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Sacra Interview - Unify (July 2024)

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Austin Hughes, CEO and co-founder of Unify, on the death of the SDR

Artificial intelligence is helping sales teams manage relationships and optimize the customer lifecycle.

Sales Engagement Platforms

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    An interview with the CEO of Unify, Austin Hughes. 
    He discusses how AI is remaking the sales and rev ops stack.
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        Outreach grew to USD 250 million ARR by enabling any sales development representative (SDR) to send outbound emails with demographic data like a prospect's name, company, and role pre-filled. &quot;Cold outbound is just really not working. We've had 10 plus years of the Outreach/Salesloft era of sending cold sequences, just spraying and praying. 10 years ago, that worked really well. You could just do that, you could book meetings. . . . This need [for a new approach] has really stemmed because a lot of the companies we talked to, cold outbound doesn't work for them and they know they need to make outbound work.&quot;
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        With the decline in the efficacy of cold outbound, companies are turning to &quot;warm outbound&quot;, where personalized outreach is triggered based on specific behavior data that a prospect is engaged in either on your own website (e.g., via Clearbit) or elsewhere on the web (e.g., on G2). &quot;When you reach out to somebody who has a current need for what you're offering, your odds of converting them into an opportunity, into a customer, are just exponentially higher. And we've seen it in the data. . . . We operate on top of is what we call website intent data. It's 6sense and Clearbit, which take an anonymous visitor and tell you the company behind it, to understand, for Acme Corporation, how much time have they been spending on our site and what have they been looking at.&quot;&nbsp;
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        AI-native tools like Unify (USD 17.9 million raised), Default (USD 11.3 million raised), and Attention (USD 3.1 million raised) stitch together multi-tool workflows to automate the sending of highly personalized messages, at scale, eliminating the need for USD 60,000/year SDRs. &quot;The way that we think that this is gonna play out is that the USD 40,000-60,000 a year SDR job is something that we're gonna fully be replacing... I think what we're gonna see is the dying out of this lower value SDR, the rise of this higher paid, higher value SDR who's kind of like an AE junior.&quot;
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