By the end of the year, AI should kill the classic human SDR/BDR screening inbound leads
It’s just a horrible experience for the prospect — waiting days for a 20 year old entry level sales rep to get back to you and get on the phone to qualify you out … or send you to an AE…
— Jason ✨👾SaaStr 2025 is May 13-15✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) January 10, 2025
Perhaps the single worst experience in B2B sales is “Contact Me”.
I don’t just mean the lack of transparent pricing inherent to that flow. I don’t even mean the need to get on the phone instead of communicating otherwise. Having a separate flow for large enterprise deals makes complete sense.
What I mean is the process is terrible, and worse than ever. A prospect shouldn’t have to wait — often days— to talk to sales to buy your product.
They should be contacted right here and now.
Even worse, a prospect shouldn’t have to wait days to talk to an entry-level SDR/BDR that qualifies them in or out without providing any value. Few processes are worse than hitting “Contact Me”, getting some sort of response that then takes days to schedule a Calendly meeting … with a first-time hire than knows almost nothing about the product … who then decides if you are worth the company’s time to talk to an AE.
It’s just awful.
Can AI replace a great outbound SDR? We will see. I suspect No. Instead, the great outbound SDRs will become Mech AEs, armored with amazing AI tools. But they will still hunt and help the best prospects:
But the “Contact Me” process has always been broken and terrible. 2025 should be the end of it.
