There’s been a lot of discussion recently about how AI and ChatGPT can and will disrupt industries. I believe a clear opportunity for disruption in go-to-market is the SDR role.
Think about it — when the modern SDR role was developed twenty years ago, it made a lot of sense. It was a challenge to find prospect data and contact information, so having a different role to basically build a database, contact the buyer and screen/qualify them took that manual work away from AEs. This allowed AEs to spend more time on qualified meetings, which resulted in more closed deals. Email wasn’t saturated, people were answering their phones, and the Internet wasn’t the buying resource it is today. AEs were the most knowledgeable and skilled at selling, so if you doubled or tripled the meetings with an SDR, the payoff worked.
I am seeing traditional outbound (emails/calls) conversion rates drop across portfolio companies as buyers have become immune to the amount of generic emails and calls they are getting. This means SDRs aren’t getting the same number of quality meetings, which is not only impacting revenue, but also hurting CAC payback. Here’s why:
As an example, we have a portfolio company that has an SDR team that sets discovery meetings. Roughly 20% of the meetings SDRs set become qualified opportunities and another 20% of those close. However, when the AE sets a discovery meeting, 45% of those become qualified opportunities and 40% close. The whole point of the SDR role was to get the AE the right amount of qualified opportunities in a cost-efficient way. Which leads me to my next point…
Broader access to AI will fundamentally change the SDR role and the go-to-market team in general. The ability to level up our current tools, where they can accurately prioritize and recommend accounts based on your current customers, help you reach out in a personalized way by finding the data and context, and then convert those into qualified meetings, means that an AE doesn’t necessarily need an SDR. They have an intelligent assistant finding and contacting the right buyers, with the right message, at the right time — and, getting smarter every time they have an interaction.
The biggest benefit I’ve seen on my SDR teams outside of building pipeline was developing a bench of AE talent. On my last SDR team, when we graduated a SDR to an AE, they were fully productive in the first month. If we see a shift back to full sales cycle AEs that are focused on developing quality opportunities supported by AI technology, does the SDR role go away or does it evolve to something else? I have some ideas — I’d love to hear yours!