← MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
Using AI to Actually Drive Pipeline Growth 2. Maximizing Demand Gen Through AI-Powered Insights
00:31:48
Loading summary
Transcript51 lines
- [00:00]
Benjamin Shapiro
The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.
- [00:26]
From advertising to software as a service to data across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate.
- [00:36]
Sarah McConnell
Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
- [00:42]
Benjamin Shapiro
Typical life span of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. We're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action. Then it's just a matter of timing.
- [00:54]
Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
- [01:15]
Every time I look at my demand generation numbers, I ask myself two questions. Am I getting enough leads? And are the leads actually going to convert enter AI'd for demand gen and theoretically, US marketers can or already have put our outreach onto AutoPilot. According to Salesforce's State of Marketing report, 78% of marketers have opted or plan to adopt AI in their lead generation strategies. Yes, more leads are important, but thinking that higher lead volumes translates to revenue growth is a dangerous assumption. The real challenge isn't getting more leads, it's getting better leads. Traditional demand generation tactics are hitting diminishing returns and webinars, white papers and endless email nurture sequences. They're all generating activity, but not necessarily results. Meanwhile, sales teams are getting frustrated with leads that waste their time. It's not about automating what we've already done. It's about fundamentally reimagining how we identify, engage and qualify potential buyers. I'm Benjamin Shapiro and today joining me is Sarah McConnell, the VP of Demand Generation at Qualified. They've created an AI SDR named Piper to do what human SDRs do, Pip, but at massive scale. And today, Sarah and I are going to talk about how AI is fundamentally changing how marketers think about demand generation.
- [02:40]
AdCritter
Today's interview is brought to you by AdCritter. Small businesses are at the heart of our communities, but when it comes to advertising, they often get left behind. That's where AdCritter comes in. Are you a small business owner struggling to compete with big brand advertisings? Relax, you're not alone. Over 30,000 businesses just like Yours have faced the same challenge. But I have good news. AdCritter makes professional advertising simple and accessible. No big budgets, no complicated contracts, just results. Their platform gives you all the tools to advertise like big brands across tv, billboards and the web without the hassle. So move away from ineffective DIY solutions, overpriced agency contracts, and advertising platforms that don't deliver results. Join thousands of growing businesses that are reaching their perfect customers with confidence using AdCritter's smart AI powered tools. To launch your first campaign in just minutes, go to adcritter.com that's adcritter.com all.
- [03:40]
Benjamin Shapiro
Right, Sarah, welcome to the Martech podcast.
- [03:43]
Sarah McConnell
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here, very.
- [03:46]
Benjamin Shapiro
Excited to have you here, and very excited to talk about this idea of demand generation that is led by artificial intelligence. Let's start off at the top. Can you explain how AI is transforming the landscape of demand generation in marketing today?
- [04:02]
Sarah McConnell
Absolutely. When I think about demand gen and how AI has sort of infiltrated our space here, there's sort of a timeline that I think about. And the first thing is there was like 2023 and before, so like pre AI boom, when everything was manually done by humans, which was like the normal thing we're used to. And you think about humans, whether it was marketers creating campaigns or the SDRs that were working the leads, everything was very manual. You kind of talked about endless nurture sequences in your intro. We were writing email campaigns, we were setting up marketing automation workflows, SDRs were sending LinkedIn requests, they were writing emails, they were doing live chat, there was event follow up. Everything was a very manual process. It always required a headcount, there was always capacity limitations. But that was just the world that we knew before AI started to become more and more of a thing. And then I think in like 2023, 2024, we started to hear more about AI. And I know from my standpoint as a marketer, the initial reception was skepticism. Like I don't know how to work this into my day to day. There was like that time period where it felt like very nebulous and we didn't know how to like work it in in a real tangible way.
- [05:12]
Benjamin Shapiro
The test and learn phase, 2024 was.
