AI SDRs: A Complete Guide

Your inbound leads might be surging due to successful marketing, but your SDRs might not have time to qualify all of them. Data shows that SDRs are bogged down, spending over two thirds of their time on non-selling tasks. This translates to sellers not having as many key conversations down the sales funnel as they could be.

This is why sales teams are turning to AI SDRs to augment their teams. They can automate outreach, qualify leads, and engage prospects, helping sales teams scale efficiently. In this guide, we'll explore how AI SDRs work, how they compare to human SDRs, and learn exactly how they can improve sales processes.

• What is an AI SDR?
• How does an AI SDR work?
• What's the difference between an AI SDR and a human SDR?
• Benefits of AI SDRs
• How can AI SDRs improve your sales processes?
• Best practices for implementing AI SDRs
• Examples of helpful AI SDRs
• The future of AI SDRs
• AI SDR FAQs

An AI SDR is an AI-powered sales development representative that focuses on automating top-of-funnel activities, like lead qualification, outreach, and engagement to help sales teams focus on more creative problem-solving tasks. These top-of-funnel tasks are time consuming for salespeople, and hard to tackle at scale. With AI, these tasks can be handled autonomously 24/7, helping teams stay on top of all of their inbound leads.

The day to day of a human SDR is pretty packed. They spend time prospecting potential leads, cold calling, emailing, qualifying them through discovery questions, handling objections, booking meetings, and logging all of their interactions into a CRM for visibility.

An AI SDR uses machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and automation to autonomously manage many of the same tasks from start to finish. They work in real-time, analyzing customer intent to qualify leads and schedule meetings for human sales reps.

Agentforce-powered AI agents help sales teams with pre-built SDR skills. It integrates the Salesforce Customer 360 application layer, the Atlas Reasoning Engine, Data Cloud, and the Trust Layer to carry out sales tasks. Sales agents are built with Agent Builder, where they are given instructions and guardrails that enable them to do their job autonomously, tackling inbound leads and moving them down the funnel.

• Automated outreach: AI SDRs send personalized emails, messages, and follow-ups based on CRM data – and they can do it 24/7. This means you can follow up with leads faster, no matter when they come in, so they stay warm. This also means they can spend this time on higher-value tasks that are more likely to lead to deals closing.
• Lead qualification: AI SDRs determine a prospect's sales readiness by analyzing their responses and engagement. While interacting via email, they answer questions and field objections, using natural language. Though traditional SDRs are good at this, it’s also time-consuming, which means some leads might slip through the cracks.
• Appointment scheduling: When a prospect expresses interest in having a sales conversation, AI SDRs can book meetings directly into a rep’s calendar. Switching between tools during conversations is cumbersome for SDRs, but not for AI SDRs.
• Data enrichment: Keeping the CRM updated is crucial for sales teams, but the activity can be tedious. Every interaction with a lead is tracked automatically, with additional notes and context for visibility. This also helps reps down the line personalize the interaction, with all of the relevant deal information at their fingertips. AI SDRs pull insights from their interactions into the CRM to ensure every engagement is tracked and the entire sales team is informed.

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To start, you won’t be meeting an AI SDR at happy hour.

Salesforce’s own sales team has seen that reps who use AI in their workflows see higher win rates and more closed deals than reps who don’t. What AI SDR tools have demonstrated is that they’re amazing at handling work that bogs reps down – but by delegating certain tasks to AI, these reps can focus on higher-touch conversations further down the funnel. In our own pilot, reps were able to handle 20 qualified leads per day after they were passed down by an AI SDR agent.

AI SDRs are adept at high-volume, repetitive tasks. Personalization is data-informed, and decision making is based on their reasoning engine and guardrails. Perhaps the most impressive detail is that their scalability is basically limitless: AI SDRs are built to engage thousands of leads at once, instantly, and at any time of the day.

While AI SDRs can manage many tasks end-to-end and completely autonomously, their job is not to replace the humans on your sales team. Human SDRs can focus on relationship-building and deal-closing, while AI SDRs handle repetitive, data-driven tasks. It’s less about replacing entire roles, and more about people and AI working together more efficiently.

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According to the State of Sales report, 81% of sales teams use AI today to boost productivity​. Sales teams who incorporate AI SDRs benefit from the possibility of limitless scale. They excel at the non-selling tasks that bog down human SDRs, while accounting for every lead.

