A short conversation between Emilia and Jason M. Lemkin about deploying AI tools for sales teams. They argue that organizations should not hand AI tools to inexperienced BDRs/SDRs without processes, a single source of truth, and a staged rollout—recommendations include selecting one tool, defining who feeds contacts, routing responses, and piloting on untouched leads before wider deployment.
Don't think you should just unleash an AI you do not know how to use. They were literally calling me to ask me how we do all this. I was like, okay, so let me get this right. You don't know how to use it now you know, we're learning, we're like figuring this out. I was like, valid. But also, if you don't know how to use it, why do you expect that your brand new BDRs and SDRs that you literally just hired in the last zero to three months will know how to use the AI version?
In all fairness, it sounds silly to us, okay? But if we think pre AI in the old days, you might buy Outreach or Sales Loft. And you should, and you should put processes in place and you should build templates for your team. But a lot of smaller groups will just hand it to their SDR teams. Pick your, pick the tool. In fact, a lot of them would even give them budget. Pick the tool you like, pick your mix max or Outreach and Sales Loft. Whichever one you like. Write your own kind of crummy cadences and set them loose. It doesn't work in AI.
It doesn't work.
And so their idea, this was a very strong, well respected, billion dollar AI B2B company. They wanted to do the same here. They want to just hand the tool to their brand new SDRs, let them train it and figure it out, do all that segmentation and sequencing. Emilia. And figured it would just magically work.
It's not silly at all. And I actually, I talk like when I walked them through why they shouldn't do that, they were like, oh, you're totally right. Like, they're like, okay, we like, now we're almost a little embarrassed. We thought we wouldn't just unleash it on all of our like BDRs and SDRs that were humans. Because now it makes sense. So like, we need to feed it, like we need to figure out, pick who's going to feed it contacts. Is it sales, marketing, cs? Okay, which contacts? Okay, Once it gets a response, who does that go to? And they were like, oh, we haven't thought about these things yet. I was like, oh, think about those things first. Maybe do like a little map of how you're going to use the contacts and then roll it out. Like roll it out with contacts right now that no one's touching. I'm like, whatever agent SDR thing you're looking at and just buy one. Like you're looking at three. Just pick one. You literally have this set of everyone has this set of leads no one is touching. I was like, all right, do that first. And then when that works and you've got it figured out and you've got it tuned in like, you know, six weeks, then you can start to roll it out to like the leads and then, you know, stair step it go from there. Also why this worked is we have a single source of truth. And that's what I told this company as well. I go, you need to have one single source of truth of which agents get which contacts, what follow up are they getting, what CTA are they getting, what do we do with them when they close? You know, the AI doesn't really ask for a lot of commissions, so you got to figure that part out. Who handles the renewals if the AI closes the entire thing by itself? Right. These are all things you should think about as you're deploying it.
