33: How to Scale an Outbound SDR Team in 2026: ICP Math, Hiring, and What AI Changes, with Florin Tatulea, GTM Engineer at ZoomInfo

Speaker A: Most teams scale outbound from the wrong starting point. They start with a, uh, revenue goal, then they hire SDRs to fill the gap. But they do not ask the harder question. Can each rep really create enough pipeline to make this brand work? That is where things break, productivity drops, targets get missed. Then leaders cut their team and say outbound is dead floor in the trailer as seen the other side. He was Lupio's first sales hire and helped the company grow revenue 65x at common room. He built the outbound team, grew the SDR team 4x and grew monthly outbound pipeline 20x. He's now go to Market Engineering resident at Zoom Info. In this episode, we talk about how to scale Outbound the right way, when to hire your first SDR, how to size your market, why Florin hires two SDRs at once, and how AI changes the team you need in 2026. A lot of leaders are cutting SDRs and saying urban instead. Florin and I think the poem is not urban. Enjoy the episode. Hey, everyone, thanks for joining. Uh, today we have Florin, uh, live with us. So we're going to talk about scaling outbound in 2026. And I think we have one of the best person to talk about this topic today. Let's start with you, Florian. Can, uh, you give us, like a quick intro for the people that doesn't know you? Yeah.

Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me. Always a pleasure to speak with you. Yeah. In terms of myself, I'm definitely a big lover of building pipeline and outbound. I've been in tech sales for the last, like 12 years or so. I was an SDR, a director of sales, head of sales development. So kind of like been rising through the ranks over the last few, last half a decade. And then more Recently, I'm the GTM Engineer in Residence here at ZoomInfo. So that kind of like includes a number of different things. One is obviously like being a subject matter expert and helping the teams here internally build out, like, the proper workflows and things that we need to scale Outbound, but then also documenting all of the things that we're doing internally and with our customers and bringing that to

Speaker A: the market and educating them, going to unpack how to scale in 2026. We are going to talk about what CROs or CMOs are doing wrong with scaling, uh, an outbound team, uh, what do you need, uh, before scaling? And then we're going to talk also about hiring, uh, you mentioned that something super important also to scale a team, building like a sport team. Um, and we're going to finish with uh, what changed in 2026 and AI and go to market engineer. Let's focus on scaling specifically. You mentioned to me that most revenue leaders are not realistic about the math when they're scaling up bomb. Uh, they take a top down number and then they use this number into SDR headcount. But they don't always focus on the icp. Uh, they don't focus on the math that you need behind that. So where does the math usually break when companies try to scalar?

Speaker B: The main way that most especially like VC backed companies kind of think about uh, their numbers I think is a little bit flawed. Um, and it almost always ends up biting companies in the butt. And I don't know why we continue to do it, but it's almost like the VC model of like uh, almost like unsustainable growth just uh, kind of like ends up continuing to shine through. And um, we're trying to change that to some degree but usually the, the way that uh, it works is you know, when you're a VC backed company, which I think most people like here, especially if you're in SaaS or software like I've worked at, they say okay, we just raised like a series A. Uh, next year we have to triple. So you know we're at, let's call it, you're at 5 million ARR. Next year we have to be at 15 million ARR. So the way that the numbers uh, for outbound and for the sales team are usually made from the top down is like okay, we have to make 10 million of additional revenue this year. What needs to happen going down, uh, the funnel for the, for that to happen. Right. So it's like 10 million is equal to 50 deals. For 50 deals we need 200 ops and then okay, so uh, we're gonna have like eight SDRs. Each of them are gonna have X amount of opportunities, et cetera. Right. Uh, which is definitely like obviously it's important to be aspirational. Like you should be able to like um, work towards hitting a certain goal but you also have to look at it from like the bottom up too and actually realize what your market really is. So one thing that I think a lot of companies are not realistic about and founders is how big their actual ideal market is.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: One of the biggest mistakes that teams make is like oh, we can sell to anybody. Uh, you know, I go in whether it's in Zoom info or in Clay or any system, you're like how many software companies are there above you know, 50 employees uh, in the US and then you get a number off that list which is like whatever, 30,000. So naturally people think that there's 30,000 companies you could sell to. You distribute those accounts amongst like different um, reps and then you start working them. That's like quite literally how most companies do it. Now the problem with that is there's not probably 30,000 companies you can actually sell to. So I think there's a difference between like your total addressable market, which is called a tam and then what we call a sam or your actual serviceable addressable market. This is one of the main mistakes that people make, right? So there's probably some attributes of certain companies that are not going to be good fits uh, for you. And I'll give you a perfect example of this because you at common room and ZoomInfo when you're thinking about like selling a software for signal, ah, based selling. Not every software company in the world, just as an example, has customers that are going to have their customers be native online so that we can actually pick up signals. They're not all digitally native, right? So the customer of our customer needs to be natively online so that we can pick up signals. Now out of those 30,000 companies, not all of them, some of them are selling to like construction workers or some are selling to mom and pop restaurants. I'm sure some of you know, like Kyle owner.com, so owner.com sells to like mom and pop restaurants. We actually tried to um, walk through like does it make sense for you to buy a signal based platform? And the answer was very much no because that mom and dad that have like, you know, the taco restaurant are not people that are online searching G2, going through software websites looking new software. They're busy 12 hours a day trying to keep the business alive, making the food, all that kind of stuff. The way that most uh, companies think about their ICP is like well Owner.com is a software company that's growing really fast. They have funding so uh, we should put an SDR to go chase them. And I think the message I'm trying to say here, I know I've been like, kind uh, of speaking quite a bit, is like you have to do a deeper analysis of who your ICP is, figure out how to do proper scoring and then realize what your real serviceable market is. So for us we realize that there's probably only like 6,000 companies out of the 30,000 we can actually sell to. So the math completely changes as to how many SDRs you need, what your conversion rates need to be, etc. And uh, if you don't do that analysis, it could completely screw you over. You're going to end up over hiring. You're going to end up wasting a ton of money. That's what's screwing over a lot of outbound teams at a fundamental level.

