Jason M. Lemkin says SDRs won't disappear, but they need to adapt. Pick one painful workflow problem, train an AI agent yourself to understand how it works, then teach your team. A $10B company tried handing an untrained AI to junior reps and expected it to work immediately, which doesn't.
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What are some, if someone's listening to this, like, oh man, my job is in trouble. What should I focus on?
It's gonna sound simple. It will work. And most, almost nobody's doing this. Pick a tool, an agent, an agentic tool to solve one of your problems. It doesn't almost matter. Just one that's the most painful or the one that's most acute. It could be support, it could be SDR, it could be inbound qualification. Pick one, pick a leading vendor. I don't care which one it is. Okay, we can talk about how to pick a vendor, but pick a leading vendor that treats you well, that you like, and do it yourself. Train the agent, ingest the data, do the iterations, understand how the damn thing works. Okay? The folks that are lost today have never done it. We literally, we've turned into a consulting shop, Lenny. It's kind of crazy. I, I don't know what I think about it. but we literally just did a job. Amelia, our Chief AI Officer, and, and Mia, she, she, she drove it. We did a call with a public B2B company worth well over $10 billion that you would think is an AI leader. Okay. And we did a call with their team and they're like, we're struck. We want to figure out this AI SDR stuff. They're like, great. You're like, we think we're just going to buy this tool and just give it to our SDRs to figure it out on their own. Okay. One, no chance. Two, we asked them, how much of this have you done yourself? Like, have you, have you done it yourself? And it was just crickets on this call of 20 people. No one had done it theirself. So they thought they could take an untrained agent with no training and just magically give it to a bunch of young 20-year-old SDRs and, and this magically would sell on its own.
