The Psychology of Outbound: Tito Bohrt on Where AI Fails in Modern Sales Development

In this episode of AI for Go-To-Market, Emir Atli chats with Tito Bohrt, founder and CEO of AltiSales, to unpack why AI SDRs are underperforming—not because of technological limits, but because buyer psychology doesn't respond well to scaled automation. Tito explains why playbooks lose power when everyone uses the same ones, and why personalization, originality, and timing are the last true differentiators in outbound. He introduces the concept of "unity"—a high-impact messaging strategy rooted in closeness between seller and prospect—and dives deep into the structural changes needed to make outbound successful today, including team segmentation, compensation realignment, and tactical AI support. This episode is packed with hard-earned lessons and frameworks for GTM leaders looking to build durable, human-first pipeline in an AI world.

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00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

00:16 Tito Bohrt's Background and Expertise

01:13 The Reality of AI SDRs

06:02 Challenges of Scaling SDR Teams

07:43 Inbound vs Outbound Strategies

14:18 Effective Outbound AE Practices

16:53 The Role of Signals in Demand Capture

19:09 The Marginal Value of Signals

19:52 Creating Net Marginal Value

23:07 The Concept of Unity in Outbound

25:14 Implementing Unity-Based Strategies

28:13 AI's Role in SDR Workflows

33:28 The Importance of Cold Outbound

35:36 About the Agency and Final Thoughts

[00:00:00] Emir Atli: Hello everyone. Welcome back to AI and go-to-Market podcast. Today we have the Mad Scientist of LinkedIn. Tito, how are you? 

[00:00:11] Tito Bohrt: I'm doing great, man. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. 

[00:00:14] Emir Atli: I'm super excited too. For those, I mean, I'm sure a lot of people will know about you, but for those who don't, do you wanna do a quick intro?

[00:00:22] Tito Bohrt: Yeah, super quick. I'm Tito Bohrt. I am obsessed with, uh, data math and sales development, so I follow a very data-driven approach to cracking the code of how to generate pipeline and close more deals for B2B companies. And the majority of my experience is in the mid-market and enterprise. So take what I say as very relevant for anybody selling products that cost over $20,000, $30,000 a year rather than for SMB sales, just because my opinion actually changes some of the things that I'm gonna, that I might say are a bad idea for the [00:01:00] enterprise. They might be a good idea for SMB. So, take it all within that context and, uh, I'm excited to be here and to, and to share what I've learned over the past years and how to, uh, use AI in today's day and age.

[00:01:12] Emir Atli: Awesome. The very obvious question, which you're talking a lot about it on LinkedIn too. What do you think about AI SDRs? 

[00:01:23] Tito Bohrt: I mean, I don't, I think that in the early days, asking my opinion would've been a good idea. I think now we're one plus year into the market, and I'll quote people that perhaps are not biased because you might say that I'm biased.

[00:01:36] Tito Bohrt: I run an SDR agency and things like that and so like my opinion should not matter, but go listen to people like Jason Lemkin, right? The founder of SaaStr, and he hosts conferences. He's all about startups. He'll tell you that he ran a poll on Twitter X.com and 99% of respondents say that they, if they tried AI SDRs, it failed.[00:02:00] 

[00:02:00] Tito Bohrt: So it clearly did not work. Now I can give you my opinion on do I think it's going to work in six months or in one year, or how much better the algorithm has to get, or how much better does the AI SDR need to get for it to work? My personal opinion is it will never work. 

[00:02:19] Emir Atli: Mm-hmm. 

[00:02:19] Tito Bohrt: And it's not a technological limitation.

[00:02:22] Tito Bohrt: It is a psychological limitation and the psychological limitations on the prospect, and it's not something you can control. 

[00:02:30] Emir Atli: Do you think like the end-to-end automation of an SDR is impossible, or do you think like AI in general and the SDR workflow is just not a good use of time and energy and money? 

