Stop Blaming Your SDRs – Why Your GTM Strategy Sucks (And How to Fix It) with Alex Olley

Outbound isn't dead, but the traditional spray-and-pray approach is. Companies need to stop blaming SDRs for missed targets and start looking at their leadership and marketing alignment. Alex Olley, CRO of Reachdesk, argues that true outbound success requires career-focused leadership, brand air cover, and a deep understanding of pipeline quality over raw volume. When leaders align marketing to warm up accounts before BDRs call, the efficiency of outbound skyrockets. A critical element of modern GTM is shifting from a quantity-first mindset to maximizing win rates through a ruthlessly defined ICP. Teams should leverage parallel dialing alongside persona-based messaging rather than obsessing over time-consuming hyper-personalization. Furthermore, AI should be used to augment the SDR through data enrichment and account selection, leaving the actual relationship-building and human conversations intact. Finally, corporate gifting must evolve from sending generic swag with strings attached into a strategic, ROI-driven motion. By offering choices, leaning into the principle of reciprocity without forcing a meeting, and tracking attribution directly to pipeline, gifting becomes a predictable engine for revenue acceleration rather than just a leaky marketing expense.

Discussed in this episode

• Outbound requires dedicated, career-focused SDR leaders rather than managers using the role as a stepping-stone.
• Marketing must provide air cover and brand awareness so outbound reps aren't calling completely cold accounts.
• Parallel dialers and persona-based relevance are replacing manual dialing and hyper-personalization for scalable outbound.
• Refining your ICP to maximize win rates can drastically reduce the total pipeline volume your team needs to generate.
• Effective corporate gifting relies on the principle of reciprocity without attaching conditions like mandatory meetings.
• Reachdesk shifted the gifting narrative from simply 'sending swag' to guaranteeing pipeline ROI and attributing revenue.
• Sales leaders must build an SDR hiring bench matrix based on tenure and performance to predict and prevent turnover gaps.
• AI should be deployed for account selection and data enrichment while protecting human-to-human sales conversations.

Episode highlights

1. 0:00 — Intro and the state of outbound
2. 2:15 — Why outbound leadership is fundamentally broken
3. 5:30 — The necessity of marketing air cover
4. 8:45 — Scaling outbound with parallel dialers
5. 11:20 — Fixing pipeline through strict ICP definition
6. 15:10 — The psychology behind effective B2B gifting
7. 19:40 — Proving the ROI of gifting campaigns
8. 22:30 — Building an SDR hiring bench matrix
9. 25:45 — The role of AI in modern outbound
10. 29:10 — Rapid fire: MQLs and bad email CTAs

Key takeaways

• Hire career outbound leaders over future VP of Sales candidates.
• Give SDRs marketing air cover to warm up cold outreach.
• Optimize win rates by narrowing ICP instead of demanding volume.
• Build a hiring bench matrix to predict and manage SDR turnover.
• Use AI for data research, not for human sales conversations.

Transcript

Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by Revenue Reimagine. It's always me because Dale says the only thing I do good on this show is the intro. We have an awesome guest with us today, which is Alex Ally, the co-founder and CRO of Reachdesk, and one of the people who has actually figured out how to break through this GTM noise without just breaking the budget and hiring a ton of people. He helped reach build reachdesk from scratch into a leader in the gifting space and direct mail.

A space I know well, having formerly led sales at SwagUp, and knows first firsthand how outbound needs to evolve especially Alex, when the buyer's BS radar is on high alert. We're going to dive into what works, what doesn't, what most GTM teams get totally wrong about trust, timing, and personalization. Alex, welcome to the show, man. Guys, thanks for having me.

I've been looking forward to this one since, well, we I've said up weeks ago and now I'm here. So I'm I'm really pumped for this one. So thanks for having me. And see you just you just have to take that clip of the introduction, now you can just go anywhere, it could be like your intro.

anywhere you want to go. It's it's the it's the best thing I do on this show. Let's see. Let's see.

Alex, so um one of the things that you've said a lot is outbound's not dead, it's just done really badly. Um what do most teams do that are so wrong? Um and what are they missing on the outbound? Oh my word, we've only got 30 minutes, right?

