[Music] [Sarah McConnell] Hello, everyone, thank you so much for joining me today for Maximizing Inbound Pipeline Generation with an AI SDR. My name is Sarah McConnell. I'm the VP of Demand Generation at Qualified and I just want to give a quick look at the agenda and what I'm going to be chatting about for the next 25-30 minutes. So I'll start with talking about their traditional marketing funnel. If you're listening to this and you're a marketer, this is something you know very well. Then I want to talk about this new marketing funnel that's being introduced with this inception of AI and what that means for us as marketers and go-to-market leaders. And then dig in a little bit more to AI SDRs. What are they, how to get started, the capabilities you're going to need, and some key plays that you can start to implement in order to start driving inbound pipeline with an AI SDR. So to get started, the Traditional Marketing Funnel. Think about your website visitors to leads to MQLs. This current process with AI is now broken and it's leaving pipeline on the table. And here's why. Everything that you're doing today is driving traffic to your website. If you think about as marketers, the things that we focus on, email click-throughs, paid ads, outbound emails, if your SDRs are reporting into marketing or sales, whichever it is, those emails typically link back to your website. If you have someone talking on a podcast, everything that you do is driving traffic back to your website. And right now the traditional way that you capture leads or that you drive inbound pipeline from that website is through contact sales. Usually it's form fills, people are requesting a demo, they want to learn more. And the thing I really want to hone in on here is at the top of this current traditional funnel are the things that marketing is focused on. These are the things that myself, as a demand gen leader, this is my day to day. It's marketing campaigns that are working on driving leads for my team. And then in that middle section, we've got our MQLs. And it's our SDR team that's working there, which I'm going to dig into a little bit more. And then at the bottom of that funnel is our sales team. And right now it is very human dependent. You can see that middle section, we had to introduce this new concept of SDRs years ago because we were driving enough leads that we were being limited by capacity. And we had to figure out a way to help our human teams prioritize who they were going to reach out to. So from an SDR perspective, they're typically working leads in two different ways. They're either going to live chat on a website, someone visits your website, they have questions, live chat has become like a par for the course these days. Or they're going to be following up with those inbound leads via email. So someone comes to your website, they want to talk, you have reps that are available to have a conversation, then that's where the live chat comes into play. If you don't have live chat, or it's after hours, it's not staffed, whatever it might be, that's where you're going to fill out a demo form. And you're going to follow up when someone requests a demo via email to set that up. But instant response is really difficult when we think about chat. I started at Qualified about five years ago when we were very predominantly a chat company. And I watched this firsthand. I actually led the team that was managing the chat. I was watching these day in and day out. And instantaneous responses are really, really difficult to do. And even if you can respond quickly, keeping the quality there is incredibly hard. So here's some examples. Typically, SDRs are not working live chat around the clock. They have an eight-hour day, they're going to sign off. So you don't have that live chat staffed. They miss conversations. We even with our best human SDRs working our live chat, they can typically have about three to five good conversations at a time before they're going to start missing conversations that are coming in. So if you have a high volume of traffic, it can start to get very difficult. They don't have the answers at their fingertips. And I think this is the key one here is typically an SDR is a fairly young, fairly green person on your team to have all of the knowledge of your product, your persona, how it works. And that can be really hard to do. And even if they have the answers, doing that quickly and responding quickly and efficiently is incredibly hard. And multitasking is difficult. And what this typically means for your buyer is they're left waiting. They're left with not great responses, which leads to a bad buyer's experience. On the other hand of that, what SDRs are doing day in and day out, we just talked about live chat. We also have email follow up. And you can see from this chart here, following up with an inbound lead is not as simple as I'm filling out a demo. And then I'm getting an email to book said demo. There's a lot that goes into responding to inbound leads. If you want to make sure that they are actually booking meetings and that you are driving pipeline from those demo requests. So form is submitted, they leave your website, you've got to run automation rules, you go through your scoring. This is all happening in your marketing automation system. It's got to be assigned to the right SDR. It's got to go through all of your routing rules that you've set up. It ends up in someone's lead queue. Then by the time that person signs back on your SDR, and they're trying to follow up with that form fill, they're going to want to send a really good personalized email. That takes time to do a little bit of research on the prospect, to look up the account, go into the CRM, see if you had an open opportunity with them before, looking up that history, finding an email template. These are all just very normal steps that SDRs have gotten used to. But even in the best-case scenario, this can take hours. Most likely, this can take days. And that just leaves your prospect who