What Are AI SDRs and How Do They Transform Sales

Like space travel and self-driving cars, AI SDRs are a reality now. For most B2B companies, 2024 was the year of AI SDRs. Nearly a dozen AI SDRs were launched, and many companies were happy to experiment with AI SDRs and see if they delivered on the promise of increased sales. 

So what are AI SDRs, what all do they handle, and why is the B2B world so bullish on them? Let’s take a look. 

What is an AI SDR?

An AI SDR is a tool that helps automate repetitive tasks in the sales process, such as lead scoring, outreach, and follow up. AI SDRs use AI, LLMs, voice technology to automate tasks such as writing outreach emails, sending follow-ups

AI vs Human SDRs

Now, does this mean AI SDRs can replace human SDRs?  Not really. While AI SDRs cannot entirely replace humans, they can take over a lot of the repetitive or mundane tasks that humans do and allow them to focus on deep work. 

How do AI SDRs compare with human SDRs? 

AI SDRs: 

AI SDRs can add value to your team by: 

• Scaling outreach: They can take over tasks such as cold outreach, follow ups, and even lead scoring, thus helping sales team scale the volume of cold outreach 
• Crafting catchy content: AI SDRs can create and send emails that grab your prospects’ attention, at scale. AI can be used to tailor and tweak content easily.
• Saving time and optimize processes: AI SDRs, unlike human SDRs, can work round the clock with no breaks and can help save time. For example, they can respond to emails immediately, reach out to prospects when they signal intent to buy, etc. 
• Eliminating employee training/onboarding: AI SDRs can hit the ground running without requiring any time for learning/training etc. Take a few hours to configure the product for your business requirements and you’ll be able to get started without facing a steep learning curve.    
• Use AI analytics: AI SDRs can be configured to analyze different pieces of data and activity to provide your team with actionable insights. 

Human SDRs: 

No matter how good an AI tool is, there are a few things they simply cannot do. Human SDRs are critical for any sales team, and can’t be replaced by AI SDRs, because humans can: 

• Manage unexpected situations: AI SDRs can efficiently manage scripted, planned situations but not everything goes by the script when it comes to cold calls and outreach. Unlike AI, humans can navigate such situations smartly and ensure that a prospect isn’t lost because of the SDRs inability to respond to a situation in a relevant manner. 
• Show empathy: Certain tasks can be automated and handed off to machines but humans are still essential to handle conversations with prospects, understand their pain points and requirements, and show empathy. 
• Nurture relationships: While AI SDRs can send outreach messages at scale and grab a lead’s attention, only a human can take the conversation forward and nurture the relationship to convert the lead into a customer.  
• Be flexible: Human SDRs can think on their feet and change how they handle different tasks or situations. They are flexible and can adapt to different requirements instantly, unlike AI SDRs that need to be reconfigured.  

As you can see, human SDRs and AI SDRs both add value to sales teams and a team with both can efficiently scale their outbound sales with no major increase in investment. 

Reasons to implement AI SDRs

Automate and scale prospecting

Prospecting and outbound sales takes time. Cold calls, emails, follow-ups, and lead qualification all require a lot of effort, often showing hardly any tangible results during the initial days. AI SDRs can step in to automate these repetitive tasks, freeing up human SDRs to focus on other tasks that require human effort. AI SDRs can easily scale the sales teams’ efforts and increase the number of leads that can be managed. Traditionally, scaling volumes would require hiring more SDRs but AI SDRs can help control these costs to a certain extent. 

Create a consistent experience for leads

In sales, consistency is key to building trust and nurturing long-term relationships. This can be a challenge when multiple humans interact with prospects as each might have a different style of writing or speaking. Emails sent by one human SDRs can look quite different from an email sent by another. And this could lead to confusion or dissonance in the messaging the prospect receives from the company. AI SDRs eliminate this risk, as they’re programmed to execute pre-defined sequences of actions, ensuring that every lead receives a consistent and personalized experience throughout the entire outreach process.

Whether it’s sending personalized emails, making follow-up calls, or responding to questions, AI SDRs guarantee that the messaging remains consistent across all touchpoints. This ensures that the messaging resonates with the lead, and the regular emails or communications they receive from the company reinforce the previous one. 

Enhance your outreach with data-driven actions

Data and analytics are core to AI SDRs, making them very efficient and effective as they’re able to iterate processes based on data-driven analysis. For instance, they can use the data they have on email sequences and cold outreaches, and determine the optimal timing for outreach. By analyzing patterns in a lead’s activity, such as website visits, email opens, or social media engagement, AI SDRs can predict the best times to reach out, increasing the chances of response.

