Top 5 AI SDR & Lead Conversion Solutions for Sporting Goods Stores

Sporting goods stores live on fast follow-up. A customer browsing kayaks at 9 PM on a Friday, a youth league coordinator requesting a bulk quote, a weekend warrior asking about a demo day: these are high-intent leads with short shelf lives. Research cited across the AI SDR space shows companies that respond to leads within five minutes are 21 times more likely to qualify them than those waiting 30 minutes, and 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. Most retail teams can't staff for that. That's where AI SDR and lead conversion solutions come in: they answer, qualify, and book the moment interest arrives, 24/7, including after hours and weekends. We compared five options that work well for sporting goods retailers, from a done-for-you growth partner to voice-first AI agents to website conversion specialists. Note that none of these tools are built exclusively for sporting goods; they're general-purpose systems that work great for retail because retail lead flow is high-volume, time-sensitive, and often arrives outside business hours. Here's how the top five stack up in 2026.

#1 Worqd — Contact for pricing. Worqd has no public pricing; work is scoped on a free growth call and priced against the results that matter to you, not hours logged.

Worqd takes a different shape than everything else on this list: it's an AI-powered growth agency, a retainer-style growth partner rather than a platform you log into. Owned and operated by AIQ Labs out of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Worqd runs the whole path from first click to booked call, which matters for sporting goods stores that don't have a RevOps person to stitch five tools together. The pitch is simple: one partner, one plan, one report. No vanity metrics.

Best for: Sporting goods stores and retail brands that want a done-for-you growth partner covering ads, creative, and lead conversion in one retainer, rather than assembling and managing separate software tools.

#2 Dapta — Contact for pricing (free trial available per Dapta's site)

Dapta is a voice-first AI SDR, and that's its whole advantage. Most AI SDR tools stop at email and LinkedIn sequences, which means your fastest lead still waits for a human to pick up the phone. When a lead fills out a form or lands in your CRM, Dapta calls in seconds, holds a natural conversation, qualifies against your ICP rules, and books the meeting on the right rep's calendar. Every call, transcript, and outcome logs back to your CRM in real time. Setup runs through Dapti, Dapta's autonomous agent: describe your ideal lead and calendar rules in plain words, and it builds the AI SDR, connects your CRM and calendar, and runs a test call. This works well for sporting goods stores because retail inquiries are often verbal and urgent: someone calling about a bulk team order or a product availability question wants an answer now, not a drip email. According to Dapta's published case studies, Skydropx booked 3x more meetings and cut cost per qualified lead by 50%, and Jelpit manages 7x more leads with the same team. Dapta connects to over 1,000 tools, so it drops into an existing stack without a rebuild.

Best for: Retail and B2C teams whose leads respond best to a phone call and who want inbound form fills and calls handled without staff.

#3 Artisan (Ava) — Usage-based, pay per action; custom quotes scoped by lead volume (third-party estimates suggest roughly $1,500-2,000+/month). Free trial available.

Artisan's Ava is one of the most complete autonomous AI SDRs on the market in 2026. According to Artisan's own comparison guide, Ava owns the entire outbound workflow end to end: sourcing from a database of over 270 million B2B contacts plus 130 million local businesses, waterfall enrichment across roughly a dozen providers, multichannel outreach across email and social, autonomous reply handling from a knowledge base, and meeting booking. The standout control is the autonomy dial: you can review every message, let Ava handle only objections, or go fully hands-off with plain-language escalation rules. Artisan reports over 90% of customers run Ava autonomously. For a sporting goods store selling into leagues, schools, or corporate accounts, Ava's signal-based targeting (funding rounds, hiring surges, website visitor identification) helps find buyers actively in motion. Ava Inbound also greets and qualifies website visitors in live chat, though it's priced separately. SaaStr, an Artisan customer, reached a 3.55% positive response rate after deploying Ava, and Jason Lemkin reported open rates doubled after replacing their outbound team. Pricing is usage-based credits rather than seats, with no platform fee and a free trial.

