Welcome to the Agentic Marketing Era: How AI reshaped the modern marketing funnel
Unlock the Agentic Marketing Era: See how AI SDR agents revolutionize B2B marketing funnels, generating 24/7 pipeline & boosting revenue. Move beyond MQLs.
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Unlock the Agentic Marketing Era: See how AI SDR agents revolutionize B2B marketing funnels, generating 24/7 pipeline & boosting revenue. Move beyond MQLs.
The world of B2B marketing is undergoing its most significant transformation yet, moving beyond "AI-powered" tools to embrace fully autonomous AI agents. This shift isn't just about efficiency, it's about fundamentally redefining how marketing generates pipeline and how sales operates, moving us into the Agentic Marketing Era.
For decades, marketing and sales functions relied on processes designed around human capacity and limitations, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. Agentic AI is here to solve these long-standing problems.
Before the digital age, marketing was largely analog, with websites serving as little more than brochures. The advent of digital platforms transformed the marketer's playbook, making the website a critical asset for demand generation. This digital shift, however, introduced new challenges: managing a flood of leads and defining ownership in the sales process.
To address this, the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) emerged as a central metric, meant to signify "sales-ready" prospects and act as a "contract" between marketing and sales.
However, MQLs have become a vanity metric.
• They don't always reflect buying intent. A download or a click doesn't guarantee a prospect is ready to engage with sales
• They incentivize quantity over quality leading to wasted time for sales teams
• They create silos between marketing (focused on MQLs) and sales (focused on revenue), fostering misalignment and mistrust.
To bridge the gap between marketing-generated leads and sales, the Sales Development Representative (SDR) role was born. While initially seen as a solution, the SDR model developed significant cracks.
• Capacity constraints: SDRs can only handle a limited number of leads (~250 per month), leaving lower-priority leads untouched.
• Slow response times: Despite research showing that responding to a lead within five minutes dramatically increases conversion likelihood, SDRs often take hours or days to follow up.
• Limited hours: SDRs work standard business hours, missing leads generated during nights, weekends, and holidays, resulting in missed opportunities. For example, one company missed 1,400 chats a year, representing a $7.5 million pipeline opportunity cost.
• Inconsistencies in execution: Human SDRs vary in their approach, leading to inconsistent messaging and engagement quality, with 63% not hitting quota.
• High turnover rates: The SDR role often serves as a stepping stone, leading to frequent turnover and constant training needs (average tenure less than 14 months).
These human limitations resulted in a massive opportunity cost from untouched or poorly engaged leads. The traditional funnel was designed around human capacity, not opportunity, and was never truly efficient.
Agentic AI marks the "next frontier" in artificial intelligence. Unlike other AI models, agentic AI is able to take initiative, make decisions, and act independently toward a goal. It doesn't require explicit human instructions and adapts autonomously based on real-time data. This level of autonomy allows AI agents to outperform human counterparts in speed, accuracy, and scale.
When integrated into B2B marketing tech stacks, AI agents bring transformative capabilities:
• Automation: Automates repetitive tasks like lead scoring, follow-up, and email outreach, freeing humans for more nuanced efforts.
• Personalization: Synthesizes disparate data systems to form a cohesive buyer image instantly, identifying content needs and tailoring messages.
• 24/7 operation: Works around the clock, closing coverage gaps and ensuring no leads are missed, leading to higher conversion rates.
• Revenue impact: Streamlines processes and optimizes funnel stages to directly tie marketing efforts to measurable business outcomes.
• Anticipate needs: Predicts what actions will drive the most impact by analyzing historical and real-time data.
• Act proactively: Identifies opportunities and takes necessary steps without waiting for instructions.
• Learn Continuously: Refines strategies and improves performance over time through feedback loops.
The agentic marketing funnel is fully autonomous, driven by AI SDR agents. It eliminates wasted time, missed opportunities, and dropped leads. This fundamental shift puts marketers back in the driver’s seat, giving them total control over inbound pipeline generation targets.
