, and holds every send behind a human approval.
Nagent Outbound Research & Activation
L3 · Practitioner — "Autonomy is earned, not deployed."
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Agent name | NORA — Nagent Outbound Research & Activation |
| Role | Team Leader |
| Department | Revenue & Sales |
| Current level | L2 · Apprentice (45% autonomy) · Karma 812 · promotion track to L3 Practitioner |
| Status | Active · in production · runs daily at 09:00 workspace time |
| Reports to | Workspace owner (human) — every send and CRM write passes their approval |
| Public profile | nagent.ai/ai-sales-team/Nora-nagent-outbound-research-activation-agent |
| Employer console | nagent.ai/admin/nora (workspace login required) |
| Profile video | NORA — talking-head introduction (MP4) |
| Profile image | Official headshot (PNG, Cloudinary) |
Overview
NORA is Nagent's outbound research and activation agent, and the first member (and Team Leader) of the AI Revenue & Sales department. She runs the outbound motion end to end: sourcing accounts against your ICP with a verified "why now" trigger, researching each one into a cited dossier, writing multi-touch email and LinkedIn sequences, qualifying replies through a state machine, and booking qualified meetings onto a human's calendar — with the dossier attached to the invite.
One rule defines her above all others: nothing she writes leaves the workspace, and nothing she proposes touches the CRM, until a human approves it. Her autonomy is earned through levels (L1 Intern → L5 Expert) and drops automatically when quality slips. As Team Leader, NORA also carries the department's coordination duties: she hands qualified pipeline to deal execution, escalates unacknowledged handoffs after 36 hours, and will brief and coordinate SERA (planning), DEXA (deals) and RIVA (revenue operations) as they join the department.
Fastest way to meet her: watch the 15-second profile video, then read her résumé (attached) — it lists live references and her working guardrails as an employee would.
NORA — Agent architecture
Orchestrator plus six sub-agents, with skills and tools listed per agent. Skills are typed prompt or logic: logic skills are deterministic and testable, prompt skills are grounded in the Knowledge Base.
Architecture at a glance
PLAN, DISCOVER, ENRICH, ENGAGE, ANALYST and ONBOARD below are NORA's internal sub-agents. From a user's point of view they are NORA's skills, not separate products you install or address.
NORA is one product with one workflow, executed by an orchestrator and six specialised sub-agents. The orchestrator owns state and sequencing; sub-agents own one job each. Everything outbound — every e-mail and LinkedIn message, and every CRM write — passes through the approval gate, which is architecture, not a setting.
How a campaign runs — the workflow
Order of operations: PLAN builds understanding and the campaign checklist → DISCOVER builds the company longlist and cuts it to a shortlist against ICP 1·2·3 → ENRICH researches each shortlisted company and its 5-person buying committee → ENGAGE drafts and (after approval) sends across e-mail and LinkedIn, qualifies replies and books meetings → ANALYST reports the funnel weekly → ONBOARD activates customers who close, and feeds what it learns back into PLAN's Knowledge Base.
Funnel defaults (set in PLAN's checklist, user-overridable):
| 100 companies | 80 qualified | 15 shortlist | ×5 people ≈ 75 contacts |
|---|---|---|---|
| longlist vs ICP 1·2·3 | triggers attached, deduped vs CRM | deep research, dossier each | buying committee mapped & sequenced |
Two base tools ship in every sub-agent: deep research and web search — plus read access to the Knowledge Base. Everything else below is agent-specific.
NORA — the Orchestrator (1st Agent)
NORA herself is the workflow owner, not a worker. She holds the campaign state machine, dispatches sub-agents in order, enforces the approval gate on everything outbound, and narrates status to the user. Sub-agents never talk to the outside world directly — they return work to NORA.
- Input. A campaign brief (one line or a saved ICP profile) + the customer's company & product
- Output. A running campaign: booked meetings, weekly analysis report, full audit trail
- Definition of done. Meetings on a human calendar with the dossier attached; no unapproved send ever
NORA skills
| Skill | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Workflow orchestration | Logic | Runs the PLAN → DISCOVER → ENRICH → ENGAGE → ANALYST sequence; parallelises research; retries failed steps |
| Campaign state machine | Logic | Every account has exactly one stage; transitions are logged and reversible |
| Approval routing | Logic | Collects every outbound draft and proposed CRM write into the approval queue; blocks until human decision |
| Escalation (36 h rule) | Logic | Any qualified handoff nobody acknowledges within 36 hours is escalated, loudly |
| Status narration | Prompt | Explains what she is doing and why in the workspace channel and Ask-NORA chat |
NORA tools
- Sub-agent dispatcher. Spawns and sequences the six sub-agents with scoped context
- Workspace state store (Smriti). Single shared memory across all sub-agents — accounts, stages, decisions
- Approval queue. The gate: Approve / Edit / Skip per item, bulk approval for first-touch batches
- CRM read/write (gated). Salesforce · HubSpot · Zoho — writes queue as proposals until approved
- Notifier. Slack / Teams / in-app for approvals, escalations and the Friday report
Guardrail: Autonomy is earned, not deployed — the level (L1→L5) widens what sub-agents may do alone, never whether the gate exists.
