Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss how AI SDRs and usage-based pricing models could upend outbound sales. They explore risks like malicious AI outreach at scale and job displacement in lower-tier sales roles, plus opportunities in AI security solutions.
These AI SDRs might just destroy outbound sales. This is actually, there's a startup called Runway, and they're like a finance startup, but they basically created these AI SDRs to help with the prospecting. And basically it's costing them around $10,000 a month resource-wise to run these AI SDRs, but it's generating them a lot more pipeline. And they don't need to, they don't necessarily need to fire anyone, but they don't need to hire more people, right? And so I think we're going to see a lot more of this trend upwards. And related to this, I wanted to talk about the most disruptive AI pricing model so far, because we're talking about these AI SDRs. And there's actually a couple of AI SDR companies, and they're charging differently versus like SaaS, because like, usually with SaaS, you would charge on a per-seat basis, right? And you charge monthly for that. Things are changing now where like Intercom, for example, they're like a, you know, they were a chat, they're a conversational intelligence tool, right? And they now charge you $0.99 per resolved ticket. So they've changed up their pricing, I believe. And then Salesforce, I think they're changing to like a, like a, on a usage basis too. And so I think we might start to see more of that. And the ones that pioneered this maybe like, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago is actually Zapier, right? Zapier, they charge you based on the number of tasks that you're running. I think we're going to see the models change. And I'm trying to pull this up right now. It's not pulling up, but there's a nice little graph from, um, Kyle Poyar from Growth Unhinged. And it actually shows you the new pricing models for AI. And I think, you know, we're going to see more efficiencies come from these AI workers, but we're also going to see pricing efficiencies as well.
I also think going back to the Gary Tan tweet or post on X, I do agree that, you know, and he's just talking about what one of his friends said. He said, a friend of mine told me that AI SDRs might actually make outbound sales stop working entirely in the coming years. And then he has the looking eyes like out of curiosity. I think an issue you're going to have with AI is people are going to use it maliciously and they're going to scale this out like crazy. So instead of 10 calls a day or 50 calls a day, they now do 5,000 calls a day or whatever they can get away with. I do believe that is going to cause not necessarily channels like outbound sales to stop working entirely. I think they're just going to be less effective because people are going to be fed up with it.
And whoever can build something on the AI side to defend against this will probably make good money.
Yes, just like on Apple does it. Hey, spam call or robocall.
Yeah, it's so good. It automatically just shuts it off.
Uh-huh. Yeah.
All right, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. So this is an agency peer group ran by my podcast co-host Neil Patel and myself, Eric Siu. And these were 9 and 8-figure agency owners respectively. And what I will say is, at the end of the day, you want to learn from people that have been there, done that. If you want to grow your agency to 7 figures, 8 figures, and beyond, this is the group for you, and we bring in other agency owners to speak as well. And it's a great peer group where you can help each other out, and you're going to learn how to acquire more clients. You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day-to-day and to build the business of your dreams. And the cool thing, till November 30th, we are holding a special price, and you can apply at marketingschool.io/agency. And the great thing about it as well, if you try to get into group, there's a 7-day free trial, right? So once November 30th hits, we're going to increase the price by $200 per month. So right now You're getting it at the lowest price possible. So go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more and we'll see you inside. By the way, I think there's a lot of AI security things that people aren't— like you look at Delta suing CrowdStrike, right? For $500 million or so? I think it's $500 million, right?
It's something large.
Yeah, it's something big. But point is, there's a dearth of security solutions out there right now. So if that's something that you wanted to go build, now's a good time to go do it. And then, you know, Gary Tan talking about destroying outbound sales. Like, I just think, what is it? There's about 700,000 people in the United States that are, that are basically in an SDR type of role. And there's about 1.3 million people that are in kind of a, some type of sales role, I believe, maybe more than that. I just read this stat like earlier this week. And so what's going to happen? I think sales, low quality salespeople are going to get replaced. Okay. You see, there's a trend here. Low quality customer service people are going to get replaced. Low quality anything, probably going to get replaced. And they're just going to have to move into a different job. That's all. And this will help people find something that they genuinely want to do and they'll be happier. Yeah. And I don't know if they're all going to be replaced.
I think you're going to have politics come into play and then people are saved in some aspect or another.
People are always saved. All right. So that is it for today, guys. Go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association, where we help agency owners grow. And that being said, we'll see you tomorrow.