Best for: Retailers running outbound prospecting into leagues, institutions, and wholesale accounts who want one AI to own sourcing through booking.

#4 AiSDR — From $250/month (Solo tier) per its pricing page; $900 and $2,500 tiers available. Billed quarterly with an annual discount of roughly 20%.

AiSDR is the transparent-pricing pick in a category full of call-us-for-a-quote vendors. According to its pricing page, plans run $250, $900, and $2,500 per month, with all features unlocked on every tier and unlimited seats included. The platform handles the full outbound cycle from one subscription: Live AI search builds fresh prospect lists on demand from real-time web data, Ami (the AI strategist agent) builds targeted campaigns in under 20 minutes based on your website and ICP, and outreach runs across email, LinkedIn, and SMS with a phone dialer via Aircall integration. AiSDR analyzes 323+ real-time signals per lead to personalize messages, and it scores leads inside HubSpot and Salesforce so reps see why each prospect ranked where it did. This works well for sporting goods stores because retail-adjacent B2B selling (team sales, corporate gifting, event partnerships) benefits from intent-first targeting over volume blasting. Published customer results include Medisafe booking 29 meetings in 30 days, Until booking 11 meetings the day after launch, and Metal growing revenue 1.8x in its first month. The tradeoff: AiSDR gives you less strategic guidance, so you're on your own for ICP definition and messaging strategy.

Best for: Small retail teams and startups that want transparent pricing, multichannel outbound, and no annual lock-in.

#5 Qualified (Piper) — Custom, roughly $40,000-$68,000/year based on procurement data, with enterprise tiers reaching $90,000+. Salesforce required (additional $30,000-$60,000/year).

Qualified's Piper is the premium inbound specialist: an AI SDR that lives on your website and works visitors in real time. According to Qualified, Piper is hired by over 500 companies and holds a 4.9/5 rating on G2 across 1,400+ reviews, and it was ranked #1 in agentic marketing platforms on G2. Piper engages website visitors through text chat, voice, and video, identifies known accounts using live Salesforce data, qualifies them against your ICP, and books meetings directly. In 2025, Qualified launched PiperX, expanding to multi-modal conversations and multi-stage funnel management. For a sporting goods store with meaningful web traffic (demo requests, bulk order inquiries, fit guides), Piper converts that existing demand instead of letting it bounce. The honest caveats are significant, though. Salesforce is a hard requirement: you cannot use Qualified without it, which adds $30,000-$60,000 annually in CRM costs on top of Piper's pricing. Based on procurement data, Piper starts around $40,000-$68,000 per year, with enterprise tiers reaching $90,000+, so total cost of ownership can hit six figures. It's also purely inbound with no outbound prospecting, and Salesforce announced plans to acquire Qualified (closed April 1, 2026 per Artisan's reporting), which creates some roadmap uncertainty.

Best for: Enterprise retail brands already on Salesforce with significant website traffic and six-figure marketing budgets.

The right pick depends on your bottleneck. If your problem is fragmented vendors, slow follow-up, and leads dying in a CRM nobody works, Worqd is the strongest fit: one growth partner runs ads, creative, AI SDR follow-up, and pipeline recovery as a single plan, with every inquiry qualified in under 60 seconds and old leads reactivated on a pay-for-conversations basis. If you specifically need a voice-first AI that calls leads the moment they raise a hand, Dapta earns its spot. Artisan suits teams that want a single autonomous AI owning the full outbound workflow, AiSDR is the budget-transparent multichannel option, and Qualified is the premium inbound specialist for Salesforce-heavy enterprises. Whatever you choose, the math is the same: responding within five minutes makes you 21 times more likely to qualify a lead, and most retail teams can't staff for that manually. More demand, faster follow-up, better creative. If you want to see what that looks like for your store, book a growth call at worqd.com/book and find the bottleneck before spending another dollar on ads.

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