The primary metrics shift from MQLs to pipeline generated and revenue impact, which are true reflections of marketing's contribution to revenue. With AI SDR agents, all leads are worked, including those previously ignored due to arbitrary scoring or lack of human capacity, uncovering additional pipeline. For instance, one marketing leader found that over 60% of MQLs weren't being worked by sales; after implementing an AI SDR agent, they saw a 130% increase in meetings booked.
Key ways Inbound AI SDR agents revolutionize the funnel:
• Instant Buyer Profiling: Agents can instantly assemble comprehensive profiles of website visitors by accessing CRM and engagement data, a level of accuracy human SDRs cannot match.
• Real-time Engagement: Autonomously engage website traffic in real time, answering questions, surfacing offers, and booking sales meetings without delay.
• Autonomous Follow-up: If buyers don't convert on the website, AI SDR agents follow up with contextual, personalized emails to drive conversion without human intervention.
These agents, such as Piper, can handle various tasks like engaging buyers in real time, intelligently following up via email, instantly scheduling meetings, and serving personalized offers. They are working across your most important marketing channels: the website and the inbox, ensuring a consistent and instant experience.
The traditional SDR role, designed for human capacity, is poised to fade to automation. Agentic AI agents can perform the highly repetitive tasks of lead qualification, follow-up, and initial engagement at a scale and speed impossible for humans. This means that the human element in sales can now hyper-focus on relationship building, as AI handles the initial, repetitive interactions.
The shift isn't about job elimination, but role evolution. While some roles are prime candidates for automation, new entry-level roles in tech sales will emerge. Today’s SDR managers will become AI SDR agent experts, responsible for managing the onboarding, training, and maintenance of these agents. Companies are encouraged to strategically automate roles that are already on their way out and prepare their teams for new, more engaging human roles.
Transitioning to an AI-driven marketing funnel can seem daunting, but a phased approach minimizes risk and allows teams to adjust gradually while seeing measurable results.
• Crawl: Start with off-hours coverage
◦ Deploy AI SDR agents to cover nights, weekends, and holidays.
◦ This addresses the common pain point of missed opportunities when human SDRs are offline.
◦ Result: Immediate engagement with every lead, significant reduction in missed opportunities, and increased pipeline from previously ignored leads. Bloomreach, for example, saw a 1.4x increase in meetings booked year over year by adopting this.
• Walk: Expand to broader segments
◦ Once comfortable, allow AI SDR agents to handle a larger share of inbound traffic, including lower-priority leads during business hours.
◦ This frees human SDRs to focus on high-impact opportunities.
◦ Result: Dramatic increase in engaged leads, improved efficiency for human SDRs, and increased meetings booked and pipeline. Crunchbase saw a 3x increase in meetings booked when they expanded their AI SDR agent to nurture inbound leads via email.
• Run: Fully automate your inbound pipeline
◦ The AI SDR agent takes over the entire inbound funnel, engaging, qualifying, and nurturing every lead. Human SDRs only step in when a buyer is ready for direct interaction.
◦ Result: Every lead receives personalized engagement with infinite scalability, faster lead response times, higher conversion rates, and seamless alignment between marketing and sales. Quantum Metric, for instance, found visitors who engaged with their AI SDR agent were 8x more likely to book a meeting.
Stay up to date with weekly drops of fresh B2B marketing and sales content.
Unlock the Agentic Marketing Era: See how AI SDR agents revolutionize B2B marketing funnels, generating 24/7 pipeline & boosting revenue. Move beyond MQLs.
The world of B2B marketing is undergoing its most significant transformation yet, moving beyond "AI-powered" tools to embrace fully autonomous AI agents. This shift isn't just about efficiency, it's about fundamentally redefining how marketing generates pipeline and how sales operates, moving us into the Agentic Marketing Era.
For decades, marketing and sales functions relied on processes designed around human capacity and limitations, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. Agentic AI is here to solve these long-standing problems.
Before the digital age, marketing was largely analog, with websites serving as little more than brochures. The advent of digital platforms transformed the marketer's playbook, making the website a critical asset for demand generation. This digital shift, however, introduced new challenges: managing a flood of leads and defining ownership in the sales process.
