Innovative Revenue Leader - The Future of BDRs Compilation
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Speaker 2: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Innovative Revenue Leader Podcast. I'm your host, Seth Mars. Join me as we deliver practical insights to help B2B CROs Find new and innovative ways to grow in this fast changing environment. The Innovative Revenue Leader is sponsored by Sandler, a triad company, empowering sales professionals and leaders to master the craft of selling at all levels.
seth-marrs_25_07-20-2026_080900: Welcome back to the Innovative Revenue Leader podcast. Over the past year, the role that has generated the most focus in terms of being replaced by AI has been the BDR. To better understand the reality of this, I interviewed go-to-market business leaders that have significant experience working with BDR teams.
One thing that was clear from those conversations is the future isn't about replacing the BDRs. The, the future is about optimizing them. So the days of high volume spray and pray outreach really are over, so that old role of the BDR. But today's po- top-performing [00:01:00] BDRs are using AI, buying signals, better data to eliminate repetitive work and, and repetitive conversations or content to customers.
So the, the ones that are doing that are, are actually seeing pipelines increase and the value of the BDR go up. So this means using things like AI-created account research and more customized messaging have better-- have led to better conversations with prospects. So in this compilation, you'll hear from four different people and, and see four different perspectives on where this role is heading.
James Buckley shares why quality and timing have become far more important than activity volume, and why the next generation of BDRs will succeed by being relevant, not just relentless in their pursuit of contacts and, and pushing volume. Kathy Mackey, the Co-Founder of Invirta, explains how AI is making personalization at scale a reality while raising the bar for human [00:02:00] judgment, accountability, and critical thinking.
And then Kyle Smith, the CEO of The Bridge Group, breaks down what companies are getting right and wrong as they integrate AI into their sales organizations, and why the best teams are using technology to amplify people rather than replace them. And then finally, Peter Mullings comes on. He's the VP of Marketing at Nooks.
He offers a perspective on how the BDR role continues to evolve alongside changing buying expectations, highlighting the importance of adapting skills, processes, and go-to-market strategies to meet that more informed buyer and succeed when you're in- when you're interacting with them. So if, if there's one thing that comes from all these conversations, it's that the BDR role isn't going away.
It's, it's just the role is, is elevating, and those that are doing it will need to elevate their game and take advantage of these things to be successful. I hope you enjoy. Let's dive in.
[00:03:00]
James Buckley: Yeah, so my opinion is that this thing is not actually a tool that's changing B2B right now. It's this idea that buying signal intelligence has to be leading the way. For a successful outbound venture, what does this mean? It means that not only do you need a tool in place that serves up signals, both buying signals and intent signals.
We can talk about the difference if you like. Right, but those signals have to be constantly being put in front of salespeople, and the salespeople have to be message ready to be able to respond in context to those signals, and that is what has become the most successful today. It used to be. Trigger LED sales and this required some research.
Uh, once chat GPT became [00:04:00] mainstream and people were using it more than Google, it was like, okay, well tell me the best sales triggers I need for this company. Right? I do this all the time. So helpful for us to be able to get that information served up to us on a silver platter so that that messaging can super-duper bee.
Can be super duper specific and f and form to the needs of the persona and the company that you're actually reaching out to. Gone are the days of more is the answer. Any leader out there that's listening to this, if you're telling your people to do more shame on you, stop this. The key is to do better.
squadcaster-9b3a_1_04-23-2026_100742: So what what's interesting is like the, the human AI I hybrid, that's what I'm really seeing,
seeing as being compelling. Um, You know, the pure ai, just doing it on its own, utterly, utterly on its own is. Is just not, not effective. But the bringing the two together, I think is, is what I think is, is super innovative. And why, why it is, is because, first off, on the, on the, uh, um, the recipient side, if you will, I don't, I, [00:05:00] I don't know about you, but I, I get too much of this. Um, You know, the AI slop as they say, You know, that's just, You know, clearly hollow, clearly lacking any kind of passion or conviction or humanity to it. And if I'm spending a hundred thousand dollars on a solution, if I'm spending a thousand dollars on a solution, I wanna make sure that there's someone on the other end of the line once I purchase something. That is, uh, gonna be there to support me. And so I do want to buy from people even at the, even at the low end of the market.
And we still see that. And I, I think we're gonna continue to see that that sales is gonna remain that, that human side of things. what's interesting is, of course, AI has a massive role and that's, um, doing things like the, the science if you will, side of, of selling. So the way, the way I think that's like really innovative is when people are able to combine those two things effectively, the science and the art, the human and the ai or the AI and the human. And one of the ways that I've seen that as being, uh, as like one of the most interesting and compelling ways that I've seen some of our customers do that is they'll be using [00:06:00] AI in order to gather these signals. You know, maybe, uh, looking across all of their CRM data, let's say discover what, You know, what was the reason why a deal was lost six months ago?