- [05:15]
Sarah McConnell
Definitely a test and learn phase. And I think of that year as almost like the co pilot phase. So there was rumblings of like autonomous and agents. But most people you talked to were like, it's not there and I don't trust this thing to run fully autonomously yet. But there were copilots that were mainly built into the products you're already using that were there to assist you as the human to be better, faster, smarter at your job. So think things like suggesting copy helping you time when you did outreach. But it was always a human in the loop and there was AI there sort of riding shotgun or copilot with you, giving you advice on how to be better, faster. Then now we're looking at 2025. And I feel like now agentic AI and actual autonomous AI feels a little bit more like a reality. And we're starting to see that narrative become more and more prolific throughout, like tech and B2B. But we're also starting to see products that are actually living up to the hype a little bit more. And we're starting to ask ourselves in demand gen, like, can we start to offload tasks in demand gen fully to AI without needing a human to ride shotgun and start to actually make an impact on things like pipeline numbers, initial time to response, things like that?
- [06:22]
Benjamin Shapiro
All right, so we've gone through these three waves of integrating AI into demand gen. No AI, Everything was very manual. We had a co pilot and now we're getting into this agentic phase. One of the things that I think about when I think about the space that you're in, and I hate to bring up a competitor and ask you to comment on them, but I'm going to. And it's the billboard. I'm sure you've heard about it. The, the don't hire humans billboards from. Is it artisan?
- [06:50]
Sarah McConnell
Yep.
- [06:51]
Benjamin Shapiro
Okay, so I live in the suburbs of San Francisco and there's a billboard with an AI looking SDR person that says don't hire humans. What are the real world implications of replacing humans, starting with the SDRs?
- [07:05]
Sarah McConnell
Totally. And it's so funny because I also live in the Bay Area and we have billboards that are also up from qualified. And a little just quick side story is the our AI SDR Piper is actually crafted after our original and best sdr. Her name is Blake. And so the picture of her is like an AI version of Blake. But then there's Artisans billboard, which I think the ones you're referencing like don't hire humans. And they also have like a personified AI, which is a bunch of research behind like why you personify AI and the impacts it has on how you use it, which is a totally separate conversation. And at one point billboards were like side by side, like on either side of the 101 and people were joking. It was like this, like battle of the aisdr.
- [07:43]
Benjamin Shapiro
We gotta get into this though. I get the personification and I know I do want to ask you about the implications of not having human SDRs, but it's always a relatively attractive female looking in business casual looking straightforward, looking very serious, like somebody that's going to reach out. I don't know, it's just like.
- [07:59]
Sarah McConnell
And there's a bunch of research on it which we can totally get into. But the message behind the billboards of don't hire humans and what's the implication that that actually has on humans and SDRs? I think the concept that they are going for is not inaccurate. And the way that I like to phrase this is nobody signs up to be a lifetime sdr. There's not a single person that comes outta college and is like, you know what I really wanna do? I wanna grind in an SDR role for the next 20 something years. I can't wait. I love it.
- [08:27]
Benjamin Shapiro
LinkedIn outreach. Woo.
- [08:28]
Sarah McConnell
Yeah. And cold calling. You getting yelled at in voicemails all day long. The human SDR job I will stand by is one of the toughest jobs that you can ever do, especially as an entry level role because you just catch flack all day long. It's a hard job. You've got your AES yelling at you that they don't have enough pipeline. You're trying to drive pipeline with prospects. You're getting yelled at by prospects to leave them alone. You have to draft really personalized, concise emails. It's a really hard job that no one wants to do for a really long period of time. So when we talk about don't hire humans, the flip side of that is don't hire them for the roles that they didn't really want to do in the first place, which is typically an SDR role where you grind. And the lifespan of an SDR in the role is typically like 12 to 18 months, the research says, before they move on to a role that they probably wanted to be in in the first place, which is either an account executive, which is typically SDRs are like a stepping stone and sort of fill the pipeline for AE hiring. Or if it turns out they're like, hey, sales isn't for me, I want to go into a different role. They move into something within the organization. The other side of that though, and the question that we always get that I want to stay ahead of when we say like don't hire humans or don't hire them for the Roles they didn't want to do is okay, well then what do they do instead? Because I think that's something we can't just ignore or like gloss over and say well like don't hire them but what are they going to do and how do they get into sales roles then if that's like what they want to be doing. And while we haven't seen it start to happen yet, I think we're going to see two things in the future. As this continues to evolve and AI SDR has become more and more of a thing, you're going to see full cycle AES get hired in more entry level roles that work in the more startup mid market space. So when you hire on a brand new out of college full cycle AE they're still doing prospecting, they're still driving pipeline for themselves but they're also closing deals and they'll probably start in the easier to drive pipeline segments of a business which is typically the like SMB type Persona. Or you're going to see them start to get hired into AI management type roles as they come out of college and they're more familiar with AI. I think we will see more of them get hired into AI management and start to work as the owners of AI SDRs. So anyways, that's a long way to say don't hire humans is a very, I mean I'm in marketing. Everyone loves to use like a really like catchy, provocative it's and it's working like there's a lot of noise out there, like you had heard of it. Their strategy is working to get you know, a lot of noise around the category but I think going a little bit deeper it's like hey, don't hire them for the roles that they don't want to do. But also let's make sure there are roles that they can then do to get into the roles that they wanted to do in the first place.