To address this, the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) emerged as a central metric, meant to signify "sales-ready" prospects and act as a "contract" between marketing and sales.
However, MQLs have become a vanity metric.
• They don't always reflect buying intent. A download or a click doesn't guarantee a prospect is ready to engage with sales
• They incentivize quantity over quality leading to wasted time for sales teams
• They create silos between marketing (focused on MQLs) and sales (focused on revenue), fostering misalignment and mistrust.
To bridge the gap between marketing-generated leads and sales, the Sales Development Representative (SDR) role was born. While initially seen as a solution, the SDR model developed significant cracks.
• Capacity constraints: SDRs can only handle a limited number of leads (~250 per month), leaving lower-priority leads untouched.
• Slow response times: Despite research showing that responding to a lead within five minutes dramatically increases conversion likelihood, SDRs often take hours or days to follow up.
• Limited hours: SDRs work standard business hours, missing leads generated during nights, weekends, and holidays, resulting in missed opportunities. For example, one company missed 1,400 chats a year, representing a $7.5 million pipeline opportunity cost.
• Inconsistencies in execution: Human SDRs vary in their approach, leading to inconsistent messaging and engagement quality, with 63% not hitting quota.
• High turnover rates: The SDR role often serves as a stepping stone, leading to frequent turnover and constant training needs (average tenure less than 14 months).
These human limitations resulted in a massive opportunity cost from untouched or poorly engaged leads. The traditional funnel was designed around human capacity, not opportunity, and was never truly efficient.
Agentic AI marks the "next frontier" in artificial intelligence. Unlike other AI models, agentic AI is able to take initiative, make decisions, and act independently toward a goal. It doesn't require explicit human instructions and adapts autonomously based on real-time data. This level of autonomy allows AI agents to outperform human counterparts in speed, accuracy, and scale.
When integrated into B2B marketing tech stacks, AI agents bring transformative capabilities:
• Automation: Automates repetitive tasks like lead scoring, follow-up, and email outreach, freeing humans for more nuanced efforts.
• Personalization: Synthesizes disparate data systems to form a cohesive buyer image instantly, identifying content needs and tailoring messages.
• 24/7 operation: Works around the clock, closing coverage gaps and ensuring no leads are missed, leading to higher conversion rates.
• Revenue impact: Streamlines processes and optimizes funnel stages to directly tie marketing efforts to measurable business outcomes.
• Anticipate needs: Predicts what actions will drive the most impact by analyzing historical and real-time data.
• Act proactively: Identifies opportunities and takes necessary steps without waiting for instructions.
• Learn Continuously: Refines strategies and improves performance over time through feedback loops.
The agentic marketing funnel is fully autonomous, driven by AI SDR agents. It eliminates wasted time, missed opportunities, and dropped leads. This fundamental shift puts marketers back in the driver’s seat, giving them total control over inbound pipeline generation targets.
The primary metrics shift from MQLs to pipeline generated and revenue impact, which are true reflections of marketing's contribution to revenue. With AI SDR agents, all leads are worked, including those previously ignored due to arbitrary scoring or lack of human capacity, uncovering additional pipeline. For instance, one marketing leader found that over 60% of MQLs weren't being worked by sales; after implementing an AI SDR agent, they saw a 130% increase in meetings booked.
Key ways Inbound AI SDR agents revolutionize the funnel:
• Instant Buyer Profiling: Agents can instantly assemble comprehensive profiles of website visitors by accessing CRM and engagement data, a level of accuracy human SDRs cannot match.
• Real-time Engagement: Autonomously engage website traffic in real time, answering questions, surfacing offers, and booking sales meetings without delay.
• Autonomous Follow-up: If buyers don't convert on the website, AI SDR agents follow up with contextual, personalized emails to drive conversion without human intervention.
These agents, such as Piper, can handle various tasks like engaging buyers in real time, intelligently following up via email, instantly scheduling meetings, and serving personalized offers. They are working across your most important marketing channels: the website and the inbox, ensuring a consistent and instant experience.