Speaker A: Okay, you share a lot here. Um, and I've seen, I live this story at one company. And um, the reality was when you start hiring also I think that the end of the story, basically it's uh, you end up firing uh, part of the team. But what's happening most of the time is how uh, you think you are scaling the team and then you start seeing the productivity drop from the team because you think, oh yeah, we have enough. Like you said, if we have 30,000 accounts on the list, well we have enough accounts for everyone so we can hire more people. But like you said, if this is not your ICP list, but it's more like your TAM at the end, you have more and more bad quality account I would say for everyone on the team. And then the product start dropping and you at this company, we are thinking about, hey, what are we doing wrong here? But basically that's the reality of it. If you are starting to get that sustain some accounts who are not ICP accounts that you think are ICP accounts to your team, the productivity drops. So um, okay, so you are talking about uh, common room and zoom info here. Um, what else do you think CROs, uh, or CMOs, ah, are uh, doing with this? They are doing wrong. So you said the first thing you need to work on is the figure out your real icp. So what's next?

Speaker B: I think the other thing a lot of people are not really looking at is like what is your true penetration rates? As I mentioned, one of the first things you should do is build out like a tiers of um, based off of certain attributes. Like you should be able to look at your customers and be like, okay, what are the actual attributes here of like why these people are buying and what is like the catalyst, uh, uh, for why they bought. So a very interesting analysis that I think not enough people do when they think about like outbound and closing deals is say okay, if we have 100 customers, go back and analyze like your calls. And again it's so much easier with AI agents now and figure out what was the reason that our top customers that are spending the most money, that are continuously like growing and not churning, what, what was happening in their businesses or uh, in the market at that time that caused them to buy our software or product. And then what you can do from there is build an outbound strategy or maybe it's signals or whatever you want to call it, that is essentially trying to identify those moments in time for other companies that are your prospects. So to give you like a very basic uh, analysis, because I remember we, we uh, demoed this to a specific customer, but they were like a software that helped monitor like software outages. So obviously a very big signal for them is like if companies in specific regions are going through outages, that was a very big catalyst or signal that those types of companies would soon be looking for software that helped uh, monitor outages and help make sure that they didn't happen. That's obviously going to be a very high converting play. I think a lot more companies need to analyze their current customers for those moments. Much easier now to do because you can actually go back and put all of your transcribed calls, CRM notes, et cetera, through agents that can then like give you some ideas as to what those things are as opposed to before. Like some people probably had knowledge of it as sales people that went through thousands of like deals or whatever, but it was much harder to identify. So that's one thing.

Speaker A: Okay, and what's the process here? So you said you use an agent. Uh, what are you looking for? Uh, in this analysis, for example, at

Speaker B: a very basic level, you could prompt the agent to be like, can you analyze these calls and let me know like what was the main uh, pain point that they had? Was there specific catalyst that they specifically mentioned? Was there something happening at these accounts in this moment in time that made them m want to buy our software at that point. And obviously like you can get deeper into the prompts, but I think at a high level, like that's what you're trying to figure out.

