More on Sales prospecting as an Engineering problem
What's changing regardless of the AI "hype cycle"
I often challenge technical Founders on what their actual bandwidth constraints are, especially when it comes to consistently generating revenue. I even write about it – I share why you can never truly offload prospecting (the best CEOs are always reaching out to other executives at their target companies) and deciding if you’re avoiding sales because it’s hard or because you’re ready to scale.
The game ain’t the same
“For all of the peacock thought-posting you see on LinkedIn about how AI is changing sales, you’ll note that only one of these tooling categories relies on AI. That’s one reason why I’m so confident in where prospecting is going: this is not just hype, it’s a gradual change that’s been a long time coming.“ - Tim Babcock
A few months ago, the Amplify team wrote a post on sales prospecting becoming an engineering problem. As we at Dynamic work with more modern technical teams, we continue to see amazing things built with modern GTM stacks that make the formerly tedious parts of outbound obsolete. This is not AI-SDR-agentic-workflows. What I really like about Tim’s POV in this post is that only one of the key components is AI focused, meaning you can do more with less through modern tooling (IP lookup/enrichment, Sales-focused email, text generation, glue tools) and that this trend will continue regardless of the “hype cycle” of AI.
The failure mode we often see is that teams try to offload sales or automate pipeline building too quickly without a deep understanding of who they’re engaging with and why, what “qualified” looks like, and reviewing learnings, failures, successes each week allow you to instrument a process that people can follow as you build your organization. This must be figured out by the Founding team first. We feel strongly about this principle because Founders often forget “the eye” they start to build for what a strong fit customer and a poor fit customer is from a very nuanced POV.
You cannot assume anyone you hire will ever have the same “eye” and therefore you must understand your prospecting “process” at which you can scale your team around – which happens to be so much more powerful than the traditional approach of list building with ZoomInfo and spamming through Outreach.
The future is actually great for introverts (and extroverts who want to win)
The people best suited for the future of sales are: technical, process-oriented, and skilled writers. What this means is that technical Founders are well equipped for the future of where GTM is headed. It’s why this is such an exciting future for what’s ahead and why traditional approaches to sales feel increasingly distant as prospects prefer to buy and engage with companies in a very different way. Learn your process, use data, debate, iterate, find success, and teach more people on your team how to think critically and creatively about approaching your ideal customers.
More from “sales prospecting is becoming an engineering problem”:
For founders today, the question becomes: Who do you hire to build and manage these pipelines? I’m starting to steer the companies I work with towards a combination of a few things:
Some technical skill: you don’t need someone who can code, but you do need someone who’s reasonably comfortable with Zapier and webhooks.
Process and product mindset: you need someone who takes joy in building new processes and fine-tuning them over time, plus is excited about finding and getting to the bottom of new products.
Copywriting: great writing is always a standout skill, and with all of this automation, the SDR of the future will be able to spend more time writing better, more compelling templates.
Essentially, you are building a cross functional team that would include both your first seller and an ops/systems generalist. As this matures as a discipline, founders should expect their first sellers and more specifically their sales leader to become an expert at managing and automating these kinds of prospecting pipelines. And like with other things related to AI and automation, reducing manual work in one area means more time and energy for the work that really does require a human touch.
We totally agree with this and have continued to see sales and GTM turn into an even more meaningful “team sport” since a group of generalists who are excited to build something great are deeply invested in finding true advocates and adopters of the products they love to promote (the companies they work at). So, as you’re thinking about your hiring plans for next year and how to allocate time, dollars, and focus, consider how to build a process that leverages the pipelines and tools of the future, allowing you to do 100 times more than you thought possible with the small (but mighty) team you have.
Go make it happen.