PLAN — understanding & development (Sub-Agent 1)
PLAN turns the input company (its ICP and product) into two artefacts every other agent runs on: a stocked, source-tagged Knowledge Base and the campaign checklist.
- Input. The customer's company: website, product, ICP hypotheses, existing collateral
- Output. Campaign checklist (targets, ICP 1·2·3 definitions, channel plan, funnel defaults) + KB shelves: pricing · sales deck · e-mails/comms · competitive intelligence · sales material
- Definition of done. Every checklist item has an owner (sub-agent) and every KB claim has a source
PLAN skills
| Skill | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| ICP & product understanding | Prompt | Reads the company's site, deck and docs; drafts ICP 1·2·3 and the value narrative for human sign-off |
| KB curation | Prompt | Files pricing, sales deck, e-mail templates, competitive intel and sales material onto shelves with source tags and refresh rules |
| Checklist generation | Logic | Compiles the campaign checklist — targets, funnel defaults (100→80→15, ×5 people), channels, cadence |
| Gap detection | Logic | An empty shelf produces a question to the user, never an invention |
PLAN tools
- Doc & site parser. PDF, PPTX, DOCX and website crawl into structured KB entries
- KB writer (source-tagged). Every entry carries its source and a refresh rule; stale entries get flagged
- Checklist engine. Template + overrides; the checklist is the contract for the whole campaign
Guardrail: No source on file, no claim in any downstream message — PLAN's KB is the only place ENGAGE may draft from.
DISCOVER — longlist → shortlist (Sub-Agent 2)
Builds the target-company long list against ICP 1·2·3 and runs the first two funnel cuts: 100 longlist → 80 qualified → 15 shortlist. Output is a ranked shortlist where every company carries a written reason to exist on it.
- Input. PLAN's checklist (ICP definitions, exclusions, geography, funnel sizes)
- Output. 15 shortlisted companies, each with ICP tag, trigger, and ranking rationale
- Definition of done. Zero duplicates vs CRM; every shortlisted company has a named trigger
DISCOVER skills
| Skill | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| ICP-match scoring | Logic | Need × Fit rubric per ICP; scores are numeric, repeatable and auditable |
| Trigger detection | Prompt | Funding, hiring, leadership change, expansion — read from news, job posts and filings |
| Dedupe & suppression | Logic | Removes existing customers, open opportunities, do-not-contact domains from the CRM |
| Shortlist ranking | Prompt | Orders the 15 with a one-line why-now per company for human review |
DISCOVER tools
- Company search / database API. e.g. Apollo company search & enrichment for the longlist
- News & job-postings feeds. Trigger evidence with links
- CRM read (suppression). Existing accounts and do-not-contact lists
Guardrail: The 100/80/15 numbers are defaults from the flow — PLAN's checklist can override them per campaign.
ENRICH — company + people research (Sub-Agent 3)
Research on the target company, and research on its people. For each of the 15 shortlisted companies ENRICH maps the 5-person buying committee and writes the cited dossier that makes every later draft defensible.
- Input. The 15-company shortlist with ICP tags and triggers
- Output. ≈75 validated contacts + one dossier per account: fit reasoning, 4 pitch hooks, buying signals with links, committee map
- Definition of done. Every dossier claim has a source link; every contact has a validated channel
ENRICH skills
| Skill | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Buying-committee mapping | Logic + Prompt | Which 5 roles matter for this ICP (logic), and who holds them here (research) |
| Cited dossier writing | Prompt | Per-claim sources; refuses to state what it cannot source |
| Pitch-hook extraction | Prompt | 4 hooks per account, each tied to a sourced signal |
| Contact validation | Logic | E-mail verification, LinkedIn profile match, channel preference |
ENRICH tools
- People search & enrichment API. e.g. Apollo people search / match for committee contacts
- LinkedIn lookup. Role confirmation and recent activity
- Dossier store. Writes into the account's CRM record; visible in the console's account view
Guardrail: Research spend is metered and shown per account — the receipt trail is a feature, not overhead.
