TRANSCRIPT

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing

Alright. Let's get into it. Thanks everyone for joining us for this session. We're gonna talk about AI SDR use cases for inbound.

We've got some great guests. We've got a lot of great content. We're gonna get right into it. Very excited to have with us today.

We got Sarah McConnell. She's the VP of demand gen at Qualified, and also Nani Shaffer. She's the VP of demand gen at Invoca.

Thank you both for joining us.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Thanks, Matt.

Nani Shaffer – Invoca

Yeah. Excited to be here.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing

Let's let's get right into it. I think, you know, the concept of a AI SDRs is, high value and high interest, but just getting into the weeds and talk about sort of what that actually means. So, Sarah, I'd love to have you kick things off. What are some of the functions you think are mandatory for an AI SDR to be able to perform inbound successfully?

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yeah. And I I think the the shortest answer is what you'd expect your human inbound SDR to do. So for a little context, the way I tend to think about it is at organizations I've previously worked at and also at Qualified, when we say SDR, sales development rep, we think of inbound. So those are the people responding to inbound form fills, like demo requests.

They're responding you know, if someone downloads something and hits, like, an MQL threshold, they're gonna be following up, trying to book meetings. If you go to events, you get event lead lists. They're the people who are following up with those. So essentially what you would expect a human inbound sales rep to be doing to drive pipeline and book meetings, I would expect an AI SDR to be able to function in essentially the same manner.

And the flip side, we're gonna have a session after this. It's gonna be about, like, outbound AI SDRs that are more focused on those outbound use cases.

So for simplicity's sake, if you are trying to figure out which use cases or which type of AI SDR you want, if you're looking at inbound, look at what your inbound human reps are doing, and you wanna find something that's gonna be able to provide the exact same thing.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing

Nani, your team has actually hired an AI, SDR. Can you talk a little about some of the in inbound problems that you're hoping that's gonna solve for you?

Nani Shaffer – Invoca

Yeah. Certainly. Yeah. We were very excited. We've got Callie as our inbound SDR. We actually had a whole, like, welcome to the team slide, like, a full on.

We've got a new member of the team, which was fun, and did set her up with exactly the same quota as our current inbound SDR, which which was a very satisfying thing to be able to do. And I don't see why that quota wouldn't continue to go up.

Our primary thing that we were trying to solve is really taking advantage of the healthy web traffic that we have.

And we had this sort of eye opening moment as we were looking at our web traffic. And, again, it's pretty healthy, and it's pretty quality, and that's a great thing.

But we weren't taking nearly as much advantage of that as we could. And so to see our top tier accounts on the site just come and leave, was frankly unacceptable. And so now we've got Callie helping to solve some of that, which has been really exciting.

And being able to do that, I think, most importantly at scale. Right? The beauty of having Callie is she never goes to sleep, ever. And she could be having multiple conversations at the same time. Right? So being able to do something at that kind of infinite scale is also, really exciting.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing

I wasn't fascinated by what people call their SDRs, their SDRs. You got Callie. Sarah, you've got Piper, which it took me the penny finally dropped earlier this week. Piper pipeline finally got it. That's impressive.

And so but you were I mean, in all seriousness, you were early adopters, of inbound AI SDRs, and you personally oversaw the rollout of Piper internally last year. You know, what are some of the things you've learned since then as part of that rollout that you can share to make sure other people are learning from best practices as well as maybe cautionary tales?

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yeah. That's such a good question. I agree, Matt. I love hearing from our customers, like, what they've named their inbound SDR. Like, some of them have kept Piper, obviously, and have Piper on their website, but, like, Invoca named her Callie. It's always so fun to hear how we're personifying them and what we've named them.

But you're right. I so I was obviously an early adopter. It's our product, so I always get a chance to dog food our own products first. We sell to demand gen people, so it's a really fun position for me to be in. But if I look back, it was probably early last year when we started to roll Piper out internally, and we started to, like, figure out, like, how is this going to work? What does onboarding look like? How what does this process?

