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The Marketing Millennials
307 - How To Never Miss A Marketing Lead Again with Sarah McConnell, VP of Demand Generation at Qualified
00:40:19
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- [00:02]
Daniel Murray
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the up. Welcome back to another episode of the Marky Millennials podcast. I'm joined by Sarah McConnell, VP of Demand Gen at Qualified, to talk about one of the hottest topics in B2B marketing right now, AI SDRs. We chatted about how AI STRs can help you cut costs and increase in conversion rates. Some of the coolest and most creative use cases for AI SDRs. And the big question, will AISTRs replace traditional SDRs? If you're curious about the future of sales and marketing, this episode is packed with insights that you do not want to miss. Let's dive into the episode right now. What is up, Sarah? Welcome to the podcast.
- [01:13]
Sarah McConnell
Thanks, Daniel. I'm super excited to be here.
- [01:15]
Daniel Murray
And for everybody listening, I can confirm we're talking about AI SDRs. Sarah is not an AI SDR. But we are going to talk about AI SDRs today.
- [01:26]
Sarah McConnell
Correct.
- [01:27]
Daniel Murray
Um, but I want to. Let's just set the stage. Start with the basics. What are exactly are AI SDRs, and how are they changing the game for B2B marketers?
- [01:40]
Sarah McConnell
Yeah, so I think the first thing to start with is the term SDR in general. Like take AI out of the equation is already a little conflated. You've been in marketing a long time, Daniel. You know this. When we say SDR or sales development rep, that term can span a lot of different things. I think traditionally a SDR was someone who worked inbound leads, sales development rep. It was like the first role that you took at a company. They were the people who would take event leads or demo requests, filled out forms on your website that was a sales development rep. But then there's also what we like to call sometimes BDRs or business development reps, which are your outbounders. They're aligned to AES and territories and they're going after cold accounts and trying to warm them up. However, over time, that term has just become, like, mashed into one at a lot of companies because the rule has changed a lot at companies. So you might see SDRs at companies that do both inbound and outbound, or they might do just one or the other. So for context, when you hear the term AI sdr, it could mean a little bit of both. It could mean inbound and it could be outbound. So when we talk about how is it going to change the game for marketers if that AI SDR can help marketing work. Just like I kind of said earlier, inbound leads that are like demo requests are coming to your website or they attended an event and you need to nurture them, they downloaded content. Those are all things that marketing has to own right now that typically they kind of have to toss over the fence to a human SDR and hope that they're going to like say the right thing and follow up with the right messaging that potentially AI SDRs can now do for marketers instead.
- [03:16]
Daniel Murray
Yeah, I think that's a good definition and I, I've been in multiple companies where that term is conflated because I've also been in where there was STRs, BDRs, MDRs, XDRs and it's hard to complain. MDRs were doing one thing, XDRs were doing another thing and you can't even.
- [03:35]
Sarah McConnell
Remember and you work there. We call them OSRs and ISRs and QSRs. I'm like, I don't even know what these people do anymore.
- [03:42]
Daniel Murray
I also going in deeper in this, the way people buy in 2025 is extremely different than 2015 and stuff like that. Also the way people used to buy in 2015 is they were very heavily reliant on using the company for research or using a third party tool like G2Gartner, whatever. Now most people are coming to the site just for questions about the product. Is the research is already done, so how, how would it be implemented in the funnel? Basically?
