The AI SDR is dying

Hey there, Austin here 👋

Welcome to The Pipeline—the newsletter to help scale your revenue team’s creativity.

I hope your first full workweek of 2025 is off to a good start. I’m feeling insanely energized to be back to building.

Today, I need to clear something up. There’s been a lot of talk regarding ‘AI SDRs’ lately. I think a lot of folks are getting this wrong.

Let’s get into it.

📒 GTM Playbook

The AI SDR is dying.

My take on the future of GTM tech in 2025

The AI SDR is dying.

Over the past few months, I've spoken to dozens of companies who have used AI SDR tools.

Every single one of them has:

A) Churned already

B) Plans to churn soon.

Why? The answer is simple.

Companies who use them book $0 in pipeline. 

The appeal is clear — outbound and pipeline in a box. Your revenue team never has to figure out all of the nuances of who to reach out to, what to say, and how this should all connect back into go-to-market systems.

AI SDR Tools:

➝ Pull lists of thousands of prospects
➝ Spray-and-pray outreach to all of them

There’s no accounting for intent signals. No deep personalization. They promise perfect prospecting right out of the box.

Here’s the thing:

Spray-and-pray doesn't work. Human sellers know this. Otherwise, any person with a pulse and an Apollo or Zoominfo license would be putting up record outbound numbers.

The best SDRs—the ones AI SDRs should be trying to replace:

➝ Qualify target accounts.
➝ Spot compelling events that signal that the timing is right to engage.
➝ Stay all over prospects via the phone, email, and LinkedIn.
➝ Follow up relentlessly (but respectfully) when someone is in a place to convert.

Can AI automate many pieces of the SDR workflow today?

Sure. We built a product that does a lot of it.

To give you a tangible example: one of our automated ‘plays’ has booked us 89 meetings.

We’ll retarget website visitors who haven't form filled via automated outbound emails.

We identify companies on our site using 6sense and Clearbit website intent data.

Then we use an AI Agent to qualify that the account is B2B (not B2C, a school, etc).

We’ll then prospect for new people using our in-house email waterfall. We enrich using many data providers to ensure the highest coverage possible.

And we’ll enroll prospects into sequences based on persona (sequences are native in Unify).

This removes a lot of the manual lift that a seller would have to undertake. Before Unify, these processes would take me hours. It was mind-numbing at times.

That said, even now, not everything in outbound can be automated away.

Being human will always be important. Connecting with prospects or customers via humor, creativity, or relatability has always mattered.

It always will.

If you're expecting a piece of software to show up and understand best-in-class prospecting out of the box, you're in for a big disappointment.

Figuring out good outbound is hard even for great sellers.

WHAT’S NEW AT UNIFY

I’m stoked to share this case study with the Recharge team. Unify influenced $5M+ in pipeline for Recharge within 3 months of onboarding.

"We had a goldmine of intent data from our website, but we couldn't efficiently turn it into pipeline," said Evan Rosenstein, Head of Growth at Recharge.

Here are the plays Recharge runs with Unify:

1/ When a company associated with a closed lost opportunity visits their website, Recharge prospects for leaders in CX and CS, Retention & Loyalty, and eCommerce and automates outbound to them

2/ Recharge utilizes website intent data to prospect for and reach out to ICP decision-makers at companies that are not yet in CRM in target industries.

3/ Recharge also uses specific page views (pricing, retain, product) within free-trial accounts that haven’t moved through the buyer funnel to automate outbound to decision-makers and get them to enter the buying process.

If you want to use Unify to generate more pipeline, book time with our team here.

BEFORE YOU GO…

Thanks again for following along. I’m excited to grow The Pipeline in 2025.

Tomorrow I’ll be sharing a look under the hood at my LinkedIn content playbook. We drove more than $15M in pipeline via inbound in 2024.

And my Linkedin content was a big contributor.

What questions do you have about our strategy? Reply and let me know. I want to make this piece as valuable as possible for you.

Austin

PS: If you want to use Unify to drive more pipeline in 2025, get in touch here.