Seeking Recommendations for AI SDR/BDR Outreach Software
Anyone have experience with AI SDR/BDR software, not agencies, but software to automate the outreach?
Yes and the first thing is you cannot fully automate it yet. What are you looking to accomplish and how do you plan to leverage it? Is this for a well established company/companies? Or start-ups
New brand, establish company, schedule demos ultimately
Yes but there is no reliable automated omni channel marketing yet… There is software to automate Linkedin outreach (Phantombuster, Dripify etc.) There’s software for email marketing (Instantly, Smartlead etc. ) There’s software to scrape leads (Apify, Apollo, Instantly etc.) And there’s the glue to automate the entire flow (Make, n8n, Zapier)
The #1 question to ask Nicholas P.
Hey, I'm working on a project to develop similar tool, mainly a GenAI powered auto dialer to rake care of these tasks. Let's connect over DM. We're about to launch beta version.
Hey David, not trying to sell, but for some context - I am part of a revenue agency and part of our offering is SDR (global one, working with enterprise and scaleups mostly). We are experimenting with automations and different sets of integrated tools to fully automate outreach and nothing is yet good enough. If you have a wide market, you can try Clay, Apollo, Expandio and a few others to create a workflow that will scale the outreach to tens of thousands per month, but will again need at least 1 or 2 people to set up, fine tune and generally improve the whole workflow. I don't recommend this as I see it to be a race towards the bottom, but may give some good results for a period of time (and obviously I am a quite biased).
Echoing others here -- the AI SDR approach is currently just a data retrieval tool with a friendly tone. They don't bob and weave with much outside of the straightforward questions. The other approach is LinkedIn automation to let you take over the messaging once somebody responds. Depending on your target environment David L., something like GoHighLevel can work incredibly well for conversion from social media like FB or Instagram. But the AI SDR is a data retrieval engine with incredible packaging.
I've worked with a number of "AI SDR/BDR" tools over the last few months and would second Nicholas P. & Ben B. said. There are two types of tools: those that aim to fully automate the SDR/BDR role and those that try to make SDRs more efficient by making monotonous tasks like going through data easier to do. The latter can 100x a good SDR by allowing them to focus on effectively communicating your product's specific value to a specific person and ensuring they are highly qualified, enthusiastic, and likely to convert into a customer rather than just take a meeting. In contrast, tools in the automation camp often end up being expensive and hard to scale. They send poorly targeted emails that leave a poor taste in people's mouth and harm your sender reputation so emails end up in spam. The only time I've seen them work is if your product's value is clear and widely recognized. And if that's the case, you probably didn't need an SDR in the first place, you needed to focus on marketing, building an inbound funnel, and depending on the product a self-serve motion.
There are many tools on the market trying to compete in both spaces right now. My favorite at the moment for augmenting a good SDR is Koala. It gives you a lot of that versatility that the tools Neil W. mentioned (all of which I love) offer, but packages it into a nice neat, and for the time being affordable, suite (since they just raised money and are in growth mode, they are clearly underpricing their offerings).
But like their headline says, they aren't going to tell you what your PMF is or the sales motions that work for your product, they are just going to let you scale them.