TRANSCRIPT

Kraig Swensrud – Qualified
Alright. So we just heard about AI SDR use cases for outbound prospecting, and I am so pleased now to be joined by probably a man who needs no introduction to all of you. Manny Medina is here. He's the founder and CEO of a new AI agent startup, Paid, which is the business engine for AI. And, of course, most of you know him as the founder, longtime CEO of Outreach. So, Manny, welcome to the AI SDR Summit.

Manny Medina – Paid
Thanks, Kraig. It's great to be here.

Kraig Swensrud – Qualified
Yeah. I mean, I was so psyched actually when when we connected and and talked about you being here at this program because I think everybody is really interested in hearing from you. You were the long time visionary. You were, you know, you were part of a team that created kind of this whole category of pipeline generation through outbound prospecting or outreach, of course Yeah. As you called it. And maybe as we we just kick off, I would just like to get your take on why is outbound such a key motion for businesses? Almost every single business has on kind of this outbound motion.

But in your experience, what does it take to really get it right?

Manny Medina – Paid
You know, it it the the the reason why outbound then exists is because every business, like every business owner, every business leader has a dream of the kind of customers they want.

And they don't have to think it that hard to to know who do they wanna sell to and what kind of customers would they want to have. The question gets a little harder when you try to scale that and then you try to create ICPs and, like, try to look at your customers and try to find more of those. But at the at the very core, outbounding is the ability for you to or any leader to own their own luck and find out who is the customer that they need to have, and then practice their pitch, practice their positioning, you know, practice finding out what their problems are. And outbound there's no better way to to determine to get quickly to the answer than outbounding. And, of course, I'm biased because that's how we build Outreach. Right? Like Outreach was originally an outbounding engine.

But the the reason I was so excited about it is that every time that I got a hold of of of an individual that I targeted, I was able to learn more. I was able to learn more about my own market, about my SAP, about what resonates to the customers, and form a view of what would it take for for anybody to capture the entire market. So I feel like outbounding is is the core of sales and is a core for you and is a core of marketing as well.

Kraig Swensrud – Qualified
I think you have learned over the course of time, though, kind of the techniques and tactics of of kinda doing it right. Obviously, it's not just, like, load a bunch of emails and and start spamming people. There's, like, a level of personalization. There's sort of an art, a way of doing it, multi touch, multi multichannel.

As we think about kinda this outbound space, it's obviously super right for AI agents to come in there and kind of do prospecting with AI. There's a lot of companies doing it, including Outreach as a prospecting agent and a bunch of new startups are on the scene, lots of kind of incumbents.

What do companies need to think about when they're thinking about kind of, like, performing this this workflow or this motion with AI agents? How do how do you get it right? How do you get it wrong?

Manny Medina – Paid
Yeah. So I I've been thinking a lot about this, Kraig. And and and and and and I wanted to start with taking a step back and sharing with this audience of, like, why did I fall in love with outbounding? Because it sounds like a weird thing to fall in love with. And the reason I fall in love with outbounding is because you have to figure out a human being before you talk to that person and what matters to that person. You don't outbound to a company. You outbound to to a person.

You got it.

And to understand what matters to that person, you need to, first of all, you need to be curious. Like, genuinely curious about what makes that person tick. And to and once you're curious, you're not driven by, you know, the reply or the opportunity created or whatever you're selling. You're you're curious about, like, what matters to them.

So you will go and and do your and do your research and you will hypothesize, and you will create sort of like list of hypothesis and then try them to sort of like peer into this black box who is the human being in front of you. So for for the for the for AI to do that, it it needs to evolve from, you know, just making workflow smarter and faster to to this really, you know, this to imbue the AI and the agent with this level of curiosity, to give him all the powers out there. Like, if you think about, you know, when you ask OpenAI to go do some research, you know, it it it does a very thorough body of work in trying to find out, you know, all the bits and pieces around this topic.

It's the same thing with a human being. Now it's more expensive and it's a lot slower, you know, they're sending a bunch of emails that personalize. In my mind, personalization is not a great way to find somebody. Like, you don't care that I reach out to you and be like, hey, Kraig.

I saw that you were the pharmacy email sales, or would you like to talk to me about marketing? Like, no. Everybody. Like, that's not that's not real work.

The real work is a fact that, you know, you you may be interested in in new technologies to bring in into Qualify. You may be interested in, you know, something for, you know, that is particular to you. And that that part hasn't really been cracked, and that's what I'm excited about, you know, the future of the space and not the past.