The main things that I learned, and I walk away when I talk to customers all the time is one, you should treat onboarding pretty seriously. The, you know, the first question you ask me is how should you look at use cases? I said, just like a human SDR. I feel the same way about onboarding. So if you're looking at onboarding an AI SDR and you're looking at bringing them onto your team, the onboarding should feel very similar to what you would do with your normal SDR team because you'd expect them to have the same behaviors and be operating and doing the same sort of function.

So I think if this is something you were considering, think about what that current process looks like. And for most customers, that's something like giving them the content that they need. So for an AI SDR that's you know, they can scan your whole website. They can understand all of your website content.

You can typically upload things that are not on your website. If you have, like, competitive intel that wouldn't live on your website, you can always give them that information. So that's always step one with onboarding is, like, you gotta train them, but then also you have to test them. So just like you would with a human SDR and you think about, you know, there's a shadow period where you're shadowing them, you're watching their conversations, you're seeing what that looks like.

Are they saying the right things? Are they not? You would do the same thing with an AI SDR, and that's what we did when we started to roll her out is, are you saying the right things at the right time? Are there things that you're you know, you could say differently?

Are you sending the right links? So first getting them content, then testing and making sure that they're saying the right things.

The other piece of advice that I like to give is think about the top fifteen to twenty ish questions that your team gets all the time. So for us, I went and talked to our SDRs and our AEs, and I said, hey. When you're on sales calls or when you're having conversations on the website for our inbound SDRs, what do you get asked? And the a lot of them were the same because there are typically about that ten, fifteen, twenty questions that come up over and over and over again. And what we did from a testing standpoint is make sure that Piper was nailing those responses every single time because eighty to ninety percent of the time, that's gonna be the questions that she's fielding when it comes to, like, website conversations and people asking questions.

So before you start onboarding, try to get those into one cohesive place so you know what those questions are going to be, and you can make sure from a testing perspective that you are getting the answers that you want. And then the second part that I want to focus on here is think about the rollout process. So things that I learned is every company is gonna be a little bit different in how you roll out an AI SDR. And for us with Piper, because it was early days, we did a very phased approach, and we that started with something we called project night owl, which is what it sounds like is we started her after hours when, you know, Nani talked about Callie's online twenty four seven. Well, obviously, human reps cannot be awake all the time and online twenty four seven. So we rolled her out in the evenings and on weekends to test, okay, this is when we don't have reps available.

Is she doing the right things? Are we getting the right answers? Making sure, like, everything was going smoothly. Just like if you had a human SDR, you might start them on, like, a ramped quota. In my mind, this was, like, her ramped quota.

And then from there, we scaled it up a little bit more. We're like, okay. Now we can do more during business hours, but maybe lower priority traffic. So traffic that's not like our ABM target accounts.

And then once we hit a threshold of feeling confident there, then it was like, okay. She's good. She can take over anything that we want her to. We're gonna give her, just like Callie the same quota that our reps have and hold her accountable to those.

So I guess in summary, like, make sure from an onboarding perspective, you're treating it very thoroughly like you would with a human SDR as of what you expect from them, the content you give to them, and testing them. And then two, think about how you're going to roll them out. Is it something you're just going to let loose on your whole website and all of your leads? Do you wanna do it in more of a phased approach?

There is no right or wrong answer. It kinda just depends on your business and what you're looking to achieve.

Nani Shaffer – Invoca

One note I would add on that that I really liked that you said, Sarah, was around the testing. That, one of the side effects of that that was unplanned but pleasant was we had a pretty extensive internal group that was a part of that testing and of and of checking answers, And that ended up bringing a lot of, not not that there were naysayers necessarily, but it built confidence internally that she was doing a really good job. Even even when there were even in our very first test, right, and you go through and you make them better and better and better, that built confidence internally that we felt comfortable with rolling her out in a more aggressive way than we might have otherwise.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing

Totally.

Such great advice. And I think what's in what what's it occurs to me is that, like, it's the same advice you would have for the humans. Right? Like, the last thing you wanna do with a new rep is, like, here's a phone here's a a phone and a phone book.

Knock yourself out. You have to onboard them. Like, you know, an AI is a really freaking smart empty vessel. You gotta onboard that as well, and you don't expect it to be right right out of the gate.

