Episode #106 Stop Blaming Your SDRs – Why Your GTM Strategy Sucks (And How to Fix It) with Alex Olley

In this episode of Bridge the Gap, powered by Revenue Reimagined, we sit down with Alex Olley, Co-Founder and CRO of Reachdesk, to unpack why most outbound strategies fail and what the best GTM teams are doing differently.

We go deep on:
 • The #1 outbound leadership mistake most companies make
 • Why gifting flops (and how to fix it)
 • The AI-powered SDR vs. the AI-SDR (yes, there’s a difference)
 • How to boost outbound ROI with less pipeline
 • Real-life processes you can steal to scale smarter

Whether you’re a CRO, founder, or just someone who’s been traumatized by bad sales emails — this episode is your GTM therapy session.

Follow Alex - https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexolley/

PS - huge shout out to Sendoso for sponsoring our show.

We could not do this without you.

See how Sendoso can help increase pipeline, ROI, and customer retention.

ZoomInfo is also a proud sponsor - check them out here!

🎁 Lastly, we have a gift for you! We’re tired of seeing people getting critical GTM components wrong. Need help with your ICP, Buyer Persona, and Value Prop? Tired of the shitty “resources” people “give away” to gain followers?

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Transcript

This is Bridge the Gap powered by Revenue Reimagined, the podcast where we dive into all things revenue. Each episode, we bring you the top founders and go-to-market leaders to challenge how you think about growth and help you bridge your biggest go-to-market gaps. I'm Adam Jay. And I'm Dale Zwizinski. 

As always, thanks for hanging with us. There's a million ways you can be spending your time and we're grateful for you choosing to spend it with us. Be sure to check out our newsletter if you want the show notes and tactical advice on how to bridge your GTM Gaps. Let's get to it. 

Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by Revenue Reimagined. It's always me because Dale says the only thing I do good on this show is the intro. We have an awesome guest with us today, which is Alex Olley , the co-founder and CRO of Reach Desk. And one of the people who has actually figured out how to break through this GTM noise without just breaking the budget and hiring a ton of people. He helped build Reach Desk from scratch into a leader in the gifting space in direct mail, a space I know well having formerly led sales that swag up. In those firsthand, how outbound needs to evolve, especially Alex when the buyer's BS radar is on high alert. We're going to dive into what works, what doesn't, what most GTM teams get totally wrong about trust, timing and personalization. Alex, welcome to the show. 

Thanks for having me. I've been a co-founder of this one since 2012. I've signed up a couple of weeks ago and I'm here. So I'm really pumped for this one. Thanks for having me. 

You just have to take that clip of the introduction and now you can just go anywhere. It could be like your intro to anywhere you want to go. 

It's the best thing I do on this show. Let's see. 

Alex, one of the things that you've said a lot is up on not dead, it's just done really badly. What do most teams do that are so wrong and what are they missing on the outbound? 

Oh my word. We've only got 30 minutes, right? Yeah. Okay. So let's start with the people side of things. Now, one of the things that I've learned about outbound, if you really, really, really want to make outbound work, don't give it to an idiot like me, a CRO, to just manage on a dough, like get a great leadership in it. Now, I hear the teams, the companies who thrive with outbound, they're not just around that 70%, 80% pacing mark, the ones that thrive are the ones that have a leader at the helm who was really driving it forward, who was obsessed. I've had outbound leaders who, they kind of tell me in the interview process that I'm a career outbound leader. That's what I want to dedicate my time to. 

And then the ones that know how to both crack the whip and motivate reps, but also understand the art and how it evolved. And they're always looking at that thing, I'm telling you how I get that SDR to perform as opposed to that one. 

And is that something you need to manage? Is that something like you just pick up? It's not easy, man. That leadership is a different style. 

Yeah, it's a different style. There's a reality to it, obviously, that a lot of SDRs, outbound is predominantly driven through younger individuals who, it's often their first job. And so, people don't just take offense to this, but you're learning how to write emails and how to behave in a corporate environment. And that in itself isn't easy, and learning how to show off, and it's probably most of a big city where one has to fund too, it's a sub-day for them to show off. 