Speaker A: Um, okay, so I know when we were preparing this session you are talking about hiring specifically. Uh, you mentioned a few things about hiring. Uh, let's start with the first thing you mentioned about. Companies don't need an easier before 1 million, uh, annual recurring revenue and definitely not before product market fit. Why? Tell me more about that.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, I mean hiring in general is like one thing that I don't think is talked about quite enough. Uh, and as a manager, I can tell you that most managers don't get a lot of like training on how to hire. It's very much just like kind of figure it out. You probably learn over time from Like a mentor too, and shadowing different people. But I think it's a topic we, I don't talk uh, enough about as practitioners, as leaders. One mistake I see a lot of like, founders in early sales teams, uh, make is that they end up hiring uh, teams before the SDR team, specifically before they have product market fit. And then the problem with that is like you're, you're setting up SDRs, uh, to fail. Right? It's not the job of an SDR or salesperson to help you find product market fit. It's the founder's job to build a product, uh, that uh, is actually like good and that people need. So what you're, what you're pretty much doing there is you're telling an SDR to go out and in most cases they're going to fail, they're not going to book enough meetings, et cetera. And it has nothing to do with the fact that they're not good uh, at their job necessarily. But it's just that either the messaging's off, the product is not actually something that people need, and then you end up like letting the, these people go. Right. So my general rule of thumb I have mentioned to you that you don't really need an SDR before 1 million in ARR. It doesn't. Like 1 million is somewhat arbitrary. But like, usually that's kind of like the point in time where you start to see product market fit. So it's like you've kind of sold enough deals at that point where, you know, now that there's, you know, 50 companies, 100 companies that uh, are using us, you can start to uh, see like what companies are using you for, some of them are starting to grow, etc. So now you can pinpoint an outbound team to go and find very similar companies to that. Right? That's really the main thing. And way, way, way too many teams, you know, start hiring str, like 100, 200k of ARR. And it's like the founder needs to close those first 10, 20, 30, maybe even 50 customers. And uh, I can tell you this. Like at Lupio, I was the first SDR that joined as one of the very first employees. Our founders closed 50 deals by themselves before even considering a salesperson.

Speaker A: And when you joined Lupio, so you are the first sdr, but, um, what about, did you have like a head of sales or VP of sales and AES also or really like the first salesperson?

Speaker B: I mean, it's a bit circumstantial. We had. It was me and as an sdr, then, uh, two. Two A's.

Speaker A: Two A's. Okay. Also, you mentioned to me that you should start with two SDRs, not one way too well.

Speaker B: Uh, and it's kind of funny because, uh, when I joined, I was actually the first sdr. But, uh, we hired a second SDR pretty soon after I joined. But this is kind of more of like a learning that the reason you want to hire two, and it's also not just SDRs, it's like A's as well. You usually want to hire two SDRs, two AES, obviously, if you can afford it, because it's much easier to do like a, A B test to see if. If something is working or it's not working, is it the person or is it the actual process? So let's go back to this market product, uh, market fit thing. If you don't have product market fit, and then, boom, like, your SDR fails. It's very easy for a founder or somebody in, like, a leadership position to be like, oh, it was the SDR that was, like, bad. But then imagine you hire two SDRs, and they're both, like, completely failing. Then it's like, okay, there's kind of. You start to have a little bit more data. It's like, damn, maybe it's not that person. It could be like, hey, you're just bad at hiring people in general. And, like, both of them are bad. But then what you might happen is you also, like, on the contrary, you'll have like, a, uh, an STR that's doing very well, an STR that's not doing well. And then it's like, okay, well, clearly it's probably the person as opposed to the process, because there's clearly something that can figure it out, somebody that can't. So that's what I. That's like just one learning that I've had. Generally, you want to hire multiple SDRs, or AES, um, at any given time to see if it's the person or the process.

Speaker A: When you say that, actually, are you talking to the founder or the CRO or the CMO? Because, uh, what I'm asking at, if you have two SDRs, are they reporting directly to the funders, uh, to they go to market?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it depends. Like, in this case, if you're hiring your first two SDRs, it's like, you don't really have a big team, so there might be like some kind of, like a head of sales or a director or something like that. Uh, a lot of the times it could still be the founders at that point. But I think this also applies to like a CRO. So if you're, let's say you're going to build out a new motion that's selling to a new industry. And I know that uh, I've had this at a few different companies where it's like hey, like let's try to venture out into like you were only selling the software. And then it's like let's see if uh, we have some inbound from financial services company. Like let's go and start outbounding here to see if like there's something there if you're starting that new function. I think again it's important to start with like two people again to see is it the person, is it the process, does this industry just not make sense? So yeah, I think it could apply to the founders or CROs, just depending on like what you're trying to do

Speaker A: there and for this stage. Because here we are really talking about hiring your first sef, uh, what do you look for in those SDRs, uh, that most leaders miss?