Onboarding and testing such good advice.

Let's get into some more use cases. And, Nani, would love to maybe have you talk about just, you know, what what are two top use cases that you're gonna use AI for AI SDRs for now moving forward?

Nani Shaffer – Invoca

Yeah. Yeah. So, so certainly, I'd say, you know, primary for us or top of mind is just how do we build pipe, right, from what's on our website. That's our number one focus and number one goal.

That being said, we do also wanna build broad engagement. Right? It does help our human SDRs to understand and have deeper engagement from our top tier prospects. And so whether that's getting them the information they need or the piece of content that's most relevant for them, just having that sort of personalized experience and tailored experience regardless of whether the meeting actually gets booked at that moment is really helpful.

And then for me, what I think is also interesting is figuring out ways to use Callie in order to help us also with existing customers. I think there's a play there for upsell and expansion that I'm really excited about as well knowing that she can ingest at scale information about who that customer is, what they might need, what their needs are. So I I'm really excited about sort of branching into that as well because my mind typically comes from sort of a new logo place, but expansion is a huge component of our business as well.

And then the other thing sort of unrelated to use cases, but something that keeps popping into my mind that I'm loving, is we're starting to have really interesting conversations about where that line really is. Like, there's so many things that we talk about where we're like, and then we need to pass off to the to the human SDR. And we're like, or do we? Like like, that line keeps getting further and further, right, where it's like, actually, I think Callie could still do that. Right? And that's great for our SDRs because that frees up that time so they can be doing things that truly only a human can do.

So that's been really exciting too that they don't have to do nearly as much of that sort of boring work that they might otherwise.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing

Yeah. Like, ninety five percent of the use cases I see for AI SDRs right now are on the net new side, but you referenced the land and expand side. Yeah. Really use it for customer success for expansion.

That is enormous, like, blue ocean opportunity for many companies, that I think we're gonna see more traction on that, moving forward. Sarah, same question to you. You've been running Piper for a little over a year now. What's a what's a use case or two that's what you that you found that she has been most effective at?

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yeah. The obvious ones, I think, are not a head on of, like, being able to book pipeline at scale. So no matter the website traffic or how big the event follow-up list is, I have an infinite resource now to be able to go work those leads and make sure we're getting time on the books. So that's kind of, like, to me, the table stakes, but the two I really wanna touch on beyond that are, one, I mentioned events.

We do a ton of events at Qualified, and so we do have a lot of leads that come from events. Typically, it's hard to get our human SDRs to work all of those leads because it is a high quantity, and sometimes the quality is in question from events. But we spend a lot of money on them. We have those leads.

We wanna make sure we're getting as much ROI from our spend, from a marketing perspective as we can.

So having that follow-up infinite follow-up on event leads is one huge one that we've really liked. And And the second one I wanna call out, like, Nani kinda talked about expansion.

The one that doesn't get talked about frequently is the ability to, like, deescalate or deflect, customer support questions.

So our human SDRs used to waste a lot of time with who we'd call tire kickers or people coming into the website that either weren't interested or customers looking for, like, very specific things. And our SDRs would waste a lot of time on the website responding to those because we wanna give a good customer experience, but they have a quarter to hit and a job to do. And so that always took away from the things they wanted to be doing. And watching Piper be able to deflect those conversations and still give the customers what they're looking for, but not with, you know, at the expense of being able to focus on another conversation that might be, like, a net new logo or an expansion has been a really great use case that my human SDRs are like, oh, thank god she can do this now, and I don't have to deal with it.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not only do you not have to triage that, like, finite human time. Right?

But now you can sort of have more. You can have you can have Piper. You can have Piper two. You can have Piper three, and sort of engage more people and not just focus on those late stage buyers, but really go with those early stage evidence and need signals.

Or you wouldn't want a rep to spend their time on it, but Piper can do it all day long and really kinda create those value deposits for someone that maybe not buy right now, but you can really start to create some relationships and sort of better that. Alright. We've been talking we got about five minutes left. We've been talking mostly words.

Let's get into numbers. So do either of you have any metrics you can share, that you're able to share publicly on sort of the impact that, Piper and Callie have had for you?