It's the right space. It's like, you're doing a bit of mumbling while having to motivate them, and that's so hard. And so, getting the leadership right there is critical, and I think I underestimated that for far too long. I think I was looking for someone who was, you know, I want to be a DPSL one day, and actually I focused on hiring the, no, I'm a career outbound leader, and this is my bread and butter. That one person can change things. And I was being a friend of mine with the CRM, and he said, I've got these really great SDRs, and we've got all the tools and the data and everything, but I just can't seem to get it worked. And I said, well, how do you, how do you, the leader who's at the helm there, and he said, we've got like a team lead. 

And then that was a combination of about nine months ago. And I told him, I think you need to hire someone who lives and breathes this. Right, and who is a visionary at the same time, who's going to want to start to think about AI workflows and solving that into like really a scale in this new era that we're living in. 

And then he pulled me up about two weeks ago and said, we didn't change anything other than the leader, and that we're flying. And I think that's really important. I think it's really important to just to address that bit, right? That's one thing. 

I love that part, because I do think people look at the BDRs, but they never look at the leader in that space. And like you said, it's a different leader. And something you just said, I wanted to just double click on, because I think, while this is prevalent across all of go-to-market in sales, AI will really take over a lot of things that are happening in the front end of the funnel, in the outbound motion. So I think that's like, that person now, I think used to be someone like, okay, we're going to do daily stand-ups, we're going to go through the process, we're going to like crack the whip, we're going to kind of a little micromanage. Now you need to have that strategy piece of it as well. So it's almost like this job has gone from like, not so sexy to like, potentially super sexy with the advent of AI. 100%. 

They're becoming a hybrid between like a BDR leader and a go-to-market engineer. And those guys are really special. And so that's what I'm saying. The second thing I'm saying that where companies fail and where we certainly fail is we re-overlook the concept of like air cover. Now there's a moment when a BDR calls someone, and I listen to loads of calls. There's a moment when a BDR calls someone, and I say, hey, is that it's calling from Reach Desk? And someone's like, who? I've never heard of you guys before, what? And oh yeah, I have heard of you guys. 

Now remind me what it is, you're gifting something on this side. That's a very different conversation. And that transpires through the words of marketing and brand awareness and being there and occupying people's minds so that when BDRs do call, they're not going totally cold. And that if we say this 

all the time, we're going to be in the 

same. So that's something that scares people because they're like, hang on a second, marketing should be over here. And BDRs should be at the opposite end, and then they should just be given lists and like go and hit the phones. And you're setting them up to fail massively. And I speak to that in the DPs of marketing and CMOs, they're like, why would we give BDRs lists to people who tend to do bens, or why would we send them signals to things that happen on our website? 

That's like a marketing, that's marketing stuff. We should hope those people turn into MGLs or something on this side. And that none of them get your people to work those accounts because they're warmed up and that's where they succeed. And actually you need a smaller team to do that. You don't need these armies of BDRs with us, and you don't need fewer people. So it's actually more efficient from a unique economic standpoint as well. And so when you understand that and you fuse the two together and you're providing that air cover, your BDRs are going to be far more successful. 

Now, one of the biggest evolutions that I've also seen more recently is that we have to scale. This concept of cold calling being dead is just like, I smile every time people say that because I smile. You're actually opening the door for more opportunities for fewer people doing it. But there are ways you have to scale. 

I'll give you an example. I don't believe that BDRs can just punch and dial one phone after the other now. You need parallel dialers and things like that to be able to scale so that they're having enough conversations to enable them to be productive enough. But with that, you have to change your approach. So we'd be like hyper-personalised on every single prospect. And we would say that this is a research call, Adam. I know everything about you and I've researched you. 

This is why I'm calling you. I don't think that's possible anymore because there's so many filters and things that are getting in the way. And so what we've done is we have done like, if you do find hooks and triggers and things on an individual, you use them. But actually, typically speaking, it's very like we've zoned in on the personas you're going to buy us. We've positioned those problems so that when you are calling someone, you're saying, typically speaking, we find heads of marketing are really struggling to break through the noise right now. Like pipeline is suffering as a result. It's because this, this and this, to what extent does that resonate with you? You're doing this persona-based prospect to scale, which I do think works. 