Okay. Touche. I look. Okay, so let's start with um the the people side of things.

Now, one of the things that I've learned about outbound, if you really, really, really want to make outbound work, don't give it to an idiot like me, a CRO to like just manage on his own. Like get a like great leadership in it. Now, actually the teams, the companies who thrive with outbound, you know, they're not just sort of around that sort of 70%, 80% pacing mark. The ones that thrive are the ones that have a leader at the helm who was like really driving it forward, who was obsessed.

Um, yeah, I've had outbound leaders who they kind of tell me in the interview process that like, I'm a career outbound leader. That's what I want to dedicate my time to. And they're the ones that know how to both crack the whip and like motivate reps, but also understand the art and how it evolves. And they're always meticulously looking at that thing, you know, understand how I get that SDR to perform as opposed to And it's not and it's not easy to manage.

It's not something like you just pick up. It's not easy, man. It's a Then that leadership is a different style. Yeah, it's a different style.

There's a reality to it, obviously, that a lot of SDRs, outbound is predominantly driven by through younger individuals who it's often their first job. And so, you know, people don't necessarily confess to this, but you're learning how to write emails and how to behave in a corporate environment. And it's that in itself isn't easy. And knowing how, knowing how to show up when they've probably moved to a big city where they want to have some fun too, so it's sometimes they don't show up in the right headspace.

And so it's like it's like you're you're you're doing a bit of mothering, whilst having to motivate them, whilst having to teach them. And that's so hard. And so getting the leadership right there is critical. And I think I underestimated that for far too long.

I think I I was looking for someone who was, you know, I want to be a VPF sales one day. And actually I would I'd focus on hiring the, no, I'm a career outbound leader and this is my bread and butter. That one person can change things. And I was um, I was speaking to a friend of mine, who's a CRO.

And he said, I've got these really great SDRs. And we've got all the tools and the data and everything, but I just can't seem to get it to work. And I said, well, how good's your how good's the leader who's at the helm there? And he said, we've we've got like a team lead.

And then that combination was like nine months ago. And I told him, I said, I think you need to hire someone who lives and breathes this. Right? And who is a visionary at the same time, who's going to want to start to think about AI workflows and folding that into like really scale in this new era that we're living in.

And then he called me up like two weeks ago and said, we didn't change anything other than the leader, and now we're flying. And I think that's really important. I think it's really important to just to address that bit, right? That that's that's one thing.

I I love that part because I I I do think people look at the BDRs, but they never look at the leader in that space. And and like you said, it's a a different leader. And something you just said, I I wanted to just double click on because I think while this is prevalent across all of go to market in sales, AI will really take over a lot of the things that are happening in the BD in in the front end of the funnel and the outbound motion. Um so I think that's like that that person now I think used to be someone like, okay, we're going to do daily standups, we're going to go through the process, we're going to like crack the whip, we're going to kind of a little micromanage.

Now you need to have that strategy piece of it as well. So it's almost like this this job has gone from like not so sexy to like potentially super sexy with with the advent of AI. 100%. They they're becoming a hybrid between like a BDR leader and a go-to market engineer.

And those guys are really special. And so so that that's what I'm saying. The second thing I'm saying that that where companies fail and where we certainly failed is we looked we overlooked the the concept of like air cover. Now, there's a moment when a BDR calls someone.

And I I listen to loads of calls. There's a moment when a BDR calls someone and say, hey, it's Alex calling from Reachdesk. And someone's like, who? Yeah.

I've never heard of you guys before. What? Yeah. And, oh yeah, I have heard of you guys.

Now remind me what it I think you're gifting, right? Something along those lines. That's a very different conversation. And that that that transpires through the work of marketing and brand awareness and and being there and occupying people's minds so that when BDRs do call, they're not going totally cold.

And that that is we say this all the time. Right? So so that that's the thing that scares people because they're like, hang on a second, marketing should be over here. And BDR should be at the opposite end.

And they should just be given lists and like go and hit the phones. And you're selling themselves you're selling them up to fail massively. And, you know, I speak to like VPs of marketing and CMOs and they're like, why would we give BDRs lists of people who attended events, or why would we send them signals of things that happen on our website? That's like the marketing's that's marketing's job.