- [10:53]
Benjamin Shapiro
What you said that resonated with me is not don't hire humans. That actually kind of pisses me off.
- [10:59]
Sarah McConnell
Fair.
- [11:00]
Benjamin Shapiro
The thing is the SDR role is something that nobody wants. So if it was eliminated from the face of the earth I don't think anybody's going to cry as long as they still have work. My first job out of college was akin to being an SDR except there basically was no Internet. I'm that old and I had to go business to business trying to sell phone service for AT&T and SBC and Verizon. It was a brutal 12 to 18 months of getting thrown out of businesses, literally asked to leave. To my face, there was no screen in front of me. It was really enlightening. And honestly, I learned a lot of valuable skills about sales, about dealing with rejection, about overcoming objectives that eventually made me better at sales, probably would have made me a better ae. But I decided to go into marketing. My concern to put a bullet in this is, okay, nobody wants to be an sdr, but where do they go without that training to learn how to be an AE? Are we just having a bunch of bad AES now?
- [12:02]
Sarah McConnell
I think that is a. And that's why I think we'll start to see them in more of like that full cycle role. And I also, you kind of mentioned the beginning. We don't want to bring up a competitor, which to be fair, I will say that don't hire humans for roles that they don't want to do, which I kind of caveated. I do think there are new billboards that say that exact thing. So I won't take full credit for that and won't take away from artisan that. I think they've shifted that messaging a little bit. And also like we're all trying to grow the same space. So like, I will caveat this to your point of are there going to be a lot of bad AES out there? I think there will be a world where we start to see there'll be a learning curve where we then ask AES to come in and drive their own pipeline and close their own deals. And it might start off a little bit rough. But I will also say I've seen having been in marketing for a long time and worked very closely with sales, that transition from SDR into AE role, even if it is full cycle, tends to be a pretty rough start anyways. And that's also why we tend to put them in that SMB fast doesn't require like as much of the skill of an enterprise ae. That requires like so much relationship building and understanding. So I think you are not wrong that there will be a learning curve and we'll see some AES join that. Yeah, they don't have a ton of experience. It's not going to be great. But that transition from SCR to AE is already a pretty rough transition as it is and I think we're just going to see it evolve over time.
- [13:15]
Benjamin Shapiro
All right, so the ethics of outsourcing to technology instead of having entry level roles aside, let's talk about how it works. So how do you manage campaign quality without humans regularly in the loop? As your sdr, I think the first.
- [13:31]
Sarah McConnell
Thing is humans should stay in the loop in the beginning. And I'll talk a little bit. I'm going to use Piper, which is our AI sdr, as the example for what it means to look at quality and, like, when you can start to pull humans out of the loop. And I think there's a lot of concern around to your point, like the quality and how they're responding to things. You know, when we talk about this, people talk about hallucinations, things like that. So the first thing I will say is, if you're considering an AI SDR and you're listening to this, you've heard about them, you're like, I'm really concerned. I would caution you to think about bringing on an AI SDR the same way you would think about bringing on a human sdr, which typically requires a heavy dose of onboarding. If you're going to bring them on and you're going to trust them to talk to any of your prospects and talk about your business and book meetings, there's typically an onboarding process. It's like a sales bootcamp or something that they go through where they're trained on. Here's the company messaging, here's how you talk about it, here's who you want to talk to, here's how you should book meetings. When you think about an AI sdr, you should be going through a lot of the same steps with the AI. What should it be referencing? Who should it be booking meetings with? Are there things it should and shouldn't say? If it gets asked tough questions, how is it going to respond? Are there things it shouldn't respond to? So all that to say, as far as quality goes, if you're doing an evaluation of any sort of AI sdr, ask about the onboarding. Ask about what that process looks like. How much control do you as a human have in that onboarding process of the AI to make sure that it is saying the things you want it to say, it is booking with the people you want it to book with and that you have control over changing those. Should it be saying things or doing things that you do not like? So I do want to say, from a quality perspective, be ready to put in that onboarding time up. Don't think if you're getting pitched on an AISDR and they're like, oh, yeah, you're just going to, like, turn it on and it's going to go send these perfect emails, that's not the case. You're going to have to put it through some sort of onboarding and make sure it's got the right materials and it has guardrails and it has parameters that it can follow. That is one thing that I would think about. When you think about quality, let me.
