AI sales prospecting agent: the Noveo Finance case

January 2026. Three hundred qualified prospects sleeping in Noveo Finance's Pipedrive CRM. Three sales SaaS had been tested without success. Several rounds with the vendor of a meeting-capture tool had failed to fix the API limitations. The follow-up cycle was broken. That is when Catalia was called in.

The silent threat to B2B consultancies

The dominant AI story in 2024 and 2025 was about the big firms and the large enterprises. Meanwhile, B2B consulting SMBs (fifteen to fifty people, sharp expertise, long sales cycle) were living a quieter and more dangerous problem: their sales pipeline was paralyzing itself.

Every leader in this situation knows the mechanics. A salesperson piles up qualified prospects in the CRM, met at a trade show, through a client referral, or via targeted outbound. Six months later, there are fifty. A year later, two hundred. Three years later, three hundred.

All of them would deserve a contextualized follow-up. None of them gets one, because human memory cannot hold three hundred stories in parallel, and because generic sales SaaS cannot absorb the specifics of a niche trade.

That is the exact moment prospect value starts to evaporate. Not for lack of intent. Out of cognitive friction.

This is what Noveo Finance lived through. An independent advisory firm in treasury management and financial risk, based in Annecy with a Paris presence, regulated by the Autorité des Marchés Financiers as a Conseil en Investissements Financiers, and a member of the CNCEF.

Why Catalia

The founder of Noveo Finance, a former investment banker in London and Paris, reached out to Catalia in January 2026 through the Malt platform. He had already tried everything.

Three sales SaaS had been tested one after another. All three produced follow-ups too generic for the standard an AMF-regulated firm demands, or they required so much manual setup that the salespeople gave up after two weeks.

In parallel, several rounds had been opened with the vendor of a meeting-capture tool already in place at Noveo, to fix API limitations that blocked any systematic use of the information exchanged with prospects. The bugs were never corrected.

This is exactly the situation that justifies bringing Catalia in: the SaaS cannot do it, the vendor will not fix it, and the in-house team lacks the dual skill set required.

What Noveo was after was a rare profile: someone who masters no-code tools and automation, and who also knows how to do prompt engineering well enough to produce follow-ups of real sales quality. That profile barely exists at SaaS vendors, who do standard configuration. No more at classic CRM integrators, who do technical workflow. Nor at AI freelancers, who do prompting without knowing how to integrate. That is what Catalia structured.

January–March 2026: framing and building the system

Mission led by Louis Darques, solo, with no third-party technical input.

Louis combines a profile Catalia structured around its Sales vertical: deep command of no-code tools, expertise in setting up complex AI systems, growth hacking, sales, and advanced prompt engineering.

This combination is what sets Catalia apart from a generic freelancer. Louis is not a developer learning to sell, nor a salesperson learning the tech. He is an operator who holds both registers at once.

The initial framing with Noveo Finance's founder and Head of Sales set two non-negotiable constraints. No new paying SaaS subscription: Noveo had already tested three solutions without success, and the need was not a fourth tool but the smart orchestration of what was already in place. And no non-evolving custom software build: a fifteen-person SMB cannot carry proprietary tech debt. The system has to stay maintainable with no vendor lock-in.

Catalia holds this third path: orchestration of existing tools through hybrid expertise, in a logic of custom AI consulting tuned to the client's real-world trade.

April–May 2026: the system in production

Technical stack used:

• n8n: orchestration of the main AI workflows
• Make: cross-application automations
• OpenRouter: multi-model access
• Claude: primary reasoning model, for the quality of the follow-up hooks
• Pipedrive: CRM, source of prospect context
• MCP connectors: to work around the exact API limitations the meeting-capture vendor had failed to fix

This last point deserves attention. Where the SaaS vendor had not delivered the bug fix after several rounds, Louis got around the limitations by building MCP connectors that tap the capture tool another way. Faster, simpler, cheaper than chasing a dead-end vendor relationship.

Architecture of the daily workflow.

The system runs every morning. For each salesperson, it identifies the ten prospects to follow up on first, based on a scoring logic specific to the Noveo sales cycle. For each one, it drafts an email sourced from the full exchange history (CRM plus transcripts of captured meetings) and proposes three variants of tone and angle. A suggested next step is spelled out for every variant. And the system feeds on new exchanges continuously: each interaction folds back into the prospect context in real time.

Prompting approach:

Louis drew on advanced techniques Catalia has banked over three years: chain-of-thought (structured step-by-step reasoning), few-shot (priming with examples calibrated to the Noveo tone), and reverse prompting (generating hooks by inverting the objective). All of it backed by structured information research that enriches each follow-up with a news angle or a piece of prospect context.

A Noveo follow-up is no longer a configured template. It is a contextualized synthesis that only an experienced salesperson, with two hours of prep ahead of them, could have written. Now it is generated in seconds, reviewed and sent in under a minute.

Over the first weeks in production, the Noveo team reports an improvement of around +20% in the conversion rate on the prospects followed up (real-world data reported by Noveo on the ground, not yet consolidated as an official metric).

The moment that says what the mission really produces

The vendor of the meeting-capture SaaS had not fixed its API bugs despite several rounds from Noveo. Handing this blocker to a classic IT consulting firm would have led to a multi-week dev project, or to buying a fourth SaaS to replace the previous one.

Louis delivered the solution using MCP connectors (an open standard protocol for orchestration between LLMs and tools) to tap the capture tool through paths its official API did not allow. The result is in production at Noveo today, at a cost below what one more quarter of vendor relations would have cost.

This is not a story of technical prowess. It is a story of posture: the hybrid expertise that looks at a SaaS blocker and sees there are three ways around it, instead of waiting for the vendor to fix it.

The Catalia team at Noveo

Louis Darques, sales and AI expert in the Catalia collective. Hybrid profile: no-code plus automation plus prompt engineering plus sales command. Mission led solo, from initial framing to rollout.

This is the direct application of Catalia's freelance community by vertical model: not a fixed-headcount firm that puts several seniors on a mission, but one senior operator from a precise trade (B2B Sales) who holds the whole mission together, from strategic framing to technical delivery.

For SMB leaders who want neither generic SaaS nor custom dev

The Noveo lesson carries over to any B2B service SMB facing the same dilemma. You need to move fast, you need tools fitted to your situation, but you refuse the two classic traps. Subscription SaaS, which solve 70% of the problem and leave the 30% that makes the difference: precisely where your trade is specific. And custom builds: too expensive, slow to deliver, non-evolving, creating vendor lock-in and proprietary tech debt your SMB cannot carry.

Catalia holds a third path that Noveo put to the test: the smart orchestration of existing tools through hybrid expertise (no-code, automation, prompt engineering) that delivers fast, at a reasonable cost, in a maintainable and evolving architecture.

This approach holds for every B2B consulting SMB (financial consulting, HR consulting, M&A advisory, specialized agencies, industrial service providers) whose sales pipeline paralyzes itself for the same reasons as Noveo's.

What this case says about Catalia

The founder of Noveo Finance reached out to Catalia through Malt after exhausting the classic options. Three SaaS, several vendor rounds, no solution. Four months later, his pipeline runs again, with no new SaaS subscription and no proprietary tech debt.

The lesson is not in the technical stack used. n8n, Make, OpenRouter, Claude, MCP exist and are within reach of many. It is in the rare dual skill set that, looking at a sales problem, knows how to orchestrate these tools together to produce a result of real trade quality.

This is what Catalia structures and industrializes in its Sales vertical. It is what will make Noveo able, tomorrow, to extend the system without depending on any provider, Catalia included.

At Catalia, we don't teach you to produce with AI. We teach you to think with it.