Adrian G. You're right that that question won't yield a consistent answer. No message no matter how personalized or impersonalized will work if the recipient of the email is not currently feeling pain that the sender can solve and prioritizing to solve that pain. Also, it matters how much budget they have, whether they understand that pain well (or live with it as status quo as opposed to something they can consciously solve), whether there's visibility and support to solve that pain internally, etc. You can use all the signals possible to determine who feels the pain and when the right timing is. But the message itself if it's accurate and contextualized properly could still not land depending on the preference of the recipient or something as random (and unhelpful) as the mood the person is in at the moment they read the email. So unless an email service can morph messages to the right tone and style to fit the mood and mindset they're in to be receptive to the message, otherwise it’s an educated guess for a fixed state.
Ha N. What'd you end up deciding? If it's like Rox, they seem like they're positioning themselves as the AI sales rep with the CRM data layer and automations but keeping human in the loop. A sales rep spends mainly 8-10 hrs a week speaking to people and selling and all the rest of the time on manual work, so giving them 4-5x throughput might be worth it for a small sales team. And even optimizing a large sales team. Although I haven't seen the product just yet.
It goes back to first principles with AI. A CRM previously existed as software as a mechanism to facilitate sales, whether that was from the data layer, logic layer or application layer. Since AI can now more easily replicate (but not fully replace) the latter two, these CRMs are more reduced to primarily a data layer. SF or HS could ultimately still prevail. But it comes down to who will best facilitate the entire customer buying journey or store the data. In the future, sales might be facilitated like how Turbo Tax works. The UI just surfaces the data and directs you where to go and everything in the background stores the data and decides how to facilitate it to a rep. One area that hasn’t been done well historically is how top of funnel data or any data with a signal merges with sales data. This could play out where it’s SF/HS, or something more ToF like Clay or Hightouch or even more vastly broader like Glean or Watt Data where every piece of data is essentially a signal. The CRM/“CRM” will change from what it is today. Too hard to tell which player, but it'll be who solves the biggest friction in sales from a data layer perspective.
Gururaj P., top of funnel is commonly the top challenge of RevOps these days. But to extend Pat’s sentiments, it's pretty universal amongst RevOps professionals that RevOps is the necessary orchestration of the entire revenue engine across marketing, sales, post sales, finance, and product.
