SaaStr 846: 10 Things to Know Before You Deploy Your First AI SDR with SaaStr's CEO and CAIO

23:43Amelia LeRutte:It just needs to be pretty good to get this person down the path you want them to go.

23:51Amelia LeRutte:Okay, number five is, for us at least with the amount of agents we have, you need at least one, but ideally two essential humans to run all this and to deploy your AI SDR. You can't have zero people. And certainly it's become harder for us even right now with like a lot of my time being split between like SASTR annual production versus like that was time I typically had spent before March managing agents. Even that has gotten like a little bit harder for us here at SASTR. And so having 0.5 of my workload is actually not ideal either. But, you know, the annual is a time sensitive matter. So just something to keep in mind here is ideally you need two folks internally to run this, even if you can just find one, but then you will need to find a backup, right?

24:43Amelia LeRutte:Like not that your agents are going to leave, but what if that human leaves? You do need to have like a backup system and a plan to keep all your agents running. And so it's essential to have at least two folks working on this, monitoring the agents. Because if not, you'll see, like I just showed in that, you know, artisan chart, your agents can sit idle like unless it's an inbound agent where you have like ours is on full automatic that one doesn't idle as much but our inbound agents and many of your inbound agents because of how we do this tooling which i do think is the best way to do it um your agents will sit idle if you don't give them new segments new context new people to go out to it will finish its sequence in a couple days and then it will sit there until you give it the next one and so i I think that's why it's essential to have two folks to backfill each other to make sure your agents are always optimized.

25:36Amelia LeRutte:That is, otherwise, you know, you're wasting a lot of time and money if they're just idling all the time. I will say, too, the reason I showed a screenshot on this one of Monaco is, like, Monaco is a very interesting, distinct use case. We're actually not their perfect ICP. Their use case is more for folks that are starting up and maybe don't have. maybe you've got some messaging figured out and you have let's say 20 or 50 customers but you want to get the next you know 100 customers theirs is great because theirs will actually fill your pipeline out more automatically based on lookalikes so that's what i really like about it is i haven't had to that one hasn't sat idle for us because it's just refilling the pipe when it finishes the sequence it'll grab another lookalike company close to our audience it'll see you know okay did Snowflake reply to you?

26:26Amelia LeRutte:They did. Okay, great. I'm going to go outbound to other companies like Snowflake. Okay, did OpenAI respond to you? They did. Okay, great. Now I'm going to go out to other companies that are like in OpenAI, which there aren't many of. It'll do things like that to keep the pipeline full, which I think is pretty cool versus some of the other agents we've tried. So they don't all do that. It's just something to be aware of. Again, agnostic of the tool, something to maybe ask your tool provider too if you're worried about your agents maybe sitting idle too much or if there's anything else you can do to make sure data is always flowing into your agents.

27:00Amelia LeRutte:Like right now, I don't know if I'll be able to finish this pre-annual but right now I'm trying to see how I can actually get some of our agents all hooked up together to talk to each other more regularly to solve this problem. But again, it's kind of a later down the road problem once you have your agent fully deployed and it's starting to work for you. okay number six and this is hyper important read everything i would say in the first 30 days and then read almost everything every day after that so if you're rolling out your first aisdr agent you are going to want to read everything and maybe you're going to want to read everything before you hit publish or send or whatever the equivalent is in your tool before it goes out to somebody in your, you know, outbound or inbound list or whatever it might be.

27:48Amelia LeRutte:You're going to want to read everything during that initial deployment to catch things like, you know, sometimes I think our agents would spell SASTR incorrectly. Not that it was wrong, but there's two capital S's and sometimes it would lowercase it. And so I would make a rule in the agent to say, you know, always capitalize SASTR as, you know, the S's are capital. and then I would write in rules like always use saster in the subject line because we have a bit of a brand and so typically it works better if saster's in the subject line versus it looking more generic there were other things that we would catch in the first you know messages at scale of sometimes it would you know because again our events are timed and we use a lot of these for our events sometimes it would use the old dates because it would just scrape the internet and then it would find like the old dates and so it was super important just to read everything I also think it's the only really way to learn it is to see what does your agent actually output.

