Pod Insights MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth How AI Is Fundamentally Changing Demand Generation About this episode Sarah McConnell, VP, Demand Generation at Qualified, discusses using AI to drive pipeline growth. In this episode, Sarah outlines the three stages of AI integration: pre-AI, co-pilot, and agentic AI. They discuss the implications of replacing human SDRs with AI, emphasizing the need for onboarding and quality control. Success stories include Demandbase doubling their pipeline and Greenhouse increasing meetings by 130%. The conversation also touches on the build vs. buy decision for AI SDRs, considering cost and expertise. Show NotesConnect With: Sarah McConnell: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 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.
0:25 Speaker 01 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.
0:36 Speaker 02 Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
0:42 Speaker 03 Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.
0:46 Speaker 01 If 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.
0:53 Speaker 00 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.
1:15 Speaker 04 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 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,
1:58 Speaker 04 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, 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. All right, Sarah, welcome to the Martech Podcast.
2:43 Speaker 05 Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
2:46 Speaker 04 Very 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?
3:02 Speaker 05 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.
3:47 Speaker 05 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.
4:13 Speaker 04 The test and learn phase.
4:14 Speaker 05 2024 was definitely a test and learn phase. And I think of that year as almost like the co-pilot. So there was rumblings of like autonomous and agents, but most people you talk to were like, it's not there and I don't trust this thing to run fully autonomously yet. But there were co-pilots 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 co-pilot 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
4:57 Speaker 05 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.
5:23 Speaker 04 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.
5:46 Speaker 05 Ah, yes.
5:47 Speaker 04 The don't hire humans billboards from, is it Artisan?
5:51 Speaker 05 Yep.
5:51 Speaker 04 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?
6:05 Speaker 05 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 AI SDR.
6:44 Speaker 04 We got to get into this, though. I get the personification, and I know I do want to ask you about the implications of not having a 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-
6:59 Speaker 05 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 out of college and is like, "You know what I really want to do? I want to grind in an SDR role for the next 20-something years. I can't wait. I love it."
7:27 Speaker 04 LinkedIn outreach. Woo!
7:29 Speaker 05 Yeah, and cold calling, you're 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, 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, as the research says, before they move on to a role that they probably wanted to be in in the first place, which
8:14 Speaker 05 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, and 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 SDRs become more and more of a thing.
8:53 Speaker 05 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,
9:37 Speaker 05 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.
9:54 Speaker 04 What you said that resonated with me is not, don't hire humans. That actually kind of pisses me off.
10:00 Speaker 05 Fair.
10:00 Speaker 04 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
10:41 Speaker 04 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?
11:02 Speaker 05 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 at the beginning, we don't want to bring up a competitor, which to be fair, I will say the 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
11:43 Speaker 05 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 SDR to AE is already a pretty rough transition as it is. And I think we're just going to see it evolve over time.
12:16 Speaker 04 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?
12:31 Speaker 05 I think the first 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
13:12 Speaker 05 We'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.
13:53 Speaker 05 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 upfront. Don't think if you're getting pitched on an AI SDR 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.
14:30 Speaker 04 Let me 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?
15:02 Speaker 05 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 could 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.
15:46 Speaker 05 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 responses 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 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.
16:31 Speaker 05 And as long as you feel good about those, the ones that come up that are in like the other 5%, Piper, our AI star 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.
16:44 Speaker 04 Okay, so there's the onboarding process initially, let's call that the crawl phase. What's the walk?
16:50 Speaker 05 So yeah, when you think about the next phase of this, and when I think about how customers rolled out our AI SDR or other AISDRs, 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 AI SDR 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.
17:32 Speaker 05 I have on boarded 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 A I S C R can now hand off conversations after they have qualified that traffic. Think about a lot of website traffic. You got people come into 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.
18:14 Speaker 05 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.
18:29 Speaker 04 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?
18:43 Speaker 05 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.
19:27 Speaker 04 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 the beach and have mojitos?
19:41 Speaker 05 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 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 SDRs? Do they move people who were doing this inbound role into outbound roles?
20:26 Speaker 05 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.
21:08 Speaker 04 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?
21:29 Speaker 05 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 coming in, 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.
22:14 Speaker 05 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.
22:29 Speaker 04 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.
22:58 Speaker 05 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, are 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, Demandbase, 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.
23:42 Speaker 05 Before they had hired Piper, their AI SDR to like come on and help, they had 1,400 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 handle. Off that live chat, event follow-up, 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,
24:23 Speaker 05 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.
24:33 Speaker 04 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 the 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, right? Who's doing a bad job of implementing this technology?
25:18 Speaker 05 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,
25:58 Speaker 05 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 pipe. 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've got to start there before you can scale into using AI to help you book more meetings.
26:22 Speaker 04 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 in traffic, whether that's your AI BDR 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.
26:46 Speaker 05 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. Two 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.
27:23 Speaker 04 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.
28:05 Speaker 05 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 were 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
28:47 Speaker 05 justify the time, resources, and costs of humans towards building it? And then if you were 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's going to take your team to build it. Look at if you're confident that they will build something
29:31 Speaker 05 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've 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.
30:15 Speaker 04 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
30:58 Speaker 04 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. All 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 can 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
31:41 Speaker 04 is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
32:10 Speaker 00 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.
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