AI SDRs: Amplification or Commoditization?

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Davide Grieco spent four years building the growth function at Verkada, a security hardware and software platform with over $700M in funding from backers like Sequoia and First Round Capital.

While at Verkada, Davide worked on a number of projects to automate workflows, improve sales efficiency, and increase revenue. These included reducing landing page creation from hours to minutes, empowering SDRs with campaign-in-a-box tooling to send personalized direct mail, and cutting cold email volume by 80% while only seeing small reductions in pipeline.

In this conversation, Davide shares a few of his big wins while at Verkada, how to break down silos between marketing and sales, and what it really takes to build GTM engineering skills. We also dive into his contrarian takes on AI SDRs and why he believes the future belongs to those who can generate ideas, not just execute them.

In this podcast, we discuss:

* Some of Davide’s most successful campaigns at Verkada including their campaign-in-a-box for SDRs

* How and why growth teams should prioritize driving revenue, even when it’s harder to measure

* The role of marketing vs. growth/GTM engineering and where these functions should report into

* The role of AI SDRs and how their inevitable advancement will influence the future of go to market

* The most important skills to look for when hiring a growth/GTM engineering team

Episode highlights:

* Verkada was able to reduce new ABM landing page creation time from hours to minutes using Webflow and Clay.

* Davide and his team drove $20-$25M in quarterly pipeline with their direct mail campaign-in-a-box for SDRs. Beyond the sophisticated and simple flow to send personalized gifts, they had sales run the enablement instead of marketing to drive buy-in.

* Davide built an SDR team sitting in marketing that booked 60-80 meetings per rep per month from his team’s automated campaigns.

* Davide argues that obsessing over attribution kills revenue growth. Instead of fighting over pipeline credit, growth teams should focus on the clear revenue-generating projects — whether it’s custom product demos or programs that help outbound reps book more demos.

* AI SDRs will eventually match human SDR capabilities, which will create outbounding noise to the extreme. The companies that stand out (and win) will be the ones that do the best true marketing.

Where to find Davide:

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidegrieco/

Transcript details:

(00:00) Intro

(03:49) Davide’s background from finance into growth

(05:32) Automating enterprise landing pages at scale

(08:51) The evolution of cold email strategy at Verkada

(15:14) Building the "campaign in a box" program for direct mail

(22:38) Structuring growth & marketing teams for maximum impact

(29:23) The MDR program: booking 80 meetings per rep per month

(33:05) Mistakes and learnings from rapid scaling

(35:43) Hiring philosophy for GTM engineering roles

(39:14) Advice for breaking into growth from other fields

(41:43) Eliminating silos between sales and marketing

(44:39) Why AI SDRs might backfire for the entire industry

(48:09) The democratization of GTM through AI tools

(52:56) Future predictions for GTM engineering and conclusion

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