As long as that pitch is really clear. And then you enable your BDRs with things like we use a so-called nooks to do parallel dialing so that you can hit enough people at the same time. And so you have to, with scale, have that trade-off to things like hyper-personalization to just like relevance. But you're getting enough volume to be able to get enough outbacks and conversations to go to book enough meetings to transit into pipeline. And I think not enough people are making that shift to be able to enable the BDR to scale. 

Yeah, I agree with you 100%. I think there's this old mindset of, you know, to your point, here's your list. Just dial. No marketing air cover, no brand awareness. And then when the conversions don't come in, it's blame the BDR, aspire the BDR, aspire the BDR leader, but no one knows who the heck you are. It has to be this team approach more than anything. Alex, if a company's pipeline is drying up, where should they start? Is it people? Is it process or is it playbook? 

Is it people, process or playbook? I'm not going to lie, our pipeline hasn't always been full. And when it hasn't been, the first thing I look back into is, are you going to, I see people, ultimately like, are the people we're hitting, are they the right people you're going to buy? And I had this, it was about just over a year ago. And actually, it's interesting, if you look at it, the trend line of pipeline wasn't too bad. It was the actual revenue that it translated from it. Our pipeline was dipping a little bit, but I think we were going, we made that mistake of going a bit too wide with who we were going after. And we, when we really narrowed it, you can do regression analysis, all those things to really show you that who are the right buyers for you. We were like, hang on, we need to get this even more and more refined. How do we really layer that on? And the moment we changed our actual ideal customer profile, not just like how many employees, what's the headcount, who are the personas, that's not your ICP by the way. 

That's like a, it's not your ICP. People think that is for some reason, or some people say like, they're this industry in this site, that is so far from right, I think it's scary. But when you start to understand one of those nuances within the buyers who are actually buying, particularly at the fastest rates, you go there and then you figure out what are the best ways to unlock those buyers from our pipeline. Not only do you need less pipeline to do it, but you only get to where you want to go to way faster. And if you think about it, if you're generating 100 opportunities a month, for example, with your win rate 8%, you could actually do that with 50 opportunities. So you're going to need half the pipeline if your win rate was 16%. We got asked to 24 when it was, eight at one point from a specific channel, which means we needed a third amount of pipeline. And when I tell people this, and like, do you realize if you really looked into what those actual signals are behind who's buying, why they were buying, what the situation they were in, look at those things that you can then go to find, you will need a third of the amount of pipeline and your life is so much easier. 

And from there you can grow. And that's my approach, is try and get the win rate as high as possible. Try and demand, force yourself to get as little pipeline as possible. Obviously, we've got revenue plans that we need to hit, but then grow back from there, you will grow way faster as a result. And that's what I've seen over the past 12 months. 

We've been nailing our numbers because we've taken that approach as like quality of anything. And as you see more and more of those, you can go and find more of them. That's way easier than having to go and find this crazy amount of pipeline because everyone gets distracted and you need way more resources and it's an impossible challenge. 

Yeah, but coming from a leader, that's super important because, again, if we go back to the leadership side of this equation, it's most people are saying more pipeline, more dials, more outreach, more contacts, all of this. 

More, more, more. And they're not actually, you know, revisiting their ICP, they're buying personas, the value propositions and then also looking, so not only the people that are buying in the front of the funnel, but who is staying with you? What does success look like? 

How much success are they really having? Who's dropping out of your funnel? Because, like, that will tell you a lot of what's happening in the front of your funnel. 

The people that are falling out in the bottom should be the people that you're not putting into the top because it's just a waste of time and potentially cost you a bunch of money. But people just like Dave tried to define their ICP like three years ago. They're like, oh, yeah, our ICP, yeah, we did that exercise. 

Like, here's the three-ring binder and we're done with it. And so I love that perspective. And I love it from a leadership perspective, Alex, that you're really looking at that quality over quantity. 

It's a much easier game. I think you both said it, right? Everyone wants more, more, more. And we actually have this conversation, like, we don't want more. We actually want less. I did have that, but I wanted to say, but we said, but we have less. 

But you can get some more. You can get some more once you get your close rates to 24, 25%, like you can go more because now you know what good looks like. You don't know good looks like you're putting fuel on crappy stuff. 

Let's shift gears for a second. I want to talk about what I'm going to call the psychology of a package, right? So when we talk gifting, you know, there's all it to real main players in the space and a bunch of like other smaller players. 