[00:02:43] Tito Bohrt: I actually believe that the technical automation of, uh, beginning to end of what an SDR typically does, it's actually, computer science wise, very possible to replicate.

[00:02:58] Tito Bohrt: I think that the day [00:03:00] you replicate it, you maybe have about six months until the human on the other end starts ignoring everything that you're doing, so, mm-hmm. What we need to understand about what an AI, what we need to understand about what an STR really does is it's fighting for attention. So if we put it in a different light, forget about SDRing. Think about recruiting. Let's put ourselves in the shoes of an employee, and a recruiter reaches out to you, right? Will there ever be a moment where you can have a perfect AI recruiter and put yourselves in the shoes of the employee rather than the recruiter, right?

[00:03:43] Tito Bohrt: Mm-hmm. Like in the early days, somebody can send me a message and be like. Hey, Tito, love your background. You used to work at Citrix and you have a lot of SDR leadership experience. My VP of sales wants to talk to you we would love to interview you. Would you hop on a call? That would be [00:04:00] a pretty good message compared to the average recruiter who's been sending, " Hey, Tito, open to a new role."

[00:04:06] Tito Bohrt: Right? But once every recruiter is sending me the same message over and over again, I start ignoring it. It doesn't feel like I'm actually the right candidate. And the same happens in sales development. Instead of selling them a new job, we're selling them a product, right? But if every recruiter is telling us the same thing, for all those employees out there, how many calls from recruiters do you take?

[00:04:34] Tito Bohrt: What percentage do you agree to? Like, I don't think somebody who's not looking for a job, actively looking for a job. You might take one out of every hundred, uh, messages that you receive, and the one that you're taking is the one that is the most targeted. Like Tito, I see, you know, three employees at this company and we're recruiting and we're looking for people with X, Y, Z experience.

[00:04:59] Tito Bohrt: And you're the perfect [00:05:00] candidate. You gotta talk to us. I guarantee you this would be your dream job. We just raised a hundred million dollars. We're the best place to work in the market. Look at our Glassdoor reviews. Come on, Tito, give us a chance. You might be happy already at your current company, but, but I guarantee you, this won't be a waste of your time.

[00:05:20] Tito Bohrt: I'll take the call, right? But what if every message from every recruiter now looks like that?

[00:05:28] Tito Bohrt: Will I now go take a hundred calls every month? No. It just becomes noise. The way you stand out as a recruiter is by doing what nobody else is doing. And the same applies to SDRs. What works for an SDR is doing what nobody else is doing.

[00:05:46] Tito Bohrt: Therefore, the AI SDR is an oxymoron. As soon as you can automate and scale it, it stops working because it becomes noise. It will never work. [00:06:00] It's the psychological limitation. 

[00:06:02] Emir Atli: Do you see the same thing with like for example if, if a company, let's say, has 10 SDRs, they work really well, they wanna scale to 30, does the same thing apply to that company with humans where they scale and it stops working?

[00:06:15] Emir Atli: Or is it, are there difference there? 

[00:06:17] Tito Bohrt: It happens very often, but it's not for the same reason. The reason that they scale up and the numbers don't grow linearly is because, call it, you have three SDRs and they're getting, at the moment, 20 meetings for the sales team. They're getting six per rep. The CFO looks at those numbers and he's like, six meetings per rep.

[00:06:38] Tito Bohrt: That's amazing. We need to double it because we're hiring twice as many AEs. Let's double it. But you know what? The CFO hasn't done? He hasn't looked under the hood. So what happened is, out of those 18 meetings that the three SDRs were booking, 12 were inbound and six were outbound. So when they hired three [00:07:00] more SDRs and they doubled the team.

[00:07:02] Tito Bohrt: What actually grows is the outbound but not the inbound. So now they go from 18 to 24 meetings and they're like, holy cow, our efficiency is down. We used to get six meetings per SDR, now we're at four. Mm-hmm. People aren't running the math. And that's why I like to believe that me being math obsessed and being in this segment really helps me when- The other thing that you'll find is that the inbound leads convert into pipeline at a much higher rate.

