By Kerry Cunningham
When great concepts and technologies come along, there are usually several good reasons to adopt them. With AI-assisted email tools like 6sense’s Conversational Email, there are two especially compelling reasons:
- It makes emailing prospects easier, and
- It makes receiving those emails much, much better
Here’s what I mean.
Unchain Your BDRs from Their Inboxes
I was once a BDR myself, and I’ve managed thousands of BDRs throughout my career. And as an analyst, I’ve consulted with about another hundred or so companies about their BDRs.
I’m deeply familiar with the role, and have a great deal of respect for it.
Because of that respect and familiarity, I believe BDRs and email writing should part ways whenever possible.
I’ve been a fan of conversational email tools for a long time — especially their ability to remove email duties from BDRs and free them up for more meaningful tasks. Back in 2020, I wrote a case study for SiriusDecisions about how Microsoft’s Global Demand Center (GDC) used an AI email assistant to:
- Make the first touch with all leads that were eligible for follow-up, and
- Alert BDRs to leads that had agreed to a conversation
BDRs were suddenly only asked to reach out to contacts who were already receptive. The result was a dramatic improvement in BDR productivity.
We liked that use case so much, we gave Microsoft’s GDC a big annual award at the SiriusDecisions European Summit that year.
AI Assistants Eliminate Email Grunt Work
Thanks to advancing Large Language Models and the rapid evolution of generative AI, conversational email is now far more powerful than it was in 2020 — or even just a few months ago.
Conversational email tools can now be trained to:
- Write in your brand’s voice
- Follow editorial guidelines, and
- Engage prospects in a back-and-forth conversation
And unlike BDRs, AI can do this at scale. No more prioritizing which contacts are invited to engage. If a contact works at a company that could buy what you sell, and if they are likely to be part of the buying group, they should get the emails.
The AI assistant is also always available for your prospects. It always responds promptly. It’s never out of the office, or forgetful, or too busy.
To be clear: The idea isn’t to replace BDRs, but to free them up to focus on conversations with the best prospects.
Conversational Email Will Redefine How We Measure BDR Impact
This represents a natural evolution, and elevation, of the BDR role.
I was there in the early days of the BDR function in B2B, and it really was just about sifting through random accounts, followed eventually by sifting through random leads, to find qualified prospects so sales didn’t have to do its own sifting.
Today, conversational email can do the sifting. This allows BDRs to add more value. Finally, we’ll be able to stop measuring BDRs by how many times they hit send or push the dial button, and instead measure them by how well they convert conversations into sales cycles.
BDRs can focus most of their energy on talking to people who have already agreed to have a conversation. At the same time, BDRs can free up time to focus on the exceptions — reaching out to unicorn contacts from the perfect accounts.
Deliver a Better Experience To Prospects
Sending an endless stream of prospecting emails is tedious — but so is receiving them.
Like most of you, I receive a lot of emails from BDRs.
In the same organizations where marketing messages are crafted by seasoned, trained professionals — and in which even those professional writers are edited and double-checked for grammar, style, brand-voice — BDRs rip off gimmicky, poorly written, unsupervised emails by the dozens every day.
These emails nearly always leave me in some combination of annoyed, bored, and skeptical. I’m confident I’m not alone in that. But we have our BDRs doing the same thing to everyone else.
Be the change you want to see in the B2B world. With conversational email, you get scale, reliability, and complete editorial control. You control the language and the tone. The AI email assistant will only be annoying if that is your brand choice.
And to be clear, automated email prospecting worked well years ago when it wasn’t nearly as smart and flexible as it is now.
A Seismic Shift for B2B Sales
We’re just a few years away from looking back at this period of time and saying to each other, “Remember back when we had people actually typing up and hitting send on emails? Yeesh!”
It’s time to move on from the low-scale, tedious, and unreliable human type-and-send paradigm. It’s time to sober up from the “hold my beer” school of email composing we experience today.
Early adopters still have a window of advantage by adopting these tools. Soon, adoption will be the default, and laggards will be at a major disadvantage. It’s time to make the switch.