And I get the space better than most, right? Like I led sales for a swag company that tried to pivot to gifting other than like corporate swag and failed effing miserably. But most people, when they think gifting, think swag, right? Like, oh, you know, Alex, you took a demo with me. 

I'm going to send you a really cool revenue reimagined logo t-shirt that you're never going to wear that's going to be some rag somewhere. What makes a gift actually move pipeline? Because I would imagine you guys use your product and use reach desk very heavily in your sales product, in your sales process. What makes a gift actually move pipeline versus being some generic like gift that you send the same shit to everyone every time? 

Yeah, it's really simple. Give people something they want they can use over and over again. I think I thought that was logical. Well, we stopped trying to play this game of trying to figure out what Gale and Adam want because it kind of gets a bit spooky. If it's like, if I showed up and I'm like, oh my God, you know everything about me. How do you know it was a boomerang I wanted for my birthday? It's like, well, I thought you on like your Instagram page. Okay, now you'll speak a bit weird, Alex. 

Oh, yeah. We're not trying to play that game. But there was a player in the space who did play that game. It didn't work out for them and we saw it from a mile away. What were you saying? 

Was it a female person's name that was the player in the space page? 

Yeah, yeah. So we're not trying to play that game because there is a spooky element to like, you know, I've had stories of sales reps sending that their female prospectus married like a golden necklace with their initials and grays on it. And it's just like, oh, what are you doing? 

And it's because the AI or whatever it was, the researcher, it oversteps the mark. And so what we do is we try to hypothesize what would someone like that want, right? But really importantly, we give them the choice to choose something else or to donate to a charity. 

And those methods work really well. Someone says, look, you have fine. You saw that I like rugby, right? Cool. You've certainly rugby gifts. I don't need a rugby gift. 

You're not sending me anything like too crazy. But actually, I don't need another lion's big tournament game at the moment, the British and Irish Lions in Australia. I don't need a lion's baseball cap or something. But you know what? 

I do need something to fight for everywhere. So I'm going to choose that instead. And so actually, we're not trying to solve this hyper hyper personalized motion of trying to guess exactly what that individual wants. We're trying to get as close to that as possible and then give them the choice to choose something they might want. We have this gigantic marketplace and Stoller Tambis recording goes out. We'll have launched it, but we've released something that essentially allows us to integrate with Amazon so that you can choose pretty much anything from whatever you want in the world. And all of our marketplaces localize it. 

If I'm in France, I could choose something from within France. There's only being shit there. It's culturally appropriate. And I'm always going to be able to fight back for me. And the principle of reciprocity is the thing that works. Remember, we built this. I built this for my SDR and AEG. 

I was a head of sales and I had SDRs and AEGs using gifting and it worked. Like there's no tomorrow. And so all you really want to try and do is get the person to give back the thing that's more valuable to them, which is their time. And it doesn't need to be massively overthought. So if you get something that's close to being what that person wants, you give them the power of choice or the ability to donate to a charity, for example. 

If there's a high degree of likelihood, they can say, yes, you know what? We will meet you now. The thing I do not believe in, just to be clear, I do not believe in this workflow. Hey Adam, if you take a meeting, I will send you something. Right? 

And there's a kid who's going to send you something. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I don't believe in that. It doesn't work. You will get a lot of meetings. 

Very few of them will translate into pipeline and revenue. That is what will happen. 

I'll pay my $25 Starbucks gift card, but I have no need for your product, but you have some BDR manager or AD manager or marketing person who's like, yeah, I have 30 minutes. I can use a gift card. I hate it. It's the worst strategy ever. 

So what we do is we give without expecting anything in return, but as a result, you will get what you ask for. And there's no condition attached to it. And that's the critical line for us. And we see that what we do well. 

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If you're looking for a proven way to win and retain more customers, visit Sendozo.com. How do you prove ROI on gifting when the action is purely emotional versus transactional? How are you guys looking at this gifting is working? Is it tied into pipeline? I'm sure you have integrations with Salesforce and our HubSpot that could look at gift-sent to pipeline generated, et cetera, et cetera. 