Maybe it was security reason, let's say. Um. And looking across all of, um, You know, external signals that are out there. You know, maybe that's, uh, posts on, um, on X or maybe it's a, um, a 10 K form or something. But AI is fantastic at being able to pull together all that information from all those sources. But what the, again, the innovative part is combining in that with the human side. And so there. what we often see our, our customers doing is having conversations lower in the stack below the line, as, as you say.
Um, So, um, let's say that you're calling, let's say that your, your buyer is a, ciso, chief Information Security Officer. You have like one shot to convince that CISO that, that they should be talking to you, [00:07:00] right? Like if you, if you manage to get them on the phone and your pitch falls flat. but if you instead are calling in to the manager of it and the director of email infrastructure and the whatever, and you're getting insights from them they're gonna be much more open, right? And you're getting insights from them into what? What works. You combine that with the AI generated intel that you're getting from previous interactions, from publicly available data, the first party and third party together, the human and the AI together. That's how you build a great business case
kathy-macchi_1_04-03-2026_140940: So I'm gonna, uh, 'cause this is BDRs. There's a colleague we're working with who I think has done the best job of rethinking from scratch the whole BDR, and I'll say sales motion.
seth-marrs_20_04-03-2026_150941: Yeah.
kathy-macchi_1_04-03-2026_140940: And how I look at is he's what was previously, I'll say unscalable parts of the Go-to-market. He has done it without sacrificing relevance.
So, um, You know, you always had to choose, and I'd love your opinion. You, to me, you always had to choose, you wanna [00:08:00] scale or I wanna do relevance or personalization.
seth-marrs_20_04-03-2026_150941: Yeah.
kathy-macchi_1_04-03-2026_140940: That's abm one to one, one to few. One-to-one. Like you
seth-marrs_20_04-03-2026_150941: Yeah.
kathy-macchi_1_04-03-2026_140940: At
seth-marrs_20_04-03-2026_150941: Yeah.
kathy-macchi_1_04-03-2026_140940: Marketing, sales, it's always the same way. And doing almost the one-to-one or that personalization. To me, that was a luxury. Like you had to have accounts that were worth doing it, and now it's with ai, it's. I think economically feasible to that for a large amount of accounts, like you can suddenly do deep research. There's a lot, I'm seeing a lot accounts going down, what I'm calling micro verticals now
seth-marrs_20_04-03-2026_150941: Oh.
kathy-macchi_1_04-03-2026_140940: To get that messaging really on point. I've seen people do tailored demos. Now you can do really more relevant outreach. You can have personalized landing pages and then think of all that institutional knowledge, like we just work with a client and basically we're just going through. All their Gong Scripts, You
seth-marrs_20_04-03-2026_150941: Yep.
kathy-macchi_1_04-03-2026_140940: The stuff in Salesforce, like, so the BDR has that history, like, oh, they did engage with us three years ago.
We lost the deal. Like how? And before it would take them, this one BDR was working on, he said it would [00:09:00] take 'em two or three hours if it was really a large account to look at all that history. You can just serve that all up now it's there for 'em. You know, like,
seth-marrs_20_04-03-2026_150941: Yes.
kathy-macchi_1_04-03-2026_140940: To me, just being able to do that at scale, that was just not possible.
You know, only could do it for your 10 best accounts like that Was it.
seth-marrs_20_04-03-2026_150941: Yeah, you would, you would have to because it took so long to do it. And now it's like, so, so this person's found a way to act, uh, is it that they've found a way because like that personal, it's really interesting, and you and I have talked about this, that ability to personalize at the top of the funnel.
squadcaster-9b3a_1_04-23-2026_100742: we just, we just actually just launched like our, our sequencing a couple months ago and like we, we basically went back to the foundations and said. Does it make sense to have these, um, uh, very linear, very uh, one after another sequences where on day one you're gonna do this, and day three you're gonna do that? Of course not because people, uh, interact with, with [00:10:00] that message in different ways. You're getting different information back all the time. If you send an email and you get the open, that's, uh, you and, uh, you get a reply of some of, or even better, you get a reply, You know, you're getting information, you get someone on the phone, you're getting information, and of course that should influence what happens in the rest of rest of your outreach. so let's just take like an easy example of day one I call. And, um, I get, I get someone on the line. Maybe they, they weren't able to talk right then, but I got one question out, or they gave me one tiny bit of information like, Hey, I can't talk right now because I'm heading to a conference.
I don't know. Intel that like AI can transcribe, can turn into a message for that follow up email. Um, otherwise the follow up email, if it's just, You know, a, a linear sequence. What, is it gonna be? It's just gonna be, um, next, You know, here's this case study, You [00:11:00] know, like, or whatever. Like it, it's, you've got intel use it, right?