- [15:30]
Benjamin Shapiro
Ask you a question before you go on the onboarding. Is this a question of the inputs? Well, I need to give it enough information. I'm taking my gong call recordings and feeding it in or other email sequences and responses so it can ingest. Or is it kind of like how I do prompting most of the time when we're using it to create our supplemental content? It's very trial and error. Hey, here's the prompt, here's some data. What would you respond? No, never respond like that. Only respond like this. What's the process for doing the onboarding?
- [16:01]
Sarah McConnell
And I can speak to it from the lens of ours just because I onboarded our AI sdr. So I will put that caveat there. And it's a little bit of both of what you said. So the first is the content. What do you want it to learn from? In our case, it's like, hey, can you go scrape our entire website and use all of that content and use that to train? But then you can also upload things that are maybe not on your website, like if you have competitive, like battle cards, things like that, that wouldn't be customer facing. But you would want an sdr, whether human or AI to know if the questions arose. You want to be able to upload those and have it reference it. Then when it comes to prompting and making sure it can answer the questions. In our case, we have what we call like a question inbox and you can test things. I asked our reps, I'm like, give me the top 10 questions that you get every single day when you're talking to a prospect and I want to go in and test our AI SDR and see how she responds and then I can go in, type in those questions, see what the response is, and then give feedback to it. What we don't want to do and what we've built into the product is we don't want everyone to have to be a prompt engineer. We don't want people to have to be really. Because you said like it is trial and error and prompting AI is very difficult. So instead we want you to be able to ask it in like a natural way, like the questions you would see in a sales process. And because you gave it the content that is relevant, you can see how it responds and it will get to the point where you're like, okay, I fully trust this is responding in the right way. I don't need to be in here testing this or looking at this anymore. And I will say I found from my experience doing this and talking to customers, you will typically find there are about 10 to 20 questions that that AI is going to get 95% of the time. And as long as you feel good about those, the ones that come up that are in like the other 5%, Piper, our AI store will handle really well, but they happen so infrequently. The ones that I invested my time onboarding on were those like 10 to 20 that I knew I was going to get all the time.
- [17:43]
Benjamin Shapiro
Okay, so there's the onboarding process initially, let's call that the crawl phase. What's the walk?
- [17:50]
Sarah McConnell
So yeah, when you think about the next phase of this and when I think about how customers rolled out our AI sdr, other a sdr, there's like the crawl stage of like you're setting it up, you're making sure it works. I think once you feel good about the onboarding, then it is actually starting to test it. So when we, when we talk about crawl, walk, run, we give our customers, we're like, hey, you can ease into this. If you don't feel like just throwing an AI SDR across your entire website and trusting your demand gen and pipeline is all going to come from this. I've been in your shoes when my CEO was like, hey, you need to launch this AISDR and ensure you still have to hit your pipeline numbers. Like, I'm still accountable to a pipeline number. So for us, crawl was nights and weekends when I typically wouldn't have a human working because it is after hours, it is a weekend, it is a holiday. I have onboarded the AI. I now want you to go make sure you're saying the right things and doing the right things on maybe a little bit lower priority of prospects and traffic that are coming to our website. So for us that crawl stage was like after hours, weekends. And that's what a lot of our customers will start with as well. And then the walk is like, okay, we'll turn it on for a little bit more traffic, but we still want some humans to be able to talk to their like highest priority accounts. So for us that walk was okay. Our AI SDR can now hand off conversations after they have qualified that traffic. Think about a lot of website traffic. You got people coming to your site, A lot of it is garbage. You don't Want to waste humans time on it. The AI can filter through all of that and qualify all of that traffic. And when it finds gold, it's like, oh, this is a target account. This is a real prospect. Because you did all that onboarding we've already talked about, they can then hand that conversation off to a human and say like, hey, this is someone you want to talk to. Book a meeting with them. So that's kind of like the next iteration, I would say, in that process.
