Ashley Kelly built Rippling's outbound sales team to book 1,300 demos in September alone. Half come from phone calls. The takeaway: outbound sales at scale still works, and AI won't kill the role.
50%
About 18 months ago (from the time of the remark).
Approximately 1,300 demos.
I think the first one is there's obviously a lot of people out there, I think these days that reference things like Outbound is dead or dying, or like that AI is going to replace first SDRs and then account executives, all that good stuff. There's a bunch of reasons why I don't believe any of that, but there's one, like, very important and obvious reason that every time somebody says that, I'm like, well, you clearly don't do Outbound well or at scale. And the reality is that's because 50% of our demos that are booked in outbound are booked over the phone. That was a shocking stat to me when we hired Ashley Kelly, who runs our outbound sales. Org 18 months ago. Credit to her, really, for building the Outbound sales. Org. If I was building it personally, I'm sure we would not be doing anywhere near as well as we are. But she was like, yes, like this still. And I thought it was crazy. Like, I don't particularly answer my phone call to cold calls and all that kind of stuff. And so it feels so unnatural. That would be how it's done. But in this month, in September alone, we'll book probably 1300 outbound demos across our various different outbound teams.
