We're in the early days of the AI SDR Movement, and we know there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about handing your inbound pipeline generation over to an AI model. Our own VP of Demand Gen, Sarah McConnell, shared her journey from concerned to confident with Piper the AI SDR.

Skeptical at the start

In early 2024, Sarah was faced with a challenge––unleash Piper the AI SDR on Qualified's website, the first fully autonomous product we developed. As any Demand Gen leader can tell you, introducing new tech to the website is always scary, especially when that tech is taking on your entire inbound pipeline generation motion.

Her concerns were valid:

• Would Piper's conversations meet the standards we set for our human SDRs?
• Could she qualify leads without derailing pipeline performance?
• How would we measure success?

Sarah was initially skeptical, admitting to starting at a confidence score of zero, but she crafted a plan to strategically roll Piper out to the website while ensuring pipeline performance stayed strong.

The crawl, walk, run framework

Sarah outlined a phased approach many marketers have followed since our customers integrated Piper into their websites.

1. Crawl: Piper debuted during low-risk hours, covering the website overnight. The Qualified team dubbed this Project Night Owl, testing her ability to engage visitors and converse with them during off-hours. Though overnight traffic quality certainly wasn't ideal, there was enough data available to determine that Piper's training was working, and that her messaging was solid.
2. Walk: After proving herself in lower-stakes scenarios, Piper graduated to medium-priority traffic during business hours. This included visitors exploring content or product pages––leads with potential but not immediate intent. Sarah analyzed these interactions and refined Piper's responses, increasing her confidence in handing over higher-priority pages to Piper.
3. Run: The ultimate goal was to allow Piper to engage with our highest-value traffic: visitors clicking on demo booking buttons or coming from high-intent email campaigns. This required a lot of confidence, but Piper's performance helped Sarah feel confident.

The magic moment

There was a crucial moment for Sarah that started shaky but ended up impressing her. Piper took on a buyer when our human SDRs were busy, engaging them and providing a link to content that even Sarah forgot existed. The lightbulb went off––AI SDRs have a superhuman memory that even our most experienced humans can't compete with.

Sarah offered three key pieces of advice for marketing and sales leaders who are evaluating whether an AI SDR is right for their inbound pipeline generation strategy.

1. Identify your pain points: Where does your team need the most help? Off-hours coverage? Scaling your SDR capacity? Engaging stale leads or leads that your human SDRs aren't prioritizing? Understand where you'll benefit most as you scope out your phased approach.
2. Take small steps: Start in lower-risk scenarios until your AI SDR has your messaging locked in. Hear how other customers took the same crawl, walk, run approach with Piper the AI SDR here.
3. Focus on impact: Prioritize AI SDRs for tasks that align with your marketing goals and stay in close alignment across your GTM org.

The future of pipeline generation is automated

Having mastered website engagement, Piper’s next challenge is email—a domain ripe for transformation. From following up on event leads to nurturing hesitant prospects, Piper’s potential to personalize outreach at scale promises to revolutionize lead management: no more rigid drip campaigns or guesswork. Piper will dynamically engage prospects based on their unique behaviors and needs.

It's clear to our team and hundreds of our customers that AI SDRs are the future of pipeline generation. AI SDRs are not just a supplement to human teams––they're redefining the marketing funnel as we know it.

Are you ready to start your road to confidence? Hear more from Sarah about how AI SDRs helped her close her pipeline gaps here.