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hey welcome back again so it's our third part of our our virtual event now we'll be talking about um the future of sales development we'll have more than 80 minutes currently we have alex greyer from set sail he is the senior director of sales development operations there so hi alex hi william thanks for having me on how have you been how are you doing i'm doing great thank you i'm in beautiful denver colorado the leaves are changing uh couldn't be a better time of year to be in denver oh wow cool cool um so yeah today we'll be talking about the future of sales development i actually have been following set sail for a while and then i realized yeah that's for sure a part of our sales future actually yeah hi morgan what's happening alex what's going on man hey morgan long time to see how you been funny been a minute man i've been good good yeah man you've been you've been moving and shaking you're doing big things i know i'm just you know i'm just just trying to do what i got to do you know hustling always hustling always always and as a lakers fan i appreciate the mama mentality there in the background appreciation oh yeah you know rest in peace as a whole but you know i always have mad love for everything kobe has done he taken way too soon because he like his just his investments and from a business standpoint where he was about to go was about to be so just cool to see but it's tough for sure he had a plan for sure he did he did cool excited to talk shop with you william uh yeah you've got cool great questions for us so uh let you uh yeah cool so very first question i don't know each other guys or they just yeah we've known each other for a few years morgan's invited me on his podcast um a big fan of everything morgan's doing we uh we run in the same circle sometimes yeah awesome awesome so yeah guys we can get started we have i would say the theme of triple a triple a photograph when you play computer games so you know we have triple a uh sdr leaders and celsius so let's get started so now we're talking about the future of sales development how it will evolve so our very first question uh we're not talking about sales development itself but from from volley to skynet are you afraid of ai and junction learning something like that who do you want to go first i'm not i'm not scared at all i'm not scared yeah at all i honestly like i'm really not like and now if you watch i robot you might be you might be terrified but here's the thing about ai but here's also the thing about anything is that if you look at for the past let's say the past 25 years you'll notice that slowly but surely jobs get eliminated due to technology as a whole right you go to the grocery store and you notice there's less and less lines i was in the grocery store last weekend there was like three lines of people working but everything else was self-service at some point all of those will probably be self-service right so ultimately what happens is that you have to evolve your skills skills is what's going to help you get not eliminated so am i am i personally scared about it no can other people be scared about it probably because that means you need to level up because the ai only accelerates and helps you right it can obviously take you out though if you're not evolving and a book that i read from for bob iger he was the ceo of disney chairman of disney disney and one of the things that set out to me a book and he he literally said innovate or die that's literally the scenario here if you're not innovating if you're not leveling up then eventually not you'll actually die but you will die out and you'll not have the opportunities that you want so that's where i would start with this one yeah man i mean i i come from a similar place where i understand the fear um if you feel like your job is going to be directly replaced by some level of automation the the reality is with with technology especially is if your job can be automated there's going to come a point where a computer can do that job for you but that does not mean that the job is eliminated there's other opportunities that get created i mean this is happening over and over again in history the industrial revolution with machinery the shift from fossil fuels to green energy jobs go away but new jobs get created ultimately what i feel is that the truth is i think what's going to be a big theme of this conversation is how these tools how automation how ai frees up humans to do other much higher value tasks and and you're not doing the tedious minutiae that could be done and will be done by a computer so i'm excited about it because it frees people up to do other high value activity yeah awesome i'm actually on your side because uh i'm gonna say i'm excited to see the future of ai but to be honest a few years ago i was on the opposite side remember when they uh accepted that gdpr law i was afraid that's it sales development i'm gonna die sell some game is gonna die so i just and i just went to my to my product manager for a p of product and said okay so what am what are we doing here our like product i'm gonna be like useless but he said no worries it shouldn't change anything so i guess the same with ai that's gonna just help us okay second question now let's talk about sales development and let's talk about meat like uh midterm trends so what do you think how how sales development will change in two three years from now are there any significant trends you see is a good one because because it's like a lot of it depends on what happens like from a global