Speaker B: I think from a value perspective, uh, one big thing for me is like curiosity, um, and this kind of goes into the second one that I have which is uh, I call like hustle mentality. Being a self starter, like the growth mindset. Overall do you have an innate will to figure things out? And I think naturally people that have that innate will are going to be curious. And when you think about it, to be a salesperson, all of the people that have been successful that I know are going to be naturally curious. Like you're naturally curious about people's businesses, you're genuinely curious about uh, how those businesses run. Which naturally is going to lead to you being better at discovery, uh, and figuring out how you are able to tie the value of your platform or map the value of your product to uh, their pain points, their problems and needs. The other thing that goes hand in hand is I usually try to look for some kind of like chip on people's shoulder. This doesn't necessarily mean that it's a must, but people that have kind of been through something difficult uh, in life tend to have a chip on their shoulder which makes them like, gives them an innate drive to uh, try to build something meaningful. And then one of the last things I actually look for is a history of success. Like it could be in volunteer work, it could be in school, it could be in like sports, it could be in like some, some kind of, I don't know, competitive gaming. Like, it doesn't matter what it is or even in your career, but it's like, is there proof that over your, you know, lifespan, whether it's, you know, five years, 10, 15, 20, uh, are you able to show that you can be successful? And people that show a history of that success tend to continue to be successful in the future.

Speaker A: So you mentioned curiosity as number one. So could you tell me more about how you vet for curiosity?

Speaker B: Yeah, the funny part about vetting for curiosity is like, it's not even about asking questions really. I think curiosity is one of the things that will naturally come out in an interview. People that are naturally curious are much better, I think, throughout it, an interview of actually like, keeping the conversation going and asking questions along the way. You know, one of the things that we do in our skills interview is, uh, we kind of like actually give them some form of like a homework assignment where we. They actually show us some of their prospecting skills. But one thing that I'm very naturally curious people do or some of the best SDRs that we've hired is like, throughout it, you're kind of like asking for feedback. You know, this is how I'm thinking about like your icp. This is how I got there. Uh, am I like, kind of on the right page here? Like, what would you do differently? You're keeping that conversation going throughout. The other place where a lot of people screw this up is at the end of the interview where we give you like 10, 15 minutes to ask questions. We're purposely leaving that amount of time to see what kind of questions you're. You're asking.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: It's easier than ever to do this again. Now with like, with like, you can literally put some, you know, what are some of unique questions you should ask in, uh, chat, GPT or whatever. But I think the more interesting thing is when you ask like, very specific questions like that are difficult to replicate without being like, supernaturally curious. So it's like, hey, like, I saw on your website that you sell to like Snowflake and data breaks, like, you know, is this like a tier one, like type customer for you or like, what makes them such a good customer? Uh, just going like one or two layer deeper when you're asking these questions. And the other pet peeve of mine is people that ask questions that are, that you can do the research and find yourself. That to me is like kind of a no. No. So you want to ask questions where you are not able to go and Google the answer yourself.

