InReplyThe AI email assistant for sales teams
Inbound leads that wait hours get lost. InReply answers qualifying and pricing questions in minutes, from your own knowledge base, inside the Gmail or Outlook inbox your team already uses. Hot leads are flagged as urgent, and anything non-standard is left for a rep. It answers inbound email; it does not do cold outreach.
Speed to lead: the problem hiding in your sales inbox
Picture the lead you actually want. Someone found your site, read enough to care, and emailed your sales@ address asking what the mid-tier plan costs and whether it handles their use case. They are interested right now, at 8.47pm on a Thursday, and they have almost certainly sent a similar email to two or three of your competitors in the same sitting. Whoever comes back first with a real answer, not an autoresponder, owns the conversation. Everyone else is replying to someone who has mentally moved on.
The research on this is old, famous and still uncomfortable. A Harvard Business Review study of lead response ("The Short Life of Online Sales Leads", Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, March 2011; retrieved 23 July 2026) audited 2,241 US companies with a web-generated test lead. Only 37% responded within an hour; 24% took more than a day, and 23% never responded at all. Among companies that did respond, the average response time was 42 hours. The same authors' companion study of 1.25 million sales leads found that firms contacting a potential customer within an hour of the query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as firms that tried even an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited 24 hours or longer.
Fifteen years on, most small teams still lose to the clock, and not because they do not care. The founder doing sales is in back-to-back calls. The two reps are mid-demo. The enquiry lands at the weekend, or overnight, or during the exact hour everyone is heads-down on a proposal. Nobody decided to reply in two days; the inbox just does not fit around a small team's day. The lead does not know any of that. They only know who answered first.
What InReply does for a sales inbox
InReply is an AI email agent that answers inbound email. It connects to the Gmail or Outlook inbox your team already uses, via secure OAuth. Nothing to install, no extension, no new client, no separate helpdesk to adopt: enquiries keep landing at sales@ or hello@ as they always have, and replies go out from the address the lead wrote to.
You then give it the answers your team types every week: your pricing and packages, what is included at each tier, your qualifying answers (industries you serve, company sizes you fit, regions you cover), how demos and trials work, implementation timelines, standard terms. That knowledge base is the only source InReply is allowed to answer from. When a lead asks what the mid-tier plan costs, the reply quotes your price list, because it cannot answer from anywhere else. And when a question is not covered, InReply does not guess: the email is left for a human and surfaced on the actions list. A wrong price in writing is worse than a slightly slower reply, so the system escalates instead of improvising.
Playbooks control tone, behaviour and routing per scenario. Pricing questions can be brisk and factual with a soft next step; demo requests can be warm and always end by proposing times; anything mentioning a contract, a tender or a discount can skip the AI entirely and go straight to a rep. The result is not an autoresponder with better grammar. It is the first decent answer, sent while the lead is still paying attention, with the judgement to hand the real selling to a person. If you have looked at outsourced alternatives, the email answering service guide compares the options in detail.
Three playbooks a sales team actually runs
The clearest way to see how this works is to walk through the three kinds of email every inbound sales inbox receives.
The pricing question, answered from your knowledge base. "Hi, what does the Growth plan cost and does it include onboarding?" This is the most common email in the inbox and the easiest to lose by answering slowly. A pricing playbook answers it in minutes: the price, what is included, the difference from the next tier up, and a question back ("how big is your team?") that keeps the conversation moving. The answer is right because it comes from your own pricing material, and many teams put this playbook on Autopilot early, because the reply is factual and the cost of a rare imperfect one is low.
The demo request, triaged and flagged urgent. "This looks interesting, can we get a demo this week?" is the hottest email you will receive all day, and it deserves two things at once: an instant reply and a rep's attention. A demo playbook replies immediately with how demos work and the times you keep in the knowledge base, then flags the thread as urgent on the actions list. The lead gets engagement within minutes instead of a next-day reply, and the first rep free picks it up warm, books it in your own calendar and takes it from there.
The RFP, left for a human. A 40-question procurement spreadsheet, a security questionnaire, a "please confirm you can meet the attached requirements" email. No standard answer covers this, and no sensible team wants an AI committing to it. A playbook routes it straight to the actions list, untouched, so a person with authority owns the response from the first word. That is the design principle throughout: automate the repetitive majority so the high-stakes minority gets more human attention, not less.
Start in Ghost Mode, promote scenarios to Autopilot
You do not have to trust any of this on day one. Every plan includes Ghost Mode: each reply InReply writes is saved as a draft in your Gmail or Outlook, and nothing sends until a rep approves it. Teams typically run a week or two like this, reviewing drafts against real leads, tightening the knowledge base where an answer comes out thin, and getting a feel for which scenarios the AI handles cleanly.