[00:07:30] Tito Bohrt: Yeah. The outbound failed to convert at the same rate and from pipeline to revenue. The inbound convert at a higher rate. The outbound don't convert as well. Now the question is, what's the right thing to do? Should we therefore give up on outbound and therefore only rely on inbound? If we decide to do so.

[00:07:51] Tito Bohrt: Go kiss goodbye your triple, triple, double, double, and tell your investors that you're never gonna be able to sell outbound and, uh, be [00:08:00] profitable and revenue efficient. Or option number two, which is what I do with my customers. Let's build an outbound program. But let's start from the ground up. We're gonna separate inbound and outbound SDRs.

[00:08:12] Tito Bohrt: I wanna separate inbound and outbound AEs. 

[00:08:16] Emir Atli: Hmm. 

[00:08:18] Tito Bohrt: Because if we go back to the example of the recruiting, I've had this happen to me. A recruiter when I was an account executive in 2016, reaches out to me, Tito, you're the perfect candidate, blah, blah, blah. Stands out. I take the call, I show up to the VP of Sales.

[00:08:33] Tito Bohrt: Guess what the first question was from the VP of Sales? 

[00:08:39] Emir Atli: They, do you do or do you self source? 

[00:08:41] Tito Bohrt: No. His first question is, Tito, why do you wanna leave your current company? I see you're an AE at X company. Why do you want to leave? And I said, I don't wanna leave. I said, so why did you come to the interview?

[00:08:58] Tito Bohrt: Aren't you applying for a job [00:09:00] here? And I was like, I came because your recruiter told me that you thought that I was the perfect candidate. And he is like, yeah, we think you would be a great candidate, but you have a job, right? And I'm like, yeah. He's like, why would you leave? I'm like, I don't know, dude.

[00:09:16] Tito Bohrt: Convince me, why should I leave? And he's like, what are the things you hate the most about your current company? I said, I don't hate anything. It's a great place. I love it. He's like, so why did you come to the interview? And I'm like, dude, we're definitely on completely different pages. I don't know what I'm doing here.

[00:09:37] Tito Bohrt: I apologize. I should have never taken this call. I better just go. And he was like, yeah. The problem was that what I was expecting, rightfully so, was the VP to comment and say, Tito, nice to meet you dude. I am so impressed by a lot of the things you've done. I wanna show you why coming and working at this [00:10:00] company that I am run is the best thing you could do in your fucking life.

[00:10:05] Emir Atli: Mm-hmm. 

[00:10:06] Tito Bohrt: Then he would need to sell me on, yeah, yeah, yeah. You might be making X money, but our commission structure's better, so you're better here. And we just raised money from X, Y, Z venture capital, and that's how we're gonna win. This is how the market looks and this is the opportunity. Here's how much equity we can give you.

[00:10:23] Tito Bohrt: And then even though I wasn't looking for a new job, I would've been like, hmm, holy cow. What's my path to becoming the next sales director for the Northeast region and running six AEs under me. And he'd be like, well, I can do that within 12 months. I'm like, would you write it in my contract? And he was like, yes, I would've taken the job.

[00:10:45] Tito Bohrt: But he never did that. He was just trying to seek for pain and for things that I disliked about my current state. And I didn't care. So outbound. Number one, you can never AI it because the [00:11:00] moment you AI it, the people start ignoring you. But number two really needs to be a conscious effort from a company to decide that we're gonna go get passive candidates like we do in recruiting.

[00:11:13] Tito Bohrt: We're gonna go after passive buyers. We can launch our SDR to go recruit that person, and we're recruiting them to become customers rather than employees, but we're gonna go recruit them. We can start the call of like, what's keeping you up at night? What are your biggest pain points? What's your timeline?