The traditional SDR role, designed for human capacity, is poised to fade to automation. Agentic AI agents can perform the highly repetitive tasks of lead qualification, follow-up, and initial engagement at a scale and speed impossible for humans. This means that the human element in sales can now hyper-focus on relationship building, as AI handles the initial, repetitive interactions.
The shift isn't about job elimination, but role evolution. While some roles are prime candidates for automation, new entry-level roles in tech sales will emerge. Today’s SDR managers will become AI SDR agent experts, responsible for managing the onboarding, training, and maintenance of these agents. Companies are encouraged to strategically automate roles that are already on their way out and prepare their teams for new, more engaging human roles.
Transitioning to an AI-driven marketing funnel can seem daunting, but a phased approach minimizes risk and allows teams to adjust gradually while seeing measurable results.
• Crawl: Start with off-hours coverage
◦ Deploy AI SDR agents to cover nights, weekends, and holidays.
◦ This addresses the common pain point of missed opportunities when human SDRs are offline.
◦ Result: Immediate engagement with every lead, significant reduction in missed opportunities, and increased pipeline from previously ignored leads. Bloomreach, for example, saw a 1.4x increase in meetings booked year over year by adopting this.
• Walk: Expand to broader segments
◦ Once comfortable, allow AI SDR agents to handle a larger share of inbound traffic, including lower-priority leads during business hours.
◦ This frees human SDRs to focus on high-impact opportunities.
◦ Result: Dramatic increase in engaged leads, improved efficiency for human SDRs, and increased meetings booked and pipeline. Crunchbase saw a 3x increase in meetings booked when they expanded their AI SDR agent to nurture inbound leads via email.
• Run: Fully automate your inbound pipeline
◦ The AI SDR agent takes over the entire inbound funnel, engaging, qualifying, and nurturing every lead. Human SDRs only step in when a buyer is ready for direct interaction.
◦ Result: Every lead receives personalized engagement with infinite scalability, faster lead response times, higher conversion rates, and seamless alignment between marketing and sales. Quantum Metric, for instance, found visitors who engaged with their AI SDR agent were 8x more likely to book a meeting.
Stay up to date with weekly drops of fresh B2B marketing and sales content.
Unlock the Agentic Marketing Era: See how AI SDR agents revolutionize B2B marketing funnels, generating 24/7 pipeline & boosting revenue. Move beyond MQLs.
The world of B2B marketing is undergoing its most significant transformation yet, moving beyond "AI-powered" tools to embrace fully autonomous AI agents. This shift isn't just about efficiency, it's about fundamentally redefining how marketing generates pipeline and how sales operates, moving us into the Agentic Marketing Era.
For decades, marketing and sales functions relied on processes designed around human capacity and limitations, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. Agentic AI is here to solve these long-standing problems.
Before the digital age, marketing was largely analog, with websites serving as little more than brochures. The advent of digital platforms transformed the marketer's playbook, making the website a critical asset for demand generation. This digital shift, however, introduced new challenges: managing a flood of leads and defining ownership in the sales process.
To address this, the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) emerged as a central metric, meant to signify "sales-ready" prospects and act as a "contract" between marketing and sales.
However, MQLs have become a vanity metric.
• They don't always reflect buying intent. A download or a click doesn't guarantee a prospect is ready to engage with sales
• They incentivize quantity over quality leading to wasted time for sales teams
• They create silos between marketing (focused on MQLs) and sales (focused on revenue), fostering misalignment and mistrust.
To bridge the gap between marketing-generated leads and sales, the Sales Development Representative (SDR) role was born. While initially seen as a solution, the SDR model developed significant cracks.
• Capacity constraints: SDRs can only handle a limited number of leads (~250 per month), leaving lower-priority leads untouched.
• Slow response times: Despite research showing that responding to a lead within five minutes dramatically increases conversion likelihood, SDRs often take hours or days to follow up.