28:47Amelia LeRutte:Like if you're only putting, if you only care about the inputs and you're not caring about the outputs, you're only seeing half the picture. Like you do want to see what your agents are saying, what they're doing. And like I just took the screenshot from Tuesday. And this is an important nuance here that I'll just explain this workflow through. This is from our qualified inbound agent. Somebody was asking about adding an additional ticket to SaaS or annual later this year. And this is, again, not a hard conversation for Amelia AI or inbound agent to answer, but just a nuanced one, right? Because it requires knowing, okay, who is this person?

29:27Amelia LeRutte:How many tickets have they already bought? What price did they buy it at? because then they need a retroactive discount. So basically what I did is the agent asked them those questions and looked it up to see if it was in Salesforce, asked them a few clarifying questions of, okay, is this third person from your same company? And then great, look at what's your email address because then we can send you the code for it. And so again, fairly hyper nuanced, but something that we read through and we go through just to see where our agent needs help. Even still today, like even 10 months later, I am still reading things that our agent is doing to make sure it's accurate, to make sure it's what we want it to say to folks, and to make sure we're represented in the right way with our agents.

30:07Amelia LeRutte:Also because so many people see them, that it's also just good to make sure it's saying things that are accurate and not going off the rails, right? Again, rarely have our agents gone off the rails or hallucinogens but they have. It happens every now and then. And so for me, it's something where every day, I'm just, you know, even if I only have 10 minutes, I'm just doing like a speed run to be like, okay, what is our inbound? I'll just go through like a couple inbound conversations, see if I spot check anything. Same thing. I'll go through our outbound agents. I'll see if I see anything in their messages that's maybe off or maybe needs a tweak.

30:42Amelia LeRutte:And then if there is, then I'll just add that to the AI's context so that it's continually improving with you, right? So that's something you're going to have to do ongoing no matter what. I would say a heck of a lot more in the early days, but you're still going to have to do it every day after.

31:01Amelia LeRutte:Okay, number seven, if you are deploying an AISDR your first time would be to budget at least two weeks of RAM time. Some specifically to with an outbound agent, they can take a little bit longer, especially if it's warming up anything like specific IPs or domains or dedicated email addresses. So sometimes that process just takes two to three weeks in and of itself, regardless of the tool you use, regardless of what you're going to do next with it. Sometimes they just have that built in RAM time. And then the other factor of the two week RAM time is nothing is set and forget. I know some of our even some of our vendors, I think, sometimes are guilty of saying things like this.

31:42Amelia LeRutte:And if they give you an FDE, sometimes, you know, it's a heck of a lot easier for sure. but as you've just seen in steps one through six nothing is ever truly set and forget you do need to make sure you are constantly checking in on your agents again a lot in the beginning and still ongoing every day thereafter but you know the iteration and like the context and training you're going to give your agents just takes a lot of calibration and testing and it is real it is a real time investment it is again something where typically i have sometimes I have a little bit more time in a day than another, but it's something where every day I have to, no matter what, even if I can, if, even if I can only sneak in a 15 minutes speed run at the end or beginning of the day to go through what's going on with our agents and that's kind of it, that's still every day, right?

32:32Amelia LeRutte:That's still like having a short one-on-one with like a human counterpart. And so you've got a budget at least two weeks in the beginning of almost nothing else. And I think that is sometimes surprising to folks is you got to almost put everything else aside to really make this work. Because if you're watching or listening to this and you're like, okay, I haven't really thought about one through six, but I'm already pretty far along with a vendor that I think I want to use for an AISDR. And then you get that product, you get into the back end and you're like, oh, shoot, I do need to do those steps one through six.

33:04Amelia LeRutte:Probably steps one through six will take you about two weeks to do it, right? Like figure out what copy works, what subject lines work, what time of day works. Hyper-segmenting your base and then multiplying those steps of like one through four by each segment. Okay, great. Now, right, actually do the deployment either with an FDE or with their team. Like that alone with some other meetings will probably take you two weeks just right there as you put everything together and then work through, you know, okay, do I want this AISDR to flow information back to something like a Salesforce? Is it going to live in the silo?

33:43Amelia LeRutte:How is it going to interact with other things? Okay, once I've added an outbound AISDR, do I want to add an inbound one? Do I want to add one for customer success? There's just all these things that kind of snowball. And so it's not even really the implementation that takes the longest bit of time. It's a little bit of a mental overhead and tax it takes to set all this up. There's obviously some real steps here that we've outlined that you will need to do when you roll out your first AISDR. But anything we have found takes at least two weeks. Even Monica, which is super great and has, you know, it's really good at the agent refilling itself and keeping our pipeline up to date.