Kraig Swensrud – Qualified
Okay. Yeah. Great perspective. I think the value proposition is just so compelling, especially when you're talking about, you know, outbound. And there's teams of twenty, thirty, fifty. I was just talking to a a company last week that had two hundred outbound SDRs.

And, obviously, when you when you when you sum up their their salaries and, the fully loaded costs of those individuals, CFOs and go to market leaders are looking to to be more efficient, but they're also looking for pipeline generation to grow at the same time. So let me zoom out a little bit.

Let's start with With with consistency too.

Manny Medina – Paid
Like, I mean, that's the thing that you don't get with a human being. Like, with an AI SDR, you get consistency of pipeline generation, at least in the written form. But what you don't get is that extra connection that you do when you get on the phone. But sorry. I interrupted you.

Kraig Swensrud – Qualified
So no no worries. It sounds like your perspective is that as far as the written kind of communication goes, you're gonna get a level of scale and personalization and probably connection that you might not, you know, that you might not get with even a large team of humans, but there's some aspects of the job are still gonna require that human touch, like you just mentioned, the the voice style, for for example.

Kraig Swensrud – Qualified
Well, let's transition a little bit and talk about kind of the broader go to market organization because kinda you've not only created Outreach, you've seen the entire landscape evolve. You're you're heavily involved in go to market even with your new your new company paid. When will go to market be entirely agentic? Like, how's not just the world of SDRs, but how's this whole thing playing out in the go to market?

Manny Medina – Paid
You know, it reminds me a lot of, of the question that we ask ourselves when we started outreach. Right? Like, you know, the the the birth of the SDR function and then eventually of the different form of of of outbounding and SDRing was really what drove a lot of the a lot of the tailwinds that, you know, made Outreach be Outreach.

But we always ask ourselves, like, what else looks like Outreach? Like, what else is has deterministic workflows that be that have a beginning and have an end? And for us, that was customer success, actually.

Customer success has a time where it starts when when you wanna engage the customer in order to drive either awareness or a transaction, and it ends at the point of the renewal, you know, and then it begins again when you need to reengage for ABRs or whatever.

And that hasn't been cracked, which is surprising to me because a renewal motion looks very much like an SDR motion. And I I don't see enough attention to that part of the problem. And the same thing with, with customer marketing. Like, there is, you know, the the the the job of the customer marketing is fairly deterministic.

And I don't see enough attention being paid to the to the post sale success awareness of the customer. So for instance, what is the biggest pain that most software company have? Is that your customers buy you for product a, and you get them all implemented, but they don't know you for product b, c, and d. So when they go up and to look for product b, b, and c, they don't even consider you sometimes because they don't even know that you have that product.

So that awareness needs to happen, and AI is prime for that. So to me, it's a no brainer that that that, you know, AI is gonna permeate the entirety of the life cycle management of a customer. It's just there's just not enough, you know, people out there doing it. So so maybe this is something that Qualify can go solve.

Kraig Swensrud – Qualified
You got it. I mean, you know, I think the light bulb just went on for a lot of people who are attending this program right now that in the world of customer success, you're all you're basically always prospecting. A hundred percent to your customers. Right.

Like, you have to stay top of mind for anybody. Like, you lose mind of, like, you know, who did you talk to last and what happened next and all that. But, an agent is perfect for that kind of stuff.

Manny Medina – Paid
Yeah.

Kraig Swensrud – Qualified
Well, let's talk a little bit about pricing, Manny.

The the title of this session is putting a price on digital labor, and I wanted to get your perspective because this is the hot topic right now. Mhmm. How do I price my solution? How should I expect to buy it for those people who are kinda, like, in market to buy an AI SDR solution?

And they're hearing words like, it's token based, it's credit based, it's tiered pricing, it's activities. I'm gonna charge you based on the number of conversations I had or the number of emails that were sent or the number of dials that were made. And then some people are talking about work perform and outcome based. Hey.

I'm gonna charge you based on the meetings booked or the pipe generated. It's, like, all over the map. Yeah. Right now.

Right? So Yeah. You know, what are you seeing as a leader in our industry, you know, with with respect to you're you're you're the founder and CEO of a new startup, paid, which is actually focusing on helping companies kinda price and monetize AI agents. Right.

So I wanted to pick your brain on this. Like, what emerging models are you seeing with respect to agent pricing, and how would you advise buyers when they're thinking about these different pricing models?