We should hope those people turn into MQLs or something along those lines. I'm like, no, no, no. Get your people to to work those accounts because they're warmed up and that's where they succeed. And actually you need a smaller team to do that.

You don't need these these armies of BDRs or something. You only need fewer people. So it's actually more efficient from from a unit economic standpoint as well. And so when you understand that and you fuse the two together and you're providing that air cover, your BDR are going to be far more successful.

Now, one of the biggest evolutions that I've also seen more recently is that we have to scale, right? I this concept of cold calling being dead is is just I smile every time people say that, because I'm like, you you uh, you're you're actually opening the door for more opportunity for me because fewer people are doing it. But there is there are ways that you have to scale. Now I'll give you an example, right?

I don't believe that BDRs can just punch and dial one phone after the other now. You need parallel dialers and things like that to be able to scale so that they're having enough conversations to enable them to be productive enough. But with that, you have to change your approach. So we used to be like hyper-personalized on every single prospect.

And we would say like, this is a research call, Adam. I know everything about you and I've researched you, this is why I'm calling you. I don't think that that's possible anymore because there are so many filters and things that are getting in the way. And so what we've done is we have done like, if you do find hooks and triggers and things on individuals, you use them, but it actually typically speaking, it's very like, we've zoned in on the personas who are going to buy us.

We've positioned those problems so that when you are calling someone, you're saying, typically speaking, we found that heads of marketing are really struggling to break through the noise right now. Right? Pipeline is suffering as a result. It's because this, this and this.

To what extent does that resonate with you? You're doing this persona based prospecting scale, which I do think works, as long as that pitch is really clear. And then you enable your BDRs with things like we use a tool called Nooks to do parallel dialing so that you can hit enough people at the same time. And so you have to with scale, have that trade off for things like hyper personalization to just like relevance.

But you're getting enough volume to be able to get enough at bats and conversations to be able to book enough meetings that translate into pipeline. And I think not enough people are making that shift to be able to enable the BDR to scale. Yeah, I I agree with you. Um, 100%.

I think there's this old mindset of, you know, to your point, here's your list, just dial. Um, no marketing air cover, no brand awareness, and then when the conversions don't come in, it's blame the BDRs, fire the BDRs, fire the BDR leader, but no one knows who the heck you are. It it has to be this team approach more than anything. Alex, if if a company's pipeline is drying up, where where do they where should they start?

Is it people? Is it process or is it playbook? Um, is it people, process or playbook? I'm gonna go right, pipeline hasn't always been full.

And when it hasn't been, the first thing I look back into is uh ICP. Ultimately, like are the people we're hitting, are they the right people who are gonna buy? And I I had this, it was about just over a year ago. And actually, it's interesting, if you look at it, the trend line of pipeline wasn't too bad.

It was the actual revenue that translated from it. Our pipeline was dipping a little bit. But I think we were going, we we we made that mistake of going a bit too wide with who we were going after. And we when we really narrowed it, you can do regression analysis, all those things to really show you that who are the right buyers for you.

We were like, hang on, we need to we need to get this even more and more refined. How do we how do we really lay that on? And the moment we changed our our actual like ideal customer profile, not just like how many employees, what's the headcount, who are the personas. That's not your ICP, by the way.

That's like a preach. It's it's not your ICP. People think that is for some reason. Or some people say like, they're this industry and this size.

That is so far from my ICP, it's scary. But when you start to understand what are those nuances within the buyers who are actually buying, particularly at the the fastest rate, you go there. And then you figure out what are the best ways to unlock those buyers from our pipeline. Not only do you need less pipeline to do it, but you're gonna get to where you want to go to way faster.

And if you think about it, if you're generating 100 opportunities a month, for example, but your win rate's 8%. You could actually do that with 50 opportunities. So you're gonna need half the pipeline if your win rate was 16%. We got ours to 24 when it was eight at one point from a specific channel, which means we needed a third of the amount of pipeline.