macro standpoint right things that are not in our control whatsoever right uh i would say though when it comes to this is that i believe that the role will become more specialized and they'll be even more they'll be less journalists and so what i mean by that is i think they'll be like more one-to-one if you're already starting to see it more one-to-one sdrs with aes you'll also start you'll actually start seeing some organizations have done expansion sdrs so what they're doing is their account managers they typically may not know actually they may not know the the process of how to prospect not to say that they don't know what they're doing it's just this is not their normal thing so they'll take sdrs that have done really well and they'll make them expansion sdrs and dive back into existing customer bases to then schedule meetings for the ams or whoever it may be so where i see the role going is it becomes more specialized where we already obviously have strategic and enterprise but it's going to be like you're going to be a healthcare enterprise sdr and this is the only thing that you do and i think we're going to start getting in that direction because buyers are obviously going to continue to get more knowledgeable so we have to make sure that the seller becomes more knowledgeable and if they're only focused on one segment if they're only focused on one thing it's gonna be easier now how that works out from a pipeline standpoint depending on how the money flows from the investment standpoint too but i would say that that sales development the changes is gonna be more granular it's going to be more specialized and you may even have less sdr's as a whole because it's going to be more specialization at least that's what i'm sensing that's what i'm seeing all the time will tell though yeah man um i'm seeing that too i'm seeing ratios shrink i'm seeing more specialization on ldr versus bdr versus expansion bdr we even had uh at cloudera we had a services arm specific to training and so we flipped an sdr to focus exclusively on finding those services opportunities uh so that's one area for sure i think another macro change that i'm seeing is you know i think most companies out there that are building out their tech stack have now turned to a tool like reply.io and similar ones that really help do activity at scale and so the consequence of that was you saw the sdr role become effectively a mass email marketer type role for a lot of people and i'm seeing the pendulum starting to swing back you know doing that you're you're run a very high risk of that that communication becoming noise and being ignored so using those tools using tools like reply dot io still to orchestrate your tasks but be swing the pendulum back to more of a task reminder tool to really you know personalize the message a little bit more make it a higher higher white glove type touch and really then shifting from activity focused management which i'm still seeing a lot of a lot of you know minimum number of dials minimum number of emails minimum number of new contacts added per day less of that or maybe less priority on that and more on quality and effectiveness measuring those pieces you know are we reaching the right people and getting responses and high quality responses and setting up those meetings versus pure volume activity-based type metrics got it got it so cool yeah actually um yeah sounds like you you're right here because uh i'm not sure but uh currently i can see lots of sdrs uh needed in the cyber security space for example like right so as you mentioned before current healthcare okay so the third question it's uh more about like definitely future what do you think in by 2020s it's like imagine it's 20 30 first year so how how does sales development look like it's still alive to rely on our channels or it's something new something different yeah i mean morgan hit on it really well and in the last question i think where i'd expand on that is listen we just had a and we're still in a global pandemic and the sdr role is here to stay in fact it's thriving it's more mission critical than ever as far as the uh you know the primary way of developing pipeline so if anything i see organizations doubling down i mean when i started as an sdr myself in 2015 it was a one to six sdr ae ratio i was i was supporting six aes we're already seeing companies shrink that down to one to two one to one pods i'm even hearing companies having multiple sdrs per ae so the ratio is starting to flip so that's a big thing specialization as morgan was talking about the other big thing is i'm seeing the the job market being very very competitive now so i'm seeing pay increases and quota thresholds adjusting as uh as the years go by it's no longer you know a very entry-level uh type uh pay for the sdrs with really high unreasonable type quotas um the sdrs that are seasoned and like being in that role see right through that and um are gonna push back on unreasonable quotas and and pay that is too low compared to the rest of the job market um yeah this is a well in terms of channels don't be surprised when people are doing virtual cold calls where it just pops on your phone don't be surprised if these things happen right because when the first iphone came out like around 20 2008 2007 so it was about 13 years ago so if you think about like in the next 10 years there'll probably even crazier stuff that will be out there from a technology standpoint so the way that we would go about this would be completely different if we really think i'll think about it right so what i would tell you though is