Yeah. So all strategies seem to get go. Everyone in our space, they were all talking about sending stuff. We're going to send you swag. We're going to send you a gift. Our whole strategy from day one, which is why I think you alluded to it earlier. There were two players now, two proper players. It's Rich Chest and one other. Our big thing was... 

I only know of Rich Chest. That's the only player I know of. 

Yes, well, let's only talk about that. Good answer. Good answer. Our big thing from the beginning was all about ROI. That's what we wanted to be known for. Our strategy was all around that. I'll tell you a story about it because I do think I'm going to go on a massive tangent here. There's this concept of, in go-to-market, you're a must-have or a must-have. I don't believe in that. I believe in being a no-brainer. I think very, very, very few. 0.1% of providers out there are a must-have. 

I think everyone else is what they call themselves a must-have. There's this really great place to play in the middle, which is, I need to be a no-brainer. I need to make this so easy to be able to go, yeah, there's no reason why we shouldn't do that. What we invented with these grand promises where we said, look, we commit to our customers that they will generate pipeline through gifting. We then have this guarantee, which is, if you don't, we're going to do something with a term for you. So for every dollar you spend with us, you're going to get at least $5 back in pipeline. 

And the guarantee was really, if we don't hit that, we're going to refine you the difference. So we were this player in the space. This is what allowed us to go. 

We went from 0 to 20 million in nearly like two years. This is what allowed us to be these new guys, these upstarts, to go, we're not talking about sending or anything anymore. We're going to talk to you about pipeline. And I trained our sales team to be consultants with, these are what I call these moments that matter, these 15 moments within every buy journey where you can use gifting repeatedly regardless who you are to generate pipeline and accelerate deals. All right, and then here's the best part, is we then created a product that no one else in our space still has to this day for Reach Desk IQ, which allows you to run the ROA in attribution, which is a flexible attribution model, to allow RevOps people to go, okay, so we're spending this much, we're getting this many meetings. 

It's linked back to our Salesforce, but there's an attribution calculator on it that we can manipulate that allows us to understand the true ROA is gifting. And no one's come close to us on being able to do that. And that's been our strategy from day one. 

I love this, and I want to let Dale chime in, but that brought up a question. So is Reach, no, I do. Alex, if I were to ask you, is Reach Desk a gifting solution or is Reach Desk a software? Which are you? 

We're gifting solution to be clear. Like the output is gifting. We have software that powers it behind it. If we positioned ourselves as a software solution, I think we would still blend in to the background with everyone else. But to be clear, we do keep it. Cool. All right, Dale. Sorry. 

I'm so used to you taking over the podcast, but whenever I could like ask a follow-up question to my own question, it makes me so happy. 

So, Adam's working in space. We've collaborated with a couple of people in this space. What we know is that this is not just a gifting place. This is really an operational nightmare piece that you guys have to deal with on a daily basis. And so, if this whole rev-op thing, and we talked a little bit about what you're doing rev-op side, but how do you make, like, people hear gifting and they think, oh, brand. But it's also about the operations, the systems, the scale. How do you make that human touch repeatable? 

It's very simple. You build it into workflows. You don't use it as this ad-hoc motion. For example, if you're an FDR, you would put this into your outreach sales last case, for example. One of our customers, let's say they're the biggest B2B data provider who we all know, we're built into their environment. 

They may not sponsor the show. 

Okay. I'm not allowed to mention who they are, but I think we all know who they are. We're built into that inbound workflow. So when specific people request a demo, for example, to drive attendance, it's within that workflow. When customers use us to... A lot of customers are now using us within their events workflow. So, pre-event, how do we do hotel drops? 

How do we send people stuff to get you to attend the booth and then send swag or gifts afterwards so they don't just chuck it in the trash can that we all do when we get handed loads of swag at the booth? What that allows you to then do is then have that really great follow-up from the FDR perspective. So we've mapped out all these different workflows as to where you can fold this in through integrations. 

So it is a very easy repeatable thing to do as opposed to this one, let's ad-hoc, send something to GIF when we think it's a good idea. And so the playbooks are built into the platform itself. So we've got all these use cases based on you as a user, how you might want to use it, and then that then folds into your self-engaging platform, your CRM, your marketing information, whatever it is, so that you can just deploy it very easily. 