Autopilot, which sends automatically, is enabled per playbook rather than as a global switch. The usual progression: put standard pricing and package questions on Autopilot first, because those are the emails where minutes matter most and the answers are pure fact. Keep demo requests in Ghost Mode if you want a rep's eyes on every one, or automate the first reply and keep the scheduling human. Leave negotiations, big accounts and anything contractual human-only. You choose exactly which scenarios send automatically, scenario by scenario, and you can change your mind at any time.
Inbound only: this is not an outreach tool
Worth saying plainly, because "AI sales email" usually means the opposite of this. InReply does not send cold email, does not run sequences, does not scrape prospect lists and will never email anyone who has not emailed you first. If outbound is part of your motion, you will run it elsewhere. InReply covers the half of sales email that outbound tools ignore: the inbound replies, website enquiries, quote requests and demo bookings that arrive in your inbox and go cold while everyone is busy. Generating demand is your job; answering it fast is InReply's.
One inbox, whole team
A sales@ address shared by password is where leads go to die: two reps answer the same email, or each assumes the other has it and nobody does. InReply is built as a workspace on shared inbox lines instead. Team members get their own logins with per-inbox access, everyone sees the same queue and the same actions list, and urgent flags make ownership obvious. Plans cover one inbox on Starter, three on Growth, five on Scale and unlimited on Business, so a team running sales@, hello@ and a founder's own address can put InReply across all of them. It works the same whether your company runs on Gmail or Outlook.
Pricing for sales teams
A founder or small team with one sales inbox starts on Starter (£39/month, 500 credits). Growth (£79/month, 2,000 credits, three inboxes) fits a team fielding leads across sales@ and hello@; Scale (£149/month, 5,000 credits, five inboxes) covers higher volumes, and Business is custom for 10,000+ credits. Pricing is a flat workspace price rather than per seat, so adding reps costs nothing, which matters when the whole point is more people watching the actions list. Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial and no card required; the full breakdown is public.
InReply also serves other enquiry-heavy teams, including agencies and property agents, where the same speed-to-lead logic applies.
AI email for sales teams: FAQs
Does InReply do cold outreach or email sequences? +
No. InReply answers inbound email: the leads, pricing questions and demo requests that arrive in your sales@ or hello@ inbox. It does not send cold emails, run outbound sequences or manage prospecting lists, and it never emails anyone who has not emailed you first. If you run outbound, keep your outbound tool; InReply handles the replies that outbound and marketing generate.
How does an AI email assistant work for a sales team? +
InReply connects to the Gmail or Outlook inbox your team already uses, via secure OAuth. You add your pricing, packages, qualifying answers and product facts to its knowledge base, and it drafts or sends replies to inbound leads using only that information. Anything it cannot answer, or anything a playbook routes to a rep, appears on an actions list with hot leads flagged as urgent.
Will it discount, negotiate or make commitments on our behalf? +
Only if you write those terms into the knowledge base and allow them in a playbook. InReply answers from your own material, so it quotes your list prices and your standard terms. Anything off the standard path, such as a discount request, a custom contract or a procurement questionnaire, is exactly the kind of email you route to a rep, and InReply leaves it on the actions list rather than improvising.
What happens to leads that arrive at night or over the weekend? +
They get answered the same way as leads that arrive at 10am on a Tuesday. If a scenario is on Autopilot, the reply goes out within minutes, whenever the email lands. If it is in Ghost Mode, the draft is waiting when your team opens the inbox, and anything routed to a human sits on the actions list with urgent flagging, so the first rep in on Monday starts with the hottest leads instead of digging through the pile.
Do I have to let it send automatically? +
No. Ghost Mode is included on every plan: each reply is saved as a draft in your Gmail or Outlook for a rep to review and send. Autopilot, which sends automatically, is enabled per playbook, so you can auto-send answers to standard pricing and package questions while keeping demo requests, negotiations and big accounts as drafts or human-only.
Does it book demos into our calendar or update our CRM? +
No. InReply does not integrate with calendars or CRMs. It handles the email side of a demo request: replying immediately, sharing how demos work and proposing times from the availability you keep in its knowledge base, then flagging the confirmation for a rep, who books it in your own calendar and records it in your own CRM. The slow part of converting an inbound demo request is usually the first reply, and that is the part InReply removes.
How much does it cost for a sales team? +
Starter is £39/month with 500 credits and one inbox. Growth is £79/month with 2,000 credits and up to three inboxes, which suits a team running separate sales@ and hello@ addresses. Scale is £149/month with 5,000 credits and five inboxes, and Business is custom for 10,000+ credits with unlimited inboxes. Pricing is a flat workspace price, not per seat, so a team of two costs the same as a team of twenty. Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial, no card required.
Reply first, win the conversation
Connect the sales inbox you already have, add your pricing and qualifying answers, and let InReply answer inbound leads in minutes. Start in Ghost Mode, review every draft, and put your first playbook on Autopilot when you are ready.