fill out a form and was showing interest and has now left your website waiting for that follow-up. These are some of the issues that we're going to see with that very human-centric funnel of MQLs, human SDRs. The cost of labor, it's expensive to hire humans. This is no surprise. A fully loaded SDR can cost anywhere from $75,000 and above, depending on the company. They have limited capacity. They can work about 250 leads per month at any given time. This is even with your best SDRs. Speed to lead, being able to follow up with those leads, whether it's from live chat or email, is very hard to do in a timely manner. When you try to get speed, you tend to give up quality. So if you are hitting some faster times with responses, that can really impact the quality of what you're doing. And then short tenure. SDRs are not in that role for a very long time. They don't want to be in that role for a very long time. And as companies, we don't want them to be in those roles for long periods of time. Typically, with inbound SDRs, we see a tenure of about 12 months. Either they're going to move on to a different company or they're going to move up. Your best reps are going to get promoted into new roles. So here's what I want to shift into now with AI. What does this start to look like? If you're looking at this, you're like, yeah, this is my funnel. This is what we do at my company. If you want to start to reshape that funnel for the age of AI, that's where I'm going to focus next. So you can see the funnel stays pretty similar at the top and bottom. This is because marketing's role and sales role hasn't really changed. We're still looking to drive marketing campaigns, market generated leads, high quality traffic to your website. Sales is still looking to get buyer ready opportunities that have been vetted that they can turn into pipeline and revenue. Where it's going to change is that middle. So where before we had to have MQLs, we had to put in scoring systems for those MQLs so that our SDRs knew which leads are worth working. When you start to introduce something like an AI SDR into that middle there where the human SDRs were before, suddenly you don't need things like scoring models. You don't need things like MQLs because you aren't limited by human capacity anymore because AI is going to help you. So when we replace that middle of the funnel with an AI SDR versus human SDRs, inbound SDRs, you have a reduced cost. You're onboarding one time. You're not having constant turnover. You have unlimited capacity. An AI SDR can work unlimited leads at any amount of time. It's 24/7. There is no constraints from a timing perspective. And there's no constraints from a capacity perspective. Again, human SDRs, the reason we introduced MQLs is, because they only want to work the best lead that are most likely to turn into opportunities. And that's normal. They have a quota to hit. They have a commission check that they want to receive. With an AI SDR, there are none of those limitations. They can work every single lead that marketing wants them to work. They don't need to prioritize. Instant speed, you can respond instantaneously. You don't have to wait for that big email flow that we showed a couple slides ago. The quality is there. They can do this at scale. They can personalize at scale. And they don't get promoted out. They don't leave the company. They're not getting promoted into AE roles. You don't have to retrain them every 12 months. They're staying in this seat after they were onboarded. So with that being said, AI SDRs are fairly uncharted territory. This is a fairly new concept to our market. A lot of you might be wondering, how do I get started? If you're all interested, where do you start to look? I want to dig into a few key things that you're going to want to identify if you're starting to look at AI SDRs and you're interested in introducing them into your current marketing funnel to help scale some of your lead and pipeline generation. So I've worked with a lot of customers here at Qualified when they're introducing an AI SDR on the different ways that you can introduce them into your inbound processes. And the way that it tends to bucket out are three different areas. You can either bring in an AI SDR to help fill your gaps. So we talked about it before. Human SDRs are limited by timing and capacity. If your reps are signing off in the evening, if there's holidays, weekends, that they are not working, which is pretty normal, a great place to start is introducing your AI SDR to fill those coverage gaps. So again, weekends, if you have a global business, but you don't have SDRs in one of your international time zones, you can start to introduce an AI SDR to work those gaps. The other is working the front lines. This is a really fantastic one. If you currently have SDRs at your company, 12 months is a tenure, but you're not ready to just replace them. You want to let them move on into their next best role at your company to do those roles that they really actually want to be doing. In the meantime, you can still leverage AI SDRs to help vet the leads that are coming to your website and ensuring that your human SDRs are only getting the highest quality leads. So what that tends to look like is every single visitor that comes to your website, your AI SDR can work. They can have conversations, they can follow up with, they can start to do that vetting process for those leads. And then when they uncover the ones that have actual buying intent that they have, they're from the right ICP accounts, they're like part of your ABM program, they can qualify those first and then hand them off to your human SDRs. And the human SDRs can take it like that last yard across the finish line there to book those meetings and make sure they are getting passed to the AE. We found that human SDRs really love this process because it saves them a ton of time. They're not having to sit and manage a live chat. They're not having to waste their time deflecting customer support inquiries