I remember hosting a dinner of sales leaders to talk about AI. I asked them what will your CRM do for you in the future?
Nearly unanimously came the reply : enable salespeople to spend most of their time with customers.
Listening to Lenny’s Podcast with Jeanne Grosser, COO at Vercel, I discovered how some companies are achieving that milestone by transforming their inbound sales teams in six weeks.
For us, we had 10 SDRs doing this inbound workflow, & now we just have one that is effectively QAing the agent. The other nine, we deployed on outbound.
It was six weeks before we felt confident going from 10 to 1. So it wasn’t like this was a multi-quarter process. It actually moved super quickly.
We were able to hold that lead to opportunity conversion rate flat. So the agent is as good as our humans were.
In retrospect, it should be obvious that speed creates an unexpected advantage. A sales representative, or an AI sales representative, can respond & analyze a lead at any point during the day. It’s important to meet a customer at the point of maximum interest to capitalize on their inertia or excitement.
It’s actually condensed the number of touches it takes to convert because it’s so much quicker at responding relative to leads inevitably sitting in the queue or coming in at nighttime & no one can get to it.
The build? One engineer, part-time.
The person who built the lead agent was a single GTM engineer. He spent maybe 25, 30% of his time on this.
The target that every sales leader at that dinner articulated is now within reach.
I think we’re getting to a point where with layering in agents, ideally, we finally get salespeople to a point where they’re actually spending 70% of their time interacting with humans.
Thirty percent customer-facing time becomes seventy percent. Double the human contact means salespeople developing deeper relationships, driving more success for customers, & less on administration.
That’s the promise of AI in the workplace.