Episode #48: How Advanced AI Workflows Are Changing Outbound - Jordan Crawford
And why AI SDRs aren't the future
It’s a fascinating time in SaaS right now, as dozens of vendors compete to figure out the best way to use AI for outbound growth.
It’s become a bit of a punchline, but there are indeed companies offering literal AI SDRs—agents that will autonomously compose emails, send them at scale, even conduct two-way conversations.
Others see AI more as a research assistant: crawling the web and creating briefs for human sellers to consolidate info on an account or suggest relevant talking points.
My honest take after talking to about a dozen vendors / experts in the past few months: it’s a brave new world, very early in the game, and I don’t think anyone has totally figured it out just yet.
But this week I speak to someone who has a very compelling vision for how to leverage AI for outbound intelligently and sustainably: Jordan Crawford, a veteran growth expert, Clay adviser, and founder of Blueprint.
He believes growth of the future will definitely leverage AI, but it will be a team sport, with AI as a thought partner and a way to automate the deep research that was once impossible to scale.
This model is (on the surface) much less enticing compared to just turning on a firehose of AI SDR spam emails because it still requires a lot of hard work. You need to have
deep insights on the specific motivations and triggers that cause your customers to buy
a way to identify accounts experiencing those symptoms (e.g., using public web data) and the right person to reach out to
a message or offer that is unique and relevant to that specific person—an email they would “pay to receive” in Jordan’s words.
Only then can you use AI to help automate and scale this intensive process.
And yet the reason I find this model more credible is precisely because it still requires human insight and ingenuity. Importantly, this also acts as a competitive moat that will prevent your competitors from simply copying the same play.
You’d be hard pressed to find a more insightful and funny dude in this space than Jordan. Truly loved hanging out with him—this is a must-watch/listen episode.
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About Today's Guest
Jordan Crawford has been in growth for over 10 years, and for the past three and a half has been the founder of Blueprint, an agency that specializes in structuring any data from the public web about your ideal prospects. He's also been an advisor to Clay since 2021.
Key Topics
[00:00] - Introduction
[01:59] - Changes in the outbound landscape
[06:41] - How to use AI as a thought-partner
[11:28] - Why AI SDRs are not the future
[14:28] - AI in the writing process
[20:42] - What WILL replace the SDR function
[30:53] - The difference with enterprise buyers
[32:35] - Signals
[40:37] - Making AI plays resilient
[45:04] - Clay
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