TMW #190 | Wednesday Martech Briefing

Aug 28, 2024

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Sales AIgents, the distributed future of search, connecting clean rooms

Here’s the week in Martech:

Sales AIgents: AI SDRs are gaining in popularity.
The distributed future of search: Search beyond Google.
Connecting clean rooms: The many ways to connect to data clean rooms.
Everything else: AI customer messaging, RAGChecker, retail media goes direct, divergent delivery, and more.

👇 Here’s everything you’ve missed in marketing and tech this week.

📰 Latest Developments

Sales AIgents. There is a slew of new tools being released that allow businesses to create AI Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) that can handle the period between capturing a lead and setting a first sales meeting¹ 💬, including answering initial questions about the product or service. Last week, Salesforce entered the AI SDR fray, announcing two new sales agents: Einstein SDR Agent and Einstein Sales Coach Agent. The former acts as the SDR for the early lead nurturing phase, while the latter acts as a sounding board for SDRs to practice their pitch. It's not just Salesforce releasing AI SDRs; there are a bunch of standalone platforms in the space like 11x.ai, AiSDR, Artisan, and more, although these independent platforms face a challenge to survive. As the underlying LLMs that drive AI SDRs continue to converge towards the same level of performance, the key differentiators for these platforms will be their ability to accurately incorporate a brand’s data into AI SDR workflows and enhance the knowledge of these “AIgents” with proprietary data. Ecosystem platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot have an advantage on both fronts, as they often host vast amounts of a company’s first-party data and content, as well as the scale to acquire and aggregate proprietary data, as seen by HubSpot’s acquisition of B2B data firm Clearbit last year. Link

💬 Insights from Alium, The Buyer Intelligence Platform:

Sales AIgents: “[We use] an AI tool that would pick up dropped calls. [The platform] basically picks up that phone call if it goes to voicemail and then sends an automatic text that says, "Hey, I'm so sorry we missed you. What can I help you with?" And nine times out of 10, you're calling to make an appointment, cancel an appointment… it converted a high percentage of dropped calls into booked appointments.”
Wellness | $100M - $500M revenue | 1K - 5K employees

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Stay Curious,

Keanu Taylor

Make sense of marketing technology.

Want to share something interesting or be featured in The Martech Weekly? Drop me a line at juan@themartechweekly.com.