[00:11:32] Tito Bohrt: Dude, I have no timeline. I have no fucking pain points and nothing's keeping me up at night. I'm happy. What you gotta show me is you're happy, but there's better. And now that you know that there's better, let's work together to build a timeline and a budget and a, and a process. So you change. You gotta sell them on.

[00:11:53] Tito Bohrt: Why change despite them being happy with their current solution? It's a completely different motion and [00:12:00] companies that are sending inbound and outbound leads to the same AEs and the AEs that are running the same process, are deemed to fail. 

[00:12:09] Emir Atli: When you separate AEs with, like these are up on AEs or inbound AEs, do you pay exponentially more to the outbound AEs?

[00:12:16] Tito Bohrt: Yes, I would. 

[00:12:18] Emir Atli: Would 

[00:12:19] Tito Bohrt: Yep. On the inbound. I would move my commission to maybe six, seven, 8%. On the outbound, I would pay 12, 14, 16, 18%. And what that creates is a two to three x payment. Now we gotta be thoughtful about this, um, because like do I think that's the main thing that you should do from day one? No. Um, there's gonna be interesting plays.

[00:12:48] Tito Bohrt: Like what if. Imagine if I move companies today, if I go work at some other company, the first deal that the first tool that I want to go use is outreach, because I'm a big fan of outreach and I've been [00:13:00] using it for 10 years, and I'm just an expert. So that's my tech stack that I like. So if I move companies on, an outreach rep from Outbound calls me, Tito, I saw you just announced, you started an X company.

[00:13:14] Tito Bohrt: Do you wanna buy our tool? And I'm like, yeah, a hundred percent I wanna buy it. He's like, great. Is that outbound or inbound? 

[00:13:22] Tito Bohrt: That's truly still inbound. AKA am not a foreign buyer. I am a known buyer. I was gonna come inbound either way. He just looked at a signal that is demand capture. So I believe demand creation should be paid much higher than demand capture.

[00:13:39] Tito Bohrt: Now, how do you, how do you distinguish those? It's a little bit harder. I don't think an unsophisticated company, right or an early stage company. If you have less than 20 AEs, don't worry about paying differently. But I would worry about starting to split it and understanding the mindset of the person coming to the call.[00:14:00] 

[00:14:00] Tito Bohrt: Are they coming with brand awareness, either coming with product awareness, are they coming with pain points? If they're not coming with any of those and it was really cold outbound sourced, I think that goes to a different AE than if somebody is coming with a project in hand. 

[00:14:18] Emir Atli: What do you see with the AEs that close the most amount of outbound?

[00:14:22] Emir Atli: What do they do differently? How do they open the calls? How do they progress the deals? 

[00:14:27] Tito Bohrt: There's different ways to phrase this. We actually have done a few different things. Number one, we internally have an outbound mindset quiz. It's 57 questions. The AEs take it and it helps you understand how are they thinking about outbound versus inbound differently.

[00:14:45] Tito Bohrt: If they're thinking about it the same, they tend not to close a lot of outbound. If they're thinking about it significantly differently, they do. What are things that outbound AEs that do very well do differently? They understand that the first thing they gotta sell is not the [00:15:00] product, but it's change. So therefore they need to sell change.

[00:15:06] Tito Bohrt: And you can sell change by criticizing current state because that creates tension. So they need to place themselves as a consultant. So it's very counterintuitive to all the sales literature, but a great outbound AE sells you. Vitamins rather than painkillers or at least phrases things as vitamins. And it's not until you really, as a prospect, you have that desire for a future better current state that he starts quantifying the cost of staying the same. You first sell the future, then you quantify the cost of not changing.

[00:15:55] Tito Bohrt: That's what creates value. Most [00:16:00] people try to go straight into what are your pain points, and those are unrecognized. Those are implicit needs rather than explicit needs. And I've tried to explain this in so many different ways of, it's like trying to sell a a car to somebody that has been riding horses.