And so that's where I think the AI is, is it can dynamically, um, support that. And you're, you're also right about like the humanity side of things. that's why we think it's so important to have the human in the loop because. Um, you don't want to just have the, you hang up the phone and there's an AI just shoots out an email without any kind of thought.
You
want to, you Want the sales rep, um, to be able to customize that, to tailor it to their own voice, um, to maybe have some extra nuance. Maybe there's some other context that's outside of the, the AI's purview. You know, having that human in the loop just again, reinforces what you're saying, which is the, the idea of making that, that premium human relationship, that's your differentiator is, is the humanity that you're reinserting.
kathy-macchi_1_04-03-2026_140940: I've seen both work. I've seen
both fail. Uh, I think if it's integrated [00:12:00] and it's well led. I think it can work. Like to me, if you're working off the same accounts, you have the same you have the same handoffs, you, You know, same definition of success, but I think it has to do with the leader. The leader doesn't know your ICP, your territory dynamics, your conversion rates, your pipeline impact.
I mean, someone has to own that business outcome and, but. week when we were talking, someone brought up a really good point that I hadn't thought of, because I think a lot of times marketing, it's almost like it's a good way to weed out some of that stuff,
seth-marrs_20_04-03-2026_150941: Yeah.
kathy-macchi_1_04-03-2026_140940: But what you brought up was BDRs don't dream about becoming marketing people. wanna become salespeople,
seth-marrs_20_04-03-2026_150941: Yep.
kathy-macchi_1_04-03-2026_140940: I hadn't thought about that and I was like. I've seen it work both ways
seth-marrs_20_04-03-2026_150941: Yeah.
kathy-macchi_1_04-03-2026_140940: Some, I think marketing can bring things like we're just really trying to qualify and there's long, they're teaching them who to contact, how to work accounts, how to qualify.
[00:13:00] They're managing it. They're following up like stale, like stale leads. Like do they know how to manage that function Yes. But a lot of them really, if, if they can't do that marketing or sales, it's just gonna fail.
seth-marrs_20_04-03-2026_150941: so I mean, a lot of it is just, I mean, it's about the leadership of it. It seems like if you're unified as a leadership group. There's no reason it can't work. And where it sits becomes almost wherever you think it works best. But if you're siloed, you're almost, it doesn't matter where it sits, it's gonna fail both ways because it takes both those groups to properly engage a customer.
kathy-macchi_1_04-03-2026_140940: Right, and you need someone who's inspecting that, who can look at pipeline progression, who can give feedback, who can get roadblocks outta the way. Like if you're doing that as a marketing leader in speeds and you have a good organization, you're sharing all that up, we're sharing the same countless we're
sharing, Then I think sales leaders will see who's good.
And if they wanna go in a BDR up into AEs, they could.
seth-marrs_20_04-03-2026_150941: Yeah. It's not like if you're in marketing that you're like, they [00:14:00] salespeople don't see you. You're still the conduit of handing off all the oppor. They're gonna know who's good, who's not good.
kathy-macchi_1_04-03-2026_140940: They know who's good or who's not.
seth-marrs_20_04-03-2026_150941: Yeah.
kathy-macchi_1_04-03-2026_140940: I thought she brought up a good point, like BDRs don't dream of becoming CMOs,
Kyle Smith: It matters a lot, but there's not one answer.
Seth Marrs: Say more.
Kyle Smith: So it definitely matters, but it's different for every company and it's different as you go through different stages of evolution. And so really what I'm looking for is two things. What percentage of the SDR team's time is going to be spent on inbound lead management? And then two, who knows the most about what if, what is required to actually operate a best in class? Sales development function. And so I'll give you two scenarios. early stage company with no inbound to be spoken of, a marketing leader who's focused on building a brand and name recognition in the space and doing some lead gen. I don't know if the SDR team's gonna be best suited there, where we have a top a hundred list of [00:15:00] prospects that are lookalikes of the first 20 customers that we've gotten. The SDR can add some significant value. It should probably be more closely aligned with sales. They're gonna need to be nimble.
They're gonna maybe take things further in the sales process than I would like if I was designing the team like that makes. It's a no-brainer. I would want that group to be sales aligned because they're gonna need to be tight and they're gonna need to be able to move fast and there's not some really well-defined process where they're gonna pick up inbound leads and partner with marketing to support field marketing events and push things across the line over to sales. And another scenario, you might have a really robust inbound engine that's pushing 1200 MQ ls a month are perfectly aligned to the ICP or is as close as it's humanly possible. And all we're trying to do is book introductory meetings because our ICP is extremely well defined. We sell into a commoditized space and they are just churning through these inbound leads and maximizing the conversion rate and a one, [00:16:00] one and a half percent difference on conversion rate is a massive difference on total source pipeline from the group. an instance like that, I might say. Okay. Yeah. Like and the marketing leader like know, has had an SDR team before, knows how to get them to be efficient and, and cares about coaching and professional development in that group. Sure. Align it to marketing it does matter.