that everything that was being said here is accurate i think the thing that we have to think about here is in terms of how pipeline will be allocated how who is going to be responsible for the pipeline right because what can happen in the future is that the aes might start getting more responsibility to build pipeline then the role completely changes then now it's like well maybe we get like i mentioned earlier we have way less strs because we have aes building out pipeline maybe marketing complete changes from a demand standpoint so now you don't need the top of funnel as much as you need from the ncrs those are other factors that take in consideration of like what the scr will be at the end of the 2020s but to answer the question i still believe in the specialization piece i really think that people will come in and be like this is going to be your role and what's going to happen is because of all the ai and technology in the background it's going to feed you insights i don't have to do as much research right it's all going to be fed right to me and all i have to do is pull the lever to figure out how i'm going to make that call how am i going to do that email and there'll probably be multiple digital channels at that point so i really just think about it as the seo will be there it'll be very product you're going to understand all the product stuff because you're going to have so much information in your database you're going to understand all the research because someone will already have a tool that will feed it to you and your job is just to pull levers to make sure it's relevant on how a human would talk like because of the technology that we'll have at that point amazing yeah cool cool so nothing to worry to you for sdrs and sdr leaders i guess here right okay when we talk about sales channels what do you think will we have any shift any changes here as well or was we will still have emails phone calls linkedin video touches as the most important part of our outreach perspective strategies or other energy changes like i could i could see video getting i could see video having it's it's relevant right now right it's during the whole entire pandemic it's easier to connect with people via video because we're not meeting in person so there's a slight uptick of that happening uh there's a there's a graphic i was looking at a couple months ago the highest engagement rate for people from an sr standpoint was actually on linkedin though so i am going to say in the next five years that the best way to schedule and interact with people is going to be connecting with people on a social network like linkedin there may be a new one that comes on five years who knows and connecting with those people in a digital and human way via video because there's going to be a lot of things across the board and to answer that question no i wouldn't have any concerns about that across the board because it's on linkedin there's not there's no spam filter that can occur through linkedin if it's email yes but on linkedin no because there's no spam filter so essentially you could connect with people one to one and it's actually easier for you to do that and that's why i actually think it'd be better because you can't there's no spam filter there so that's what i would tell you is the future because more and more people are engaging on social the numbers are continuously going up the engagement rates are going up more people are signing on to linkedin the data's all there so that leads me to believe that more people will want to be more on the social networks because they're going to want to be more social because maybe outside of their world they want to go learn more information whatever that may be so i see the future of that being on the linkedin platform if there's another platform that occurs we'll discuss it and interacting with those people via video nice i always love to hear what morgan's perspective is on this one yeah i mean listen i don't have any data to back this up but just anecdotally email and phone don't don't not do it but it's getting harder and harder to connect with those channels it's really easy for people to ignore the call it's really easy for your email to get lost in the inbox even if the personalization or the message is really good but on linkedin it is still ridiculously easy to stand out versus all of the like really bad like nondescript connect requests and really poor emails like it is insanely easy to stand out and if you insert video on top of that so much the better you know because you're able to convey much more information with your with your intonation and your body language um i think you know video is effective in in that i'm seeing people evolve it it's transitioned from the whiteboard like hi morgan the whiteboard real fast do uh you know my i'm very likely to respond if you've got a video thumbnail or gif that shows me something about my company that stands out to me with you and the picture in picture and you're telling me something specific to what we're doing i'm seeing that being super effective so social video those are interesting as far as things that come out in the future i mean clubhouse is interesting um i don't know about it as a way to engage but certainly another place where like if morgan or you know a persona that you want to connect with is having some type of uh discussion on clubhouse and they see your your face and name pop up there that's another interesting angle um you know don't discount checking out people's twitter profiles if they have them especially if marketing is your persona they