So let's give a little bit of a value here. What's the process you've built internally that other CROs should take and steal from Reach Desk? 

Oh, wow. What's the process that I've built? About gifting or not? 

About go-to-market. Something about go-to-market. Nothing proprietary, but something where you had a problem, you built an internal process, and you're like, someone should try to rebuild it. We don't know, they probably won't, but... 

Yeah, I mean, I share a lot of my stuff on LinkedIn. I write it up and I just put it out there. But the one I haven't shared is actually mine in our CEO's Pride of Joy. Again, it stems from a problem that I had. So I'm very outbound heavy. I believe outbound is huge. It's generated over half of our revenues of business. 

But one of my biggest problems is when outbound isn't working. And what we did is we built this model. And what we looked at is we looked at things like performance, tenure, and we looked at things like, what is the average tenure of a BDR when they look to leave? Because either they want to be an account executive or they get offered another job. 

They should get frustrated because they're trying to get the next one at the ladder. And we built this matrix, which we looked at every two weeks. And it looked at every single BDR, month over month, performance-based, tenure-based, and it spits out this number telling you what we call this concept of having a bench of BDR, saying you need to be hiring now because that person is going to ramp here. 

And so there's this forensic approach, and we haven't really missed any BDR targets for about a year now, because we've got this forensic approach which puts a mirror up to us. When we go, no, no, no, we're good. Steve's not moving on any time, do you? 

Yeah, you do agree. Basically, you know, Steve's like, I'm out of here, guys. Obviously, we should have known that because Steve's been here for 22 months and the average is 18. 

So we should have been hiring six months ago to make sure that someone is going to go, it's not Steve who is actually ramped and is going to be able to make sure that we're not going to miss our outbound target, right? And so it's really simple. It's the principle of having a bench, right? This is something that I negotiated with our CFO. And I said, I did the maths on it. I said, if we don't have a bench of people, and if we wait until somebody's performance managed out or that they leave, then we're going to have a revenue gap. And I showed them the maths. And so these are the consequences of not doing this. So I need another X amount per year to be able to build this bench. 

But as a result, we're very rarely going to have a risk in our pipeline. And so it's this forensic document. It's a Google sheet, actually. We've spent thousands of hours on it, not just to monitor it, but it basically goes Yinka Hai now. What segment you're hiring for, his Y, it spits out the number. And so we're always hiring for this bench to be able to have this constant succession so that we're never in trouble. And that is a mechanism that I wish someone had taught me 10 years ago because it would have got me out of a lot of trouble. 

It's brilliant. I love it. I think that's gold for anyone that is listening to this for sure. 

Yeah, if you're not budgeting for that to your point, you're going to have some huge misses for sure. Alex, everyone's talking about AI, right? Outbound, your BBRs, your SDRs, it's all going to be replaced by AI. 

Just go to play, automate the hell out of it. Where do you think it's really headed? What should be replaced by AI and what still needs that human touch, man? 

So the thing you cannot replace is the conversation. That's the thing that I'm protecting at all costs. I've seen people talking about that, you can talk to this AI salesperson, I would never buy from them, partly because I wouldn't trust the person programming it to give me all these false arms. Because if I'm talking to a bot, I think there are salespeople like third top on the list, behind the most untrustworthy people, it's like politician, bankers and salespeople. So I think AI sales agent is going to go right above the politician. That's like number one. 

So the company AI politician, aren't they, oh god, that's terrifying. But like, stick to Outbound. I think a lot of people know there's a theme here with Outbound, so let's perhaps stick with that. What you can automate is account selection, right? Contact research, data enrichment, all these things can be automated. 

If you know this is a really good account, here's why. Now I've already found you, this is what I'm building at the moment, I've already found you, we know on average it takes six to eight prospects to break into account that we need to touch. So let's find the six to eight people, AI can do that for you. We've enriched the data, doing the water falling, using water falling mechanism to be able to get the phone number, the email address, that LinkedIn profile. We've done the research on them. Guess what? 

What you need to do now is you just need to call them, you need to engage with them on LinkedIn and that's it. Those are the bits, the conversation and that human interaction is the bit I would never replace. Never say never, but I am saying never now. The rest of that I think can be optimized and that's where SDRs, BDRs, they're spending like 30 to 40% of their time doing that. I'm looking to eliminate that and just allow them to be what we call this call center, which I think we can give any name. 