that are coming in through your live chat. They're not having to follow with a bunch of demo request form fills when the person just responds and turns out they actually had no interest, they're not in your ICP. You're letting AI handle that massive volume and sift through a lot of what we like to call tire kickers. And then letting your human SDRs get the credit for the ones that they actually want to be booking. And then the third and final way that you can start to introduce AI SDRs onto your team is flying solo. So once you feel comfortable, like you've started to introduce them in off hours or weekends, you can have them fill in the front lines. But once you start to see the impact the AI SDR is going to have, let's say your human SDRs have been promoted on into AE roles or other like AI specific roles within your company, which I think is what we're going to start to see here in the future. Now that AI SDR can fly solo, they can engage with every single person coming to your website, they can follow up with all of your inbound leads and handle that entire motion. And when they're flying solo, again, you're not worried about them moving on into another role. You don't have to give them that 12-month tenure and look for their next step. You don't have to keep onboarding them and retraining them. They're just going to continue to fly solo indefinitely. So these are the three areas and strategies that we tend to see our customers work through when they're introducing an AI SDR onto their team. But when we think about capabilities of an AI SDR, again, a couple slides ago, I talked about it's pretty murky market still very new. What are some things that you as a go-to-market leader are going to want to look for for an AI SDR to make sure that can actually do those three things that we just talked about, like flying solo or filling coverage gaps or working the front lines? And there tends to be seven areas that I want to hone in on that you're going to want to make sure if you're on the marketing side and you're looking for more inbound pipeline that your AI SDR can provide for you and your company. So I won't spend a ton of time here because I'm going to dig into each one individually. First up, onboarding. If you think about a human SDR, when they join your company, what's the first thing they're going to do? They're going to go through boot camp. Typically, they go through a sales boot camp. They're going to be getting all of your information about your company, all of your differentiators, like competitive Intel, training your SDRs about routing, what teams they're aligned to. You're going to want to think about onboarding an AI SDR the exact same way. And what I like to tell when I work with customers on an AI SDR onboarding, there is going to be an investment of time up front to bring on this AI SDR. But then that is an unlimited investment because again, they're not moving out of that role. They're staying in that role. So if you're looking at AI SDRs, and it is a one hour up and running, you barely have to train them process. There's probably a good reason for that. Just like you would train a human SDR with very thorough information. You want to make sure that your AI SDR is also able to be thoroughly trained on a significant amount of your information, pricing, case studies, FAQs, product news. They also should be able to know your routing, your knowledge base, rules of engagement. How should they engage with different leads that are coming to your site? Not all leads are created equal. You probably have ABN. So the same way that you would onboard a human SDR is how you're going to want to think about onboarding an AI SDR. So if you're doing an evaluation, ask about that onboarding process. What does it look like? What is the information that you can feed to that AI SDR? How are they going to retain that? How are they going to then use that information when they're booking meetings? These are all really important things to dig into. So this is the first one you really, really want to focus on. The second thing here is lead and account profiles. They need to know who they're talking to and how they should treat them differently. So this is where I really like to talk about like your segmentation. As marketing leaders, you have your different segments, you have your ICP that you then bucket into different areas. Typically, we have our segments for ads that we're running for email campaigns, etcetera. Your AI SDR should be able to understand those different segments and speak to them in a very personalized way based on that segmentation. And that goes back to being able to read lead and account details from your CRM, your marketing automation platform, your ABM platform. So you want to make sure that your AI SDR is not giving just a one size fits all to every single visitor. You want to be asking questions of potential vendors of how do they know who the visitor is? What's the data that they're able to unveil? How are they matching it into my systems? How can they then pull that in and use that for personalizing live chat and email follow up? So making sure that they understand your visitors and can tweak the responses and how they're engaging with those visitors based on the rules of engagement that you can set as a company is very important. The third thing here is lead capture and qualification. They should be able to work holistically across your entire website and email. So there's a few things highlighted here on this slide. Things like having, we've already talked about live conversations, but being able to capture leads in different ways. Not everyone wants to have a live conversation. Can your AI SDR find other ways to bring them in? Think like offers. Can they invite them to an event? Can they have them download a white paper? An AI SDR that is working for an inbound team and working for a marketing team should be able to drive lead gen just as much as meetings booked. And that comes in a plethora of different conversion points like