How to Train Your AI SDR Agent to Book 3 to 5 Meetings per 100 Cold Leads
Find out how to teach your AI SDR to consistently get a 3-5% meetings booked rate.
Getting your AI SDR to book 3 to 5 meetings per 100 cold leads might sound like a tall order, but it’s totally realistic with the right approach.
Like any tool, an AI SDR needs some fine-tuning and a framework to run your sales effectively.
Red flags for SDR performance
SDRs are responsible for finding and nurturing leads until they’re ready to go to demo. This is easier said than done though.
There are plenty of reasons why your SDR performance can stall.
No personalization
71% of customers expect personalized interactions with companies, while 76% get frustrated when brands fail to deliver. Your SDRs will have trouble making headway if they don’t tailor their messages to individual prospects. And this gets hard to do when they deal with too many leads.
You may find your SDRs blasting out generic email templates and sequences that fail to resonate with your prospects. Instead of winning over new customers, they could be irritating your target audience with what appears to be spammy messages.
No follow-ups
Adarsh Noronha (Sales Director for HubSpot in India) points out how today’s challenging economic climate has made relationship-building even more critical for sales. Companies put a lot of thought into every purchase, bringing in an average of five decision-makers.
You can’t expect a positive response on the first point of contact, though. Your sales reps must send timely follow-ups that foster trust and establish connections. Failure to do so could have you seeing leads stay cold or fall through the cracks altogether.
Low volume of qualified leads
Quality matters just as much as quantity when it comes to lead prospecting. Your sales outreach can only achieve so much if it knocks to the wrong audience. Imagine having agents spend much time and resources connecting with startups when only established enterprises can afford your products.
There are many reasons why your teams might reach too few qualified prospects. Your SDRs may be capturing leads from the wrong places. They may also misqualify the prospects, failing to filter out those that actually match your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Low lead conversion
Do you see your lead conversion rate dropping? Figure out the root cause. SDRs might be doing a poor job communicating the merits of your products. Or they could be sending unqualified leads down the sales funnel, leaving your closers to grapple with prospects that have yet to warm up to your offerings.
This is a direct route toward wasted resources and missed opportunities. After all, the more time your agents devote to unqualified leads, the fewer chances they get to engage those who are more likely to convert.
Success tactics for using an AI SDR
AiSDR helps companies address these SDR red flags in several ways:
- Writing personalized emails in seconds (while human SDRs take 20-30 minutes)
- Following up with 100% of leads contacted
- Finding and building high-quality lead lists
- Responding to incoming messages within 10 minutes
This is just the tip of the iceberg. And AiSDR will never get overwhelmed no matter how many emails it’s bombarded with.
Here are some success tactics for using an AI sales agent like AiSDR.
Revisit your ideal customer profile
AiSDR can research, qualify, and prioritize leads and companies based on how closely they match your buyer persona and ideal customer profile (ICP).
Your buyer personas and ICPs need to be narrow enough that your AI SDR can meaningfully tailor and personalize content. If they’re too narrow, finding leads won’t be easy, and if they’re too broad, then content will be too generic and unlikely to convert.
Here are some important details to include in your buyer personas and ICP:
- Firmographics: Company size, geography, industry, budget, revenue.
- Behaviors: Purchase frequency, average order value, preferred technology stack, decision-making processes.
- Needs and pain points: For organizations, this could be expanding to a new market, restructuring, and hiring new employees. For buyers, this is anything that prevents them from doing their work better and more efficiently.
Create a sales persona
Your sales persona is a representation of either your ideal fictional SDR or a real member of your sales team. It should contain all the knowledge that you’d expect your sales team to know.
Most sales personas include this information:
- Demographics: Age, gender, position at the company
- Campaign goals: Getting meetings booked, scheduling discovery calls, event reminders, inbound follow-ups
- Company details: Name, industry, offers, social proof
- Customer objections: Reasons why customers may not work with your business (and how the AI SDR can overcome them)
- Approach to selling: Sales frameworks, tactics, and emails
For best performance, you should create a specific sales persona for each of your primary buyer personas and ICPs.
Leverage intent data
Instead of targeting any cold lead that matches your buyer persona or ICP, you should focus on leads who are flashing certain intent signals.
You can configure AiSDR’s AI Prospecting feature to search for leads and companies using these intent signals:
- Hiring intent
- Web search queries
- Technology stack
- News
- Funding rounds
Intent signals help you target leads who have a problem and are actively searching for a solution. With a virtual SDR reaching out to them you should see better results than blindly contacting cold leads.
Automate follow-ups
You can configure your AI SDR to automatically send inbound and outbound follow-ups containing promotional offers, social proof (reviews, case studies), and other content.
This stops leads from leaking through cracks and gaps in your sales pipeline.
Outline how to handle objections
Every time you have a call, demo, or email conversation, take note of every question and objection that prospects ask.
Using this information, create a list of the 5-8 most common objections and write down how you’d answer them. If the answer is extremely complicated, you can tell the AI SDR to flag it for a person to review it themselves.
Design personalization rules
Meaningful personalization is no easy task, which is why you should tell the AI SDR what to do and what to avoid when personalizing. This ensures that your outreach feels tailored, relevant, and, importantly, human.
The AI can craft messaging using any factors so long as it has the data, whether it’s the industry, position, or even previous interactions.
For example, AiSDR’s performance improves over time because it learns from past customer interactions and applies lessons to future emails. It can also pull insights from a lead’s LinkedIn profile or from your HubSpot account to enrich messages.
Provide 3 to 4 examples of strong sales emails
The best strategy for teaching an AI SDR to craft sales emails that convey your messages and mimic your voice is simply to provide it with examples of your best emails.
You shouldn’t give too many examples as it will overtrain the AI and it may produce inaccurate results. At the same time, too few emails won’t give it enough to learn from.
The sweet spot is usually three to four examples. While you can add emails in their original form, a good next step is to either mark them up with personalization placeholders or spintax.
