Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing
Alright. Very excited for this next session, titled AI SDR agent cases for outbound. And I think sometimes guys when we think about AI SDRs, we think of it primarily around cold calling, but AI SDRs can do so much more than that. And in this session, we're gonna really specifically talk about the AISDRs, how they can help sales leaders scale their outbound efforts without sacrificing either quality or pipeline. So very excited in this session to have with us two great panelists, Daniel Vasilev. He's the cofounder of Relevance AI and Kieran Snaith, SVP of revenue operations for Qualified. Thank you both for being here.

Thanks, man. Thank you for having us.

So I need to get us started. I'd like to just set the stage and talk about what are some of the typical functions performed by an outbound specific a, AI SDR. Maybe, Daniel, let's start with you.

Daniel Vasilev – Relevance AI
Yeah. Happy to. I mean, look, just as a kind of point of clarification on us, when we think about AS SDRs at relevance, we think of them very specifically as tools that can help you elevate the work you're doing.

A lot of industry, tends to think of them more as, like, spray and pray approaches. How can we just juice the volume and not think about the quality too much? So what we do at Relevance is we help companies build an AI workforce. We help them train these agents to replicate niche, high quality work.

And when it comes to SDRs in particular, what we typically do is just ask, like, what does the top performing rep do, and how can we help replicate that? And so this might involve tasks like research and qualification. It might involve tasks like creating outbound sequencing. It might involve creating tasks like, in, qualified case, like, trying to highlight and identify which personas are correct to reach out to, which who is above the power line or below the power line.

So when you think about the role that one of your sales reps is doing for top of funnel and all the different jobs to be done that go into into that, that's where we think kinda AI agents could help them and help elevate some of the work they're doing. Mhmm.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing
Turner, what would you add to that?

Kieran Snaith – Qualified
Yeah. I I think for me, the things that we really looked at and we're critical of are what are the activities or the tasks that we don't want an SDR doing? Like, ultimately, we wanna maximize for the conversations they're having and, ultimately, the pipeline that they're generating. So, for us, it's a lot of about, like, account research, account tiering.

Right? Like, do you have a good understanding of the account, the techno graphics, the firmographics? You know, our AISDR agent is able to go and gather that information, standardize these notes, and make it really easy to leverage from their prospecting. Right?

Like, what does the buying team look like? Who are the five individuals that you're gonna reach out to that kinda meet our ICP and maybe a decision maker, for this type of software. So identifying those, individuals, doing that account based research, and then also building that email and that outreach. Right?

So creating that sequence and reaching out to those prospects to essentially, book a meeting or help them learn more about the product.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing
Daniel, as the founder of an AISDR company, I'd love to hear you kinda tell some success stories and use cases, for specifically for some of you, the most successful companies you have using Bosch. Can you give us a couple of those?

Daniel Vasilev – Relevance AI
Yeah. Absolutely. And, again, just to set the stage for everyone, we don't see ourselves as AI SCR company. We ask we see ourselves as an AI workforce company. So we've got, organizations that build a whole variety of agents for a whole variety of tasks with us.

The AI SDR is just a really powerful space that you can get started in, with work that tends to be quite repetitive.

And, typically, it's really important to the business. Right? Like, this is pipeline generation. This can be the this can make or break any business as if do you have enough pipeline in there? There. So I think it's a really good use case to get started with, but, it's not necessarily the only one that you should be thinking about when deploying agents.

Some of our most successful customers are doing a variety of different things. The way we, again, think about an AI SDR is that if it's going to be successful in your organization, it has to be as good as your top performing rep, and it has to be doing the niche things that your top performing reps are doing. And so how you measure success there might vary. But, like, if we just look at very, very, kind of, outcome based metrics, like, they still got pipeline generated, book book meetings. We've got one customer who processes, a hundred thousand leads per year.