- [04:23]
Sarah McConnell
Yeah, that's a really good question because you're totally right that from all the research we've seen, buyers do buy very differently. It's like 80% stay anonymous until they are ready to buy. But as part of that anonymous research is they do want to ask questions and learn more. Whether that's from trusted sources like communities, peers or they want to come to your website and they want to anonymously poke around and like find answers. Which is why we spend so much time and effort as marketers on providing good content on our website. An AISDR should be able to answer questions about your product and its benefits and all of these things that a prospect would ask when they come to the website as they're evaluating a tool or a platform. So that's something as a marketer that has obviously rolled out. An AI SDR at my company that was really big for us is training a human SDR on the complexities of a tech SaaS product can be Very difficult. And it takes a lot of time to get them onboarded with that knowledge. If you think about the intricacies of our products, the benefits, how do you compete with these vendors? What should you say here? That takes a lot of onboarding and time. And in addition to that, again, marketing has a ton of content on their website that we've produced that we want to get in front of potential buyers. I have no expectation that a human SDR is going to remember all of that content. Like, my team has written hundreds and hundreds of blog posts. No human's going to remember that. So one of the benefits of having an AI SDR that can work on your website is they can answer those questions instantaneously. So to a better buyer experience. If I come to your website and I'm curious about how you compete with someone, or I want to know how you integrate with another product, I can just ask those questions and get instantaneous answers without ever having to engage with another person and give up my information. And then you're going to call me all the time and you're going to email me. I can have an AI SDR essentially do that for me. In addition to that, I can ask for, you know, content recommendations and they can surface content as part of that and say, hey, here's something you might be interested in based on the questions that you're asking. What I found from doing my own rollout is that's not something I would ever expect a human SDR to honestly waste their time doing. To go like search our database and go find a blog post from 10 years ago and share it. They're not going to do that. So I think the ability for AI to one, traverse databases of hundreds of thousands of data points, there's no limit on the data that they can analyze and utilize. And then being able to then turn that around and answer questions in a natural language type of way is something that buyers are just going to get more and more accustomed to. So I think marketers adopting it early are going to be ahead of the curve.
- [07:01]
Daniel Murray
A lot of AI just needs to be trained on your stuff as well. So having that control of, hey, these are the posts that are like our top blog posts, these are the top content. Here are internal stuff that we don't share usually, but an AISTR will do. But also, I think a thing that marketers have struggled in the past is they're measured on opportunities, but they are not. They don't have full control of converting things to opportunities. So totally they really have control over Half of what they're really gold on, or actually like probably a third on what they're going on. Because if revenues involved too, then you have two spots in the funnel there. So how would it fill a gap for more control for markers in the pipeline?
- [07:55]
Sarah McConnell
Also, great question, because if you think about you, there's three or four metrics that I usually hear marketers in B2B say. They're going to be gold against leads created, which is great. Like some companies are going to look at just a volume of leads that you've generated. It's a good metric to track, but it's a hard metric to be totally measured on because leads doesn't tell you are they good or are they bad. Then there was the term mql or marketing qualified lead, which has been in the industry for a really long time. It was a byproduct essentially for SDRs. Like as this conversation, you know, we're Talking about both AI SDRs and human SDRs. Marketers created MQLs as a measurement because we're saying, okay, these are marketing qualified leads. We've done some sort of analysis, scoring system, whatever it might be, and said these leads meet a certain threshold where I think it's worth a human working. And the reason we had to do that is strs have limited capacity as humans, you can only work so many leads at one time well for to do your job well. So we had to create MQLs to give some sort of threshold for them and not just hand over a deluge of leads and say, go work all of them. But then the second metrics or the other two metrics we talk about are pipeline and revenue. Well, in the traditional funnel that I just talked about, if marketers in charge of leads and MQLs and then tosses them over a fence to a sales team and says, okay, now please go finish working these. They've shown marketing that they're, they're greatly, they fit every ICP that, you know, parameter that we have. They've shown a ton of interest. They've watched all the stuff on our website. I now have to cross my fingers and Hope that the SDRs or the AES or whoever's working them, the BDRs, the, you know, whatever the acronym is for them is actually working them and turning them into opportunities. So with the current setup that we have, it can be really hard as a marketer to be gold on pipeline because you sort of lose control of when pipeline is created at that handover from marketing to sales with that MQL or leads or whatever you do to hand them over. Now an AI SDR on the other hand, can be owned completely by marketing. You're going to train it on your content, you're going to give it goals and say, here's who I want you working. Here's who I want you booking meetings with, here's what I want you to say to them. Here's the event leads, I want you working. There's no limitation on how many leads that they can work. So there's no reason for your marketing team to put any gates in place like MQLs before handing these leads over to that AI SDR to go work. And now suddenly I feel like I have a lot more control of pipeline because I can control again what that person is saying or the AI SDR is saying. I can control all the leads that they're working. I never have to worry about any capacity limitations. And I've found as someone who owns a pipeline number that is just a breath of relief because again, I don't have to worry about one handing over bad leads to sales. And then they don't like marketing. Cause they're, it's that like age old sales and marketing tension where they're like, hey, you're handing me crap that I don't want to work. Or alternatively I feel like I'm handing them great leads and then I go look at our system. I'm like, why are these all in nurtured? None of them have converted into opportunities or revenue. So it gives marketers a lot more control over the process and essentially the metrics that they're going to be held responsible to no matter what.