Kyle Smith: It's a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Okay.
We saw win rates decline because of macro pressure. we're not seeing worse sales, we weren't seeing worse sales execution, just macro pressure. Win rate came down. win rate for a decade was like 25% in general was like a fair number that you could throw out there. You are gonna win 25% of the deals, which means, although it's not exactly like this, but let's just say for simple math, you need four x coverage. Well then we saw win rate drop to 18%. Let's call it 20. now you need five x.
And so you know, [00:17:00] hey, we saw a win rate decrease, so we need more pipeline. But the answer was not, or the response was not to actually increase. More of the same pipeline. It was to just move the goalpost. It was just, we'll just get more opportunities in the door. Well, how do we get more opportunities in the door? There might be eight things that we're doing, but one of them is we'll just book the meeting sooner. Just get them in front of the AE faster because we need more pipeline. And then the win rate goes down even more. And then, so that's what I, when I say it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, that's what, I saw happening. so I think there's merit to getting. It depends on what's happening. Go listen to I, I like inspection first.
Like, I don't jump to conclusions like, yeah, sure, we do these benchmarking reports and I have a solid idea of where I think you should be, but I need to know what's going on in the organization.
Go listen to uh, 50 qualification and discovery calls.
And sometimes I'll listen to qualification calls and be like, whoa, we have SDR teams trying to be [00:18:00] AEs today, and they're talking themselves out of opportunities because they're not there yet. And they took the conversation three steps past where it should have gone and. book the meeting as a result because they weren't equipped to go where they were trying to take the call in that instance. Sure. Like I, I'm gonna walk back qualification and be like, Hey, listen, like we gotta get them over the line sooner. Or you're introducing budget conversations, which is unnatural as part, like, they, it doesn't make sense to bring it up.
Then this is, this feels. Weird and uncomfortable and clearly is not appropriate for that stage of the sales process for your product. And so yeah, I've walked back qualification plenty of times, but that's not what I saw happening at the, on the larger scale is just, Hey, we need five x now, so get more ops.
James Buckley: because because they, that's exactly what you want them to be doing with their time. Not closing deals, digging through shitty leads. That came from marketing, right? That's exactly what they should be spending there. What the heck are you talking? No, absolutely not. Two [00:19:00] things, one. I agree that AEs should prospect.
Let me get that out of the way.
Seth Marrs: there's a type of prospecting though.
James Buckley: there is a full cycle rep that exists that is easily the hot commodity in the market today. They know how to prospect, they know how to automate the right things. They know how to write effective messaging. They know how to use AI and automation to set up systems that create these things that put new people in front of them consistently.
Kudos to these people. I am supportive. 100% of account executives who prospect, however, most AEs are not excited to get out of selling mode and pipeline management mode and go prospect new accounts from scratch.
If you want them to prospect, they have to understand that. That's gonna take away time.
Leaders have to understand that's gonna take away time from working existing pipe, which by the way, is what you're gonna hold my toes [00:20:00] over the fire for at the end of the month in our one-on-one meeting. So no one is suggesting that account executives shouldn't have to prospect. I think that's false, right?
That's a misnomer. What I am suggesting is it makes zero sense to think to yourself as a leader, I'll just fire the SDRs because the account executives are gonna prospect, know the fuck they won't. In fact, I would wager that they will find a thousand other things to do before they prospect. And this is not a shot at account executives.
It's just the reality of what it takes to manage an effective pipeline today. If you have 15 deals with any kind of momentum behind them, that's your priority every single day of your life to get those deals over the finish line that you have momentum with. That means if it's not marketing, picking up the slack to book new conversations, which by the way is new, where new revenue comes from 100% of the time, I don't give a fuck what you sell.
That's true. [00:21:00] Right. If that's true, and marketing's not picking up that slack, there needs to be an SDR team, A BDR team, even if you're outsourcing it, which is very popular today.
You know and loads of great solutions out there for it. By the way, you can even find AI solutions that you get to train and it will do it for you at scale.
There are too many solutions to book new meetings for us to say that BDR is not necessary. It's just different and, and it's a specialized role and still an entry level role at this point.
Speaker: And that wraps up another episode. Thank you for joining. For show notes and other episodes, visit us@innovativerevenueleader.ai. The Innovative Revenue Leader is sponsored by Sandler, a Trilia company. Sandler provides top corporate sales and business development training while empowering sales professionals and leaders to master the graph of selling at all levels.