ENGAGE — outreach, approval, booking (Sub-Agent 4)
E-mail and LinkedIn message, and the word under them that governs both: Approval. ENGAGE drafts everything, sends nothing on its own, qualifies replies through the state machine and lands the booked meeting with the dossier attached.
- Input. ≈75 contacts + dossiers + KB (the only permitted source of claims)
- Output. Approved multi-touch sequences live across 3 channels; qualified replies → booked meetings, warm-handed to a human
- Definition of done. Meeting on the calendar, dossier attached, CRM updated (post-approval), handoff acknowledged
ENGAGE skills
| Skill | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Sequence writing | Prompt | 3 touches per committee role per channel, grounded in KB — no source, no claim |
| Dossier personalisation | Prompt | Opens with the account's own trigger and hook, never a template smell |
| Reply classification | Logic | Need × Fit × Authority × Timing × Intent state machine; misfits get a polite close |
| Booking & warm handoff | Logic | Calendar invite + dossier to the human owner; unacknowledged → NORA's 36 h escalation |
ENGAGE tools
- Warmed e-mail infrastructure. Staggered sends, domain warm-up, caps and suppression built in
- LinkedIn messaging. Connection + DM sequences within platform limits
- Approval queue. Every draft waits here — Approve / Edit / Skip; the gate at every level and every price
- Calendar & scheduler. Booking against the human owner's availability
- CRM activity logger. Every touch, reply and decision logged (writes gated)
Guardrail: The approval gate is non-negotiable architecture. Higher autonomy levels widen batch approvals; they never remove the gate.
ANALYST — analysis report (Sub-Agent 5)
Closes the loop. ANALYST reads the shared state, computes the funnel per ICP and per channel, and writes the report a human actually reads — what worked, what to change, shipped every Friday.
- Input. Campaign state (Smriti) + CRM activity
- Output. Weekly analysis report: funnel per ICP & channel, reply and refusal counts, next-run recommendations
- Definition of done. Posted to the workspace channel Friday; numbers reconcile with the CRM
ANALYST skills
| Skill | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Funnel metrics | Logic | 100→80→15→75→meetings computed per ICP and per channel, deterministic from state |
| Insight narration | Prompt | Explains movements and anomalies; proposes checklist changes for the next run |
| Friday report | Logic | Sourced, drafted, sent, refused, booked — the department's weekly numbers, on schedule |
ANALYST tools
- State reader. Read-only over Smriti and CRM activity
- Metrics engine. Funnel, conversion and pacing computation
- Report generator. Doc / dashboard output; feeds the console's metrics tiles
- Slack / Teams post. Delivery of the Friday report
Guardrail: Recommendations route back to PLAN as proposed checklist edits — humans approve strategy changes, same as sends.
ONBOARD — customer onboarding (Sub-Agent 6)
For when a deal lands: account access → customer calls → onboarding. ONBOARD activates the new customer and feeds everything it learns back into PLAN's Knowledge Base, so the next campaign starts smarter.
- Input. A closed customer (from the human seller's handoff)
- Output. Activated account: accesses provisioned, first campaign brief captured, day 0–7 plan running
- Definition of done. Customer's first campaign live inside 7 days; context written back to KB
ONBOARD skills
| Skill | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Access checklist | Logic | CRM connect, e-mail auth, calendar, channel accounts — tracked to completion |
| Customer calls | Prompt | Schedules onboarding calls, summarises transcripts into structured context |
| Day 0–7 activation plan | Prompt | Connect (Day 0) → target & knowledge (Day 1) → silent research (Days 1–2) → first 20–50 approvals (Day 3) → sends & replies (Days 4–6) → first qualified meeting (typically Day 7) |
ONBOARD tools
- Access provisioning. Workspace, integration and permission setup
- Calendar & meetings. Onboarding call scheduling
- Transcript summariser. Calls into structured, sourced KB entries
- CRM + KB writer. Customer context flows back to PLAN (writes gated)
Shared services — what every sub-agent stands on
- Smriti (shared memory). One workspace state across all six sub-agents: accounts, stages, decisions, learnings. No agent has private state that matters.
- Approval queue. Single gate for all outbound and all CRM writes, regardless of which sub-agent produced the item.
- Knowledge Base. PLAN writes it; everyone reads it; ENGAGE may only claim what it contains. Stale entries flagged by refresh rules.
- Audit log. Every action by every sub-agent, customer-readable. Karma and level promotions are computed from this record.
- KARMIC (learning). Approval edits, refusals and outcomes feed the learning loop — what humans change is what the system learns.
- Deep research + web search. The two base research tools, available in every sub-agent.