- [11:07]
Daniel Murray
Anyways, I think an underrated problem that is hard to solve with real STRs that are just coming in and you have this problem with the ramp and people who are ramping and they're not fully, they don't really fully know your brand. And all that stuff is, I feel a lot of things is brand messaging and brand touch points. And as marketers we want to protect the brand, want to protect. This is how we want to show ourselves to the public. And I think sometimes humans could forget that this is really important because one, they're not in marketing and two, they have a thousand other things to think about. But on the flip side I want to ask because there's that problem which I think AI could really solve. But then I know a worry for some people is okay, well branding is okay, but what about losing the human touch, the human feel? We're in an age of more Authenticity. So how do we balance those two dilemmas as marketers that we want these human touch, but we also want a really good brand touch point playbook.
- [12:21]
Sarah McConnell
Totally. And I think to the the first point of expecting human SDRs to stay on brand messaging is very hard to do. We, you know, at Qualified where I work, we have some of the best SDRs in the business. They're great at what they do, they know our brand really well, they use our product every single day. But still, the pace at which marketers move and the way that we tweak and edit branding and the things that we say can be very difficult for anyone that's even close to the brand to keep up with, let alone a 20 something SDR that's in sales, it might report not into your team. It's really difficult for them to keep up with the expectation of messaging. And on the same point of that, even if you kept messaging the same forever and you're a large enterprise company and you don't move that fast, SDRs typically are only in seat for like 10 months. That's not a role anyone wants to stay in for a prolonged period of time. It's a stepping stone into a sales role. So you're constantly retraining them. Every time you have a new one, you have to retrain on that brand messaging. So to your point of something AI can help with, and I'm not going to just say, oh, AI is this perfect solution. It's always going to be on brand and say the right things. We all know that's not true. The difference with AI is that you have a little more control over tracking what they're saying and then once you can edit that. So in our case, if an AISDR says something that I didn't want them to say about our brand, I can go in and give prompts and feedback and say, hey, say it this way or change. All of these AI products you're going to work with in marketing, they're going to allow you typically to give some sort of feedback loop to the AI. Once I've trained it once, that lives on forever. I never have to retrain it. If it quits or goes to a new job and gets promoted, that stays forever until I update my messaging. And I only have to do it once and retrain it. So that's the one side you asked about, Daniel, as far as like staying on brand messaging. And yes, there is a ton of benefits to using AI for scaling the ability to talk about your brand in a way that marketers want control over. But on the side of keeping that human touch, you're totally right. There is. I can't remember the last time I opened an outbound email. It's just, it's really hard to catch people's attention. You need authenticity and that is something we see all over the place that AI is not always very good at. So I think what we're going to end up seeing in the future from an AI and human standpoint is this is, and like this is what we're doing at Qualified is we keep our humans on the task that we know require a ton of authenticity. And for us right now that's breaking into cold accounts. If I have cold target accounts that I these are like my top 100 accounts I've worked with, my go to market team. They're like, you gotta go win these accounts. And I need to reach out to a VP there or a CMO there. I want my human SDRs or BDRs working those accounts. I want them sending really authentic messaging, doing the research, building relationships versus if we're getting a inbound request that says, hey, I'm interested in a demo that doesn't require a ton of authenticity, that just actually requires something to go in and book meetings and help or asking product questions with responses or asking questions about your brand, those typically don't require the same level of like human touch or authenticity that something like cold outbounding in my opinion does. Or like an AE or a sales rep, I don't right now. I think sales will always stay with a human because that requires such deep relationship building. So anyways, the long winded answer I think of that is we'll start to find a way to fit AI into roles that one, have high turnover and don't have people that want