Exploring the Effectiveness of AI Sales Development Representatives
Hi there. Anyone using an AI SDR’s? Exploring into these and curious to know if they are effective and what the experience has been like
Hi there. Anyone using an AI SDR’s? Exploring into these and curious to know if they are effective and what the experience has been like
I actually just hired an agency to build me an AI SDR. Happy to share my process, lessons and results... (DM me for actual costs b/c they said I can't share publicly)
Hi Pablo A. book a demo w McKenah at Sale.ai - you basically test their product w an inbound call. It’s pretty cool. Full disclosure, I’m an affiliate partner, but not in for any $$, so feel free to go to their website for a non-affiliate route. https://salesai.referralrock.com/l/CHRISDENOI20/
^^ btw: if anyone is interested in social selling, follow McKennah on LI or TikTok (she has over 130k followers on TT). Her social media posts drive a lot of inbound, good lessons for any SDR/AE.
I'd worry about any company that won't allow public pricing like that Konstantinos P.. Not to say they're practicing anything in bad faith, but I have to wonder what inspires that.
Fair point... Just to be fair to them, they didn't say specifically about pricing but the contract said that anything inside the contract should be treated as confidential, and I didn't want to run afoul of any terms. Maybe I'm reading into it too much or maybe they used a template. So far I've had a good-enough experience with them but we'll see. It's an investment in the thousands but not the tens of thousands so I thought it's worth the test b/c I've been hearing a lot about these types of AI SDR agencies and wanted to see how much value they really deliver, and if the results justify the investment.
That's quite a fair observation, and very respectable.
Hopefully it's a big success and brings a nice ROI! Keep us updated.
Hey Pablo! I'm a bit biased since my company (Ciro — AI Prospector) is building in the space, but our experience is that folks are having mixed experiences:
GOOD: AI SDRs seem to be very, very at finding and qualifying leads — a lot of the successful products in the space are doing something akin to ChatGPT Deep Research for people / prospects. Clay is probably the most popular product here but there are a handful of upstarts like us that are focused more narrowly on nailing prospecting / lead qualification since Clay is such a general purpose workflow tool
BAD: Automated outreach. Most of the companies we talk to that have tried these full stack AI SDR solutions churn or at the very least stop using the email outreach part. Writing a good cold email is still something LLMs don't seem to have cracked — they often sound robotic and elicit much worse responses than human drafted emails
My experience with teams working in AI automation stuff is that these systems are way too brittle so they require much longer to develop and much more labor to maintain. At the end, I often wonder if it's cheaper to take a mechanical turk approach (the anti-AI;) and do things manually with cheap labor. Because AI can only automate what cheap labor could do. So if you develop the SOPs, there are certain benefits to employing humans: you lose speed but you gain in flexibility and adaptability. Or, my favorite approach is 80% AI with 20% human in the loop for the last-mile that's tricky for AI to automate. Automate as much as you can but don't overdo it. Would love to hear others' experiences in the field too!