- [19:28]
Benjamin Shapiro
Let me ask about that handshake. How is the AI vetting? Whether it's an abm, Is it through the prompting and questioning when somebody comes onto the site, or is it. We're using intent signals and other data sources?
- [19:42]
Sarah McConnell
It's usually data sources. So I will say it should integrate with the systems that you already have. So your CRM, your ABM platforms, your marketing automation platforms, wherever you have annotated by data, this is an important account that we want to talk to. It should be able to read that data and know. And then as part of the qualification process, when it says, hey, we use reverse ip, there's. I can tell, like, okay, we think you're from this company, but let's verify it, let's ask a question, that type of thing. Once we're confident you're from a company that we have in our systems, our CRM and our ABM platforms is a target account. That's when it pings. We call them rules of engagement and say, okay, we want to hand this off to a human. This is ready for a human to have a conversation with. So the short answer is it should be able to integrate into your data so that it's a seamless experience and it's the same as the other systems that your team is working within.
- [20:27]
Benjamin Shapiro
So it's a filter initially to understand and verify, but if it's a quality, if it's an ABM lead, you're going to hand it off to a human. What's the next iteration? When do you let the thing just run and you get to go sit on a beach and have mojitos?
- [20:40]
Sarah McConnell
Gosh, doesn't that sound like a dream? Typically, I found, you know, customers give it a little bit of time, they make sure those answers are right. I go back to those, like 10 to 20 questions it's answering. Well, you've got the handoff. At a certain point, you're like, okay, I trust this thing is going to do its job. It's going to do it well. It's not going to impact my pipeline Numbers. That is the point where you, as the demand gen person who's owning this, feel confident in letting the AI SDR run fully autonomously. The other side of that though, when I would say for customers, when they fully let it run, also depends on your team structure. So if you have current SDRs, you know, going all the way back to the like, don't hire humans. Every company is going to have a different strategy on what they want to do. Do they want this AI agentic working alongside their human sdr? Do they move people who were doing this inbound role into outbound roles? Do they move them into AI management roles? So I think it really just depends on what your strategy is for your organization and how this AI is going to work alongside humans. So again, some of our customers will, they have no SDR team, they're going to let it run fully on its own. It's the only SDR they have. Great. Some of them will always maintain that human handoff because they have the SDRs in that role that are doing a good job. Some of them will wait until they've moved those SDRs into other, better, bigger roles. That's kind of what we did at qualified is our SDRs eventually just moved into AE roles or BDR roles or some of them. We have two of them that moved into AI management roles and that's when we're okay, you can run on your own. We only need this one AI SDR because she can run infinitely at scale and has no breaks. Essentially.
- [22:07]
Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah. It's interesting. I kind of assumed that the AI SDR would not only be fielding and sorting and replying to incoming traffic, but also sourcing it. And maybe that's the difference between what you're calling an SDR and a bdr. Are we there where artificial intelligence can do our outreach and is that the same product or is that something totally separate?
- [22:29]
Sarah McConnell
Everyone calls SDRs and BDRS something different at their organization. So I think in general there's just a lot of confusion around it. The way that we think about it at Qualified and beyond just Qualified, I think this is how most traditional teams are set up is there's SDRs which deal with inbound, so fielding event follow up leads, people come in and filling out a form, those type of things. And then There are your BDRs who are out prospecting and trying to generate new conversations with cold accounts that aren't actively coming to your website right now. From what we see in a product standpoint, those two are pretty delineated from an AI there's AI BDRs and there's AI SDRs and it really depends on what your organization needs. For example, at Qualified we have both. We have our own AI SDR running our inbound process and then we have an AI BDR that we've hired that works alongside our BDR team and is doing all of that outbound messaging. That's not to say in the future we don't see that within a product become one singular thing. But I think right now I would think about them as SDRs, inbound, BDRs outbound. And most of the products on the market you see right now are going to excel in one or the other.