But we just want them to be humans doing what humans do. I don't want hallucinations and I've heard of people trying to automate everything on LinkedIn, even on tech, just stay away from that, it's a social network. 

I just posted about all these NADN workflows and all this, oh my god, I can't stand it anymore. 

I've been deep in the AI-SDR world. I was an advisor to one of those companies and I said to the CEO, I said, you have a choice. You either build the AI-powered SDR or the AI-SDR and I would never build an AI-SDR. The AI-powered SDR is the human surrounded by the technologies that can take away the busy work that just doesn't need to be done by humans anymore. You will always need a human at the center of it and that's when I'm on the journey. At the moment, I'm going to start writing it all up quite soon. 

Build the AI-powered SDR. 

100%. Is there good AI that builds good outbound messaging or does it still need to have that human touch? 

I haven't found it myself yet, to be honest with you. We've tested loads of different things but I don't think we're waiting for this next wave of agentic AI. Maybe it will start to mimic us as humans in the best way. Maybe it's us, right? As a business, we're selling to salespeople and marketers. It's a bit more freedom, right? 

We're not selling to banks or government and we're quite cheeky with our messaging. I love it. There's a lot of puns, quite good ones as well. There's a lot of creativity to it and I'm yet to find a solution that can replicate that. The people that we hire are really, really good at that. The messages I get from people are like, oh my God, your outbound team is unreal because they're taking things to a level that is already breaking boundaries. 

That's how it stands out from the 37 other messages I got today that are clearly AI with the M dashes and the hope that some email finds you well. I love that. Yeah, exactly. 

I was sitting down with them talking about BDRs yesterday and we were looking through someone's LinkedIn profile and they saw someone, the post was like, hey, I started with a cold plant this morning. 

Like, hey, I'm not going to find that. I hope your cold plant wasn't too cold this morning. Here's something to warm you up, right? They're just going straight to the point on it. He said, hope the email finds you well. What's that line I get along? It's something like looking to connect to 

a couple of leaders or whatever BS. 

No, looking to connect with industry leaders to brainstorm and synthesise ideas together. I'm like, oh my God, I do not want to meet you. So yes, I think we're a bit more creative. We're a bit more out there. 

I do advocate for that. Even in companies, every company says, well, that's not what our bias is. I'm like, why are we just humans at the end of the day? And they just want something different. 

Alex, this is amazing. Let's wrap it up with some rapid fire and so I'll jump over Adam for a second. 

Okay, I'm always terrified by rapid fire questions. 

So you have no idea what you're doing. No, don't be. 

What's the most overrated GTM metric? Again, QR. 

I had to love that. Love it. What's one thing reps should stop doing in Outbound today? 

Stop putting their, Outbound Messages has stopped putting their calendar link as the call to action in every email they send saying, give my calendar link, quicker than time than me on the first email. Love it. 

What's a gift that you sent that completely flopped? 

I once sent a brick mug. It was a mug that was shaped like a brick saying, do you feel like your pipeline is constantly running into a brick wall? And then the guy called me up saying, why did you send me a brick? I didn't get it. I'll work on that one. It didn't work very well. 

If you, you're starting over to a new company, you have to build a GTM team from scratch. Who's your first hire? 

Oh, that's a very hard question. If I started from scratch. Oh, man. I mean, I'm a sales person. So if I was there, I'd be doing the selling. So I was telling you I'd hire an AE. I think I would still hire an FDR. To be honest with you, I think I would. Final question. Let's wrap this up. 

Dream vacation destination. 

Always. Always fails last question. In India. Have you got them? I have. 

I've been there for a month. I went for a month. My wife and I, it was amazing. 

Yeah. So India, South West Coast, Kerala. I went there once. I could go back every year. Yeah. 

Very cool. Couple of good spots. 

Awesome. Alex, thank you for joining the show. Thank you for sharing all things go to market, all things gifting. Y'all, if you want to gift and you want to do it right, go check out Reach Desk. Great product. Great people. And great mindset on gifting. 

You really can't go wrong. We'll drop a link in the show notes for you to go check them out. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot to you guys. Thanks so much for listening. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. 

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