usually have a profile and they blend a lot of their personal uh stuff into their twitter profiles too and so it's really interesting that direct mail is you know an old school tactic that's become new again sendoso and companies like that are doing really well and so if you see somebody's a particular type of sports fan or type of animal they love then you can use that to do really effective direct mail campaigns so there's a variety of ways that you can stand out above the email and phone method of trying to get in touch with people yep amazing so probably a few more questions for me then we have tons of questions from the chat um currently uh i'm actually also a big fan of video prospecting but currently there are a few tools uh there are tool that allows you like automate even personalized videos or for example google just uh a few years ago uh like introduced an ai they can't can book a meeting for you like with your hair cutter for example and i was like it was like four years ago 2017 i guess something like that so now maybe let's talk about an ethical part of this approach should we kind of use ai for and automate all our interactions for example using like video outreach at scale uh or what do you think or should we just keep it to the ideas yeah so there's there's a lot of these ai generated one-to-one video or you know just video tools in general capitalizing on the whole deep movement i mean it's become crazy effective um or effective in the way of like it looks authentic um you know so my take on this is this like i'm a big fan of any type of ai or automation that boosts efficiency those are huge but as far as ai that serves as a direct substitution for people and what is meant to be a one-on-one human interaction i think that's going to be a turn off so i could see it being effective for like marketing sajing but as far as having an ai bot you know communicate to somebody in my place i think would be kind of creepy now if it was my face then then maybe it would work but then that's also creepy i don't know i'm not down with deep uh just yet keyword is not just yet right so i think with this when you think of ai it's about automating things that don't necessarily need the human involved right that would require you getting away from active selling time an act of selling time for sellers typically isn't that high i don't know what the exact stat is and i don't want to butcher it but it's not that high so that's what ai comes into play it eliminates the things that a seller doesn't really need to do that is preventing them from actually selling which is their job so the job is for you to get meetings the job is for you to sell then ultimately i think this can actually derail from that purpose because what happens is that you rely on this too much and then you don't even know how to do your own pitch and then now you get rusty and you can't actually even do it and that's where the problem comes into play so i see this it could like let's say this you can a b test it you can see if it works or not i always believe in that but i think ultimately i think it would derail your impact of how you would reach out to prospects i would love to see an a b test of deep morgan versus real morgan i would too i would too it'd be interesting you see see what happened oh yeah cool so yeah i got it got it uh amazing um no probably let's go through a few questions from the chat here's one what do you think about selling via instagram in the future or even her um what is that n i i don't think about it as in the future like you could do that right now if you wanted to it depends on your audience like if your audience doesn't live on instagram then i would not be on instagram if your audience lives on pinterest then you probably need to go figure out pinterest right none of my clients live on pictures so i will never be there so ultimately what it's not about the future it's about where are your people at right now so if they're on linkedin you need to figure out linkedin if they're on twitter you need to figure out twitter so it's about where the prospects live and then you capitalize on it from there yeah now speaking of where they live i have seen advertising on linked or not only on instagram be effective like buyers now are of the instagram age you know so if they if you're doing impressions there or on tick tock or snapchat or whatever like i i do believe that that's effective as far as like sliding into the dms of your prospects on those tools i don't know about that like because it still is used more for more personal stuff whereas linkedin you know you keep it professional so um that's my take on using those types of alternate social media channels uh awesome got it so we have another great question from nathan ward i wanted to ask it later but he did it first eventually how do you think it's again about future and ai will eventually uh take over the as your role or do you believe people will still be like attached to that human element in sales like probably whether or not we need sales like interiors yeah so here's here's the macro trend that's happening is is now you're hearing the term plg a lot product led growth and so you have people that are now starting to buy b2b type tools enterprise type tools uh on individual plans where a human doesn't need to be involved but that just serves as a beachhead for a company that does sell enterprise deals to then figure out which companies are starting to show a lot of interest you know this is exactly what companies like reply zoom slack asana they all make you know versions of their product