[00:16:18] Tito Bohrt: If you ask 'em what do they want, they'll say a faster horse. Yeah, you wanna, you want a car, right? So it's, it's a little bit, it's a little bit different on how you think about it. But once you make 'em want to have the car, then you go quantify what's the value of actually changing. And then they get excited about it.

[00:16:38] Tito Bohrt: And then you need to empower them to sell internally. You need to empower them with the right material. So they be, make that a project. It's a way longer sales cycle, usually add two to four months to the regular inbound sales cycle. 

[00:16:53] Emir Atli: What do you think about signals? 

[00:16:57] Tito Bohrt: Signals are great. [00:17:00] Signals are great when you are looking at doing demand capture, but signals are not scalable.

[00:17:07] Emir Atli: Mm-hmm. 

[00:17:08] Tito Bohrt: There's a certain number of companies that are looking for a type of product and if you sell let's make it super easy, right? Let's sell, let's say you sell something like sales engagement. You're an Outreach or a Salesloft or a competitor of them. There's a, there's 2% of the market that is wanting that type of solution.

[00:17:31] Tito Bohrt: If you have a very big brand, you will have a lot of inbound demand already. Your SEO, your, you know, your friends, everybody knows about you. So if I'm an Outreach or Salesloft, they're coming to me. Yeah. Okay. There's also gonna be scenarios where the company's gonna go buy this tool, but it's gonna go buy it in a month or two.

[00:17:53] Tito Bohrt: And that's where the signals start playing a role. We're hiring 15 SDRs. [00:18:00] Okay. And you don't have Outreach or Salesloft, like you're definitely gonna come inbound in a few months. You can outbound, but what signals tend to do is they, they, they turn future inbound into current outbound, it's still demand capture.

[00:18:17] Tito Bohrt: What the signals do is it shows you where demand exists and it tries to capture a little bit early. I actually don't think that the, doing outbound to signals is a huge value add, especially if you have a really good brand. It is very helpful if you're an unknown brand. If you wanna go take market from a market leader and you're not a market leader and you're nowhere to be found signals is the, is the way because you are gonna, you're gonna start finding those fights, but if you're already a big player, it doesn't matter.

[00:18:54] Emir Atli: So do you think basically signals is not gonna be. It's not gonna have a wide [00:19:00] adoption in upper mid market enterprise. Is that fair to say? Because an enterprise company already has market share and probably brand awareness. 

[00:19:09] Tito Bohrt: I actually think that they will benefit from it. But when you look at the numbers like there's this idea of like, what is the marginal value?

[00:19:18] Tito Bohrt: I think that if a company like, grab a big one, like Snowflake, right? If they start doing signals, they'll start capturing a lot of leads. They'll start capturing a lot of demands. They'll, they'll be able to show on the board that they're getting lots of meetings from signals. But the question is, 

[00:19:32] Emir Atli: Revenue will not increase.

[00:19:33] Tito Bohrt: Will their inbound be affected lower? Because now they're doing signals. So the signals are getting the same meetings that the inbound was gonna get two weeks later. Mm-hmm. So what is the, the full. Marginal value added by doing signals. It's actually very small. Where you get a lot of value is when you go sell to somebody that was not planning on making this a priority, and you [00:20:00] help the leader reprioritize somebody, I'll give you an example. Even in a big company, somebody uses AWS as their only cloud that they use for their code, and you're with Microsoft. You call them and you say, you should do multi-cloud, you should do AWS plus Azure. And they say, I'm not sure. And you say, how much are you paying per X, Y, Z? And they give you the pricing.

[00:20:29] Tito Bohrt: You're like, that's nuts. If you were multi, multi-cloud, you weren't tied to one single provider, your price would go down by 20% and you're spending $10 million a year, you'd save $2 million by being multi-cloud. Now you're convincing somebody that had no interest in changing anything to change. That is net marginal value. 100%. You found money where there was no money to be found. While the signal is a complete [00:21:00] opposite, Tito changes jobs. It was 100% gonna go request a demo into outreach. But guess what they did? They just called me. 