to stay in them for very long and then also have a ton of repetitiveness to them where they're doing the same thing over and over thinking, responding to demo requests, following up with event leads, trying to book meetings, you know, very repetitive, very redundant. AI can help with that. But when you look at your organization and you look at where you need that human touch, I don't think AI is going to necessarily replace any of that. What it's going to do is it's going to copilot it. And we hear a lot about copilots. We hear a lot about like assistants. It'll give recommendations, it's going to tell you who to focus your time on. But it isn't doing that full task. It's just kind of writing Copilot with the human who's going to bring that like human element to that messaging.
- [16:45]
Daniel Murray
Well I, I it also sounds like STRs are going back to what the original job of an STR was was to create net new pipeline from accounts where we got into the stage where there's a lot of double touching of leads that marketing is already working and we were just doing it also forces marketing to do demand gen which we were a lot of marketing started turning about just capturing things through Google or bottom of funnel leads that were probably already going to convert to ready so now marketing is forced to which is a good thing I think to start doing more prospecting with meta and whatever platform they're using for the ad platform which I think is a good thing and let SDRs do human SDRs do what they were doing and then AISTR is helping the tasks that are monotonous or forgotten or humans have hard to remember. But I also want to add one question because I don't think we actually got into this what tasks are AISDR supposed to be doing versus human? What are the what are the tasks? Breakdown?
- [18:02]
Sarah McConnell
Yeah and I would say one the not as clean answer is depends on your organization and what you need because they're pretty flexible. I would say what we see right now where they excel and I kind of mentioned it's like repetitive tasks. So things like talking to website visitors, that's a big one. You we talked about it earlier Daniel. If they come to the website they've got product questions but they're not ready to book yet. That's not something you typically want to waste a human SDR's time on because if they're bonused typically they're commissioned on meetings booked wasting time with tire kickers on the website, not really super interesting to them. That's a repetitive task that AI can help take over responding to demo requests or you know, I want to book a meeting, whatever it is helping book meetings for inbound prospects super easy, super scalable, very repetitive qualifying visitors. So if you think about an SDR typically they're going to have to ask a few questions to make sure one you match our ICP and two you have some sort of buying interest. So if I book the meeting in and I hand it over to an ae it's actually worth their time. That's something that AI is going to be able to do over and over again and then I think we already talked about this one but being able to answer questions and provide content, being able to again traverse a database and understand how your company works and what you want to say. And being able to surface that content and answer questions is a very repetitive and not fun process that AI SDRs are going to be able to do. And I actually, I actually recently on my LinkedIn was showing some different metrics that we measure AI SDRs on at our company that are not your typical metrics of like meetings booked or convers, whatever it is. And one of them is disqualified sales conversations. And again to the repetitive tasks that a human SDR does not want to waste their time on is if you have a website visitor that came in, they're showing some interest, they want to have a conversation, they want to talk. Our AI SDR was able to disqualify, it was almost a hundred like in, in a month was able to disqualify like 100 something potential sales conversations that I think was like 94 was the exact number. But they're able to disqualify those for a number of reasons. Whether they don't fit icp, they're not showing the right buying intent or they don't have the right tools that we need, whatever it might be. Those are repetitive tasks that a human would have had to do before. And if a human wasn't doing them and it was just behind a form, then it was an AES problem to then go disqualify them that you can now have AI just do for you. So I think to your point, it's freeing up a lot of time for humans to do the tasks that need that human touch that they're kind of wanting to do anyways going back to it and we can let AI handle some of those more monotonous things like qualification meeting, booking, event lead, follow up. Those are the things that they don't really want to do anyways. Frankly I also, I mean going a.