And, per month, that meant that they can only process a small fraction of that with their team. Now they're processing it on fully autonomous mode of agents, and then that feeds their people highly qualified opportunities. They've gained a two to three x, volume of qualified opportunities with the same amount of people.

And, again, we can see, other organizations beyond kind of just specifically outbound and maybe use cases for sales. They're deploying these agents and then measuring their success based on how well they're performing the work that previously was done by people. And I think that's really the benchmark for agents. If an agent is highly capable, it can help rival, what a person was doing in c.

So then that person can actually spend time doing something else versus doing that task all day every day. And that's how we tend to kind of evaluate performance. It's not just the outcomes for, like, book meetings. That's an important part of it.

But, actually, how well does the agent perform and do its task?

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing
Kieran, how does that align with the use cases you're seeing inside of Qualified?

Kieran Snaith – Qualified
Yeah. It it aligns well. So, you know, I've been a customer of Relevance now for almost a year. Love the Relevance products and the Relevance team. We've we've done a lot of great work with them. We really started with just the the AI outbound SDR use case. Right?

And what I've learned is anything's possible with relevance. So, like, we've really nailed the AISDR use case with both manufactured a human, built Copilot, and we're probably working towards autopilot here in the next, you know, three to six months. But we're also doing a lot more than just AISDR outbound work. Right? There are things that maybe the operations team would have done in the past, clean data, populate account research. You know, we're now in a position where we just work with the relevance team to build these agents and build these processes.

Some other examples of this is, even just scoring, like, contacts, for instance. Are these contacts above the line or below the line, and why? Right? There's a lot of, like, questions that we wanna ask of our data that we have been unable to ask these questions and get standardized answers, and now we use relevance for this. So even just getting outside of that AISDR use case, think like data cleanliness, data hygiene, doing research, populating technographics, firmographics, and scoring what our humans are actually doing. Right?

So for us, it's a horizontal processing layer across the entire tech stack that allows us to understand, you know, what's going well, what's not going well, where is this where is there opportunity for improvement?

But anytime that we wanna maybe change something that we know is gonna be a heavy lift, we're assessing bringing a relevance agent in to help us with those workloads.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing
Karen, I next question, I think, is still for you. I mean, you oversaw the release of Bosch within Qualified. And I think sometimes when people think about these tools, it can be intimidating if they haven't used them before, just how to get started. Can you walk through the rollout process a little bit and and talk about what it took from a performance standpoint to feel comfortable, like, letting it loose on your team?

Kieran Snaith – Qualified
Yeah. So I think we're building for about thirty to sixty days. We took one of our best BDRs, one of our best outbound reps, and we put them on this project as kind of a coordinator. And the Libris test for us was his name's Rich, Rich Campbell.

We said, Rich, when you tell us that this agent is as good as you, then we're on to something here. I think it took about thirty to sixty days of just iterating on this model, continuing to, like, tweak and fine tune, and we eventually got there. And Rich was like, this is as good as me. Like, I can't write emails better than this thing.

It's it's right on par with what I would do. And that's when we started to scale it out and really involve it in our go to market processes, Matt. So, first was kinda get that test done, and then we said, great. You're gonna give it a quota.

We're gonna give Bosch a quota. And we we gave it the same quota that, your average human would have, inside of qualified, and it absolutely crushed it in q four. It was the top of our leaderboard from a BDR perspective, both on s one and s two. So it was really good at this volume game, and it really nailed it in q four.

And that's when we said, okay. Great. We've proven that we can build a human or or or build capacity with this by kind of building an AI human, if you will. Then we started to say, well, this is more of a program.

Let's give Bosch a territory. So we we what we did is we moved a lot of our reps upmarket into enterprise and commercial, and we took our lower segments. We call them bronze and iron. And we said, hey.

We're gonna have Bosch and this program source all those deals because we don't want our high value humans kind of sourcing, you know, these lower market, like, deals. We want them focused on the enterprise and commercial accounts.

