Anatomy of the Best Virtual SDR: 6 Key Factors
Check out the 6 factors that separate good AI SDRs from bad
Finding the right virtual SDR can sometimes feel like searching for a needle in a haystack — or worse, like trying to find the sharpest needle in a stack of other needles that all claim to be the sharpest.
Anatomy of a virtual SDR: What to look for
Virtual SDRs are software solutions that can take lead generation and nurturing work off the hands of your sales team, allowing them to focus on higher-value SDR tasks that require a human.
To find the AI SDR that works best for you, you’ll need to look at 6 key factors.
1. Personalized outreach
Personalized outreach is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s a must-have.
In a 2023 survey from Twilio, nearly half of Gen Z respondents said they’d be less likely to make a purchase following an impersonal shopping experience. At the same time, 56% of all respondents stated that they’d be repeat buyers if their experience was personalized.
To maximize your personalized outreach, an AI SDR should be able to provide:
- Unique, dynamic content generation so that every email you send is fresh, engaging, and tailored to the recipient while generated by AI.
- Deep personalization so your AI SDR creates emails that show you understand your prospect’s preferences, pain points, and past interactions.
- Ability to work with data such as LinkedIn activity, HubSpot data, lead databases, intent signals, news portals, and previous conversations with leads.
What to look for?
Ask your vendor about these things to ensure your AI SDR will give top-notch personalization:
- Sales frameworks: There are two options: Either the vendor will build sales frameworks into the core of the AI SDR, or they can provide training materials like manuals, videos, and in-product UI copy to help you fine-tune the virtual SDR to your needs.
- Success scripts: The vendor should ensure that AI bases its conversations on proven sales scripts from the best in the business. Again, these can be embedded in the AI, or the vendor can support you in training the platform.
- Easy-to-use personalization tools: Intuitive and user-friendly personalization tools will ensure that every message is tailored to every lead.
Personalization in AiSDR
We built AiSDR to provide personalized outreach and nurturing out of the box.
- No more cookie-cutter templates and tired sequences. AiSDR crafts unique emails for each prospect, ensuring every message stands out.
- We’ve also built proven sales frameworks into the platform’s functionality, so sales teams get relevant and suitable messages for every scenario.
- AiSDR incorporates the insights and strategies of over 50 sales leaders. This means your virtual SDR comes pre-primed with top-tier sales knowledge and is ready to handle any situation from day one.
- AiSDR uses a lead’s recent LinkedIn activity to personalize communication. You can also sync AiSDR with HubSpot, connect a list of contacts to a campaign, and then select which properties or data you want to use.
Thanks to all these features, AiSDR can reach every lead with a professional-sounding personalized email in less than 10 minutes.
2. Follow-ups
Follow-ups are the lifeblood of sales. In fact, first follow-up emails have been shown to bring a 220% increase in reply rates in some campaigns.
What does this mean for AI SDRs?
- AI SDRs should be able to automate the entire communication process, ensuring that your follow-ups are timely and consistent with sales framework rules.
- AI SDRs can build trust if they’re able to smartly process auto-replies and take appropriate action, such as by pausing follow-ups until the lead returns to work.
These capabilities ensure that follow-ups get to the right person at the right time instead of simply spamming an email address.
What to look for?
- AI training to classify and process standard auto-replies: Training ensures the AI can accurately respond to different scenarios, keeping your follow-ups on point.
- Email notifications: Once you’ve delegated follow-ups to your AI platform, notifications ensure you stay informed about what’s happening.
Follow-ups in AiSDR
With AiSDR, you get professional follow-ups on autopilot.
- We’re continually training and fine-tuning our AI on email classification and processing. It can easily recognize out-of-office emails, understand when a lead will be back, and pause or reroute follow-up messages accordingly.
- AiSDR can also update its contacts when a new person becomes responsible for communicating with your company.
- AiSDR offers notifications for all automated follow-up activities, such as auto-reply processing, paused messages, adding new leads, and closing old ones. You can change notification settings to suit your needs.
With these features, all your follow-ups are relevant, personalized, and timely.
3. Lead prospecting
An AI-powered SDR can supercharge your lead prospecting by searching through vast amounts of information to find companies that match your ideal customer profile (ICP) and leads who fit your buyer persona in minutes.
In fact, in one study, 25% of marketing teams who used AI frequently reported an increase in lead generation.