- [20:57]
Daniel Murray
Little deeper on the, the disqualification process, one area I see that this could really have a lift or gets potential squeeze of pipeline is a lot of forms DQ a lot of people upfront and there's a lot of mistakes that humans make to dequeue. So having an AIs here go after DQs to confirm if they actually do disqualified totally, that's one. And then I think one thing we used to do in my old company is we had ICP and then like ACP which was like accepted customer, like acceptable customer profile. But we didn't want generally strs to have to touch the acceptable unless we had to create a basically a whole team to go after acceptable ones. Just we Just called it a tiger team that just went after acceptable people. But now I feel like an AISTR could at least get to the root of what they're wanting before a human comes to touch those two places.
- [22:04]
Sarah McConnell
Before my role at Qualified, I was working in cybersecurity marketing, which is very, very different than working for Martech. And one of the things that we required to your point of form fills was we had a pretty strict, you know, ICP of who we could sell our product to. And not only that, we had pretty strict routing rules in cybersecurity because you have like, we called it sled. It was like they went to specific AES that specialized in like government agencies or education because there's so many more strict regulations around them. So the number of form fields that I had to have on a form, I was our digital marketer there, would drive me nuts. And I constantly was butting heads with our sales team because I'm like, I don't want to put all these form fields on a form because people drop off and they don't want to answer all these questions. If someone is showing interest and wants to buy our product, I would much rather, of course, as a marketer, that's bonus on, on leads MQL's in pipeline. I'm like, let them fill out a form. It takes a human a little bit of time to disqualify him. Who cares? But the sales seems like, no, I don't want my sales team to work all these garbage leads that they don't think are ready to buy and then they are, you know, who do we route them to? We've got to do all this manual human labor to route them appropriately. So it fell on marketing to put it in form fields. Now, an aisdr, you don't need all that. Like, they can kind of one, ask it in a more natural way. And two, to your point, Daniel, they can follow up with any leads that come into your site and make sure they are qualified. No human has to do that. No human has to send the email. Hey, Daniel, just checking. Do you use this? Do you have this, like, what's your industry? They can do all of that instantaneously and at scale. And the second one of that is event leads. We do a ton of events in B2B and giving an event lead list to your SDRs, they're always like, not again, thousands of leads that I have to go work. I don't know anything about them. Are they cold? Are they hot? Do they have interest? And as a marketer I get it. I'm like, I don't know. But I did pay 30 grand to get this lead list so I definitely need you to go work it so I can prove it was worth it. I can give that to an AISDR now and they can work every single lead. Doesn't matter. And you know what, if there weren't a ton of opportunities in there, that's fine. I did not just waste hours and hours and hours of a human's time following up with those leads. So those are the two use cases that I think I get a ton of excitement about for AI SDRs is like the qualification and following up with like a massive amount of leads from something like event follow up.
- [24:32]
Daniel Murray
One question I think I could see another use case for AISTRs. But I also think when I ask you how marketing or sales can help this process, one thing I feel like AISTRs could do is become a good source of collecting first party data into and doing market research on, on people who are just browsing. So I think that's one. But how can teams internally help even any AI they're using? But how could they use it? Because I feel like to make an AI more authentic, the way to do it is feed it more data that isn't collected through forms and through, through data providers or enrichment providers. So how could we as marketers or we as salespeople collect better first party data to make these touches more personalized?
