Is AI About To Take Over B2B Marketing?

When I started this newsletter, I promised you I would keep you up to date with the latest changes in the world of B2B marketing

Today, we’re going to discuss what I believe will be the biggest-ever shift in the industry

Is AI About To Take Over B2B Sales/Marketing?

The two most effective B2B marketing channels of the past decade are cold emailing and cold calling.

The playbook of old was to pay an SDR just above minimum wage to sit there all day, research prospects in your target market, cold call them, and if they couldn’t get through, send them a cold email.

Then came mass automation tools, where tech replaced the SDR. But as the ESPs battled mass email and the market became saturated with billions of calls & emails, that has slowly become less and less effective.

So, if the mass automation approach is struggling, and hiring an SDR to do highly personalised outreach is prohibitively expensive, what is the answer?

My Secret Project

Over the past six months, I have been working on a secret project to explore whether we could build an AI agent that can beat a human SDR at hyper-personalised cold calling/emailing.

Our new agent, Charles, knows everything there is to know about our business. He can find ideal prospects in our target market, research them, call them to gauge interest, set appointments for our BDMs, and then follow up with emails and meeting reminders.

In a test against the best SDR at our agency, Charles managed to book 1.9x the number of meetings that our human achieved, at less than half the cost. That’s a 4x improvement over a world-class human SDR.

Charles can also operate fluently in 29 languages, opening up a global market for us.

Couple that with the fact that Charles will always turn up to work, he doesn’t take sick days, he doesn’t go on vacation, and he will never leave for a better offer, and we start asking if this is too good to be true?

What Next?

Like with any new growth hack, there is a limited lifespan before everyone figures it out and the arbitrage shrinks.

Cold email, Google Ads and Meta Ads were each a gold mine for nearly a decade. These days, word spreads quicker, and the arbitrage window is often much smaller.

I suspect we’ve got 2-3 years before the masses clue on and flood the market.

How Am I Capitalising?

I’m going all in on this space and doing two things:

1) Building several agents to scale up sales for each of my businesses

2) My agency, Growth Yard, is now building these custom agents for other B2B companies

If you want to see an AI SDR in action and explore building a custom AI agent for your business, you can schedule a demo here: https://www.growthyard.com/ai-sdr