34:21Amelia LeRutte:That part is really nice. But even the beginning, I think we got it down to like one and a half weeks. It still took us one and a half weeks to get it all set up, right? Like nothing we have found is instant. so I would be wary of anything that you see as like an instant AISDR oh roll it out today I'd be wary of that for a lot of reasons and two I would say a lot of this is the prep that only you can do right like most of these vendors regardless of the tool will help you out some of them will give you an FDE most of them more of them should I um but regardless of that I would say budgeting at least two weeks of RAM time is fairly standard now with all the prep that you'll just need to do too to make sure it's successful.

35:05Amelia LeRutte:Okay, number eight, we can ask this quite a bit, I think, because we're one of the few folks that have a voice agent along with our chat and email agents. I will say we don't use like a text messaging agent at this point. I know a few of our vendors are actually playing around with that. So we'll see how that goes. And so we have a we We have a voice agent too who's multimodal, so she has video as well. But what we found, because she's been, Amelia AI, Amelia AI, our chat and video agent has been live since about November. Jason's AI, if you talk to his Delphi, you can do it also in chat or voice.

35:50Amelia LeRutte:That's been rolled out for almost a year now. And what we have found for the last year is that most people still prefer to chat with an AISDR over chat or over email versus either phone, voice, or video. I think some of it's just a comfortability thing, right? Like literally I was on the phone with somebody yesterday. I was doing a speaker's call for their speaker's astray annual. And she went to his astray annual to look at stuff. she goes is this she's like this ai um agent just popped up and it looks like you i was like yeah it is me that's a million ai i literally went to the qualified studios to record that and do motion capture of her so that i would have a full multimodal agent which is a fun thing to do um i was like but still most people want to talk to her in a chat format i was like do like the video because then you know you don't have to type and some folks really like that that they can they feel like they're actually talking to someone a few of the folks who talked to amelia ai before our lunatic event came up to me at our lunatic event um last december and they were like oh hey i talked to amelia ai i had a conversation with her and i'm like that's fantastic that is exactly what it's there for she's there 24 7 to answer questions to route people to just be helpful in a way that no human can be because she's on 24 seven.

37:19Amelia LeRutte:So it's nice to have an extra layer where if people want to interact with her video, they can. And I think the important learning here is let people pick. Like I don't think you need to strictly be chat only or text or email only and or that you need to be only video. Like we let people choose. If you want to chat with one of like Amelia AI or Jason AI, you can chat with them. If you want to use the video, you can have a video call with them. If you want to just do a text-based conversation with them, you can just do a text-based conversation with them. And so I think it's just important to let people pick their preferred format and whatever they're comfortable with and let them interact with your agent from there versus trying to maybe force them down one road or another.

38:05Yeah, this is, and this, this particular use case is us using Qualified, which has, I don't even know what they use. They don't use Synthasia. Someone asked. They use, I think, a more cost-effective vendor, right, underlined.

38:15Amelia LeRutte:It's called Tavis, yeah. Tavis, yeah, that's who they use. The 85 % of the 15 % that want to speak with the digital U, do we have a sense, do they go as far deep or do they revert to chat? Do you happen to know? They stay in video mode, I think because - They don't want to talk to the video version of the digital U. Yeah, they want to talk to the video, yeah. it's like because she default her default is chat right so like her default is like you can i'll show you you can just go oh yeah yeah i know it but i mean yeah okay i'm like yeah you can just go to anyone on this call though can just go to sassradio.com you'll see her this is her this is so so people do do it yeah i do think they're you know and this 85 15 was pretty our first day agent was this general agent called delphi that that does uh you know still use hundreds of thousands of times where people can shout visual version of me these were the rough i think these are the rough 85 15 ratios too for voice versus chat they actually deprecated video unfortunately they didn't think it worked well but uh i do think there's a i do think there's a benefit that it looks trustworthy and modern and connects with you so i do think there's a benefit but maybe our learning for b2b use cases it may be more indirect than direct right yeah if you're not ready to start off with voice don't kill yourself like just get the basic chat going and then down the road, once it's dialed in and it's working, if you want to have some fun and add it, it's cool, but it doesn't need to be a day one implementation, the video voice, right?