• Limited hours: SDRs work standard business hours, missing leads generated during nights, weekends, and holidays, resulting in missed opportunities. For example, one company missed 1,400 chats a year, representing a $7.5 million pipeline opportunity cost.
• Inconsistencies in execution: Human SDRs vary in their approach, leading to inconsistent messaging and engagement quality, with 63% not hitting quota.
• High turnover rates: The SDR role often serves as a stepping stone, leading to frequent turnover and constant training needs (average tenure less than 14 months).
These human limitations resulted in a massive opportunity cost from untouched or poorly engaged leads. The traditional funnel was designed around human capacity, not opportunity, and was never truly efficient.
Agentic AI marks the "next frontier" in artificial intelligence. Unlike other AI models, agentic AI is able to take initiative, make decisions, and act independently toward a goal. It doesn't require explicit human instructions and adapts autonomously based on real-time data. This level of autonomy allows AI agents to outperform human counterparts in speed, accuracy, and scale.
When integrated into B2B marketing tech stacks, AI agents bring transformative capabilities:
• Automation: Automates repetitive tasks like lead scoring, follow-up, and email outreach, freeing humans for more nuanced efforts.
• Personalization: Synthesizes disparate data systems to form a cohesive buyer image instantly, identifying content needs and tailoring messages.
• 24/7 operation: Works around the clock, closing coverage gaps and ensuring no leads are missed, leading to higher conversion rates.
• Revenue impact: Streamlines processes and optimizes funnel stages to directly tie marketing efforts to measurable business outcomes.
• Anticipate needs: Predicts what actions will drive the most impact by analyzing historical and real-time data.
• Act proactively: Identifies opportunities and takes necessary steps without waiting for instructions.
• Learn Continuously: Refines strategies and improves performance over time through feedback loops.
The agentic marketing funnel is fully autonomous, driven by AI SDR agents. It eliminates wasted time, missed opportunities, and dropped leads. This fundamental shift puts marketers back in the driver’s seat, giving them total control over inbound pipeline generation targets.
The primary metrics shift from MQLs to pipeline generated and revenue impact, which are true reflections of marketing's contribution to revenue. With AI SDR agents, all leads are worked, including those previously ignored due to arbitrary scoring or lack of human capacity, uncovering additional pipeline. For instance, one marketing leader found that over 60% of MQLs weren't being worked by sales; after implementing an AI SDR agent, they saw a 130% increase in meetings booked.
Key ways Inbound AI SDR agents revolutionize the funnel:
• Instant Buyer Profiling: Agents can instantly assemble comprehensive profiles of website visitors by accessing CRM and engagement data, a level of accuracy human SDRs cannot match.
• Real-time Engagement: Autonomously engage website traffic in real time, answering questions, surfacing offers, and booking sales meetings without delay.
• Autonomous Follow-up: If buyers don't convert on the website, AI SDR agents follow up with contextual, personalized emails to drive conversion without human intervention.
These agents, such as Piper, can handle various tasks like engaging buyers in real time, intelligently following up via email, instantly scheduling meetings, and serving personalized offers. They are working across your most important marketing channels: the website and the inbox, ensuring a consistent and instant experience.
The traditional SDR role, designed for human capacity, is poised to fade to automation. Agentic AI agents can perform the highly repetitive tasks of lead qualification, follow-up, and initial engagement at a scale and speed impossible for humans. This means that the human element in sales can now hyper-focus on relationship building, as AI handles the initial, repetitive interactions.
The shift isn't about job elimination, but role evolution. While some roles are prime candidates for automation, new entry-level roles in tech sales will emerge. Today’s SDR managers will become AI SDR agent experts, responsible for managing the onboarding, training, and maintenance of these agents. Companies are encouraged to strategically automate roles that are already on their way out and prepare their teams for new, more engaging human roles.
Transitioning to an AI-driven marketing funnel can seem daunting, but a phased approach minimizes risk and allows teams to adjust gradually while seeing measurable results.
• Crawl: Start with off-hours coverage
◦ Deploy AI SDR agents to cover nights, weekends, and holidays.
◦ This addresses the common pain point of missed opportunities when human SDRs are offline.
