Your Tech Stack: As AI takes on SDR roles, companies rethink entry-level training

Editor’s note: Your Tech Stack is an occasional series about, well, your tech stack. How do you build it? Should you go with an all-in-one provider or take a mix-and-match approach? What’s the best bang for your buck?

Those are the types of questions we’ll aim to answer. Have a specific challenge? Send it to: [email protected]. (Miss the inaugural installment? Right this way.)

For business majors hoping to land an entry-level sales job in the next year, the proliferation of AI into SDR and BDR roles might seem like a nightmare. And trepidation is certainly warranted: Some companies are using AI to accomplish work that would otherwise be delegated to entry-level employees. Some are hiring fewer recent grads—or expecting them to be trained right out of school.

But others are reimagining how SDRs and BDRs can work alongside AI in a way that prepares recent grads for the sales landscape they’ll be working in long-term. These investments in training new hires on the technology and changes in job descriptions poke holes in the pervasive narrative that all entry-level sales jobs will be wiped off the map by AI.

Right-hand man

A pioneering example is that of Asymbl, a workforce orchestration company that paired (human) BDR Mitch Canaday with an AI agent dubbed “Teddy” that would do the same work as Canaday.

Canaday provided messaging and reviewed Teddy’s work weekly, and over time optimized his own output based on his past successes and those of the agent. Though Canaday wasn’t right out of school at the time, he told Morning Brew while he trained Teddy, he was being trained, too.

“It’s very important to understand the information that you’re giving to the agent, because at the end of the day, it will be doing the outreach, potentially at volume,” Canaday said. “So there is a component of making sure that the humans are also trained well…Without the human involved, technology just sits there.”

After less than a year working as a BDR and with Teddy, Canaday was promoted to account executive; Teddy is now working with a new Asymbl BDR. Canaday said that while the agent changed what was expected from an entry-level BDR at the company, the training he received is applicable for sales jobs at other companies, too.

“I just see [Teddy] as part of the process,” he said. “Having a digital worker involved is really nice, because you now have a teammate [and] you can increase the amount of volume that you can do to figure out what works and doesn’t work much faster.”

Paying it forward

Entry-level training at Owner.com, a restaurant marketing software company, is hands-on, too. CRO Kyle Norton told Morning Brew that approximately 70% of the company’s new hires have been recent college graduates, all of whom are trained through Owner’s onboarding program that’s “built off of modern neuroscience and elite performance principles in adult learning psychology.”

“We don’t just sit them in front of a classroom and [say], ‘We’re going to talk at you for an hour, and now you know how to do discovery.’ It’s very hands-on and application-based,” Norton said. “[We’re] taking the principles that we want to teach and making sure that they are done in the way that we know is scientifically proven to maximize retention, recall, and successful application.”

Setting up a training program—especially one that is so comprehensive—is part of Owner’s philosophy of taking the “difficult short-term path” for “long term, compounding payoffs,” Norton said.

“It required a massive investment in enablement and training,” he said. “Hiring 50 kids out of school is very difficult from an onboarding, enablement, training, and coaching perspective, and most sales managers don’t want to coach…We’ve basically chosen in all of these different scenarios to do the thing that is more challenging up front.”

Win, win

Providing robust training in a world full of AI SDRs doesn’t just benefit new grads. It’s also an asset to companies—and not just because good training fosters strong employees. Bryan Berumen, the chief services officer at AI services company Perficient, told Morning Brew that because young adults are struggling to find sales jobs right out of college, the company is able to “grab talent that five years ago would have been very difficult for a company of Perficient’s size to compete for.” And by training them using AI, Berumen said new hires can learn quicker.

“We’ve gone to essentially the top 10 schools around the country and hand-picked about 15 individuals to come and do more of that in-person-style onboarding training, multiple weeks where they’re going to be learning all of these capabilities,” he said. “But they have a different mindset because they’ve grown up in more of this digital-native, AI-native world, and that’s going to be really exciting.”

That’s why Berumen’s confident that AI won’t hollow out the lowest rung of the sales rep ladder, especially if new hires have the right tools. Despite the cost of AI enterprise licenses, Berumen said he’s ensuring that his team can explore the new technology.

“We’ve got to let our people embrace and adopt these tools,” Berumen said. “And we believe firmly that those investments will pay off in bigger deals, different deals, new revenue streams, new ways of thinking and operating with our clients.”