So it did really well there.

Now it's a program. It's, you know, I think its goals are something around twenty million dollars this year from from the relevance program alone.

Kieran Snaith – Qualified
And we're now we're assessing things like Copilot and all autopilot. So outside of just, you know, building capacity, manufacturing a human with Bosch, how how can it help our humans get to their number? How can it help them do research? How can it help them be better at their job? And we're doing Copilot so that we can eventually do autopilot. Right? Let's figure out what these triggers and thresholds are going to be so that we can just automatically trigger Bosch to go and do the work on behalf of a human, and then we'll be in a position to raise productivity, raise quotas, you know, things like that.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing
So let's move a little bit from words to numbers, and I'd love to talk about the results we're seeing here. Daniel, can you share some examples of what some of your customers are seeing maybe before and after, as well as sort of the impact it's having on their organizations?

Daniel Vasilev – Relevance AI
Yeah. I mean, so the the numb the numbers I called earlier, like, we saw a two to three x increase in pipeline, for a hundred thousand leads that previously they were only processing less than ten percent. We had another customer that went from processing, one million dollar oh, so one million objects per year from four, from twelve months to four weeks. And at a cost, that was a reduction of about four x as well. So not only could they go through more of their capacity, but they could actually go through at a high quality and a lower cost. And that was, basically replacing a BPO.

We have another customer that increased their, conversion rates from five percent to thirty five percent when it came to some of their inbound webinar and book demos and things like that. So I'd say these numbers always vary depending on the company. The important bit is if you have operational rigor, if you have operational maturity on a process that works and you can replicate that with an agent, then then you should be able to see results. And that's not through magic.

It's not like, oh, this agent is doing something magical. It's just simply, did we increase us, our speed to lead? Like, are we responding faster? Are we more personalized now?

Are we more targeted? Are we contacting the right people? Because when you think about it, right, if we if we have only so much time in the day and our reps can only spend so much time researching an account before that's moved to the next one, can we just level that process up a little? Can we make sure instead of having one hour, we've done ten hours worth of work?

So I think the really important thing to keep in mind is none of these results are are are due to some magic, and, like, I I think we shouldn't even think about this these these toolings in such a like, you know, we shouldn't put them in a really high kind of bar. It it should just more be, this is a tool that can help me move some key levers that I would love to move if I had more people. That's as simple as it is. And then you, as the leader, have to be able to identify what needs to be adjusted and what shouldn't be adjusted because some things are probably absolutely working really well.

We don't wanna touch that. These bits, we can definitely juice up a little bit and do a better job on. And so, yeah, that that's what we've been really fortunate fortunate enough to see when agents work really well. They work really well as a result of that.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing
Love it. Kerry, can you share some similar examples of success you see to qualify so far?

Kieran Snaith – Qualified
Yeah. Totally.

I'll I'll just start with, like, operational efficiency and just, like, time savings on the rep side. Right? Like, when you when you talk about removing the, like, research and personalization, which is where they're probably spending, you know, sixty to seventy percent of their time. You know, removing that from the the rep's plate's been really helpful.

So it's helping just, like, augment the humans. They're becoming more efficient, more productive, and that's great. Outside of that, if we look at just relevance as performance on its own, in q four, crushed it. As I mentioned, the top of our leaderboard from s one and s two attainment perspective, I don't have those numbers off the top of my head, but well above a hundred percent attainment in q four for our initial, like, hey, let's just let this thing run and see how it can do.

You know, now we're entering a new year, and I'm able to add twenty million dollars of pipeline capacity into my business. Right?

It's seventeen to twenty million dollars, like, right into the business. That's that's incredible.

You know, this this quarter, because we've chosen to to put, relevance down in kind of these lower market segments, it runs into some issues that are more aligned with our business, not so much relevance as product. Right?