[00:21:08] Emir Atli: Yeah. 

[00:21:08] Tito Bohrt: The SDR gets the points, the SDR gets the commission, but did he actually create value or did he capture value?

[00:21:16] Tito Bohrt: And I think it's 90% value capture. 10% value creation. 

[00:21:21] Emir Atli: Yeah. Yeah. That is phenomenal explanation. Maybe there are like maybe the. Opposite, like objection to this might be like maybe there are signals that buyers do not correlate with like a tool. I don't know what it is, but probably there are some signals that you can find where you don't really immediately think, I need outreach, but then it's like a, I don't know, it's like signal that might correlate to have meeting outreach.

[00:21:48] Emir Atli: Um, yeah, that was great. 

[00:21:51] Tito Bohrt: Those are better, right? Like somebody opening more offices or more locations or somebody launching in a certain region. And then you having to [00:22:00] translate your software. Like it might not even be something that they're thinking about, but somebody being like, we're gonna start a sales team in Japan.

[00:22:08] Tito Bohrt: And it's like, okay, great guys, but uh, do you guys have, uh, your software in Japanese? I'm like, oh shit. No, we don't. 

[00:22:16] Emir Atli: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:22:17] Tito Bohrt: Okay. Well that's a good signal to go outbound. And maybe they were gonna go very far on not realizing it, and when they were gonna translate, they were just gonna use chat GPT. But if you're an expert at translating for software, that might be a good signal.

[00:22:32] Tito Bohrt: So you're gonna be very careful about your product. And again, part of this podcast for me, Emir, is just putting out their ideas that Yeah, the people who listen just say. Huh. That is interesting. I never thought about it that way. 

[00:22:48] Emir Atli: That's my goal too, yeah. 

[00:22:50] Tito Bohrt: Yeah. If we get them to think about it that way, then, then they're getting value from this podcast.

[00:22:54] Emir Atli: Exactly. I mean, we talked a lot about the things that do not work for, [00:23:00] to make people a little bit more optimistic. What is working right now in outbound or pipeline generation?

[00:23:06] Tito Bohrt: Yeah. Remember that we need to stand out, right? And one of the concepts that I talk about in outbound that works really well is something called unity.

[00:23:17] Tito Bohrt: And again, people will need to quote me on this long term because I believe I'm one of the inventors of the idea of unity. Unity is the closeness between you and the account you wanna close or that you're gonna target. So imagine the following. Imagine you run. The call center infrastructure of AI for American Airlines.

[00:23:39] Tito Bohrt: Every time somebody calls American Airlines there's the bot that picks up says, hey, thanks for calling me here. Imagine that you're that company. 

[00:23:45] Emir Atli: Yeah. 

[00:23:46] Tito Bohrt: What would be, or I'm, I'll just give you the answer. So what do you really wanna do if you're that company, is you want to try to get Delta Airlines to buy your product because American Airlines is paying you $10 million a year.[00:24:00] 

[00:24:00] Tito Bohrt: So what's working in outbound is creating micro campaigns that have a really good reason. So I would create a list of all the airlines that have lots of passengers, and the messaging around it would be, American Airlines is doing X, are you gonna start doing that soon, or are you gonna lose the battle?

[00:24:25] Tito Bohrt: And you can phrase it in whatever ways, but phone, email, LinkedIn, everywhere. It has to be consistent messaging on you're Delta Airlines, you're United Airlines, you're Spirit Airlines, you're Frontier. You might be Lufthansa, you might be Avianca, you might be any of these airlines. But if American Airlines has already moved and they've already seen increased efficiency, increased KPIs, better time to resolution, all that stuff, now I have a proven improvement that I can create in your company.

[00:24:57] Tito Bohrt: You weren't even thinking about. You thought that hiring your [00:25:00] regular agents was the best idea, and now I'm coming with a very disruptive technology and just showing you straight, and it needs to be numbers driven and it needs to be a little bit of a FOMO campaign. Now, why do I call that unity? The closeness between American Airlines, which is a current customer and United is quite close.

