SaaStr 846: 10 Things to Know Before You Deploy Your First AI SDR with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO
episode
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
1h 5m
2 speakers
7 chapters
transcribed 18 days ago
Transcript
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Why does the choice of AI SDR tool matter less than the underlying strategy?
Welcome to the official Saster Podcast, where you can hear some of the best Saster speakers. This is where the cloud meets. Up today on the Saster Podcast. This is a mistake that both raw startups, scaling folks, and very large companies we talk to make the mistake. The raw startups that you know they've raised a t a token amount of money they want, uh, a tool to magically get them customers. It can do that if you've already proven you can do it yourself and you feed what works to the AI SDR. If you can't, the odds it works are extremely low, right? And then some of the on the other end of the spectrum, some of the largest leaders. We've talked to folks, multi-billion dollar public companies and bigger just want to turn on a tool and not train it with what works.
Now of course they could, they are obviously you've got two point five billion in revenue, you've got at least a few SDRs that have performed, but it maybe it's bought by a marketing team, maybe it's bought by a different team, maybe it's bought with a different perspective, but they just want to turn something on. And the cost there may not be that important i to the latter category if you're big, but the results are terrible. They don't reproduce the best ten percent of their team inside the app. And if you do nothing else the first thirty days, your job is to reproduce the human playbook works inside the training or the UIUX of the AS Joe. If you don't do that, it won't work. Hey everybody, Saster Annual will be back in May 2026, the world's largest SaaS and AI gathering for executives with 68 VP level and above attendees, 36% CEOs and founders, and 25% were AI-first professionals.
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Hello everyone. Glad to have you and your agents with us here today. We thought we would do something fun since now we have, you know, more than twenty agents. In our full stack, we've deployed more than one. AISDR. And so somebody asked us this question the other day and we thought it'd be fun to go through it live as well, which is, you know, what are the top 10 things you should know before rolling out your very first AISDR if you haven't deployed one yet? Or maybe this is your next deployment and you want to know what you know tips and tricks to avoid. And what to do to make it successful. So That's the context of today. We'll go through these 10 as always at our beginning. If you want to see some of the tools and agents that we use, they are on sasser.ai slash agents.
You can go there. We link to a lot of our agents that we use there. Yeah, I think some of this we've covered, but I think it's important to know if you're going to roll out your very first AI SDR. Just cause that is our use case that we have multiple actually AISDRs. Now I'll preface in saying that you probably only need one. And then to point number one that I'll drive right into, you probably only need one vendor to do this. Like we have multiples for a lot of different reasons, but most of what you will need to do slash wanna do with your agents, you'll probably be fine using just one vendor versus using the four or five that we have for outbound. And I'll kind of explain why. So just coming into it first.
The tool doesn't really matter. Like you're gonna see today, I interchange different screenshots from our different AI SDRs that we have, but you don't need to again, you don't need to use multiple vendors. I would pick one that does the majority or bulk of what you want to do with an AI SDR agent. And roll it out from there. You may need multiple in the sense if you know if your outbound agent truly only does outbound and then you need to add an inbound agent that truly only does inbound. So maybe at the max you end up with two.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Why does the choice of AI SDR tool matter less than the underlying strategy?
0:01–8:16
2
What is the biggest mistake startups and large enterprises make when launching their first AI SDR?
8:16–16:11
3
How should you segment your prospects to give each AI SDR the right context?
16:11–26:20
4
Why does consistency beat brilliance when scaling AI‑generated outreach?
26:20–36:29
5
What should you focus on during the first 30 days of an AI SDR deployment?
36:29–46:42
6
How much traffic or list size is needed for inbound vs. outbound AI SDRs to be effective?
46:42–57:08
7
How many humans are required to run AI SDRs and what happens if you lose a team member?
57:08–1:05:45
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
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SaaStr 853: The Agents #004: Tragedy Apps, Too Many AI SDRs, and Why Your Next Hire Should Report to an Agent
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SaaStr 851: The Agents, Episode 002. Managing 20+ AI Agents: Lazy Agents, Stealth Churn & the Death of 60% Solutions