Jason M. Lemkin describes AI SDRs that achieved a 70% email open rate and generated 15% additional ticket revenue by chasing low-value leads human reps ignored. AI agents excel at servicing neglected funnel segments that humans won't touch, boosting overall revenue without extra headcount.
AI will also know your product a lot better than most entry-level, like, SDRs. And so whatever you tell it about the product, it will contextualize for them and add value. So AI does this in a way, you know, obviously 60,000 messages we couldn't do ourselves beforehand. So it's really crazy to see, which we'll dive into.
And maybe one thing to add on that data, I wrote a SaaStr post on this recently, but The agent force, 70% open rate, which on its surface is jaw-droppingly high, right? Let me dig into that for just one second. And the 15% of revenue from London. This is a theme I call having agents do the work humans don't want to do or unwilling to do. Okay. So the 15% of ticket revenue folks coming here, we, for 6 years on and off, we tried to get our human SDRs to help us reach out to return attendees to get them to come to SaaS Trail in London. They just wouldn't do it. It wasn't worth their time. They wanted to hunt a 6-figure sponsorship. So we'd ask them, we'd give them incentives, we'd give them Starbucks cards, we'd beg them. They wouldn't do it. And they said they'd do it. And then finally we would use tools like Amendement Attentive and we see they didn't actually do it and they lied. Okay, so that 15%, here's the point. It's a lift, a lift without the agent we wouldn't have gotten. So I know a lot of folks, again, going to service companies that want to turn on an AI SDR and have it magically create revenue. Another way is understand calmly which parts of your funnel, which parts of your go-to-market process is not even happening. Is it even remotely optimized? Where are the leads where it's just not like your team says they want to do them, but they don't want to do the small leads. They want to do the, the low scored leads, you know, and that's what that 15% is. The Agentforce one, if you didn't read this or catch it, that why is it that this is a amazing and a tragedy at the same time. These are folks who reached out to us and said they wanted to sponsor SaaStr for 5 or 6-figure tickets, and we did not respond to them. As our human team—
not because we didn't like round robin it, not because I kept crying. It's just because our SDRs just said it wasn't worth their time.
They mentally leave. And everyone is like, you're going to say they don't do it. Every salesperson is managing their time. They're gonna, they're gonna, they're gonna, they're gonna force rank their leads in their head. They're gonna put all their effort into that one big deal that's gonna close this quarter, a little bit of effort into the small ones and nothing to the bottom.