39:44Amelia LeRutte:Right. And our Qualified had already been on for maybe at least a quarter by the time we added the voice and video component to it. So it was already up for a bit when we started the process of, you know, going to their studios, recording a million AI, I deciding what we wanted her how we want her like voice and video interactions to be versus chat maybe this is obvious to everyone but I'll just say it for context is you have to have a lot more guardrails though in a voice slash video agent than you do a text-based agent maybe for obvious reasons but because it's a live avatar sometimes like the wild card of this we were like a lot.

40:29Amelia LeRutte:Well, we think we know what people will ask her, which is, you know, we have at least a quarter of data of what people have been chatting with her about. And so that's how we trained the voice and video agent. And then we're like, but then people started asking her more personal questions about me. And so that was learning. They were like, oh, well, can I talk to real Amelia too? Or they'd be like, oh, what's Amelia's email address? Which she does give people in certain contexts, not just if you blatantly ask her, but... Or they'd ask other questions like, oh, where's she? I think people were like, where's she from?

41:03Amelia LeRutte:Or like, what's her LinkedIn? And so they just started asking more personal questions because, again, I think people thought it was actually me like chatting back to them in the voice component, which is OK. But yeah, I was like, no, that's still a slightly different brain than our chat interface of Qualified. Because obviously, again, we were like, we're just going to have to put in more guardrails because what we want her to do is still steer the conversation towards the same goals. And sometimes when you're talking in person, you can get off track or you can get distracted or you start asking Amelia AI about real Amelia.

41:37Amelia LeRutte:and so we had to put in just more training and contacts and guardrails for Amelia and I to be like okay it's fine if they start asking those and you can answer it like this way we literally told her what to say but then also try and get them back to whatever they were doing on the website like if they were trying to buy a ticket try and steer them back to buy your ticket if they were trying to book a meeting show my meetings booker to just book a meeting with them and so we had to put again just like additional things you don't necessarily need to do in chat in the video format But I think people have fun with it, to be honest.

42:08Amelia LeRutte:Again, for folks that prefer this format. But yeah, it was not something we rolled out day one. We already knew what was kind of working in our inbound agent. It had already been up for more than a quarter. And then we started to tackle the video and voice component. But it's fun. And I'm actually figuring out a way for Amelia AI to be live at Sastra. And also, if you guys have not talked to her on the website, you will have another version of her that will be at Sastra that you can talk to. Okay, on that, though, actually, what's interesting about Amelia AI is, you could probably guess by now, it is a very person-dependent deployment, which actually we would recommend avoiding for other folks.

42:47Amelia LeRutte:For many reasons. And I think, you know, if you look at things like Amelia AI or the JSON AI that's live on the site, those are so tied to us. Like, those are not only our entities. Like, the JSON AI talks like Jason. Like, it's kind of crazy. like an Azure personality, a bit of Amelia AI kind of talks like Amelia. It has obviously video that I captured that was me. And so I think having these implementations that we have, I'm not sure actually that you should do that unless, unless, Asterix, like us, you're right, you're on the exec team, right? Like you're on the founders, you're invested in business, you're on the exec team.

43:27Amelia LeRutte:And there's less of a risk to do it that way. But I would say, you know, I famously roast qualify for doing this all the time. Like their Piper agent is based on one of their original AEs who's still there. Now she's like been promoted. I'm like, but what if real Piper ever leaves? Like, I actually don't even know how that works. I'm like, do they have her likeness? Because it's also on billboards. Like it's on their website. Like these are just things you may not have thought about yet in a very person-based appointment where if there's any chance that person might leave, obviously there's some inherent risk in that.

44:01Amelia LeRutte:Now, you can do things to obviously safeguard yourself from that if there's somebody you really want to base your AI agent on to make sure you have maybe the rights to the agents if they ever leave the company, et cetera. That gets tricky. Obviously, there hasn't been like rulings on that kind of stuff yet. That hasn't happened yet in real life. So we'll see whatever happens with that down the road. But just know it's kind of tricky when you build these agents so closely deployed on persons and personalities, right? Like our personas are tied to these two agents that we have live on the website.

44:39Amelia LeRutte:And so I would say that's something that's a risk there, but also it's a risk that like a lot of what is running Amelia AI, I, like, I don't think, I think David has, David from our sales team has logged into Qualified once to set up the meetings booker in his calendar. And the other day we logged in for maybe the second time in 10 months so that he could adjust his calendar settings because he had it cutting off too early in the day. But other than that, I'm like, he doesn't have like that tribal knowledge that I have of, I know who our FD is at Qualified. I know who it is at Agent force. I know where to tweak the context.