Speaker A: Yes, I agree with you on that I'm not seeing that a lot on LinkedIn right now. But like uh, two or three years ago people were giving the list of ways you should ask during the interview, the core attainment of the team, um, stuff like that. I think it's. Yeah, you can ask those questions, but you can ask this question to every interview you have with every company you have. And you are not showing some curiosity or um, uh, that you've done your research. You are just vetting the company. So you are not showing any curiosity here. So yeah, I agree on this one. You mentioned prospecting task. Uh, what, what's on this task specifically? Is it like a custody or what do you do?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's usually some kind of a case study. Again like I want to see how resourceful people are and it's like do you deeply understand like who we're selling to? Uh, how do you think? Through prospecting and pretty much giving you the. So what we pretty much ask like it's nothing revolutionary by the way, but I'll tell you like how maybe we differ in how we think about the evaluation. So the, the homework task itself is like, okay, go and find two companies. It's pretty vague. So like people can ask us questions and again, um, that before the actual interview. So you want to see if like they're good at uh, being curious and thinking through things. But find two companies, two contacts at each account that you think are going to be good fits. Write a couple emails, send us like a, a quick like Vidyard or loom video and then uh, we'll also do like a live cold call. So you're kind of covering like all different skill sets uh, in the prospecting process and it's okay like if you get help, that's fine. The thing that we're vetting in that interview when they're presenting it is uh, I less care about what you provided as the answer to like the best accounts and people and like your actual emails or video. Although obviously we are judging you on that a little bit. But it's like walk me through your process, like why did you do it this way? Why did you think this was the right person, uh, or the right, right account? Um, when you think about writing this email, like do you follow any uh, specific like frameworks for, for it or why did you write the sentence this way as opposed to this way? So we're trying throughout the process to like vet uh, you live and see what your thinking process is as opposed to like just getting to a final answer. Right. The Cold call kind of speaks in itself like a lot of the times actually doing a mock uh, cold call in an interview I, I think is a bit more nerve wracking than even calling uh, somebody. But one, we're trying to see like can you handle pressure? And then two, what we really try to do because I think coachability is also a thing I, I didn't mention initially in the attributes. That's very important to us. It's actually totally fine like if you screw up a uh, cold call, if we give you feedback and then you want to run it back and I see you in real time that you've been able to improve on the next call, that to me right away shows coachability and it's like, okay, I can work with you because I know like you're willing to get better.

Speaker A: What I'm seeing here also on what you mentioned is you are vetting for example the different skills at different stage during the hiring process. So it's not like just a uh, one off moment to say oh yeah, this person is curious, I'm not curious. So it's like you say it's, you send them the homework, then you see if there's questions, then you give them time also to see if they ask questions. Interesting. So now I want to focus on building an Azure team like you build a sport team. So what are the positions that you want uh, on your team?

Speaker B: I remember at my last company we had a few people that were very good on like LinkedIn. We had a few very good copywriters. We had a few people that were killer at cold calls. One of the interesting things about building teams in that way is that you know, if they're doing like power hours together or uh, we also used to do like blocks specifically for account research or for writing emails. Without you as a manager always needing to be in the room, you're going to have people with different skill sets that can naturally coach people and help them in different scenarios. And then the team kind of like is self sustaining and they build themselves up because people have different skill sets that they can leverage at different times.

Speaker A: And that was the first time you are doing this. Did you do that on purpose?

Speaker B: And I'll give you actually another example because it doesn't just have to be hard skills, it can be soft skills as well. I don't necessarily believe that every sales rep that's is naturally going to be like super outgoing and like uh, have like a great personality and all that kind of stuff. And some of the best se we've hired were actually very introverted, maybe even like kind of like nerdy in certain ways. But one thing that we're thinking through is like, okay, we can't just hire everyone that's super introverted because then it's like when we go on a power hour, it's like you also kind of need some energy. And sometimes that energy can't just come from the manager. It needs to come out like in the group itself for it to be like, um, you know, functioning very well. So in that interview process when we're deciding between two candidates, let's say that are very similar, we're kind of like looking at, okay, this person's like a little bit more timid. We already have like five people that are timid here. Like how is this going to contribute to the energy that we have in cold calls? So I think as I've gotten further on in my career, I'm much more intentional as a manager in looking for these different things and what the composition of the whole team is and how they're gonn work together as opposed to just being like this one individual in a silo is a great sdr.

Speaker A: You don't need to have like the perfect answer for that. But do you, do you have like your ideal team? If I have 50% introverts, 50% extra, for example, no.

Speaker B: And I don't like to kind of like make it so formulaic. I think sometimes like you just have a feeling, a feeling for it. And I'm not saying by any means that I'm like a perf. I'm perfect at hiring because I'm not. And I still make a ton of like bad decisions or at least like decisions that aren't optimal. I think it's just like a balance. Like you kind of want it to be like 50, 50, uh, in my general opinion. And I also do think it very much is contextual to like who your sellers are. Like if you're for example selling a software that's very technical, having that like sports minded, like outgoing extrovert that's like very good at soft skills, might not necessarily in itself be like super powerful where it's like, maybe you do want someone that actually worked either as like a developer or like has a bit more of like an analytical like mindset is a bit more like timid because they're going to relate better to that prospect. And even at like my last company because uh, we actually sold to a lot of companies that were very like develop, uh, we're selling to developers, we actually had someone that came from a company that was in that space that actually had a lot of knowledge on it. And that person did very well with that demographic of people where someone that was more like extroverted, just good at cold calling did not do as well.