And when I tell people this, I'm like, do you realize if you if you really looked into what those what those actual signals are behind who's buying, why they were buying, what the situation they were in, look at those things that you can then go to find, you will need a third of the amount of pipeline and your life is going to be like so much easier. And from there, you can grow. And that's my approach. Try and get the win rate as high as possible.

Try and demand, force yourself to get as little pipeline as possible. But we'll obviously we've got revenue plans that we need to hit. But then grow back from there, you will grow way faster as a result. And that's what I've seen over the past 12 months.

We've been nailing our numbers because we've taken that approach of like quality over anything. And as you see more and more of those, you can go and find more of them. That's way easier than having to go and find this crazy amount of pipeline because everyone gets distracted, you need way more resources. And it's an impossible task.

Yeah, but coming from a leader, that's super important, because once again, if we go back to the leadership side of this this equation, it's most people are saying more pipeline, more dials, more outreach, more contacts, all of this stuff. More, more, more. And they're and they're not actually, you know, revisiting their ICP, their buying personas, the value propositions, and then also looking, so, you know, not only the people that are buying in the front of the funnel, but who is staying with you, what does success look like, how much success are they really having, who's dropping out of your funnel, because like that'll tell you a lot of what's happening in the front end of your funnel. The people that are falling out in the bottom should be the people that you're not putting into the top, because it's just a waste of time and potentially cost you a bunch of money.

Um, but people just like they've tried to define their ICP like three years ago. They're like, oh yeah, our ICP, yeah, we did that exercise. Like, here's the uh, here's the three-ring binder and we're done with it. And so I love that perspective, um, and I love that from a leadership perspective, Alex, that you're really looking at that, um, quality over quantity.

Because it's a much easier game. I think you both said it, right? Everyone wants more, more, more. And we actually had this conversation like we we don't want more.

We actually want, we want less. I did go through the same, but high quantity, but we we said, but we've had less. But you can get to more. You can get to more once you get your close rates to 24, 25%, like, you can go more.

Because now you know what good looks like. If you don't know what good looks like, you're putting fuel on crappy stuff. So, Let's let's let's shift gears for a second. I I want to talk about what what I'm going to call the psychology of a package, right?

So, when we talk gifting, you know, there there's call it two real main players in the space and a bunch of like other smaller players and I I get this space better than most, right? Like I led sales for a swag company that tried to pivot to gifting other than like corporate swag and failed effing miserably. Um, but most people when they think gifting, think swag, right? Like, oh, you know, Alex, you took a demo with me, I'm going to send you a really cool revenue reimagined logo T-shirt that you're never going to wear that's going to be some rag somewhere.

What makes a gift actually move pipeline? Because I would imagine you guys use your product and use reachdesk very heavily in your sales product in your sales process. What makes a gift actually move pipeline versus being some generic like gift that you send the same shit to everyone every time? It's it's really simple.

Give people something that they want, they can use over and over again. How do you find that? That's actually logical. Um, well, we stopped trying to play this game of trying to figure out what Dale and Adam want, because it kind of gets a bit spooky, right?

If it's like, if if if I showed up and Adam's like, oh my god, you know everything about me. How'd you how'd you how would you know it was it was a boomerang I wanted for my birthday? It's like, well, I stalked you on like your Instagram pages. You're like, okay, now you're being a bit weird, Alex.

Yeah. We're not trying to play that game. Like there was a player in the space who did play that game, it didn't work out for them and we saw it from from a mile away. What we think What was it a female person's name that was the player in the space by chance?

Potentially, yes. Um, so we're not trying to play that game because I think there is a spooky element to to like, you know, I've heard stories of sales reps sending that their female prospect who's married like a a golden necklace with their initials ingrained on it. And it's just like, oh, what are you doing? And it's because the AI or whatever it was, the researcher, it oversteps the mark.

And so what we do is we we try and hypothesize, what would someone like that want, right? But really importantly, we give them the choice to choose something else or to donate it to a charity. And those methods work really well. If someone says, look, yeah, fine, you you you saw that I like rugby, right?

Cool. Like you've sent me a rugby gift. I don't need a rugby gift. You're not sending me anything like too crazy.

But actually I don't I don't need another Lions. There's a big tournament going on at the moment, British Lions are playing Australia. I don't need a Lions baseball cap or something. But you know what?