45:13Amelia LeRutte:Like, again, having person dependent, maybe it's obvious, but you can quickly fall into a trap here. If it's too dependent on one employee's maybe voice or knowledge of the context that's being fed to the agents, et cetera. And then I just put some screenshots here of like, this also becomes obviously more of a risk the longer you have an agent. So now that these screenshots are from qualified, but you can see like even on March 10th, I didn't scroll down all the way just between, you know, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Those are a million video chats. That's just video. There's more than a whole page. That is maybe that screenshots, maybe 20 deep.

45:52Amelia LeRutte:And then there's the rest of the page before 9 a.m. Like, so my AI was shown to maybe 30 people in that day. Right. That becomes risky if you're like, OK, what does that person ever leave? But now 30 people have already talked to her AI agent the whole day. Plus, in the entirety of time, if you actually look at our whole funnel, we've had more than 1.5 million sessions just overall, just in qualified, not counting our other agents, with text-based communication or video communication. And so it just becomes a real risk if you don't have some sort of backups or documentation for these agents going forward.

46:29Amelia LeRutte:Because the more you use them, you'll see we've had qualified up. We rolled it out last August or so. So maybe six-ish months now, but six months and 1.5 million sessions, that's a lot of sessions. That's a lot of exposure to not only an AI agent is it a lot of exposure to, but it's a lot of exposure to an agent that's dependent on not only Amelia AI being Amelia, but real Amelia giving her context and making sure she has all the right data to push back to folks. So it's a lot. So it can scale pretty fast. And so I think the speed is sometimes something folks don't account for when they roll out their first agent because you don't realize how fast it is, right?

47:14Amelia LeRutte:Like once you get past your two-week maybe implementation period, once you deploy your agent and your agent is fully deployed, that thing will just go, right? Like it's just going to go every day constantly. This is 1.5 million sessions. That's on one website, by the way. That was not counting. That was just like SASTR annual. that wasn't plus saster plus saster london like it just can scale so quickly that is something you want to be mindful of too because i feel like folks don't maybe fully understand that they can quickly spin themselves up and have like again almost infinite conversations at scale with people hey amelia i don't know it's not the point you raised one that comes up a lot But if you had to spitball, how much data, you said 1.5 million sessions went into qualified since we've started, right?

48:06Yeah. How many sessions, how much data do you need for most of these products to work versus do you need to get bigger and be a bigger startup until there's enough data generated for them to be effective?

48:19Amelia LeRutte:Yeah, I put it on the next slide here. because it is our last point of your data slash your fundamentals have to work before you have an ai agent qualified in particular just on this agent hat you can see it scrapes our website every couple days so every couple days and you can force it like you could do it every day but i have it scraping sastra.com every couple days sastra annual i think once a week sastra london And I think I turned off for now because we're not promoting that event at the moment. And then you'll see I also have like custom snippets I've uploaded, custom PDFs, custom Q &A that I've loaded into it.

49:02Amelia LeRutte:So it now has all together. It has almost 6 ,000 pieces of context that it's working off of. So that's a lot. Most people don't have 6 ,000 pieces of content or context to feed the agent. I would say a bare minimum, if that's the question. Again, I would focus on what works, but you're going to quickly find with any agent you roll out, whether it's sales or an AISDR or not, you need more data than you think you have. Even for me, I've needed more data than I thought we had. And we had a lot of data. Case in point, like these agents have to answer questions. and if you want them to answer questions autonomously, guess what?

49:50Amelia LeRutte:You have to do a brain dump and say, okay, let me answer all the questions. I think a customer would ask if I haven't documented that yet, which I think most people haven't, to be honest. Maybe some of you have, but it just becomes this snowball of almost every day you're going to find a scenario like that where you're like, oh, folks are starting to ask my agent about XYZ things. So now I have to trade it on that. Oh, now they're asking about, you know, maybe this particular product feature, and I don't have documentation about that. Now I have to make it, then give it to the agent, then let it deploy.

50:24You definitely need the documentation. If you had to spitball how much traffic to my website for something that relies on inbound and data capture, how much traffic do I need for my website? And for an outbound agent, how many at least slightly qualified leads, folks that you've collected, how big a list do you have to have, right? Have created to feed it for both those inbound and outbound actions to be effective.