event invites, downloads, live chat, and email. And on that point of live chat, real-time conversations. You can see here in an example, an AI SDR could hand that conversation off to a rep or to an AE or another SDR, depending on your unique business situation. So you really want to dig into when you're doing an evaluation, what does that real-time conversation and engagement look like? What do those conversations look like? Again, in previous slides, we talked about they've been onboarded. They understand your segmentation. You want to make sure that you trust that AI SDR to go in and have live conversations and answer questions when someone's on your website and expects an instant response. If you have reps or AEs that are really hungry and they want to be talking to their target accounts, you need to make sure that AI SDR can appropriately hand off that conversation. But the most important part is hand off the conversation to the right person based on your routing rules. If they can't hand off the conversation to the right rep, it's just going to create frustration and friction between the sales and marketing teams when your sales team is saying, hey, your AI SDR is passing me the wrong conversations. I don't want to talk to these people. So make sure you're digging in again that was kind of slide two, like that segmentation and routing and rules of engagement and make sure if they're having conversations that are getting handed off, it is to the right people. Five is probably the most important one. Can your AI SDR schedule meetings? The whole point of an AI SDR is to be able to scale your inbound pipeline generation. They need to be able to book meetings with the people that you care about and want to actually book meetings with. So in this example here, you can see the AI SDR understands who the visitor is, who the dedicated account rep is. You can even have flexibility with AI SDRs to say like, hey, I want to book with an AE and an SE if they're part of this segment. You need to make sure that they can book those meetings in a really frictionless, instantaneous way on your website. And again, with the right people on your go-to-market team and on your sales team.
Number six here, as far as an evaluation of an AI SDR email follow-up. I feel like this is typically the one that most frequently gets associated with AI SDRs is email follow-up, which is, it makes sense. This is a very common use case for AI SDRs. Obviously, the other slides I've talked about things like live chat and meeting scheduling. Also very important if you're looking for an inbound use case. But when we think about email follow-up, you want to make sure that your AI SDR can follow up with those form fills. If you're getting a really heavy volume of form fills, and right now it's really dependent on your human SDRs logging back in the next day, doing that research, sending follow-up, you're losing that speed to lead. You're losing the ability to scale that based on capacity and headcount. You want to make sure that AI SDR can take those form fills and send personalized email responses in a very timely manner to make sure those meetings are getting booked. And it's kind of a flywheel. You send that email, you see here it says book time, then it's going to go back to slide five where they're going to book time with the right people. So this is all things that you need to ask questions of when you're doing evaluation to make sure that the AI SDR can do all of these things. And then last but not least here is SDR workflows. This is probably the least exciting one because typically this is not something that we think of. But if you think about your human SDR and their day-to-day, there is a lot of monotonous work that's done within your CRM and making sure things are up to date. Are they adding leads into campaigns? Are they updating leads with the right information? Typically, in my experience, as great as human SDRs are, this is a part they hate doing. They don't like to go into Salesforce or your marketing automation tools and be updating leads and adding notes. But an AI SDR should be able to still do those things. They should be able to trigger actions, update things in your system based on interactions that they've had or who's on your website. So make sure if you're looking at AI SDRs in the future that they can do some of these not exciting things like workflows and adding things into campaigns and updating leads and account records and etcetera. Okay, so with my last little bit of time here, I want to dig into some key plays that we've seen that you can actually start to do once you bring an AI SDR on board that will help you scale that pipeline generation for your inbound team here. The first one here is one of my favorites. Our first play is your high intent buyer. On the first part of this play, you've got people coming to your website. They're doing the research. Again, going farther back into this presentation, we showed that traditional marketing funnel and the AI marketing funnel. The top part of that funnel for marketing is always marketing campaigns, driving people to your website. And as part of doing my job well, it means driving the right people to my website. Now that might mean the right people based on title or the companies that they're at. But also typically, I want to drive buyers that have the highest intent and the highest likelihood to convert. So when those people land on your website, I've spent a ton of time, a ton of money and resources as a demand gen leader, getting them there. I want to make sure I optimize the heck out of that visit and I do not lose out on potential pipeline. So when they land on the website, the first thing your AI SDR is going to do, which we showed previously in this presentation, is identify who they are and start to work them into your segmentation. Who are they? Do they matter? Is it who we want to be speaking to? They can unveil all of that information. Now, say, that person leaves the website. They come, you know who