◦ Result: Immediate engagement with every lead, significant reduction in missed opportunities, and increased pipeline from previously ignored leads. Bloomreach, for example, saw a 1.4x increase in meetings booked year over year by adopting this.
• Walk: Expand to broader segments
◦ Once comfortable, allow AI SDR agents to handle a larger share of inbound traffic, including lower-priority leads during business hours.
◦ This frees human SDRs to focus on high-impact opportunities.
◦ Result: Dramatic increase in engaged leads, improved efficiency for human SDRs, and increased meetings booked and pipeline. Crunchbase saw a 3x increase in meetings booked when they expanded their AI SDR agent to nurture inbound leads via email.
• Run: Fully automate your inbound pipeline
◦ The AI SDR agent takes over the entire inbound funnel, engaging, qualifying, and nurturing every lead. Human SDRs only step in when a buyer is ready for direct interaction.
◦ Result: Every lead receives personalized engagement with infinite scalability, faster lead response times, higher conversion rates, and seamless alignment between marketing and sales. Quantum Metric, for instance, found visitors who engaged with their AI SDR agent were 8x more likely to book a meeting.
Stay up to date with weekly drops of fresh B2B marketing and sales content.
The world of B2B marketing is undergoing its most significant transformation yet, moving beyond "AI-powered" tools to embrace fully autonomous AI agents. This shift isn't just about efficiency, it's about fundamentally redefining how marketing generates pipeline and how sales operates, moving us into the Agentic Marketing Era.
For decades, marketing and sales functions relied on processes designed around human capacity and limitations, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. Agentic AI is here to solve these long-standing problems.
Before the digital age, marketing was largely analog, with websites serving as little more than brochures. The advent of digital platforms transformed the marketer's playbook, making the website a critical asset for demand generation. This digital shift, however, introduced new challenges: managing a flood of leads and defining ownership in the sales process.
To address this, the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) emerged as a central metric, meant to signify "sales-ready" prospects and act as a "contract" between marketing and sales.
However, MQLs have become a vanity metric.
• They don't always reflect buying intent. A download or a click doesn't guarantee a prospect is ready to engage with sales
• They incentivize quantity over quality leading to wasted time for sales teams
• They create silos between marketing (focused on MQLs) and sales (focused on revenue), fostering misalignment and mistrust.
To bridge the gap between marketing-generated leads and sales, the Sales Development Representative (SDR) role was born. While initially seen as a solution, the SDR model developed significant cracks.
• Capacity constraints: SDRs can only handle a limited number of leads (~250 per month), leaving lower-priority leads untouched.
• Slow response times: Despite research showing that responding to a lead within five minutes dramatically increases conversion likelihood, SDRs often take hours or days to follow up.
• Limited hours: SDRs work standard business hours, missing leads generated during nights, weekends, and holidays, resulting in missed opportunities. For example, one company missed 1,400 chats a year, representing a $7.5 million pipeline opportunity cost.
• Inconsistencies in execution: Human SDRs vary in their approach, leading to inconsistent messaging and engagement quality, with 63% not hitting quota.
• High turnover rates: The SDR role often serves as a stepping stone, leading to frequent turnover and constant training needs (average tenure less than 14 months).
These human limitations resulted in a massive opportunity cost from untouched or poorly engaged leads. The traditional funnel was designed around human capacity, not opportunity, and was never truly efficient.
Agentic AI marks the "next frontier" in artificial intelligence. Unlike other AI models, agentic AI is able to take initiative, make decisions, and act independently toward a goal. It doesn't require explicit human instructions and adapts autonomously based on real-time data. This level of autonomy allows AI agents to outperform human counterparts in speed, accuracy, and scale.
When integrated into B2B marketing tech stacks, AI agents bring transformative capabilities:
• Automation: Automates repetitive tasks like lead scoring, follow-up, and email outreach, freeing humans for more nuanced efforts.
• Personalization: Synthesizes disparate data systems to form a cohesive buyer image instantly, identifying content needs and tailoring messages.