50:52Amelia LeRutte:Yeah, I would say for the inbound piece for like website traffic, because a lot of this is obviously based on our website traffic. I think if you have less than, let's say 10 to 20 ,000 visitors a month, it's probably not worth it. But that's a lot for a startup. It's a lot, I know. Yeah, 10 to 20 ,000. Everyone kind of exaggerates, you know, see clearly. I know. But not a lot of folks have 10. Folks might not to your marketing site, right? You might not have 10 ,000 visitors for your first 18 months as a startup, right? Right. It's entirely possible. So you would pass or you would just pass for, you wouldn't pass for outbound necessarily, but you would pass for something.

51:30I would pass for inbound. Like a qualified, the way we use it, you would pass until you're big. A hundred percent.

51:34Amelia LeRutte:I would pass if you have less than, and I know 10 to 25K seems like a lot, but honestly, we have more than that. And if you look at specifically at our, you know, obviously we have 1.5 million sessions just on one website in six months. So we have a lot more than that. But if you look at how that funneled down, right, of what it does with people of, okay, how many completed conversations does it have? Now, how many million AI conversations is it having? And then how many, you know, this and that and how many meetings were booked? Like that all obviously dwindles down the funnel. And so I think if you don't have that volume at the very top, you're not going to get the results you want at the very bottom.

52:13Okay, just a challenge and then summarize what you've learned on Outbound. So that makes sense. But let's imagine I have no humans responding to my website, to any leads or Outbound. Do I really need 10 ,000 visitors a month? I mean, maybe we do for some of the tools we use, but intellectually it makes sense. there's a different level where going to some of your early sites, if it's just not getting done, I want an agent that is available 24-7 to answer prospects and customer questions, right? Even if I don't have the volume. But maybe that's a different question.

52:47Amelia LeRutte:No, that's okay. I think it's a good nuance, I would say. That's maybe the ideal volume. But if you don't have that and you do want something where, again, getting it done is better than not having it at all, then just do it right like if you if you have any inbound volume at all but you don't have the traffic just do it but if you're like i'm in a boat where i don't have the volume and i i don't have the volume of traffic and i don't get a lot of inbound anyway then i think that's the that then that's maybe a slippery slope to thinking oh maybe an aisdr will fix it like magically for an inbound agent like it won't if there's if there's truly if you have like a double handicap there if there's If there's not enough something going on there, then maybe focus somewhere else.

53:31Amelia LeRutte:Yeah, maybe focus on outbound first or maybe focus on current customers first before you tackle them. Got it. Outbound is interesting. I would say, you know, I like to keep ours hyper segmented. But if you think about just the pure math, right, like let's just I keep ours to about a thousand or so per campaign. and then let's just say a campaign takes about a week and a half to run right because it's going to do a first email then it's going to wait a couple days on the second one that's going to wait a couple of days and then send a third one that is like our cadence that we do with most of our outbound agents so if if you know a thousand people take a week and a half then you could do it in a month with like four thousand people right because if you're doing just at the bare minimum let's say one sequence and you're loading it up once a week you let it run for a week and a half then yeah, I would say you could probably do it with like less than 5 ,000 contacts.

54:25Amelia LeRutte:I think the issue people run into is after the first month, they're like, what do I do now? They're like, I ran through. I had this list of like 5 ,000 or maybe 10 ,000 people I want to go out to. And then after a quarter, I exhausted all those leads. So I think the true magic actually on Outbound is not figuring out. It's just continually figuring out who you want to reach out to. Whereas like I have almost endless folks I always want to reach out to. But I think for startups who are maybe starting out, you may not have that, right? And so it's just something to think about within AISDR is like, are you going to be able to continually feed it?