I do need something that's like everywhere. So I'm gonna choose that instead. And so actually we're not trying to solve this hyper hyper personalized motion of trying to guess exactly what that individual wants. We're trying to get as close to that as possible and then give them the choice to choose something they might want.

So we have this gigantic marketplace. Um, and by the time this recording goes out, we'll have launched it, but we've we've released something that essentially allows us to integrate with Amazon. So that you can choose pretty much anything from whatever you want in the world. And all of our marketplace is localized.

So if I'm in France, I can choose something from within France, it's only been shipped there, it's culturally appropriate. And I'm always going to be able to find something for me. And the principle of reciprocity is is the thing that works. Remember, we built this, I built this for my SDR and AE team.

I was a head of sales. I had SDRs and AEs using gifting and it worked like there's no tomorrow. And so all you really want to try and do is get the person to give back the thing that's most valuable to them, which is their time. And it doesn't need to be massively overthought.

So if you get something that's close to being what that person wants, you give them the power of choice or the ability to donate to a charity, for example. There's a high degree of likelihood they're gonna say, yes, you know what, we will meet you. Now, the thing I do not believe in, just to be clear, I do not believe in this workflow. Hey, Adam.

Um, if you take a meeting, I will send you something, right? And there's a condition attached to Thank you, thank you, thank you. I don't believe in that. It doesn't work.

You will get a lot of meetings, very few of them will translate into pipeline or revenue. Right? That is what will happen. I'll I'll take my $25 Starbucks gift card but I have no need for your product but you're have some BDR manager or AE manager or marketing person who's like, yeah, I have 30 minutes, I could use a gift card.

I hate it. It's the worst strategy ever. And so so what we what we do is we we we give without expecting anything in return. But as a result, you will get what you ask for.

And there's no condition attached to it. And that's that's that's the critical line for us. And we see that work really well. People buy from people.

That's why companies who invest in meaningful connections win. The best part, gifting doesn't have to be expensive to drive results, just thoughtful. Sendoso's intelligent gifting platform is designed to boost personalized engagement throughout the entire sales process. Trust me, I led sales for a Sendoso competitor, and I could tell you, no one does gifting better than Sendoso.

If you're looking for a proven way to win and retain more customers, visit sendoso.com. How um, how do you prove ROI on gifting when the action is like purely emotional versus like transactional? Like how are you guys looking at like this this gifting is working?

Is it tied into pipeline? I'm sure you have integrations with Salesforce and or HubSpot that could look at gift sent to pipeline generated, etc, etc. Yeah. So our strategy from the get go, everyone in our space, they were all talking about sending stuff.

Yes. We're gonna send you swag, we're gonna send you a gift. Our whole strategy from day one, which is why I think, you know, you alluded to it earlier, there are two players now, two proper players, it's Reachdesk and one other. And um, our big thing we kind of I I only know of Reachdesk, that's the only player I know of.

Good. Well let's only talk about us now. Good answer. Good answer.

Um, our big thing from the beginning was was was all about ROI. And so that that's what we want that's what we wanted to be known for. And our strategy was all around that. And actually, I'll tell you the story behind it because I do think like I I I'm gonna go on a massive tangent here.

But there's this concept of like, in go to market, you are must have or a nice to have. And I don't I don't believe in that. I believe in being a no-brainer. Like I I think very, very, very few, like 0.

1% of providers out there are a must-have. I think everyone else is what they call themselves a nice to have. But there's this really great place to play in the middle, which is I need to be a no-brainer. I need to make it so easy for people to go, yeah, there's no reason why we shouldn't do that.

And so what we invented with these brand promises where we said, look, we we commit to our customers that they will generate pipeline through gifting. Okay? We then have this guarantee, which is if you don't, we're gonna do something in return for you. So for every dollar you spend with us, you're gonna get at least $5 back in pipeline.

And the guarantee was really, if we don't hit that, we're gonna refund you the difference. So we were this player in the space, this is what allowed us to go, we went from zero to 20 million in nearly like two years. This is what allowed us to be these new guys, these upstarts to go, we're not talking about sending or anything anymore. We're gonna talk to you about pipeline.