Speaker A: You mentioned that you are not perfect at, ah, uh, hiring, uh, and that you, you made some mistakes. So could you share an example of something you've done recently that you, that you learned?

Speaker B: So one of the best pieces of advice I got from one of my old, like, VPs of sales, there was actually a few things I would just assess that situation at, at its like, face value. And I'll give you a perfect example here. If I want to know if someone's truly passionate about sales, the easiest thing to do, you could try to be like, hey, like, why are you passionate about sales? Like, so many people ask that question. This is, it's almost like a mental hack in some regards. I would actually rather ask someone and say, hey, tell me about a topic that you love or like, you know, outside of work, what do you, what do you love to do? And explain it to me. You don't really care about the answer. One thing you care about is how their body reacts to them explaining it. When they're explaining something they love, do they, they get up in their chair, Are they smiling? Do you see like an energy, like, do their ey light up? And then what you can do after you hear the answer and assess their body language on something they truly love, um, ask them, so, like, why do you love sales? And something very interesting happens. If someone doesn't actually truly love sales, their body language, they'll retreat again. And then like, their eyes don't sparkle anymore. And then you, you're seeing like a, uh, you're seeing two different scenarios in real time that they couldn't have prepared for. And the body language actually tells you whether they're passionate about it or not. Right? So it's things like that where these are almost like psychological. I don't even know what to call them, like, frameworks that I've learned from very good leaders that have done good hiring that actually assess people much, much better for the values that you care about as opposed to just asking a situational question.

Speaker A: If we think about that, it's the same as you do with curiosity about do they ask questions here. It's not like you are vetting, you are asking something specific. If they don't ask questions, it gives you a bit the answer. Um, and after, for example, if you give them Feedback. Do they ask questions when you give them feedback? No. Okay. You know that this person is maybe not curious. Coachability. If you give them feedback after the live call, how do they react about this? Because I think it's here, it's. How do they react to your feedback? Are they defensive? If they are already defensive during, um, the interview, I don't know if they are fully coachable. But having someone already being defensive about a feedback I'm giving them during the interview and you might think, oh, yeah, but that's easy to vet something like this. Uh, I've had, uh, people being defensive during hiring, uh, interviews and I already know this person is not a lot coachable. Obviously we're assessing coachability in different ways, but that's not the only one, which I think it's more about the behavior.

Speaker B: The other example I was going to bring up is with coachability. How many times have you seen in like interviews your, yourself, uh, like when you're going through an interview is like, tell me about a time that you were coachable and like what you did in a situation where this happened. Right? Anyone can like, sure, you can like peel the layers of the onion there to see if that's like a real story. But the best way to actually measure coachability is go through a live cold call. Uh, are they, after the call, are they automatically. It's like, I, uh, think I messed up here. Like, here's where I would diagnose, like where I did bad. What are your thoughts? Right? Or once you give them feedback, they go and apply right away on the next call that you just did live. You can't fake that. It's much harder to fake that, uh, layer of, or that attribute of coachability, um, than it is to just talk about it.

Speaker A: I, ah, had one, um, candidate once that actually that I thought was interesting for coachability. I gave him feedback after the first role play. He didn't know we were going to a second roleplay before saying, hey, now let's do the role play again. He said to me, can I try again first? And before I was uh, telling him we are going to do it again. So I've hear same again. That's the behavior. Uh, but if this person is already asking to do it again, it shows me this person is coachable, for example, 100%. Now let's talk about 20, 26, uh, because right now we are talking about, I would say, uh, the stuff that I think didn't change until now. Uh, well, we talk a lot about the foundation. I think for Scaling a team. So now let's talk about 2026. What do you think is different right now in 2026 when we're thinking about

