Hi folks —
Maybe you’ve heard the AI SDR hype?
Well — I’ve been experiencing the AI SDR anti-hype.
Read on and let me know what you think. I’d love to know if you’ve had any success with these tools / approaches.
Thanks for reading,
Eric Boggs
CEO @ RevBoss
This RevBoss email is brought to you by RevBoss — the relationship-first demand generation partner for B2B software and services.
AI SDRs Ain’t It
An AI SDR (AI Sales Development Representative) is supposed to automate prospecting — from research to personalization to outreach.
The idea is enticing and there is lots of investment $$$ is chasing it as a result.
My experience however has been…not great:
Conversation with prospective client re: a pilot with one of the top AI SDR brands: “Absolute sh*t. Non-sensical messaging. Requesting January meeting dates in February. I had to do a lot of damage control with prospects after we turned it off.”
Conversation with a friend (that’s a top tier founder / builder) that pulled the plug on an AI SDR product: “We tried everything. It just didn’t work.”
My inbox: (melty face emoji)
I’m not surprised and I’ll tell you why.
First of all, I’ll admit that RevBoss and I were a small part of the “busy inbox” problem for a very long time — we sent millions and millions of outbound emails from 2015 through 2023
And it really, really worked, both for us and for our clients.
But the widespread availability of data, the advent of AI, and — more recently — the new crop of vibecoding tools have lowered the “send a good prospect a decent email” hurdle to zero.
And it killed everyone’s inbox, which killed everyone’s trust in email, which killed the channel for most businesses.
RevBoss is actually doing great…but our email business is a fraction of what it was.
Once again, no one can kill the golden goose faster than online marketers.
AI SDRs turbo charged all of the things that people hate about outbound email…and somehow made it feel even less personal and relevant.
In this case, the message is the medium. A sloppy AI-email — honestly, even a good but still obviously AI-email — says “you’re not worth my effort” to the recipient.
I might be totally wrong — maybe these tools get better at “faking it” or maybe we get better at training the models / process or maybe we actually enter the “agents talking to agents” post-modern hellscape I’ve seen a few people describe.
But honestly I think that the ship has sailed.
Turns out nobody likes getting robot mail.
My take on all of this…
Outbound email still works well in just a few contexts:
— You are a known quantity with a great brand. There are just a handful of these and you (and I!) probably aren’t one of them…unless you can draw a very small circle around a very small audience with a very specific problem that you can solve, in which case…maybe it can work?
— You sell lawn services vs. roofing services. Said another way, you sell something that is simple and transactional with an immediate impact vs. something that is expensive and complicated that I need to only buy once in a while.
— You sell to the choir. Emails to old leads, old customers, lost deals, etc. can work really well…but this is a finite pool.
(Note that “have a robot scorch the Earth with email” isn’t on the list.)
For our clients that stopped getting outbound email results but are still getting RevBoss results, the playbook is pretty simple:
— Build a narrative with a small audience of people that align with your ICP. You can do it on LinkedIn or via emails like this one.
— Develop relationships and work a smaller, higher quality pipeline that is more likely close instead of chasing the “XX leads per week!” volume-based model that no longer applies.
— Solve problems, do great work, and grow through referrals and WOM…which helps you build a narrative with a small audience of…. (You get the idea.)
When everyone is hellbent on “easy” and “automation”, effort is a meaningful signal.
One last thing…
It’s tough out there for sure — huge layoffs, huge SaaS sell-off in the public markets, huge AI-shaped black cloud hanging over all of us, and distractions everywhere.
Keep building and keep solving the next problem for the next customer.
Happy to chat — just let me know.
My wife and my oldest have been out of town for competitive soccer the past couple weekends, which means extended time with just me and my daughters. To give you a sense of what Daddy Time is like at my house, here is a contract I signed allowing my daughters to eat up to 30 scoops of ice cream a couple Friday nights ago. :)
Good Stuff:
— Great post from Sarah Charlton re: the collapse of trust in B2B marketing. She coined (I think) the phrase “trust recession”, which I think applies. (See above!)
— New Cordovas record is really great — honky tonk folk with North Carolina origins and dashes of Mexican flavor…and a Kamasi Washington cameo.
Know some good stuff? Reply and tell me about it.