Nani Shaffer – Invoca

You? I can maybe start because I'll have, I'll probably have a lamer answer. I know you can have a huzzah with you, Sarah. But we're we're fairly new, having rolled out just a month or two ago, so I don't necessarily have, you know, in our entire business turned around.

That being said, our primary metrics are around sort of pipeline, obviously, meetings booked as a a sort of level above that. I also think there are gonna be things related to our overall brand. Right? Like, I think that there's even a sort of brand element to this of how consistent we are in the way that we're presenting ourselves given that now we've got literally, like, a a single, agent, supporting us.

And then Sarah also talked about quality. I think that will be really important for us as well to be able to have Callie be able to sort through and understand who are the most relevant, and not having to have a a human SDR have to sort of deal with that or wade through that, I think, will be really critical for us as well. So that's just some of the things. And, obviously, marketing ROI.

Right? That's great. Again, Callie can be an army of SDRs, which is fantastic.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yeah. I would second. If you're looking for, like, metrics you should be measuring an AI SDR against, again, it not sound like a broken record. It's like, what would you hold a human rep accountable to, which is, like, pipeline, meetings booked rate, things like initial response time, like, how quickly are we able to get back to those leads that a human SDR, you know, if it took them five, ten, twenty minutes, days, whatever it is, can they do that faster?

Some finite numbers that I can share is we before we launched Piper, like, full time on our website, we compared our inbound AI SDR or our inbound human SDR, like, meeting booked rate. So what was that conversion rate? And our humans were at about, like, twenty nine percent from of meetings booked, and we got our AI SDR up to about twenty eight to thirty percent. And so we're like, okay. Like, if this is comparable, we know it's only going to get better, then that is what we need to see to be able to then move those human SDRs into better different roles and let Piper run a hundred percent on the website. So, again, it's numbers that we would hold a rep or an SDR accountable to. We're also holding Piper accountable to.

So I think that is my biggest advice when you're thinking about just metrics in general. And then obviously, your pipeline goals, Are you hitting them? Because that's what I look at every single day. Like, am I pacing ahead of my pipeline goals? And right now, the answer is yes, then I'm happy.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing

Yeah. I mean, this is a place where you should be able to apply some fairly simple napkin math. We we literally would have a spreadsheet with clients that we call pipeline napkin math. And it's like different stages of the pipeline. You get small marginal improvements that you're talking about here. Like, twenty six to twenty eight, given the depending on the volume you're doing, if it's high enough in the funnel, that can have an enormous difference on throughput with very little, if any, marginal cost.

Now we're speaking to CFO's language. Alright. We are almost at a time. Real quick question for you.

I would pause it to say that AI SDRs aren't actually for everybody.

Are there situations where, Sarah, you would not recommend or you would caution people not to use an AI SDR for?

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yep. I would say if you don't have website traffic or lead volume, it's just a waste of money. So if you aren't focus on your marketing first then. If you don't have that lead volume, you don't have that website traffic, focus on are you, like can you put your money into, like, marketing efforts and campaigns to get more website traffic? So, yeah, if you don't have the web traffic, it's not gonna be worth the investment.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing

Yep. Nani, what do you think?

Nani Shaffer – Invoca

Literally took the words right out of my mouth. I had it written down and everything. But, yeah, low web traffic, is, you know, you gotta start start at square one there. It's not gonna be something that's bringing in net new web traffic.

Right? So so you have to have that first. The other thing you could think about a little bit as well as a prerequisite is just making sure you really understand that the your lead, qualification criteria. Right?

Being able to have what you need, have the the, information that you need in order to train, your AI SDR, which hopefully you do if you have human SDRs as well, but, again, just worth noting.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing

So to summarize, I heard a lot of talk about testing, around training, around doing better onboarding, about situationally making sure you're having the right conversations and being really crisp about where those those sort of micro conversion rate improvements are happening and looking at the cost of that.

I bet a lot of people could do that pipeline napkin math and very quickly realize there's an awful lot of optimization to be had, in the pipeline by applying an AI SDR. So, Nani, Sarah, thank you so much for your insights. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks everyone for joining us. Enjoy the rest of the summit.