Speaker B: scaling Albon, obviously there's like a lot of things that are rooted in AI. Uh, that's really the main difference. And I think a lot of it is actually like an engineering uh, problem to some degree where like you having really good growth and revenue operations teams um, is going to be a big competitive Advantage uh, for SDRs, for AES, for all GTM teams. And I'm seeing that happen live even at like ZoomInfo, uh, as I get deeper into like the GTM engineering side of things. Essentially what we're trying to do in 2026 that we didn't do before, uh, or we're getting much more efficient at it is uh, you're trying to automate as much of different uh, processes as you can so that your sales teams are focusing on what I like to call revenue generating activities. So for example, I think the future could very much be instead of a rep that's fantastic at cold calling, spending time researching accounts and like going back and forth to see across different systems. Like you know, what signals did this account do? Like are there any funding alerts? Why is this account a good fit? It we're building agents and processes now that are automatically going to tell them all of this stuff. So that instead of you spending 30% of your time researching, 30% of your time calling and 30% of your time like logging and doing all this kind of stuff, I can actually have a rep that's good at cold calling. Call hundreds of people where when somebody picks up, whether it's in nooks or whatever dialer, they actually will get a uh, like a card that says this is why the account uh, should buy, why it's buying. Now here's the signals they're displaying. This is the angle that you should take off a cold call. So like that's all stuff that someone had to do manually before. And this is why I keep saying so many people are scared of like the SDR role going away or whatever, which is simply not true. I actually think it's going to make good SDRs that are really good at selling or cold calling become 10 times better. The value of that person is going to significantly increase because they're going to book more meetings, they're going to convert at higher ratios because we're doing all the manual work for them uh, automatically. And you're even starting to see this too, right? Like a Lot of people saying that, uh, the SDL role can be replaced. Anthropic OpenAI. These people are hiring hundreds of SDRs. Now, Clay, there's a reason that that is ultimately happening, right, that the, the best companies that have the best LLMs are actually still hiring the, these salespeople. So my message is that it's not a doomsday type thing. I actually think it's one of the most interesting times to be a true seller.

Speaker A: For me, what I've been seeing, uh, what's happening right now in 2026 and having to for AI and also go to market engineers, it's helping. Companies are really good. I would say, uh, in terms of Outbound, specifically, because I'm seeing companies I'm talking with where you have like the CRO that they cut the SDR team because they say, oh yeah, SDRs are dead. Outbound is dead. Outbound doesn't work for us. Which I think is if you start digging, you start to learn that they didn't invest enough, I would say, to make it work. So that's one thing. But I think AI ego to market engineering in general are, um, helping with the market also. Because I don't know for you, but what I've been seeing since 2018 is the conversion rate in general with outbound is dropping. Uh, if you think about all the different channels, uh, connect rate is decreasing, uh, the email reprierity is decreasing. Um, and so you have like the market and something that you can't change, unfortunately. And you have more and more salespeople. So, uh, the inbox of your prospects or their phone are busier than ever, uh, which I think right now, uh, you have less shots, I would say, when you have someone on the phone than before, which means that you need to be prepared, like you're saying. So you have your card and the research that makes that, uh, in 2026. That's why I think you still need Azios, uh, especially when you are scaling. Because if you have any SDRs, you can't just, especially if you're scaling, you can't rely just on inbound. And the main reason, uh, when I talk to CROs, for example, you mentioned Kyle earlier when I asked him, for example, when you joined the owner, why did he invest in Outbound, for example, and not double down on inbound, because they were, uh, inbound driven. And he said, well, inbound is great, but it's unpredictable and outbound is predictable. So I know if I have, um, this conversion rate with 2 SDRs, I know I can hire 4 SDRs. And well if we go back to what you were saying earlier about the acp, when you have your conversion rate, NICP list of accounts, you know how many SDRS you can hire and which conversion rate.

Speaker B: Let's just use Anthropic and OpenAI as an example. They have an unlimited amount of inbound right now. It's like insane. The reps are drowning but they're still hiring outbound teams because you know at a certain point in time not everyone's just going to come to you anymore. And it's like that inbound engine does tend to drop especially as you gain more market share. There's going to be less and less inbound. So you have to pinpoint exactly like where you want to go with outbound and make sure that like you're taking those people that are somewhat um, maybe they're problem aware or maybe they don't even know you have a problem yet. You need to like help with that awareness and push them down the funnel. And the SDR and outbound SDR team is one way to do that.

Speaker A: Snowflake specifically, earlier we're talking about Snowflake and Snowflake for example, they, they have 300 SDs and if you compare to Amazon web Services, Google Databricks, you might say oh, but why do they have like a big team like this? But because they're competing against the biggest companies in the world. So if you just rely on inbound, well unfortunately you can't wait for your target accounts to come via inbound basically. So we are talking about AI specifically uh and you are talking about being more focused on revenue generating activities. One use case that, that you've seen uh, being successful with Seattle.