- [25:32]
Sarah McConnell
Yeah, you, you hit one already which is first party data. If it lives on your website. It, you know, AISDRs can understand like what are you looking at? What, what pages have you shown interest in? Like what products are you showing interest in? Stuff like first party intent data that can be collected over time and then an AISTR can again aggregate and analyze in the blink of an eye. Is incredibly helpful. The other thing that I think is important is AI brings in this opportunity for like a feedback loop. And one of the examples I'll give as a use case that we use quite frequently here is when you think about data and how you can make your AISDR better or any AI that you're using as a marketer, I'm going to use the AISDR as an example obviously, since that's what we're chatting about. But people come, they ask questions, you know, they're showing what they're interested in because they're having this conversation with this aisdr. If you can aggregate those questions and you can do an analysis on them and the product should be able to do this for you and tell you the questions you're getting. As a company, I use it as a feedback loop internally to say, oh shoot, I don't have any content about this topic that these people keep asking about. So my AICR can't even, I mean it can answer it, but it's not able to share like links or like obviously the market doesn't understand this yet because we're getting a ton of people asking questions. I, as a demand gen marketer can then go to my team and say there is an obvious need for us to create more content and do more demand gen around this topic. Because I can see from this analysis from the AISDR and what it's collecting that there's a lot of misunderstanding in the marketplace and then I can create that content and then feed that back to the AI who can now answer those questions better and have links to share. So I think that feedback loop and being able to look at like what the analysis is of what's being asked can really help us be better marketers and create better content and make sure that our prospects are getting the answers that they want and that we are saying the right things out in market. So that's something that I've found that being able to create the content and give it back to the AI and let it be trained on can be really helpful for making sure those conversations are relevant.
- [27:42]
Daniel Murray
So for people who are skeptical, they don't want to adopt AI, they think it might be not human touch. What are some real results you could share that could help prove that, hey, this is at least worth the test. It's worth something you should try for your funnel. It could do X, Y and Z. What are some examples you could share that are cool that marketers could adopt today?
- [28:08]
Sarah McConnell
Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing I will say as far as skepticism, totally normal, like it's new. This is a massive shift in our industry and having skepticism of handing something over like Pipeline to AI can feel very daunting. One of the recommendations that I give, because it's something that I did personally when we rolled ours out, is it's not like opening up a fire hose and just letting it run. Like in this massive stream, you can do it in phased approaches in a way that will give you confidence. So like in our case, we started with things like off hour coverage. I don't have SDRs that are working 24 hours a day. If you can start to test it off hours, see what it's saying, see if the messaging is right Start to learn, like, how what you need to do can be really helpful and then slowly opening up the gates a little bit more like, okay, now I'm gonna let it talk to everyone and work all these leads other than my, like, you know, top 1,000 target accounts. And then once you have a level, level of comfortability where you're like, okay, I am ready to let this talk to everyone, then you can open up those floodgates and say like, okay, we're going to let this work, every single lead, because we know that it's saying the right things and I have the confidence that I need. So, one, if you have skepticism, totally normal, you're right to have skepticism. Just know that it's not a 0 or 100 thing, that you can do it in a phased way. That builds confidence for you, for your executive team so you can start to collect data to prove value. So that is one answer as far as, like, results go. 1. If you go to our website, qualified.com, we have a ton of customer stories talking about AI SDRs and the success that they've had. So if you're ever curious, you don't believe me, you can always go there and look. I would say the main success stories that we get from customers are one, never missing an opportunity on their website. So we'll have customers come to us and say, like, hey, we've we. Before we did this, we had thousands and thousands of missed chats people coming to our website. Our SDRs weren't available to have the conversation. We've never missed one since we rolled out an AI sdr. So that's one. The second is just meetings booked. In Pipeline, we had a customer called sin7 they were talking about, they were able to increase the meetings booked from website visitors. So you know, when they're coming to the website, they're having a conversation, they were filling out a form, whatever it might be. Their conversion rate from visitor to meeting book, they were able to increase because they were able to cover the entirety of their website visitors. So usually meeting book increases and no missed chat conversations, being able to work all of those leads, those are the results you're going to see. And again, if you want to see like actual numbers or anything, if you go to our website and look at customer stories, there's tons of them there that I would encourage people to go look at.