As your assistant in lead generation, your virtual SDR should be able to do these things:
- Search through big data to find potential leads from databases or open sources like social media.
- Use sources like a company’s website to monitor, recognize, and notify you about prospect intent.
- Enrich lead data by gathering additional information like job titles, company details, and contact information.
What to look for?
- Tools and resources for researching leads: To find the best leads, vendors should provide tools that help the AI SDR conduct thorough research.
- Tools for simplifying data enrichment: Automation tools for collecting additional lead data ensure you have all the details at your fingertips.
Lead prospecting with AiSDR
AiSDR offers advanced features for lead search.
- A built-in lead discovery engine allows it to quickly and efficiently search a database of over 700 million leads.
- AiSDR monitors four different types of intent signals to ensure you don’t miss a single lead or communication opportunity.
- Deep search capabilities dig through layers of data from public sources to uncover the most promising leads or enrich HubSpot or another contact list with essential information.
Thanks to all these, AiSDR secures a 1-5% lead-to-demo CR.
4. Mailbox warm-up
Since email warm-up is a pretty mundane job, it’s an excellent task for a virtual SDR.
A quality AI SDR knows how to increase the number of emails sent each day gradually, ensuring that your emails hit the inbox, not spam. You can sit back and relax while the AI does the heavy lifting.
What to look for?
All an AI SDR needs to carry out warm-up is instructions on how to do it well. Look for warm-up configuration tools and check that built-in automation features are based on best nurturing practices, like when and how much to increase daily outgoing volumes.
Mailbox warm-up with AiSDR
With AiSDR, you can connect as many mailboxes as needed, and the AI will warm them up simultaneously while carefully ramping up daily outgoing messages.
AiSDR checks every email address three times and takes into account any recent policy changes by email service providers. This ensures your emails are welcomed by recipients and email service providers and your bounce rate is below 5%.
5. Integrations
Having all your tools work together to share and exchange lead and customer data is a game-changer for personalization and CX.
Your virtual SDR should slot easily into this workflow. It needs the full picture of your sales process to generate relevant and personalized communication, which takes at least two types of integrations.
- First, it should integrate with major CRMs to effortlessly pull in and push out data, keeping your sales process streamlined and efficient.
- Second, it should support major email service providers like Gmail and Outlook because it’s where most of the action happens.
What to look for?
Check that integrations with your candidate AI SDR will occur without any delays, data loss, or other issues that can interfere with seamless customer communication.
Integrations in AiSDR
AiSDR offers one of the market’s deepest integrations with HubSpot, meaning you can sync your active and static lists in a snap. It also works seamlessly with Gmail and Outlook platforms, so all communication stays organized and accessible. Other integrations include Sendo, Calendly, Warmy, Apollo, RocketReach, and ZeroBounce.
And, of course, since every business is unique, AiSDR can be tailored to fit your specific needs with custom integrations.
6. Scalability
Flexibility and scalability go hand-in-hand. You want to scale your sales efforts up fast when business is growing, but you may also need to scale them down or refocus them when change happens.
A good virtual SDR will have three main features to help your business scale.
- First of all, whether you’re sending a few emails or thousands, an AI SDR should be able to scale outreach up or down to match your human resource availability.
- It should also have a flexible configuration. You should be able to tweak the SDR’s settings to match your unique approach, ensuring everything runs smoothly.
- Of course, SDRs should continuously learn, which is kind of a given because that’s what AI does.
What to look for?
- Customer support and materials: Vendors should provide customer support and materials that show you how to adjust the AI SDR to meet your needs.
- Tiered pricing: Look for tiered usage plans that will allow you to scale your AI SDR without worrying about cost.
- Ability to provide feedback: A vendor should be able to use your data to adjust the AI to work exactly how you want it to.
Scalability with AiSDR
AiSDR gives you the flexibility to ensure successful and easy scaling.
- AiSDR offers 24/7 customer support via email, Slack, and video calls. Whether you have questions or need help configuring your AI SDR, we’ve got you covered.
- There are also pricing discounts for higher email volumes, making it affordable to scale up your outreach as your business grows.
- We regularly fine-tune AiSDR’s AI to keep it at peak performance based on your feedback. Plus, you can easily configure sales personas, ensuring the AI aligns perfectly with your sales strategy.