[00:25:21] Tito Bohrt: Where else can we find unity? Unity is just closeness. So it can be friends. You're a CEO of a brand new company. Find every person that follows your CEO and is the right person on the right target account, right? Yeah. You sell to mid-market companies that use Outreach. Great. You just launched a product integration with Outreach.

[00:25:45] Tito Bohrt: Great. Find every SDR leader that is friends with Tito and use this Outreach and just send 'em a message. Hey dude, I see you follow Tito Launch. We just launched a new product. We would love to show it to [00:26:00] you. Tito's doing some info sessions and he has a friends and family discount for anybody who checks it out before July 1st.

[00:26:08] Tito Bohrt: Can I pencil you in for June? You're gonna get meetings left and right and now remember when the person shows to the meeting, don't ask him what's your biggest pain point. 

[00:26:18] Emir Atli: Yeah, 

[00:26:18] Tito Bohrt: sell them on the idea of changing. Yeah, that works.

[00:26:23] Emir Atli: So it's like Finding patterns in your own data and also finding commonalities with the people so you find unity, right?

[00:26:30] Tito Bohrt: Correct. And it's different from signals. As you can see. It's not about signals. It's all about them taking the first step. I posted a job, I raised funding, I launched a new product. I, those are signals. This is less about signals, it's about unity. It's about how close are they to me? All sorts of different ways.

[00:26:53] Tito Bohrt: So we internally, we've documented 87 different plays that we like to run. 

[00:26:58] Emir Atli: Wow. 

[00:26:58] Tito Bohrt: Some of them are unity [00:27:00] based, some of them are cold outbound. Some of them are events, some of them are signal based, and we just, for every customer, we start alternating what are the types of signals, what are the types of things that we can run?

[00:27:11] Tito Bohrt: Another very obvious, very easy, a lot of people run it is the closed lost campaign. Now, depending on how you structure your CRM, going to a closed lost that got to contract or proposal is very different than going to a closed lost that only had an intro call is very different to go to a closed loss that never showed up for the meeting because it was a no-show.

[00:27:32] Tito Bohrt: What do you say and how you say it is different? So many times it's also about your data layer If you structure your data layer well. Then you can run quite complex ideas and you can build micro lists and micro segments that allow you to just yield more meetings from a smaller target and then turn meetings into revenue at a much higher rate.

[00:27:54] Emir Atli: Yeah. That's, so you, you have 87 plays internally, is that, is that [00:28:00] right? 

[00:28:00] Tito Bohrt: Yeah. And again, we've been doing this for seven years, so, you know, we have a big competitive advantage. You're not gonna. You don't need 87, you can start with 4, 8, 12. Just start somewhere. 

[00:28:12] Emir Atli: Yeah. And in terms of like what parts of the SDR workflow can be basically like AI doesn't need to replace, but how does AI help SDRs right now other than like AI SDRs?

[00:28:28] Tito Bohrt: Yes, it's easy to know what works when you understand what doesn't work. So what doesn't work is mass messaging and saying every the same thing to everybody. So what works is quite targeted, but it also needs to be written in a very, like, executive outbound format. Right. Um, there's been two camps right now, right?

[00:28:49] Tito Bohrt: There's the I see a lot of outbound messaging, especially from, uh, AI SDRs. That are very much demand capture. Hey Tito, are you looking for a new accounting firm? [00:29:00] We can help you. Like I get 52 of those every day. 

[00:29:04] Emir Atli: Yeah. 

[00:29:05] Tito Bohrt: And like remember, only three, 2% of the market is looking for new solutions. So sure you send a hundred thousand of those and if your market is huge, then you'll find it.

[00:29:16] Tito Bohrt: But where I think the AI actually works is help me clean up my list. Building my campaigns, building my messaging a little bit, but make it small segments and then it will help me streamline some of the finding of data, but, and it might help me even draft some emails, but the key of outbound is multi-channel, so you need to do coordinated LinkedIn, email, and phone all at the same time to enter my brain awareness.