Hey. But budgets are concerns, things like that with these types of customers, but it's doing really well. It's gonna hit stage one target. We're probably forecasting around ninety percent on its stage two target. But for its first quarter of being, you know, a program really happy with these results, and it's playing an integral role in us getting to our numbers. If if we did not have relevance performing, I would have a pipeline gap. Right?

Mhmm.

I'd like to you know, there's some areas for improvement, which we're always working on with the relevance team, and we'll do that kinda quarter over quarter. But, again, it's it's providing a lot of capacity to the business right now, and that's a massive value add.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing
So I'd like to try to ask questions here. Assuming that this isn't perfect for everyone, not everyone can see these same kind of same results. And I'd be curious, Daniel, do you have some examples of companies and businesses that maybe should be more cautious about hiring an AI SDR for right now?

Daniel Vasilev – Relevance AI
Absolutely. I mean, I think this the most simple kind of litmus test that you can apply to this is do you have a process that a human can do successfully? Mhmm. There's a lot of businesses out there who, you know, they might not yet even have the the product right product market fit.

They might not even be able to actually sell their product yet. They might not even know the context. And they expect an agent to sell something that a person could. And so what I typically like to say is think of your agent as a junior employee.

It is not your VP. So if you're already relying on it to come up with your strategy and come up with your sales motion and come up with who you're contacting and come up with, your message and pitch and everything else, then you're in trouble. So what I'd say is, first, we have to have, the product, the team, the process in place. Like, you can think of it almost as, like, you know, that operational maturity, operational rigor.

Typically, you start seeing this with companies maybe four or five hundred employees plus.

Qualified, I think, is very much an exception to that. They just have, like, when first, Kieran showed me how they how they run things, it it's just the most organized, the best reported on the best metrics I've ever, I've ever seen. So and, actually, we learned a lot from from Kieran Singh on how to do these recordings. I've asked him a few times and, like, to show me how they reported things.

So I think it's so important. Because once you have that operational rigor, you can actually measure the right things. So when we started working with Kieran Singh, he not only knew, okay. These are some of the challenges we have.

We've tested a lot of things, but they didn't work for us, but we know these are the things we wanna do. And then secondly, he said, let's give you the best performing person on our team to actually really focus on this. And then Rich who, is, on the qualified team, stepped in and really was able to teach the agent how to sell. So, again, we have no idea, how to sell qualified the product.

Like, if it just it was if it was just to us training the agent, we would be terrible selling it. We'd probably be the top performing rep in the company. But because we had the top performing person distill their knowledge into the agent, now the agent was doing what they would do. And what they do is really good because they can sell the product.

They they already are really good at selling the product. The product is already really loved. Their buyers already buy it. And so it's like, okay.

Well, this is such a good motion. Let's now just translate it into an agent. And that and that's and this is honestly, I think, the most important message I think I could share with people is agents are, again, they're they're not a magic bullet. They're just simply taking something that already works really well and helping you juice it up a little and helping you find opportunities in that space.

And so if you're if you're potentially looking to deploy, even if you're a large company on a use case that's not necessarily clear and it's something that you're already struggling with, then, I would, you know, really wanna think about that decision. I wanna question why that is, and is the challenge process and actually not yet being there, or is it just capacity?

Because the simple yeah. The simplest way to think about an agent, it's my junior employee that I'll deploy on a task. I'm gonna tell her that process.

And if you can't hire me and teach me maybe in a day how to do the job, you're probably gonna struggle teaching an agent how to do that job. Mhmm. That's the current state of technology.

So, yeah, I'll summarize it. Process and the right people in the team who can distill their subject matter expertise. If if Qualified didn't already have such a great product with such a clearly working sales motion, it will not have worked. And if, and if Rich wasn't deployed in the project so that he could give the agent the right knowledge, it also wouldn't work.

So those two things are are the bedrock of any successful agent deployment, and we've seen this time and time again with customers. So, in the last, you know, fourteen months, we've grown a lot. And, in early days, we actually didn't qualify for those two things as much, and then we didn't have great success with those customers. Now that's, like, the first thing, like, we check on any call is, like, do you have these two things?