And I trained our sales team to be consultants with these are what I call these moments that matter, these 15 moments within every buy journey where you can use gifting repeatedly, regardless who you are, to generate um pipeline and accelerate deals. All right? And then here's the best part, is we then created a product that no one else in our space still has to this day called Reachdesk IQ, which allows you to run the ROI and attribution, which is a flexible attribution model to allow RevOps people to go, okay, so we're we're spending this much, we're getting this many meetings, it's linked back to our Salesforce, but there's an attribution calculator on it that we can manipulate that allows us to understand the true ROI of gifting. And no one's come close to uh to us on on being able to do that.

And that's been our strategy from day one. I I love this and I want to I want to let Dale chime in, but I that that brought up a question. So is no I I do. Alex, if I were to ask you is Reachdesk Reachdesk a gifting solution or is Reachdesk a software?

Which are you? We're a gifting solution to be clear. Like the output is gifting. We have software that powers it behind it.

If we if we positioned ourselves as a as a software solution, I think we would still blend into the background of everyone else, but to be clear, we use Reachdesk. Oh, that sounds cool. All right, Dale. Sorry.

I'm I'm so used to you taking over the podcast that whenever I could like ask a follow-up question to my own question it makes me so happy. So, um, so Alex, we Adam's working in this space, we've we've collaborated with a couple of people in this space. Um, what we what what we know is that this is not just a uh uh gifting place. This is really an operational nightmare piece that you guys have to deal with on a on a daily basis.

And so you have this whole RevOps thing. And we talked a little bit about what you're doing in the RevOps side. But how do you make like, people hear gifting and they think, oh, brand. But it's also about the operations, the systems, the scale.

How do you make that human touch repeatable? It's it's very simple. We you you build it into workflows. You don't use it as this ad hoc motion.

You know, for example, if you're an SDR, you would put this into your outreach sales loft cadence, for example. Um, one of my customers, let's say that they're the biggest B2B data provider who we all know. Um, we're built into into their inbound motion, right? They they remain out sponsor of this show.

Okay. Um, I'm not allowed to mention who they are, but I think we all know who they are. But like we are built we're we're built into like their inbound workflow. So when specific people request a demo, for example, to drive attendance, it's within that workflow.

When customers use us to you know, a lot of customers are now using us within their events workflow. So pre-event, how do we do hotel drops? How do we send people stuff to get you to attend the booth and then send swag or gifts afterwards so they don't just chuck it in the trash can like we all do when we get handed a load of swag at the booth. Uh, what that allows you to then do is then have that really great follow-up from the SDR perspective.

So we've mapped out all these different workflows as to where you can fold this in through integrations. So that it is a very easy repeatable thing to do as opposed to this one, let's ad hoc, just send someone a gift when we think there's a good idea. And so the playbooks are built into the platform itself. So we've got all these use cases based on your you as a user, how you might want to use it and then that then folds into your sales engagement platform, your CRM, your marketing automation, whatever it is.

So that you can just deploy it very easily. So let's give a little bit of a um, a value here. What's a process you built internally that other CROs should take and steal from from Reachdesk? Oh, wow.

What's a process that I built? Well, about gifting or not? About go to market. Something about go to market.

Not nothing proprietary, but something where you like had a problem, you built an internal process, and you're like, someone should someone should be to try to rebuild it. We know we all know they probably won't, but Yeah. I mean, I share a lot of my stuff on LinkedIn. I I I write it up and then I just put it out there.

Um, but the one I haven't shared is actually mine and our CEO's pride and joy. Again, it it stems from a problem that I had. So I'm very outbound heavy. I believe outbound is huge.

It's generated over half of our revenue as a business. But when I've had my biggest problems is when outbound isn't working. And what we did is we built this model. And what we looked at is we looked at like things like performance, tenure, um, and we looked at things like, what what is the average tenure of a BDR when they look to leave?

Because they want to be an account executive or they get offered another job, or they just get frustrated because they're trying to go on the next rung of the ladder. And we built this matrix, which we look at every two weeks. And it looks at every single BDR, month over month, performance based, tenure based, and it spits out this number telling you what we call this this concept of having a bench of BDRs saying, you need to be hiring now. Yeah.

