AI aims to automate parts of the SDR role, though it’s widely believed AI won’t replace SDRs but will significantly reshape the role to boost productivity. The most common phrasing is that AI will enable SDR's to spend more time on building relationships. While AI helps reps identify contacts and craft personalized content, there's a tendency to "set and forget," with reps relying on technology instead of honing opportunity-recognition skills. This shift makes the SDR role more technical, or relies on a technical resource to be successful.
As buyer resistance to outbound methods grows, SDR teams are producing more through automation, yet using similar approaches, flooding inboxes with comparable personalization.
Since 2015, the SDR role has evolved from high-volume, basic outreach to account-based strategies, personalization, and advanced tools like Salesloft and Outreach. SDRs have adapted to new challenges like spam filters and GDPR, becoming skilled researchers using intent data and social media. SDRs have navigated these changes with resilience, often with limited clarity on advancement paths. Now, they’re expected to adopt new technologies without much budget or support.
There’s not many ideas being shared on what the future state of the role will be. Many emerging tools are designed to streamline specific aspects of the SDR workflow and will increase notification and context switching for the reps. This opens up the possibility of a more specialized approach to the role, where responsibilities are divided into targeted functions. By focusing on specific tasks, SDRs can develop deeper expertise and work more efficiently within a defined area of their role, ultimately enhancing productivity and driving better outcomes across the sales process.
More specialization doesn’t mean organizations will have to double headcount - the goal here would be to increase capacity and output, resulting in higher quality opportunities and increasing SDR sourced win rates.
Most commonly, SDR reps are paired with an AE and what if we play off these type of pairings and create a specialized SDR team: “Special Agent” ops SDR paired with a “Relationship SDR” (working titles of course). Could look something like this:
Special Agent SDRs:
- These are your tech enabled SDRs responsible for sourcing qualified accounts, prospects, and mapping the organization. This rep will combine the tech touch with human oversight and develop strategic plans on the outbound approach, focusing on the "who, what, and when", and passing that information off to the relationship focused SDR.
- These reps will closely partner with RevOps and Sales Ops to map processes, ensure a clean ICP account list, and data cleanliness in the CRM. These reps will have capacity to test new technologies and implement AI properly.
- These reps are your marketing counterparts who can piece together triggers and signals alongside marketing to truly understand where we have opportunity to engage. These are your CRM hunters, looking back through closed/lost and marketing generated leads to uncover opportunity for a more strategic outbound approach.
- Reporting and trend analysis can also be a responsibility. SDR’s currently use multiple different tools and the reporting aspect can actually be quite cumbersome to understand where we are winning and why.
Relationship focused SDRs:
- These are your outbound reps responsible for engaging with prospects, sourcing qualified leads and opportunities. They take the research and account plans done by the special agent rep to thoughtfully outbound and engage.
- These reps will be responsible for activities like cold calling, social selling, personalization, email writing, etc.
- They can run discovery and implement qualification criteria to increase the quality of opportunities passed to AEs. More so your traditional SDR with an emphasis on relationship building and sales acumen. These reps are your AE’s sidekick, being more involved in the deals, helping to revive stuck or closed/lost deals, multithreading, etc.
We have always operated as one rep is responsible for all of these activities, and yet there is a constant emphasis on SDR’s not producing enough quality opportunities. So do we just replace them completely with full cycle AEs utitlizing new technologies? What are the other options?
There are still questions that need to be answered when thinking about an SDR program like the above. How are the reps comped? What do the career paths look like?
Are folks ready to make a bigger investment into SDR programs or just a bigger investment into technology? If you have ideas on the future of the role, let’s chat.