- [23:28]
Benjamin Shapiro
Okay. I saw a LinkedIn post the other day and maybe it's just great LinkedIn content fodder because artificial intelligence is what we're all talking about all of the time these days. But somebody asked me, has anybody seen an example of these SDR companies that are actually work. I actually think they might have meant BDR meaning demand generation, not the filtering and conversions. But give me some examples of who's using the tools effectively and maybe sometimes when they're falling down.
- [23:57]
Sarah McConnell
Yeah, and I do think Those questions on LinkedIn are so valid because again, it's such a new space. It's our job in marketing at Qualified to make sure that the market is educated on. There are different sides of like the inbound versus the outbound. But from a customer perspective, our people using this. We have over 400 customers who have hired Piper onto their team to use her to help drive more inbound pipeline. Some great examples, demand based 2x their pipeline. When they put Piper on their website, they were using her for a human to human handoff at first and then they moved into that fully autonomous. We had a customer vanilla that doubled their meetings booked using Piper. Greenhouse is a huge customer of ours. They increased their meetings booked by 130% and the last one I'll give you is NextGen Healthcare, which is a really cool healthcare company. Before they had hired Piper, their AISDR to like come on and help. They had 1400 missed chats. They were averaging people coming to their website wanting to have a conversation. Conversations weren't happening. They hired Piper and that's now zero. They don't miss people on their website. So we have a lot of customers that are seeing success with this inbound AI SDR when they hand off that live chat event, follow up, event form filled, demo, follow up, making sure that anyone who's coming to their website and showing any sort of intent is getting followed up with and is having someone work them to try to book a meeting. That's where I think we're seeing a lot of success. And beyond that, I think we've seen Jason Lemkin had a post recently from Saster and he was talking about his assumption is in 2025 the inbound qualification and meeting booking process will be like fully handled by AI. And I think AI SDRs will be a big part of that. So I think that's kind of the consensus we're hearing in the market.
- [25:32]
Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, there's some irony here where eventually we're all going to have our AI SDR and bdr, but we're also going to have the email inbox gatekeeper AI. So your AI BDR is going to talk to my inbox BDR and they're going to have a conversation, decide whether we should schedule a meeting or not, and then we'll be informed later. Tell me a little bit about. You mentioned some customers and some case studies and examples, and it seems like the trend there is we have a lot of traffic and we're having trouble filtering the traffic. And this is a mechanism that allows us to guarantee that we will have a better response than just not having something there before. If not up to being on par of what the humans were doing, where does it fall down?
- [26:13]
AdCritter
Right?
- [26:14]
Benjamin Shapiro
Who's doing a bad job of implementing this technology?
- [26:17]
Sarah McConnell
You hit the nail on the head. It's not going to be a good fit if you don't have a lot of inbound traffic. If you've got a website, you don't have your ICP figured out, you're not driving a ton of traffic. The one thing no product is going to do for you is drive more demand to your website and to your product. So if you don't have a good marketing strategy, if your marketing team is not focused on driving demand and driving people to your website who are the right buyers, there's no point in putting money into this. It's not going to magically just make more pipeline appear. You need stuff at the top of that funnel to be able to convert. What it's going to do really well is if you have the traffic, you're running ABM campaigns, you know you're getting the right people to your site, but they're just not converting. And they're not filling out forms, they're not booking meetings, they're downloading content, but your SDR team isn't following up on them or you're seeing them at events and your SDRs aren't following up on them. That's where an AI SDR is going to help you drive more pipelines. So bad examples are you don't have a good marketing strategy in place, you don't have inbound interest. Nothing's going to fix that for you. You got to start there before you can scale into using AI. But to help you book more meetings.
- [27:22]
Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, it seems like there's an order of operations, which is figure out your marketing brand strategy first. Make sure you know who you're going after and what you want to say to them. Have some sort of a mechanism to drive interest and traffic, whether that's your AIBDR or some other marketing campaign, events, whatever strategy. And then the AI SDRs are the filtering mechanism and the response mechanism to try to drive improved conversions.
- [27:46]
Sarah McConnell
Totally. And I will say as a demand gen person, the thing I like about an AI SDR is it frees up my time not hounding my human SDRs to go follow up with event traffic. Or did you miss this demo request? Why is no one followed up with them? I don't waste my time on that anymore. I can focus on doing the things you just said, which is driving better quality traffic to things like my website and my events and my campaigns. And that's what I like doing anyways. Like that's why I went into demand gen. I didn't really go into demand gen to babysit humans and see that they're following up on people. So we hear a lot of, oh, it frees up your time. And in my mind, that's how it frees up my time to do the things I actually want to be doing.