Because that person is going to ramp here. And so there's this forensic approach, and we we have not missed any BDR targets for about a year now because we've got this forensic approach, which puts a mirror up to us when we go, no, no, no, we're good, we're good. Steve, Steve's not moving on anytime soon. Yeah, he's doing great.

Yeah. Next thing you know it, Steve's like, I'm out of here, guys. You're like, obviously, we should have known that because Steve's been here for 22 months, the average is 18. So we should have been hiring six months ago to make sure there's someone who's gonna be able to slot into Steve who has actually ramped and is going to be able to make sure that we're not going to miss, um, miss our miss our outbound target, right?

And so it's really simple. It's the principle of of having a bench, right? This is something that I negotiated with our CFO. And I said, I did the maths on it.

I said, if we don't have a bench of people and if we wait until someone's either performance managed out, or that they leave, then we're gonna have a revenue gap. And I showed them the maths. I said, these are the consequences of not doing this. So I need another X amount per year to be able to build this bench.

But as a result, we're we're very rarely going to have a risk in our pipeline. And so it's this forensic document, it's a Google sheet actually, is a lot of we've spent thousands of hours on it, not just to like monitor it, but it basically goes, you need to hire now. Right? Here's the segment you're hiring for.

Here's why. And it spits out the number and it's we're always hiring for this bench to be able to have this constant succession, so that, um, so we're never in trouble. And that is a mechanism that I wish someone had taught me 10 years ago because it would have got me out of a lot of trouble. It's it's brilliant.

I love it. I think that's gold for anyone that is listening, uh, listening to this for sure. Yeah, if if you're not budgeting for that to your point, you're gonna you're gonna have some huge misses, um, for sure. Alex, everyone's talking about AI, right?

Outbound, your your BDRs, your SDRs, it's all going to be replaced by AI. Just go to play, automate the hell out of it. Where where do you think it's really headed? What what should be replaced by AI and what still needs that like human touch, man?

So so the thing you cannot replace is the conversation. That's the thing that I'm protecting at all costs. I've seen people talking about that you can talk to this this AI sales person. I was like, I would never buy from them.

Partly because I wouldn't trust the person programming it to give me all these false answers, right? Because if I'm talking to to a bot, I mean, people don't I think where is it, sales people like third top on the list behind the most untrustworthy people, it's like politician, bankers, then sales people. And so I'm I think an AI sales agent is going to go right above the politicians, like number one. So the conversation.

AI politician. Oh, god, that's that's us terrifying. Um, but like again, let let's stick to outbound. I think a lot of people know there's a theme here with outbound.

So let's perhaps stick with that. Like what you can automate is account selection, right? Contact research, data enrichment. All these things can be automated.

If you know, this is my, this is a really good account. Here's why. Now I've already found you. This is what I'm building at the moment.

I'm already found you. I we know on average it takes, uh, six to eight prospects to break into account that we need to touch. So let's find those six to eight people. AI can do that for you.

We've enriched the data doing a waterfalling, uh, using waterfalling mechanism to be able to get the phone number, their email address, their LinkedIn profile. We've done the research on them. Guess what? What you need to do now is just need to call them.

You need to engage with them on LinkedIn. And that's it. Those are the bits that the conversation and that human interaction is the bit that I would never replace. Never say never, but I am saying never now.

The rest of it I think can be optimized and that's where SDRs, BDRs, they're they're spending like 30 to 40% of their time doing that. So I'm looking to eliminate that and just allow them to be what we call this call center, which I think we need to give it a new name. Um, but we just want them to be humans, doing what humans do. I don't want hallucinations.

And I've heard of people trying to automate everything on LinkedIn. Even I'm like, just stay away from that. It's a social network. So I I just posted about like all these N8N like workflows and all this oh my god, I can't stand it anymore.

Yeah. And I've been deep, I've been deep in the AI SDR world. I I was uh an advisor to one to one of those companies. And I said to the CEO, I said, you have a choice.