available for anybody to download if they use their business email and you see a number of people using the same domain then that's a perfect indicator that that might be the opportunity for a human to reach out to a human and start developing a dialogue to right size you know a price and package that you know serves the whole team and their purposes so i do see you know plg handling a lot of the automation piece in terms of capturing the initial customer but as far as doing the enterprise deal ultimately humans are still doing deals with humans and i don't see that going away in the near term yeah i yeah i definitely can could see that piece i've heard a lot about the product like growth as well i'm actually glad you touched on it you definitely have some good context there because that's definitely happening i know from i know from tesla i think you don't even someone told me you don't even talk to a rep you just no you just fill it out online and then they either the car shows up or something like that someone told me yeah that's pretty wild yeah i mean so that's definitely disrupted you know the car dealership industry i didn't have to talk to nobody at all yeah when i got my yeah it's insane i have i have a i have a different point that i want to make for you all so let's say you have to call say if you call airline and you have you have a question how many of you all love talking to the robot that doesn't actually answer any of your questions such a good point yes that's my phone that's my point i get i'm so mad i'm like i just want to talk to someone that's a human that can actually answer my question right until there's ai that can substitute a dialogue you're still experiencing a phone tree chat bot type experience which can only take you so far i've never found any of them to be helpful let's just say that i'm actually even more upset when i actually get someone live on the phone and i'm angry and i don't like being upset it's just they don't answer any of the questions well when you reach the point where you're trying to talk to somebody the phone tree serves no purpose you're calling because you need to talk to somebody otherwise you have done it yourself oh my god so that's my point is that i think that will be fine if they fix it in a different conversation but right now i have not seen anything that's blown me away i'll say that i agree so actually a few years ago i wanted to i i used a web hosting provider one of them and i wanted to to get my refund like it was like twenty dollars or something like that and i was on a call with with the robot for like two hours i guess i just wanted to give it a try and and i wasn't amazed because they are like i guess a.i wrote him to at least chatbots that can cancel me or request or font that's going to be awesome so it's probably nothing i think when i change it to yours yeah should be good for now um okay so we have a few more minutes um okay let's talk about uh automation we just discussed uh ai and probably here's the last question for maybe sdr leaders sdrs uh sales leaders out there so how do you think guys what should sdr leaders kind of automate like by the end of this year to have their team more productive next year first take is any type of reporting anything that requires any type of manual tracking or having managers spend time building reports and dashboards when they should be spending time with their team coaching that should absolutely be automated or delegated as much as possible the other thing that i'm starting to see automated a bit more seeing some interesting tools that help with this is is messaging um you know i i don't believe in taking the keys completely away from the individual contributors from building out the messaging but a good amount of it could be automated and then you give the the sdr ae the ability to freeform it from there so those are the two key areas um and then i'd say even more specifically any type of management of spiffs or any type of measurement of key behaviors that you would try to manually track or report on that can absolutely be automated and should be yeah i mean he took he took mine but now i'm like oh what is this one that i could recommend uh those are the ones i was gonna lean on uh i think i think it's one of those things that as a manager this would be my thing i would write down things that you feel like are preventing you from being being with your team more and then you need to write down next to it can this be automated or do i actually have to do them so i don't have an exact answer because alex took mine but what i would say is like think about it and be like okay is this taking away this take away my time am i the only person that could do this if i'm not the only person that can do this that means it could be automated who or what do i need to talk to to get that automated so that would be like the mindset from like a high level of what i would do to figure out what i do need to automate okay amazing so let's quickly sum it up first of all ai won't conquer us in the next 10 years that's for sure then as your role will be here we'll stay with us we will have some kind of specializations we will still rely on emails phone calls linkedin one-on-one communication um and sounds like a promising future i guess right yeah man it's here to assist us it's not here to take over our jobs no by no means yep okay then then guys thanks for for for visiting us for for your time and um happy to see you in the future again yeah yeah our pleasure thank you reply.io for having us and yeah thank you applause always good to see you