- [30:56]
Daniel Murray
I always say, really marketing, there's really two levers you could pull and in those levers there are nuances that you could pull. So the, the two levers is you could pull and open up the floodgates and let a bunch of leads in and then the other lever is in helping increase conversion rates. Those are the the two levers really you could pull at the simplest level in this nuanced and what channels you use. But this seems like which is a lot of the leaky funnel. All these things you hear about where you want to push a metric up like hey I want. I need my meeting book rate is on website leads are X and I want to increase it by 5 to 10%. That's a huge lever that markers could pull. You want to your. Your sales rep are working really DQ leads like let's. Let's get rid of those and give them more time to work qualified leads. So you. You see opportunity books go up. You really can use this AI and I'm not doing it to pitch because I'm. I when I was in marketing ops my goals were always like what is the most important lever to pull on the site and how to pull that leverage. And this seems like the off hour thing is a really big problem a lot of people have. The website chats are really big. Also stos are really not that good at feeding the right article at the right time to the right person. Which is. I know that. So you take the things that are hard for SDRS off their plate and let them do the stuff that requires humans. I think that but looking at your. Your pipeline and saying hey these are levers I can pull to move those up and what would that affect on my pipeline be? And usually you could look down funnel and that's actually a lot of revenue. You're missing out.
- [32:55]
Sarah McConnell
Totally. And the last thing I will say to that too is as we were talking about this and we're saying okay, if an AISDR suddenly takes away the need to track things like MQLs which most there's still a good number of marketers out there that are tracked on MQLs. And Dana, you're in marketing ops so you know this. Typically when you look at a conversion funnel and you're looking for a leaky part of that funnel, you know, you look at things like visitors to leads to MQLs to SALs to opportunity. Like you have that full funnel and to understand what levers to turn you still, you know you're like well I need those numbers. So how do I as marketers like step back from that MQL number in my funnel? And I was going back and forth with our team and I was like what gets me Excited about this from a demand gen perspective is it allows me to go back, you said it a little while ago, Daniel, to doing like actual demand gen. I no longer have to like do my activities, aren't driven by needing to like shove MQLS at my sales team and them saying like I missed my numbers. So I'm like, okay, there's a lot of things I can go do. I can change my scoring system or I can do these activities to skew those numbers. Now if we introduce something like AI into that funnel, I can still track all those things. Those metrics are still there and still reliable. But what got me excited is I was like, I can go do demand gen, like true demand gen out in market that drives interest in our product, that drives more brand awareness, that's driving more website visitors. And now I'm like, hey, because AI is working at all hours of the day, it's qualifying all of these visitors. I'm not missing any chats, I'm not missing booked meetings instead of having to focus on like little small things which I'm still gonna do because let's be honest, it's marketing and we're in demand and that's just kind of part of the job. But it opens me up to be able to do some more like bigger things from a demand gen perspective to try to drive up website traffic because I know that's what's gonna fuel that funnel now versus doing smaller, maybe less brand efficient things to try to drive up numbers like MQLs. So anyways, that's just something that I keep thinking about of like man, this just lets me do a lot more creative things to drive people to my website once I know my AISDR is going to work. All of those website visitors.
- [35:09]
Daniel Murray
Yeah, because you can easily say okay, branded Google search goes straight to human because you know that they searched your name, they know who you are. You could easily say yeah, say Google is a channel that I know converts really high. Pass that to an sdr. Facebook meta is a very prospecting top of funnel tool. Maybe key accounts and people who filled out the form correct like perfectly go to STR the rest. Let's get AISTR to qualify more. Now you can do it also channel based which a lot of problems is like I remember STR is getting so excited to just get Google leads because you know Google leads are, are the best leads. Like perfect. It's perfect because they, they search your name, they're gonna, they know who you are. It's not a hard conversation. So yeah, it just takes. You could start feeding the leads that should have already been fast tracked to an SDR ready and that really let true intent happen and then pass it to the sdr.