You either build the AI powered SDR or the AI SDR. And I would never build an AI SDR. The AI powered SDR is the human surrounded by the technology that can take away the the busy work that just doesn't need to be done by humans anymore. And you will always need a human at the center of it.

And that's what I'm on on the journey on at the moment. I'm gonna start writing it all up quite soon. Um, But that's my stance. Yeah, build the AI on the human side.

100%. What um, Is there good AI that builds good outbound messaging or does it still need to have that human touch? I haven't found it myself yet, to be honest with you. We've tested loads of different things, but, um, I don't think I don't think it's got there.

You know, we're waiting for this next wave of like agentic AI, maybe it will start to to mimic us human in the best way. But like, maybe it's at us, right? Us us as a business, you know, we're selling it to like sales people and marketers, it's a bit more freedom, right? We're not selling to banks or government.

And we're quite cheeky with our messaging. We're quite so I love it. There's there's a lot of puns, quite good ones as well. There's a lot of creativity to it.

And I have I'm yet to find a solution that can replicate that. So the people that we hire are people that are really, really good at that. And the messages I get from people that are like, oh my God, your your your outbound team is unreal because they're just they're taking things, they're taking things to a level that is is is already breaking boundaries. And but that's how they stand out from the noise, right?

That that's how it stands out from the 37 other messages I got today that are clearly AI with the M-dashes and the hope you're fine, I hope this email finds you well. Um, I love that, man. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Um, and I, you know, I I was sitting down with um, a couple of our BDRs yesterday and we were looking through someone's LinkedIn profile and they they saw someone, uh, the post was like, hey, started with a cold plunge this morning. Like AI's not gonna find that. So it's like, hope your cold plunge wasn't too like too cold this morning, here's something to warm you up, right? And like, they just they've just going straight to the point on it.

This hope, yeah, as you say, hope this email finds you well. Um, what's that what's that line I get a lot? It's something like, uh, looking to connect to, oh, I can't remember. Industry leaders or whatever BS looking to connect with industry leaders to uh, to brainstorm and synthesize ideas together.

I'm like, oh my God, I am not I do not want to meet you. Um, so yes, look, I think we're we're a bit more creative, we're a bit more out there. I do advocate for that. Even in companies, every company says, well, that's not what our buyers want.

I'm like, your buyers are just humans at the end of the day. And they just want something different. Alex, this is this is amazing. Let's let's wrap it up with some rapid fire and uh, so I'll jump over to Adam for a second.

Okay, I'm always terrified by rapid fire questions. I have no idea what you guys gonna find. No, don't be. What's the most overrated GTM metric?

Uh, the MQL. Yes. I love that. Love it.

What's one thing reps should stop doing in outbound today? Uh, the MQL. Yes. I love that.

Love it. What's one thing reps should stop doing in outbound today? Stop putting their outbound message needs to stop putting their calendar link as the call to action in every email they send. Saying, here's my calendar link.

Book a time with me on the first email. Love it. What's what's a gift that you sent that completely flopped? Uh, I once sent a brick mug.

It was a mug that was shaped like a brick, saying, do you do you feel like your pipeline is constantly running into a brick wall? And then the guy called me up saying, why did you send me a brick? I didn't get it. I'm like, oh my god.

I'll work on that one. So it didn't it didn't work very well. If you um, you're starting over to a new company, you have to build a GTM team from scratch. Who's your first hire?

Oh, that's a very hard question. If I'm starting from scratch. Oh, man. I mean, look, I'm a sales person.

So if I was there, I'd be doing the selling. So I don't think I'd hire an AE. I think I would still hire an SDR, to be honest with you. I think I would.

Final question, let's wrap this up. Okay. Dream vacation destination. Always always Dale's last question.

India. Have you guys been? I have. No.

I've been there for a month. My wife and I it was amazing. Yeah, so India, Southwest Coast, Kerala. I've been there once.

I could go back every year. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool.

Couple good spots. Awesome. Alex, thank you for joining the show. Thank you for sharing all things go to market, all things gifting.

Y'all, if you want to gift and you want to do it right, go check out Reachdesk. Great product, great people, and great mindset on gifting. You really can't go wrong. We'll drop a link in the show notes for you to go check them out.

Thanks a lot for having me, guys.