Speaker B: Well I think this whole idea of uh, a gentic signal based uh, selling is something that's specifically getting quite uh, a bit better. I think a lot of the times when people thought of intent or signals we always focus on third party stuff. So it's like you get intent from whether uh, it's extends demand base zoom info which was somewhat um, useful but I think now we're focusing more on like first party stuff. So being able to combine third party intent with like hey, like let's go and look at Snowflake like your product usage data. Is this someone that's actually uh, used your software in the past? And can you summarize like what they did with it? Like I'll give another example. So let's say you have like a job change. I think it's very easy on LinkedIn to go and be like oh, someone changed jobs. But what you can do now with agents is like uh, plug them into okay, they changed jobs in the last month, but they also logged into your platform at their last company 10 times uh, in the last three months. So you know they actually used the platform and what they did with it. And then you can also have an agent go and find custom signals. So like uh, look through job postings, what software did they use, etc. So it used to take a, a human a lot of time to. And you usually didn't have access to like first party data like your product usage. Summarize all of it and put it in one context and then give you like a good account summary or like an email or a talk track on a cold call so that you can be much more relevant than you've ever been before. So I think that's one good use case. Two is we talked about this idea earlier but like ICP scoring and mapping your market I think is a fantastic use case for AI. So before someone had to go like one by one and then like try to figure out like is this a good fit account? Now you can upload 30,000 uh, accounts into like a table, whether it's GTM, Studio, Clay, whatever you use and then run it against your models, signals, um, product usage data, CRM notes, call transcripts and you can actually build out a very clear tier list of accounts that you should prioritize. 3 When you need reps to practice running real time simulations that are very close to real life examples. So being able to take past call transcripts, extrapolate that to scorecards and run simulations that are going to help you. Objection. Handle and run calls that are as close as possible to real calls as opposed to just doing mock calls which I tend to find are never going to be as real as possible.

Speaker A: Yes. And this one actually I was surprised about this one. I thought it was better to do it like with uh, a manager or a colleague for example. But, but I think early days with uh, this AI roleplay use case for example, it was not maybe great because the models were not good enough to have um, um, been trained on your customer or prospects for example. So. Yes, but now I think it's getting way better. And now you have companies like Honor, actually. And also another one that I Talked to was JumpCloud. When they're hiring a new BDR, for example a new SDR, they need to go through 100 simulations with a tool like Hyperband before picking up the phone for the first time. And they do a lot of different scenarios obviously. Objection. Handling uh, how to um, make a cuckoo basically. But they already have 100 repetitions before they make their first call. And they start seeing a faster ramp just by doing this. Because they are way better prepared than learning by making corkos.

Speaker B: Some of the other ones that are interesting, like I know our VP of RevOps was, is working on this, Molly, for example, like let's say a deal closes. I tend to find that a lot of information gets lost from when you're passing it from like an A to like an account manager. There's stuff in like call transcripts, there's stuff in notes or etc. But imagine there's like an agent that when a deal automatically closes, it goes and like finds all the information possible. It's like what do they do in their trials? What do they do? What do they say on their calls, what is in the CRM notes, what is happening in the market with this account. And then just like builds full summaries, writes emails for the introductions and is making a handoff process like so much smoother. I actually saw a real live example of how we're doing this at Zoom Info and I was like, damn, like there's so much information there that would have taken a human so much time to do and they would have missed so much of that information. Um, big fan of like that type of, that type of stuff as well.

Speaker A: Yes. Because if you go back to what you are saying earlier, that gives the team more time to do more revenue generated activities. For me right now it's what's not possible before. But right now I've been doing this like five times already in the past three months. It's uh, trade shows, um, being able to getting the attendee list, uh, of those trade shows with cloud club, uh, here I'm using cloud code so it's more having the M, uh cloud code figure out what's the best way to get the list. Basically when I'm working with a company, they have the system like maybe have their five reps going at the trade show, they already have the list with the names of. They have the list of the account going at the event, the names, titles that before it was super long to try to get this list basically. Um, so they were doing it manually. Now if you can get for example 2000 or 3000 attendees from the event, they already have the list and they know for example if you only have 100 people that you need to focus on, they already have this list and they are better prepared. Um that's something I know before was not. You can do it if you get the data needle but right now with QR code you can figure out getting the list I know we are almost but what's the best way for people if they want to to be in touch with you?

Speaker B: You can follow me on LinkedIn Flooring Tutulia I also have a substack where I'm writing down my my knowledge and thoughts as much as I can. I don't use AI for that. I actually like try to think through and think through my mental models of like outbound and actually provide tactical examples. So yeah salesflow.substack.com the newsletter is called Prospecting from the Trenches. So please like follow, subscribe, add uh

Speaker A: the link also in the description of the episode so people can subscribe directly. Well Freund, thanks so much for being uh, uh on this today. Uh, really appreciate it and uh, for everyone listening I see you on the next episode.

Speaker B: Awesome. Thank you so much everybody. Take care.