Because if you don't, then this might not be the right approach for you.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing
So Kieran Snaith, given what you have rolled out at Qualified, you know, what would be any cautionary tales you would tell to new customers or people that are trying to roll this out, and what would you have done differently, to maybe accelerate success out of the gate?

Kieran Snaith – Qualified
Yeah. I think you've you've gotta know what you want to accomplish, like, with the tool. I'm I'm even gonna kinda piggyback on what Daniel said. Like, you've gotta have standardized operating procedures.

I think if you've got document documented, like, standard operating procedures that you can give to relevance, they're gonna help you a ton, and you're really gonna fly with them. Right? But if you're like, hey. I wanna get from a to b, and I don't know how to get there.

I'm trying to use you guys to help me figure that out. Like, you're gonna have a bit of an issue. So that's just the one thing I would say. Standard operating procedures, you gotta know where you wanna go.

The next thing is data.

You've gotta have, like, really sound data. You've gotta be relatively hygienic as well. Like, if your data's all over the place and CRM is a mess, like, your output is only gonna be as good as probably what's in CRM. Relevance can do a lot of things to augment and supplement and actually clean up your CRM. But, you know, if it's a total mess, you don't have an account list, you know, you don't know how you're going to market, You know? You need to establish those things before you go and, like, work with a with a relevance. And then the next thing I was just gonna say is is focus and time.

You know, when I first started talking with the relevance team, in my mind, I was like, this is gonna be a side project that I'll spend a couple of hours on every other day, and, like, we're gonna get this thing rolling. And I was so wrong.

You know, we bought it. We had we had one of our top performers, really kind of adopt it and own it. And that's the reason it got to parity with our best BDR. Right? It's because he nurtured it for for that implementation period. So I wish I would have known that sooner because I would have just found that SME and I would have put the SME on it right from the get go. Daniel, we you probably wasted two weeks with me in the beginning of the of the sales cycle before you, you know, you got it, like, a true owner in the program.

But, really, ownership, it it it it takes a lot to to get these things, like, up and running. But once you're up and running, it's really great. Right?

So just really kinda making sure you're allocating adequate resources there, would be one of the, one of the things I would highlight as well.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing
I think your point about, like, finding sort of an early adopter in the organization that can really help prove that it works, not only will you learn from that and you have someone that leans in and is willing to work with you sort of through those sort of, like, scruffy moments when you start out, but it also builds a lot of credibility with the rest of the team once they see that someone that they that the rest of the sales team trusts and appreciates and and respects is doing that.

Last quick question I'll add on I'll add on to that.

Kieran Snaith – Qualified
Yeah. Please, Matt. Like, we put it in our leaderboard with our human Nice. Like, we're like, this is how transparent we're going to be about this. Right? We put it right there in our leaderboard. We reported on it every Friday to the entire company, and we would talk about how it's performing.

That also made the program owners, the rev ops team, and then probably even relevance this team a little bit feel like, oh, man. We're we're pacing behind this week. Or maybe last week, we had a great week, and this week, we're not having as good of a week, but it would really drive Rich. And I know the relevance team because they're, you know, an extension of our team.

It would really drive them on these goals. So just being able to measure their performance of that agent, I think, is really good for helping people understand, like, hey. We gotta move because we maybe didn't see the results we wanted to over the last seven days. Right?

And I think showing that early results too. Right? Showing the sort of the AB doing the AB testing, so to speak, you know, across the team using a rep or a team that is willing to lean in on it are some great ways to sort of accelerate your path to success and really build some trust and momentum and credibility along the way. Daniel and Kieran, thanks so much for joining us.

Matt Heinz – Heinz Marketing
I really appreciate all of your insights. This has been great. Thank you everyone for watching with us. Enjoy the rest of the summit.