Manny Medina – Paid
Yeah. That's a that's a very good question. And and, we we you know? And at Pay, we play the field. So we talk to every, you know, AI, SEO company and support agent company. So if you are if you are an an agentic company, Payd is custom built for you. It has the business engine with the monetization vehicles and and is a is a billing and and invoicing platform to make sure that you're both pricing towards what the work that the agent is doing, but also making sure that you have good margins.

So, fundamentally, we're seeing four models dominate the market right now. So you either price for agents, which is the ability for you to say, look, an agent is like a human being, you know, maybe thirty percent less or forty percent less than that, and you price, you know, somewhere south of that.

You know, fixed fee per year, and then you're done.

The other way is to charge productivity. And, you know, we see a lot of that, which is sort of like a a step up from tokens. Right? So the agent does something you charge for it.

Each of these models have a pro have pros and cons. Right? The the the pricing per agent allows you to redirect the spend from being a software spend to into to go into the headcount spend. And when you go into the headcount spend, you're not talking anymore to, you know, the CRO. You maybe talking to the CFO and you're trading headcount for software, and that's a great place to be because the headcount budget is bottomless. You see what I mean? The software budget is always a percentage of revenue, but the headcount budget is a little bit is a lot bigger.

They are talking to a company, Manny, that has twelve million dollars of SDR spend. And so, of course, the CFO is looking at that budget and going like, woah. If we could save half of that, you mean, like, that that would be insane.

Kraig Swensrud – Qualified
And so I think that companies are thinking about buyers are thinking about these pricing models, and they're trying to figure out, like, what is it gonna cost me? Like, for example, in my experience, we sell the CMOs, and they're very they're very skittish on some of these pricing models because they go, what am I gonna be paying you a year from now? I can't quantify how many conversations or how many emails your SDR is gonna send. So I don't wanna pay, like, two dollars per conversation.

I kinda want a fixed price, and then I can reevaluate a a a year from now. But the value prop is, like, so compelling that I think vendors, like, the ones that you mentioned that you're working with, are trying to figure out how do I price to maximize kind of, the contract value, and then buyers are like, well, that makes sense because I know I'm not paying per seat for this thing. Right? They know the seat based pricing model is going away, but they're they're fearful of, like, the unlimited spend on metrics they don't understand. Yeah.

Manny Medina – Paid
A hundred percent. This is why I don't like the consumption model because, you know, as a as a marketer, as a sales leader, like, you don't you don't, you know, you don't put food on the table based on consumption. You put it from the table based on outcomes.

So now outcomes are sometimes hard to determine. So there are sometimes intermediate outcomes such as workflows. So for instance, you know, sending an email, getting an email reply, or booking a meeting, those may be intermediate outcomes that they have a price. They tend to have a price.

So, like, the cost of a lead, a lot of people know the cost of a lead. And the cost of a qualified lead, a lot of people know the cost of a qualified lead. So if if you can get the closer you can get to some kind of, like, opportunity stage zero one, then you're starting to look more like, you know, a a true human being that gets paid for performance. Right.

And then outcome base is is not here yet, but it's getting there. Like, there is a lot more people who are open to doing that. And to control for variability of spend, you can create buckets. So there's nothing wrong for saying, look, I'm gonna sell you a bucket of, like, you know, fifty qualified meetings is this this, for the next six months.

And that's a, you know, that's a known quantity that you can pay for and you can judge that against the alternative. And then you can take that to the bank all day long. Right?

Kraig Swensrud – Qualified
And as a vendor, you're you'll be happy to say, look, buy fifty, and if I deliver sixty five, then pay me for sixty five on the next contract.

Just keep the contract short. You see what I mean? But the idea is that, you know, we have to explore the edges of the alignment to get really aligned because this is the sin for the majority of the AI SDR companies is that if they charge for something that is very easily replaced, like per agent or per activity, then somebody else can come along and say, I do the same but cheaper.

Manny Medina – Paid
And that is not a great place to be, especially when we're both agreeing that AI SDRs need to do more research, which means that the cost per token goes up.

So margins get get compressed. So to do really good work, you need to stand in the flow of outcomes and less of the flow of activities.

Kraig Swensrud – Qualified
The I'm a hundred percent aligned with you. I haven't met a CRO or a CMO that wants to talk about tokens. I think they wanna talk about meetings booked and pipeline generated because that's how they get measured, of course.

Percent. Nobody knows what the hell is a token. Not even a even the opening, I can tell you what a token is. Because it could be a word, it could be a half a word, it could be, you know, a comma.

Who knows? You know what I mean? So why are you paying for that? It's an absurd outcome.

It's an absurd metric.