AI SDRs can also use the data to personalize the content of their outreach based on the lead’s actions. For instance, if a lead clicks on a specific link or visits a product page, the AI can automatically tailor the follow-up message to focus on the product or offer they showed interest in. 

Save time and let human SDRs focus on deep work

As AI SDRs take over and handle repetitive tasks like cold emailing, human SDRs can dedicate more time to the high-value activities that require emotional intelligence and strategic thinking. AI can take care of automating outreach, and human SDRs can focus on building relationships, managing key accounts, closing deals, and handling tasks that require the human touch. Essentially, AI helps accelerate the overall sales cycle by taking care of the basic work, allowing human SDRs to spend their time on tasks that actually help close deals.

The role of AI SDRs in lead generation

Lead generation is at the heart of the go-to-market process. AI SDRs are capable of not just reaching out to the leads but generating leads as well. 

AI SDRs can be configured to research potential leads, reach out to them, follow up, and qualify them, and do all of this at scale. 

Here’s how AI SDRs can streamline the process:

By analyzing data such as demographics, behavior, and engagement, AI can identify which leads are worth pursuing, and spearfish these leads rather than take the spray-and-pray approach for a large volume of leads. 

AI can manage the qualification and segmentation, allowing human SDRs to focus on building relationships and closing deals

How AI SDRs segment leads based on data

AI SDRs have access to millions of data points and can analyze these and group leads into different categories based on the chances of conversion. 

Here are some broad categories they analyze in order to qualify the leads: 

• Demographics: AI SDRs look at basic information like job title, industry, company size, and location. For instance, an AI SDR might prioritize leads from certain industries or roles that align with your product’s ideal customer profile (ICP).
• Behavior: AI SDRs can look at how leads interact with your company online. They analyze activities such as visiting specific pages on your website, clicking on emails, or engaging with social media content to infer buying intent. 
• Engagement: In addition to managing outreach, AI SDRs can track how leads engage with the outreach. They analyze data on responses to emails or social media posts, and use the insights to infer intent and prioritize high-value leads.

AI SDR in different sales processes

Whether it's for outbound or inbound sales, AI SDRs can help streamline sales processes and improve efficiency. Here’s how they can add value to outbound sales teams and inbound sales teams. 

AI SDR for outbound sales

Outbound sales is difficult, time-consuming, and involves a lot of repetitive tasks. AI SDRs can take over a lot of these tasks. 

• Email warmup: AI SDRs can handle the warm-up process for cold emails, ensuring that outreach messages reach leads' inboxes without being marked as spam. 
• Lead discovery: AI SDRs can analyze data to identify high-value leads and enrich the leads, saving time and effort.
• Cold email personalization and outreach: AI SDRs can craft personalized cold emails at scale and send them out in sequences to prospects. They can easily manage follow-ups, and can tweak follow-up emails based on past interactions and the prospects’ actions, increasing the chances of engagement and response.
• Follow-ups: One of the most cumbersome tasks in outbound selling is following up with leads periodically. AI SDRs can be used to automate this process using predefined triggers, such as no response to an initial email or a specific action taken by the prospect. 

AI SDR for inbound sales

While AI SDRs are typically used for outbound selling tasks, inbound sales teams too can find value in AI SDRs. Here’s how they help with inbound sales motions:

• Automating meeting scheduling: AI SDRs can automate the process of setting up meetings and managing the back-and-forth often involved in finding a suitable time.
• Identifying high-intent buyers: AI SDRs can be used to identify high-intent buyers based on their behavior and actions and help sales reps prioritize their outreach.
• Summarizing discovery calls: AI SDRs can automatically transcribe and summarize discovery calls, saving sales reps time and providing them with actionable insights. AI-generated summaries help sales teams with the information they need to continue the conversation and close deals effectively.
• Handling follow-ups: Once the initial interaction is done, such as a form-fill or engagement on a piece of content, AI SDRs can step in to craft personalized follow-up messages based on the information gathered, and ensure that no opportunities are missed.

Businesses have swiftly adopted AI SDRs and integrated AI SDRs into sales workflows to see how well they augment their existing processes. Clearly, AI SDRs and other such AI agents can help B2B companies scale their sales efforts efficiently and enhance processes. To learn about how Highperformr AI can help you business, schedule a demo with our team today!