• Reps engage with higher quality leads: AI SDRs ensure immediate lead response, passing on leads that demonstrate a strong interest to reps for a deeper conversation.
• Improved productivity: Sales teams save time by automating lead qualification, spending less time on non-selling tasks and more time relationship building.
• Consistent messaging: Supplied with relevant documentation and guidelines, AI SDRs ensure their interactions align with company messaging.

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Let's take a look at how an AI SDR can benefit your business.

AI SDRs are ideal for inbound sales, when customers reach out to companies themselves and express interest. They can tackle a mountain of backlogged inbound leads, qualifying them instantly and scheduling meetings for sales reps. As AI SDRs engage with leads in real-time, no warm lead is left waiting.

In outbound sales, the sales team makes first contact with the customer, like through cold-calling or cold-emailing.

Fully autonomous, end-to-end outbound motions are more complex for AI SDRs. While in the near future it may be possible for AI engage in prospecting and customer research, the most sophisticated AI SDRs today are better suited to tackling inbound leads. Still, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that an AI SDR would be able to proactively reach out to leads, using personalized messaging, and nudging the prospect to follow up at an optimal time.

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The best way to think of an AI SDR is not to envision a replacement for your sales reps, but rather a handy addition to your sales team. They work in your sales tools like an additional user. And set up couldn’t be simpler: Agentforce Agent Builder is an AI-powered, low-code platform that enables users to create and customize autonomous AI sales agents for various tasks, with pre-set skills for nurturing and qualifying leads and setting up meetings.

Customize the AI SDR: Agents can be customized for any industry or use case using natural-language instructions that outline the agent's tasks and set operational boundaries.

Leverage pre-built topics: Common prompts and actions can be deployed out-of-the-box, allowing users to define its role and clarify its objectives and tasks.

Test and monitor: Users should make sure their AI SDRs are operating correctly. Assessing its responses and capabilities on a regular basis ensures it's doing the job it's supposed to do.

Lean into the human handoff: An AI SDR knows when certain interactions are beyond its scope, or simply ready to progress down the funnel. Sales teams can have meetings with prospects popped into their calendars automatically.

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While there are numerous examples of AI SDRs on the market, few of them have the ability to execute tasks autonomously and end-to-end. Even fewer are built with the power of the Agentforce Platform, which integrates Data Cloud for unified data access, the Atlas Reasoning Engine for intelligent decision-making, and Agent Builder for low-code customization, all secured by the Trust Layer to ensure safe, autonomous actions across business systems​​.

In short, AI-powered SDR agents from Agentforce are better equipped to do their jobs than AI SDRs from brands that lack the same deep integrations and data. And while automation is not new for certain SDR tasks, the ability to complete tasks without assistance is the key differentiator.

One company that has seen success in implementing Agentforce to qualify leads and book meetings is the Finnish government research institution VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.

VTT's research and services are focused on solving global challenges with sustainable solutions. With thousands of inbound leads coming in across their web pages, digital and in-person events, they needed a solution that would help them qualify every single one. They implemented Agentforce with the pre-built SDR skills to automatically qualify and engage with their incoming leads – handling all outreach, answering questions with up-to-date info, and working around the clock to ensure every lead received a response.

The result was that VTT has been able to connect with nearly every single lead – a task that previously took their team of SDRs hours or days. Now, every lead is accounted for, and their reps can focus on meaningful conversations and high value opportunities, ensuring no potential research partnerships are missed.

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According to the State of Sales, 84% of sales leaders say AI will play a bigger role in lead generation within the next two years​. But with AI developing every single day, it’s easy to imagine how developed AI SDRs might be in the near future.

Here are some big bets for AI SDRs in the future:

• Greater AI autonomy: AI SDRs will become more independent, managing more complex interactions. They will be able to handle prospecting and customer research alongside handling inbound leads.
• Enhanced personalization: AI SDRs will leverage platforms like Data Cloud to provide hyper-personalized, seamless messaging for every lead and customer, freeing up time from SDRs who perform extensive research.
• Multimodal AI: Currently, AI SDRs interact mostly via email or messaging, but with current trends it’s easy to imagine that AI SDRs will interact via voice, video, and text across multiple channels.

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AI SDRs give sales teams a lot to be excited about. With AI sales agents on your team, you’ll be able to hand off time-consuming busy work and spend more time actually selling – all while seeing productivity skyrocket.