they are. They've been cooking in the past. But they're still in the middle stages of evaluation. They're not ready to convert quite yet. Your AI SDR can nurture those leads for you. They don't have to wait for a form fill. If that person has been cooking and they land on a high intent page, like a pricing page, but they don't fill out a demo, you can still have your AI SDR follow up with that prospect and say, hey, I noticed you were looking at this page. I noticed you're looking at alternatives or pricing. Are you interested in booking time with us? So again, this is really about optimizing every single website visitor that you have because that AI SDR has unlimited time and unlimited resources to follow up with them. This is something that'd be very hard to convince a human SDR to do because they don't have time. They're working the other demo request form fills that have come in and the event leads that they've gotten. Typically, there is not time in their day to go look at, oh, well, I noticed there was a visitor on a pricing page, but they didn't fill out a form. It's a waste of my time to follow up with them. And it sometimes can be. But your AI SDR has an unlimited time so they can send that email to that high intent buyer based on the propensity that they're showing to buy as they're browsing around on your website. And then the third part of this is when they come back to your website, they click on the email, they're like, "Oh, wait, this is really cool. I was browsing this. You've sent me a really relevant case study based on the pages I was browsing, which is incredible. Now I can greet you personally as an AI SDR on the website and ask what questions that you have in reference back to that email." So again, from website visit to email to-- it's this very personalized experience every step of the way that this AI SDR is able to provide. The second one is event follow-ups. This is Adobe Summit. So obviously, we are very big on events here at Qualified. As are most marketers, they're an incredible way to drive new leads into your system, to get in front of your potential buyers. In my experience, SDRs hate event follow-up. And there's a reason for it. They're massive event lists. They have to pick through them. They don't know who's actually interested, who just came by the booth for swag. It's really hard for them to work event leads and find like the diamond in the rough within those event leads to actually drag pipeline. So they tend to deprioritize them. With an AI SDR, I can give them every single event lead that I get and say, hey, go work these. Even if 95% of them amount to nothing, that's okay. There's no time wasted. They can do this all day, instantaneously, infinitely. So I can give them this entire event list and they can work it. So for event follow-up, just like a human would, they can take that event list, they can send a follow-up email that references back to the event, gives them some personalized content. If that event lead clicks through to the website, just like the previous play, your AI SDR can jump in, personally greet them because they know who they are, they know what they clicked, they can give them a personalized conversation, and then they can book a demo with them. If that person is interested, they've had a good interaction with your company because everything was really personalized from that first email to that website conversation. They can book time with the right people on your team and we didn't waste any of your human SDR's time digging through this massive lead list. So this is one that we use all the time at Qualified. It's one of my favorite plays and use cases for an AI SDR. And then last but not least is the ABM red carpet. You're running ads typically on something like LinkedIn to your ABM accounts. You've, again, spent a lot of time, money, resources running these ads. When someone clicks on them because you've done your targeting right, you know they're one of your target accounts, you know they're part of your ABM program and it's costing you money, you want to give them a really good experience when they land on your website. So I previously mentioned that an AI SDR should be able to lead capture beyond just booking meetings because you have people coming to your website at a variety of different stages in their purchase cycle. And here they can do a lead capture that isn't a demo booker. So you can click through a ABM ad, they can come to your website and you can offer up something like download a case study, join us for this event. But it's done in a really personalized way and it's completely connected with things like the emails that the AI SDR is sending and the chats that they're having. Because this is all connected, it can give that personalized experience. So ABM ad click through, lead capture through something like an offer. And then if that person is interested and anytime they come back to your website, again, the AI SDR can reference all of these activities that have happened. They know they're an ABM account and they can strike up a real-time conversation and even hand it off to a sales rep. So again, if you have AEs that are really hungry, they want to be talking to their target accounts, they've spent a bunch of time chasing these accounts because they're an ABM account. The AI SDR can then hand that off to the AE so that AE can then give that personalized human touch to your really high priority ABM accounts. So that is it for my presentation today, talking about the previous AI marketing funnel, the new AI marketing funnel. If you can get rid of MQLs and start to introduce this concept of an AI SDR, things that you should be looking for as you're evaluating the AI SDR, if you're looking for an AI SDR that is for marketers, and then three of my favorite plays that we use at Qualified and that we see a lot of our customers use to really get the most out of your AI SDR investment. So thank you so much for joining me today.
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