- [36:13]
Sarah McConnell
Absolutely. I could not agree more.
- [36:16]
Daniel Murray
Lastly, I want to ask you a couple just like rapid fire questions about about this. What is the biggest advantage from AI sdr over traditional SDRs?
- [36:30]
Sarah McConnell
I think fast answer is scalability. There's no limitations, there's no capacities you can scale infinitely.
- [36:36]
Daniel Murray
If you would have one word to describe an aistr, what would it be?
- [36:42]
Sarah McConnell
Infinite.
- [36:43]
Daniel Murray
I love that. What's one of the most creative ways you've seen AI STRs be used?
- [36:51]
Sarah McConnell
Oh my gosh, this is a fun one. Creative. I think a creative one because we talked about ads being able to speak to ad click throughs. So if they came to the website and they had clicked like a branded ad or they clicked a competitive ad or whatever it is, the AI SDRs can ingest that information. Say hey, it looks like you were googling this and being able to like really reference very specifically like ads that they clicked on or things that they've done or emails they've clicked through. Those are things that are in my mind it's not super creative, but it is very personalized. That would take a human a lot of time to like analyze and be able to say that that they can do like instantaneously. So creative and interesting.
- [37:32]
Daniel Murray
What's the biggest mistake companies make when implementing AI SDRs?
- [37:37]
Sarah McConnell
Not training it, not giving it the right content and just hoping it'll work.
- [37:42]
Daniel Murray
Or what is a dream feature you have for the like next gen of AI sdr?
- [37:48]
Sarah McConnell
Being able to do handoffs to other AI agents as more agents get bigger. So think like handing off to customer success agents, things like that.
- [37:56]
Daniel Murray
Aistrs. Is it a cost saving tool or revenue generating machine?
- [38:01]
Sarah McConnell
I think the answer's both. It's both cost saving and it'll drive more revenue.
- [38:05]
Daniel Murray
And last question I ask everybody on this podcast is what is a marketing hill you would die on?
- [38:10]
Sarah McConnell
A marketing hill I would die on is that marketers shouldn't be measured on MQLs. And that was well before AISDR. So that like years and years before AISCRs were introduced is that MQLs are not the right metric for marketers to be measured successfully on.
- [38:25]
Daniel Murray
I mean I 100% agree on that because one marketers could game that easily.
- [38:31]
Sarah McConnell
Easily. I've done it.
- [38:32]
Daniel Murray
Yeah, every market, I mean you content syndication like oh sh, oh no.
- [38:38]
Sarah McConnell
Suddenly you got five more points. You've MQL'd yay.
- [38:41]
Daniel Murray
Yeah. Suddenly we took off a form field that was and it's less qualified but it works perfect.
- [38:49]
Sarah McConnell
But I hit my number.
- [38:51]
Daniel Murray
Exactly. Lastly, where can people find you and what you're doing?
- [38:57]
Sarah McConnell
Qualified.com. so if you want to check out an AISDR in action, we have one called Piper. She is on our website. If you go. If you want to check it out, go to qualified.com. have a conversation. Also, if you ever have questions, find me on LinkedIn. I love chatting with other marketers, so if you ever want to pick my brain or test me on anything AI SDR, come find me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to chat.
- [39:18]
Daniel Murray
Well, thank you so much for joining and I'm excited to see the next generation. I mean, I left Marking Ops just before this was happening, so I'm sad that I don't get to implement a feature like this and then get credit for increasing pipeline, but it's okay, it's okay. But thank you so much for coming on.
- [39:40]
Sarah McConnell
Yeah, Daniel, thank you so much for having me.
- [39:45]
Daniel Murray
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.