55:08Amelia LeRutte:Just like you would a sales team, right? Like you used to have to feed humans leads all the time. The AISDR is no different. You got to keep feeding it leads in this, not only the same way, but more because actually humans are way slower at outbound than way slower. So let's imagine you're a startup, but it's not day zero, but you're only at a couple million revenue. You have a small list you've built from inbound, right, from your website. And then you're using clay or other tools and you're kind of hand building a target list, right? is that going to work um for a sort of a pre-brand startup if i build up a list of a couple thousand folks from an enrichment tool do some of these tools do it themselves like will they automatically build the list for you um how does that work if you don't have a massive list already yeah some of them are really good at lookalikes right like artisan has a lookalike feature clay has a lookalike feature like if you have let's say a list of just a thousand people then build lookalikes all day long like i'm not at that point where i want to like you can you saw it monica was doing it for like new target accounts but for the other stuff i'm doing more manually yeah i but if you're not in that boat then use lookalikes all day like they're pretty good at it right like the monica one's pretty good at it i've tried i've tested it more recently in clay it's pretty good at it like um i gave it i think i was telling you like i gave it a list of folks who came to our cmo summit last year, which is like an invite only thing we do as part of faster.

56:39Amelia LeRutte:I said, for this purpose, actually, give me a lookalike of CMOs. Cause I only had like a list of, okay, the top thousand CMOs that I had narrowed it down to from like past CMO summits, CMOs in our database, you know, you have to be over like 40 million. So it was a smaller pool than just our whole database of CMOs. And then you'd have to, then you also had to be at, you know, a somewhat agentic company. And so for that purpose, I was like, give me a lookalike because my list is less than a thousand people. And I want people who look exactly like this ICP already. And then I sent it out actually last week.

57:14Amelia LeRutte:I happen to use Clay. You can use whatever vendor you want to do your lookalike. I happen to use Clay. And we had actually doubled the amount of CMO Summit attendees in a week just by using a lookalike. So I do think the lookalike audiences for Outbound can work pretty well if you only have like a set of a thousand people. just make sure you give it a thousand really good people like don't give it like oh this joe schmo company churned or there are i only have like customers that i maybe don't want the same dna of like give it your best customers and then make a lookalike but i do think for outbound you can get away with having a smaller list and maybe that's a better place to start with um before you scale out the inbound is to use a lot of those lookalike lists to start building out outbound.

58:02Amelia LeRutte:And then you can do other things like layer and ads, whatever. But that for us, like even that just use case and scenario right there works really well because I had a much smaller list than I normally have to work with and it still worked. So if you do it yourself with a human, you prove the copy and context that works, that gets meetings, right? If your list is then too small, build, you can get to initial scale for it to work with a thoughtful copycat list right i mean yes classic crappy copycat lists uh are a low effort thing like buying a purchase list but if you do it if you spend the time to do it right you really target the icp that works and then customize the copy that's a hack to getting scale if you don't have it yet in the early days right is do it do it's really well but i to your point like i think when i had clay copycat it it gave me like 2 ,500 more CMOs.

58:57Amelia LeRutte:And I was like, that's probably too many. Like, so I went through, I went through it one by one. It took me a couple hours. I think it was Saturday. I went through it one by one while I was watching something on TV and I deleted all the people I didn't want. Cause I was like, you know what? The list is pretty good, but there's like 2000 people here. I probably don't want. So I deleted a bunch. I like hyper pruned it to get it to the best quality. But then, you know that's how i doubled our attendees for that particular thing in a week so it can work really well but yeah it does take some time to go through it and like i literally like there were companies i hadn't heard of i was like i'm gonna click them make sure they're an ai there make sure their revenue is right like double check it's the right person click their linkedin and make sure they actually work there like that can take for a list of 2 000 that can take a couple hours and i did nothing else for those couple hours but it did work right so i think if you're willing to put in the work, that's a good hack.

59:51Okay. Do we have, I know, I know we're over and people will leave, which is fine, but do you have 10 more minutes? I can ask you some of the, a few, there's a few good questions in the chat. I'm going to ask you to wrap up. Yeah. This one's a good, a good basic one. I think this was great as is how many people and visit and leave when they realize they're talking to an AI agent. And in prior sessions, we you've presented some rough data that says we think people prefer to talk to our agent in many cases, right? Um, but what is, How many leave the chat or interaction or digital Amelia digitalization when they realize it's an AI?

1:00:25Amelia LeRutte:At least a couple people a day. Yeah. Do they ask to talk to a human? Is this a big deal? No, they just ask to talk to a human. So I'll go over an inbound case and then I'll go over an outbound case. So in our inbound, it tells me immediately because I have a Slack set up. It will tell me immediately in qualified if there's somebody who's asking to talk to real Amelia. if I'm in a meeting I will say give them my email or whatever and I'll talk to them later I can't talk to them like Amelia I could but I can't come to the phone right now and and then there's a couple times a day I'll see at the end of the day like I have it you know flagging of like if there's a trigger of somebody got frustrated it's funny like first I started out with like oh I'm gonna flag in our inbound agents when people say something good now I'm like no I actually just want a flag.

