For nearly two decades, the Traditional Marketing Funnel we’re all familiar with has been the status quo.
Marketing drives leads to the website, Sales Development Reps (SDRs) work them and flip them into meetings with Account Executives, they move on into the Sales Funnel–it’s a simple process that has “worked” just fine for B2B marketers for years…
As long as you don’t look at all the pipeline left behind.
The old funnel we know and love had its place, but we’ve all seen the cracks in the process–we just didn’t have another choice until now.
In the Age of AI, marketers finally have a solution to all their funnel faux pas:
The AI Marketing Funnel.
But, before we get to the new way to think about the funnel, let’s take a look at how we got here in the first place ⬇️
15 years ago, as the world went digital, so did B2B marketing.
And things have stayed pretty much the same since.
We advertise online, send email blasts, optimize for search marketing, post to social media, host virtual events… and everything we do drives to one place:
The website.
The website is the #1 asset and critical vehicle for demand generation teams.
Digital-first marketing became the norm, but this new norm created a new problem: A sudden influx of leads that no one really knew what to do with.
Once you extracted bogus leads ([email protected]), this pile of leads then got sorted into two smaller piles:
Unqualified leads that don’t fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) and, therefore, aren’t going to be a buyer
Leads that do fit your ICP and are somewhere within the buying process and need someone to engage and guide them
And, well, someone had to do something with them.
Marketers didn’t have time; they were too busy getting more leads to the website, and your Account Executives definitely weren’t going to waste valuable closing time on working form fills… thus, the Sales Development Rep (SDR) was born.
We created an entirely new function to work the ICP leads that marketing generated and convert them into a meeting with an Account Executive. We hired them right out of school, trained them up on our content, and gave them a quota to justify the investment.
And what happened right from the start? Under pressure to hit their quotas, SDRs wouldn't work just any lead. They only wanted to work the most obvious intent-driven leads—form fills, inbound calls, the easy wins—but they left massive opportunities (and cash) behind.
To support SDRs’ quotas and keep their focus, marketing and sales struck a deal: marketers would deliver a set number of leads that aligned with their ICP and showed intent to buy—Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), and this became the metric that every marketer held themselves accountable to.
SDRs working MQLs are commonplace in any GTM org now, but fifteen years ago, they didn’t exist. Human SDR teams are a response to how digital marketing transformed the lead generation process into what we now understand as the Traditional Marketing Funnel.
Let’s take a deeper look at the Traditional Marketing Funnel ⬇️
The Traditional Marketing Funnel we all know today looks like this:
Marketers do all kinds of things at the top of the funnel to get buyers to the website. The hope is these leads will convert via phone, live chat, email, or form fills, but in the digital age, these leads pile up quickly.
There had to be a way to separate the signal from the noise, ensuring SDRs weren’t wasting precious time on low-quality leads.
Enter lead scoring systems: a way to assign numerical values to leads, pushing the most engaged prospects to the top of the queue while less engaged ones are held in a database for nurture campaigns.
The SDR’s entire goal is to flip that lead into a meeting with an Account Executive, turning it into Pipeline.
After years of this process, something became clear—human SDRs are underdelivering.
Why?
And your best SDRs who do excel? They get promoted.
SDR’s inability to quickly service MQLS is why marketers hesitate to commit to a pipeline number. They can confidently deliver a steady stream of MQLs, but what happens next is out of their hands. They can’t control how quickly an SDR engages with those leads or scale that function.
This process was the best we had, but it was never efficient—the entire funnel was designed around human capacity.
But in 2025, we’re no longer optimizing for human limitations ⬇️
Just a few years ago, Generative AI became widely available to us, and everything changed. From how we create content to how we measure performance, marketing has seen nearly every facet of our jobs impacted by AI’s groundbreaking capabilities.
These AI models, specifically, shine when it comes to repetitive tasks that utilize vast amounts of data.
It was a natural progression to see what these models could do when put to work in the sales motion—giving rise to the AI SDR.
These powerhouse models aren’t just ChatGPT in a mask. They can take on the full scope of a human SDR, from engaging buyers in real-time to nurturing them with personalized follow up.
AI SDRs can instantly assemble a full profile of every lead that visits your website with the kind of accuracy human SDRs could never accomplish. They can access all of your CRM data and data platforms to form a coherent picture of your lead and marry it with engagement data as they interact with content on your website.
AI SDRs can autonomously engage your leads in real-time via live chat and answer all of their questions with messaging crafted by your marketing team.
AI SDRs can book meetings with reps, converting your leads into pipeline, and if the lead isn’t ready to book a meeting, they can send them tailored, contextual emails to nurture them until they’re sales-ready. They constantly learn and improve and operate within guardrails your team has full control over.
Best of all, AI SDRs can do this all at scale–they can work leads from the top of the funnel all the way to the bottom simultaneously.
60% of our leads weren’t getting followed up with because they weren’t considered top tier accounts.
We saw a 130% increase in meetings booked after implementing an AI SDR to work those leads.
The new B2B marketing funnel is The AI Marketing Funnel—harnessing the power of AI SDRs to eliminate wasted time on lead qualification and follow-ups, and instead, seamlessly convert leads into pipeline.
In the Traditional Marketing Funnel, MQLs became vanity metrics at best—it was the only metric marketers really had control of, but they don’t actually have a business impact.
In the new AI Marketing Funnel, acronyms like MQL lose their significance.
Now that AI SDRs have the capacity to scale and engage with all leads, not just some, we can pivot to what truly matters: pipeline.
Instead of tossing MQLs over the fence and hoping human SDRs work them, marketers now have AI SDRs working for them, giving them control of every aspect of the lead qualifying and converting process, delivering qualified pipeline to sales.
It’s the dream for both marketing and sales leaders.
But what does it take to step into this new era of B2B Marketing? ⬇️
For two years, SaaS leaders have sidestepped the implications of AI for roles like the SDR—but it’s becoming increasingly clear that some of these roles are prime candidates for automation.
Fifteen years ago, we paid entry-level reps to pick up faxes and type them into computers—unimaginable just two decades later.
AI is stepping in to handle the roles no one truly wants—the repetitive, thankless tasks that have long been seen as a necessary stepping stone. By automating these functions, AI effectively removes the least desirable rung of the career ladder.
This AI Era is the natural progression of the digital transformation that gave birth to the SDR role 15 years ago. Now, entry-level roles will focus on managing AI SDRs and leveraging the technology to drive business outcomes. These reps will even have opportunities to step into full-cycle SMB AE roles earlier, skipping 12-18 months of grinding through lead queues.
This transformation isn’t waiting for anyone, certainly, but it doesn’t mean you have to make the jump all at once. We took a paced, roll out approach to our own website that hundreds of our customers have now replicated.
Start with off-hours coverage. After you’ve onboarded an AI SDR and trained them, let them cover nights and weekends. Focus them on the lower-value segments of your business to get everyone comfortable with automating these steps.
Give your AI SDR a bit more room to grow and show you what they’re really capable of. Let them work everything but your highest priority leads, saving your human reps hours of time.
In some cases, you might find that your human SDRs have too much on their plate and are missing inbound opportunities completely. Letting your AI SDR work the frontlines as the default ensures chats never get missed and takes the pressure off your human representatives.
When you’re ready, let your AI SDR take over the entirety of your inbound workflows and only hand off leads to your sales team when they’re ready to speak with a human rep.
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As you embark on your AI Marketing Funnel journey, you’ll have to shift your mindset around KPIs, as well. Your marketing and sales orgs should both be marching toward the same goals—pipeline generated and revenue generated—the two metrics that matter most to your business.
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