• 24/7 operation: Works around the clock, closing coverage gaps and ensuring no leads are missed, leading to higher conversion rates.
• Revenue impact: Streamlines processes and optimizes funnel stages to directly tie marketing efforts to measurable business outcomes.
• Anticipate needs: Predicts what actions will drive the most impact by analyzing historical and real-time data.
• Act proactively: Identifies opportunities and takes necessary steps without waiting for instructions.
• Learn Continuously: Refines strategies and improves performance over time through feedback loops.
The agentic marketing funnel is fully autonomous, driven by AI SDR agents. It eliminates wasted time, missed opportunities, and dropped leads. This fundamental shift puts marketers back in the driver’s seat, giving them total control over inbound pipeline generation targets.
The primary metrics shift from MQLs to pipeline generated and revenue impact, which are true reflections of marketing's contribution to revenue. With AI SDR agents, all leads are worked, including those previously ignored due to arbitrary scoring or lack of human capacity, uncovering additional pipeline. For instance, one marketing leader found that over 60% of MQLs weren't being worked by sales; after implementing an AI SDR agent, they saw a 130% increase in meetings booked.
Key ways Inbound AI SDR agents revolutionize the funnel:
• Instant Buyer Profiling: Agents can instantly assemble comprehensive profiles of website visitors by accessing CRM and engagement data, a level of accuracy human SDRs cannot match.
• Real-time Engagement: Autonomously engage website traffic in real time, answering questions, surfacing offers, and booking sales meetings without delay.
• Autonomous Follow-up: If buyers don't convert on the website, AI SDR agents follow up with contextual, personalized emails to drive conversion without human intervention.
These agents, such as Piper, can handle various tasks like engaging buyers in real time, intelligently following up via email, instantly scheduling meetings, and serving personalized offers. They are working across your most important marketing channels: the website and the inbox, ensuring a consistent and instant experience.
The traditional SDR role, designed for human capacity, is poised to fade to automation. Agentic AI agents can perform the highly repetitive tasks of lead qualification, follow-up, and initial engagement at a scale and speed impossible for humans. This means that the human element in sales can now hyper-focus on relationship building, as AI handles the initial, repetitive interactions.
The shift isn't about job elimination, but role evolution. While some roles are prime candidates for automation, new entry-level roles in tech sales will emerge. Today’s SDR managers will become AI SDR agent experts, responsible for managing the onboarding, training, and maintenance of these agents. Companies are encouraged to strategically automate roles that are already on their way out and prepare their teams for new, more engaging human roles.
Transitioning to an AI-driven marketing funnel can seem daunting, but a phased approach minimizes risk and allows teams to adjust gradually while seeing measurable results.
• Crawl: Start with off-hours coverage
◦ Deploy AI SDR agents to cover nights, weekends, and holidays.
◦ This addresses the common pain point of missed opportunities when human SDRs are offline.
◦ Result: Immediate engagement with every lead, significant reduction in missed opportunities, and increased pipeline from previously ignored leads. Bloomreach, for example, saw a 1.4x increase in meetings booked year over year by adopting this.
• Walk: Expand to broader segments
◦ Once comfortable, allow AI SDR agents to handle a larger share of inbound traffic, including lower-priority leads during business hours.
◦ This frees human SDRs to focus on high-impact opportunities.
◦ Result: Dramatic increase in engaged leads, improved efficiency for human SDRs, and increased meetings booked and pipeline. Crunchbase saw a 3x increase in meetings booked when they expanded their AI SDR agent to nurture inbound leads via email.
• Run: Fully automate your inbound pipeline
◦ The AI SDR agent takes over the entire inbound funnel, engaging, qualifying, and nurturing every lead. Human SDRs only step in when a buyer is ready for direct interaction.
◦ Result: Every lead receives personalized engagement with infinite scalability, faster lead response times, higher conversion rates, and seamless alignment between marketing and sales. Quantum Metric, for instance, found visitors who engaged with their AI SDR agent were 8x more likely to book a meeting.
Discover how we can help you convert more prospects into pipeline–right from your website.