1:01:14Amelia LeRutte:If they say something bad, because then I need to take an action. If they say something good, great. Like, I don't even care about that anymore. I actually only care now if they say something bad or if they need an escalation and they still need help. So now I kind of swap those filters. But it's pretty funny. So at least a couple times a day, I'll get somebody where I had an escalation or they got frustrated talking to the AI. And then I think I said this to you a couple weeks ago. There's also this weird mix of people who try and trick our AI now. And I don't know what's up with that. All the way to prompt injection and everything.

1:01:47Everyone tries to break them, right?

1:01:49Amelia LeRutte:Yes. And so that is a weird phenomenon where I would say in the last couple weeks, that's picked up more. I see more of that in our agents across the board. So I don't know who on social media started that trend of like, hey, if you're talking to an agent, you can't get what you want. Try and break its prompt or break its brain. And I'm like, one that's not very nice like i know amelia ai doesn't have feelings but real amelia reads the amelia ai conversations and she has feelings and that's not very nice when i read those so those ones i will delete like it'll send it to me and i'll see somebody try to break the prompt and i'm like you know i'm just gonna ignore that person i'm sorry but like i'm not gonna garner a response when you were rude to my ai i'm just not gonna respond to you which is my right as a human.

1:02:34Amelia LeRutte:But yeah, I would say, you know, I can probably count on my hand though, the amount of times our inbound agent flags in one day that it needs a human or somebody got frustrated by it. But yeah, I would say lately, it is this weird trend that people get frustrated because they try and prompt inject it and then it doesn't work. So then they get really mad. But for the most part, 99 % of people are happy to talk to Amelia because we're busy. Like I can't come answer your questions about tickets or where the hotel room block is or when did when does the ticket code expire or when do prices go up and what's the next price and where's the venue because i forgot even though we told you a thousand times like most people are happy to have that answer in real time or they're happy to also book a meeting with like me or david in real time they don't have to go back and forth with the scheduler like again 99 of folks are happy maybe one percent slash a handful of folks are mad on the inbound side.

1:03:28Now on the outbound side, I probably at the same

1:03:31Amelia LeRutte:degree, I can count on one hand, I will get an angry email per day of, hey, stop emailing me, or this email wasn't very good. But on the flip side, I also get a handful of emails every day that were like, thanks, this was such a good email. What do you use for this? So those really balance out at the end of the day on the outbound side. For the most part, again, 99 % of folks, though, happy to have the information and the emails all in real time, even with an AI. Yeah. Yeah. I think we can wrap there. I think that's a good question. A lot of folks have fear that people won't talk to the AI. There is maybe, Amelia, I think you hit it, but if you could add anything else, then we could wrap.

1:04:15There is some sort of line, a quality line, where an agent adds more value than a mediocre human. We've talked about that. It's not the best. It doesn't add more value than talking directly to Amelia or me or David. None of our agents actually are that good today for the most part. They should be maybe toward the end of the year, but they're not as good as talking to three of us, but they are better than talking to a decent human or a mediocre human. They just know more. So what we found is if, and it might be hard to quantify that, maybe it isn't, but if you get above a certain line, if you invest the time to train your agent, if you read the email exceptions every day, if you upload all the documents, you're going to find this concern that folks don't want to talk to an AI is misplaced because the interaction will be better than a media for human and just it's I don't know if it was in these 10 points but in some ways you're competing with media for humans here on this whole AI SDR journey again you're not competing with the best SDR you could hire in the whole world but the best SDR in six months wants to be an AE the best six months and nine SDR in nine months might want might leave even go to a better company.

1:05:16The turnover in SDRs is the highest at anything and go to market. So there's the notional pretend competition of the best person you ever worked with. And then there's the reality that if you get above the bar, you're going to find, and you invest the time, you're going to find people are happier to talk to that AI than to most humans. It just is. It just is. So anyhow, this was great. Thank you, Amelia, for driving this. Thanks everyone for joining and And we'll keep it going and see everyone at Saster AI annual in May.

1:05:44Amelia LeRutte:Thanks, everyone.