Kraig Swensrud – Qualified
Well, where do you think this is all going, Manny? You know, in in my experience over the last year of bringing AI SDR agents to market for inbound, It's been very clear to me that, that every company wants to stick their toe in the water, but they all wanna have their own crawl, walk, run with AI SDR agents and AI agents in general.

They all wanna crawl, walk, run. So how should companies be thinking about pricing?

Manny Medina – Paid
There's there's massive potential for cost savings. Mhmm. There's massive potential for value creation, but every company wants to crawl, walk, and run here in twenty twenty five. How do how do vendors and how do buyers think about pricing when I want I we have the same end goal. We know where we wanna go, but we kinda have to phase it out.

Yeah.

I I think that, the what what I love about where we are right now is that every board has a mandate to the CEO and the executive staff to go become Magento.

Right? To go figure out how to imbue AI across the entirety of the organization.

Manny Medina – Paid
And when you read, you know, some like, the the, the memo from Tobia at Shopify, like, people gave me more excited. Right? Like, we need to go do that. Right? Like, it needs to be compulsory.

Don't talk to me unless you're trying AI. So it's great. Like, this is actually creating a lot of momentum and a lot of a lot of a lot of hunger.

So as an as a vendor into this into this, you know, river, what I suggest everybody is that, first of all, try to get into a POC of some sort, you know, and make it long enough so that it's meaningful outcomes. You see what I mean? Like, make it, you know, good twelve months, charge something that, you know, covers your cost but allows the other company to have a fixed, you know, a fixed rate for the trial.

And then use that to align to the value outcomes that you really wanna charge for.

Kraig Swensrud – Qualified
So don't just, like, sell the POC and move on. Like, no. Sell the POC and then find out the alignment. And then once comes renewal time, then figure out how what the right pricing should be.

Manny Medina – Paid
And don't get stuck into this, like, oh, I need the same price for everybody because that's stupid. If you're selling enterprise, of course, you're gonna do custom pricing per per customer. So just figure out, like, what matters to your customer and then align to that price.

That that's my recommendation, and and I see a lot of success when companies do that.

Kraig Swensrud – Qualified
And I I think it's really important in this new world to learn about the vendor that you're working with, and it could be multiple vendors in this kind of pilot phase because we have everybody's all over the map, really.

Kraig Swensrud – Qualified
We have a lot of companies that have been around for a decade or more who are Right. Coming out with AI agents, and then we have brand new startups that just appeared and got seed funded in the last two months Right. That are that are making wild claims too. So it's all about, like, which vendor can you trust to go on this journey and guide you to the future.

But, Manny, let's wrap up. I wanted to ask you one final question about the venture that you just started.

Kraig Swensrud – Qualified
I mean, you've got an incredible past, and you've been a leader in our industry for so long. But you just started paid, and you've you've marketed that as the business engine for agents.

And you talk about monetizing agents.

Why have you been so excited about this new opportunity? And to kinda tell everybody who's on the program today what paid is all about and how it can help them be more successful in this agentic world.

Manny Medina – Paid
Yeah. So paid came out of our of the insight as we were building, agents at Outreach that if if you look at the world, you know, five, ten years from now, a lot of the work is going to be done autonomously by by AI.

And when when the work is done autonomous by AI, you know, there's no real there's there's no seats. There's no consumption.

What it is is is how do you price the work than that a digital worker is doing? And how do you price the value that they're delivering? How do you measure that and show that to your customer?

Manny Medina – Paid
And at the same time, how do you navigate this morass of confusion around, you know, what model to use and what cost it will drive for you and your and your organization?

So we decided to take a first principles approach and create the entirety of the business engine.

So instead of having to buy, you know, a billing application and then you have to buy a finance application and having to buy an account receivable application, how about I just I just give you the entire platform in one sitting where you can just run your agentic business?

Manny Medina – Paid
So if you are building agents and you're selling agents, this is a place to be because we were built for you from the ground up thinking about agents and undoing all the mistakes of the past of the SaaS built applications.

That's that's how you think about it. And and I'm I'm very excited because everyone is building agents. I think every company will become an agent com agentic company at some point.

And I'm just starting with the ones that are natively agentic now, and at some point, I'll catch the ones that will turn into agents in the future.

Kraig Swensrud – Qualified
Yeah. The whole for certain, the whole go to market is there's there's a whole new Agencia Clare being built on the go to market, and that's why we're here today at the AI SDR Summit.

I'm so thankful, that you're here with us today, Manny Medina. Everybody appreciate your perspective on AISDRs.

Thanks so much, Manny.

Have a great day.