- [28:22]
Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, you don't have to whip the horse anymore. The AI whips its own horse, I guess. I want to ask you one last question, which is around the Build versus Buy and I did a little homework. I won't make you say your pricing, but my understanding you can confirm or deny is that an AI SDR is essentially priced at the low end of what you'd have to pay for a domestic here in the United States SDR. So less than $100,000 annually for an autonomous scalable resource. Help me make the calculation of when you should pay for that. If you're a company, should you try to build it yourself? Talk to me through build versus buy.
- [29:04]
Sarah McConnell
You are right. I think most AI SDRs you're going to find on the market will be priced pretty competitively with I would have to hire a human to do this role. Is it competitive with that now, there are nuances to that of AI based on queries. And if you have a ton of queries, it's going to cost more money. But then the alternative to that is like, okay, well, if you were a large company with a bunch of queries, you'd have hundreds and hundreds of SDRs. So the pricing usually scales in like that type of, I guess, scale. But you hit the nail on the head. It's usually priced pretty congruent with like a human. If you are considering building versus buying, the two things I would consider here are one time, which I think is something you can't necessarily quantify, although you could if you really wanted to sit down with your team and say, how many people have to work on this? What's their salary? How much time investment are you doing? Can you justify the time, resources and cost about humans towards building it? And then if you are thinking about building it internally versus buying something externally, do you have the resources and the knowledge internally to build something that will book the right meetings with the right type of people? So all that to say is, I think one of the concerns with building, although it is not a bad strategy and companies are doing it, is if it's being built by someone who is not a subject matter expert in sales or marketing, how do you make sure they are building it in a way that benefits you as a marketer? It's one thing to set up like AI workflows and do all these things, but they are very, very basic. So anyways, the short answer is look at the time investment it's going to take your team to build it. Look at if you're confident that they will build something of quality that will make your job as a marketer easier. And then if you're looking at buying it, the thing I would say is look at the pricing. Does it feel fair with like your SDR team, how many SDRs you have, how many inbound queries you have, et cetera. And the other part of that is how many customers do they have? Ask them for proof. Because if you're looking at a build versus buy and you're like, well, I could just throw money at this and I could just buy something. But then you buy something and it's not performing, that doesn't do you any good, then you just wasted time you could have put into building something that was effective. So if you're going to buy, ask the vendor, can you tell me about your customers? Who's seeing success? What are they doing? What does it look like? Can I get Examples of it. Can I go mess around with it? That should give you confidence in whether you want to buy that versus build it. So hopefully that helps.
- [31:14]
Benjamin Shapiro
We're in this funny space now where we all have access to artificial intelligence and LLMs and we can do prompt engineering and connect to marketing automation and really do some sophisticated work that wasn't even imaginable two years ago. And there's all of these different types of companies that are starting to get into agentic AI and they're starting to be verticalized. There's marketing automation, there's demand gen, there's lead gen. You can do it yourself. Do you want to trust an expert? Do you want to try to build yourself? Do you want to actually rely on people to continue to do the work? All sorts of crazy fundamental changes to the way that we do marketing. And I think what's happening in our demand generation, our lead generation, is a great example of what we can expect in the future. It's starting to peel off a little bit of the entry level and hopefully there are roles that those people can go into to start their careers and avoid the process of going through the painstaking SDR vetting process.
- [32:12]
AdCritter
And a special thanks to AdCritter for sponsoring this podcast. AdCritter helps small businesses create professional advertising campaigns across multiple channels with transparent pricing and no hidden fees. Upgrade your advertising strategy with an easy to use platform that won't break the bank and join 30,000 businesses that are using AdCritter to get seen by their ideal customers. To launch your first campaign in just minutes, go to adcritter.com that's adcritter.com all.
- [32:42]
Benjamin Shapiro
Right, that wraps up this episode of the Martech podcast. Thanks to Sarah McConnell, the VP of Demand Generation at Qualified, for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with Sarah, you could find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes. Or you can visit her company's website, which is qualified.com and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or follow us on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed soon. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
- [33:38]
Thanks for listening to the Martech podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything. Com.