My primary #AIMonday project with @IgniteTech -- a custom-built AI sales development assistant, designed to field inbound customer emails -- yielded exceptionally positive results. Jenna (our SDA's name) took, in total, under 20 hours to build and test. Even using @OpenAI's comparatively pricey API, Jenna cost just $4.15 through all her testing and live responses.
After contacting just 200 end users at 60 accounts, Jenna "sold" $8,600 worth of new business. While she helped redirect some customers to our support or finance teams for other matters, she's also built to recognize sales interests and qualify potential opportunities. Once qualified, she'll pass the opportunity along to a human ISR to close the business.
In this case, the $8,600 she uncovered was a customer who needed a new software license but only requested it because of the proactive outreach. It was a nice-to-have that they hadn't gotten around to yet. Jenna prompted them to think about their product and their needs, qualified their interest, and set an ISR up for a straightforward transaction.
Her capabilities, both through testing and live interactions, surprised me. She displayed abilities that exceeded her prompt on multiple occasions.
When she finally gave in to a test customer's pressure to "speak with executives," she made up an email address. That required additional instruction in the prompt so she wouldn't do that in the future.
But when an actual customer expressed confusion about corporate structure, Jenna explained where the customer's product fit into a larger ecosystem of companies, correctly (and satisfactorily, according to the customer's reply) detailing the somewhat complex relationships between various entities.
Let's say that we spent $2,500 to build Jenna -- my time, others' time for testing and review, a subscription to OpenAI, and the direct cost of using the API. Jenna still had a nearly 3.5x ROI in just a few weeks.
There's more work to be done, but the early testing and launch of Jenna resulted in several learnings:
1) There isn't an AI solution for everything yet. With more than 12,000 tools listed on @theresanaiforit, I figured we could find and deploy an AI SDR product that someone else had already built. But some products that claimed to fill an SDR role used the term AI a bit too liberally -- complex workflows that still require users to think of every possible type of customer interaction and prepare messaging are outdated in the age of generative AI. And even generative AI solutions focused more on massive outbound marketing campaigns that could only provide general product information in response to interest.
2) You can build your own solutions. Yes, you. My technical capabilities peaked in 2002 with basic HTML and game modding with Python. But I used a few simple tools -- @OpenAI's API, @google Sheets and Apps Scripts, Zapier, and Gmail to create a fully autonomous AI SDR. With @mavex_ai added, Jenna could even schedule meetings directly for ISRs and customers. I frequently used @ChatGPTapp, @google Gemini, and @perplexity_ai for guidance on how to create the connections needed to build Jenna. If you have a need and can articulate it, both the tools and guidance now exist to allow you to build a complex tool on your own.
3) Just launch it. Jenna has a number of issues that need to be worked out, both in her core prompt (though it's pretty damn good at this point) and in the overall structure of how everything works. I could have spent the next four months taking an hour here and there to refine and test, but launching provided me with much more information than I ever could have learned through my own testing -- most importantly, proof that Jenna works. If you're building a solution, get your AI MVP to a satisfactory point and then launch. Then monitor, verify and edit as needed.
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