[00:29:47] Tito Bohrt: Yeah. 'cause I can tell you if somebody calls me and, and tells me, Hey Tito, I know your inbox is super crowded. I sent you an email, but I bet you haven't seen it. I just wanted to call you to let you know I'm a [00:30:00] human. I'm not a fucking bot. I'm, you're not in a marketing drip campaign. I just, we're working with American Airlines and you're the VP of Delta.

[00:30:10] Tito Bohrt: I have to show you what, what we've done for them. Can I ping the email back to your inbox so you read it? I'd be like, yeah, brother, ping it. What was the subject line? It said American Airlines improved KPIs. Yes. Ping it right now. I'll take a, I'll take a look. He's like, thank you. Bye. I'll read the email and the email's gonna be really good because it's about American Airlines and I'm Delta.

[00:30:38] Tito Bohrt: I'm gonna look at that. I'm gonna reply. I might say, ping me in three months. Now you have a worm lead who understands what you did, who you did it for. And in three months you are creating value. So the way to scale is you need mobile channel. 

[00:30:52] Emir Atli: So the way to scale is, is essentially finding these small groups of companies, small groups of patterns, small groups of [00:31:00] unity as you call it.

[00:31:01] Emir Atli: And then as you can find those over and over again, then you scale. Is that correct? 

[00:31:07] Tito Bohrt: That's correct. And you can try to build. Reinvent the wheel, build it from the ground up. And again, a little bit of a, you know, uh, shameless plug or promotion. But that's what my agency does all day, every day.

[00:31:20] Tito Bohrt: We've already documented these. We already understand the logic. We already know how to build it. Some lists. You build directly on clay tables. Other lists, you gotta go on LinkedIn and instruct stuff. Some things are about the connection between customers. Sometimes you gotta export a CRM list and enrich it in certain ways.

[00:31:37] Tito Bohrt: And we already built all those workflows. So I have these 87 that whenever a customer says, Tito, can you help us with outbound? I say, yes. I log into their CRM and in a week. I'm ready to launch somewhere between 10 and 25 different strategies with high unity internally that would take him [00:32:00] six months, nine, 12.

[00:32:02] Tito Bohrt: So it's about the speed to value and about a creative outbound value. Um, but I think that's where the market needs to go. And I think, um, Emir, if we talk again in 12 months and you ask me what's working, I bet that what I just said right now, in 12 to 18 months, it might be too late. This market evolves really, really, really quickly.

[00:32:26] Emir Atli: The um, the thing about yeah, market is changing a lot, but like the, if I go back to signals, what you said really resonates with me because as like, I mean, I'm sure all sales leaders are saying we kind, like want to have control. The reason that anyone goes in sales is because you want to have the inputs that correlate with outputs and you wanna have control over you are essentially double to whatever you wanna have, like in terms of money, financial, everything. Like if you rely on signals, you essentially give the control to the company so that they [00:33:00] can open up 15 SDR positions so that you can reach out or like they need to raise a funding ground. And most of them mean we also wait, waited seven months in the last funding round, more in the previous one.

[00:33:10] Emir Atli: So then you need to raise funding, then they need to announce it. Then you go into that company. So essentially you give control to the prospect to do something so you can reach out. That is also like another like framing issue with signals and also control issue too. 

[00:33:28] Tito Bohrt: If you actually get very thoughtful about that process, what you'll learn is that the only area where you have control is cold outbound.

[00:33:36] Tito Bohrt: Because think about it, even this way, you go to a trade show, you put a booth at the Dreamforce conference, you think you have control. No, the attendees have control. They gotta stop by your booth or they gotta sign up for their conference. You put a webinar, do you think you have control? No. Somebody needs to find your webinar and join.

[00:33:54] Tito Bohrt: Newsletter, right? Everything except of absolute cold outbound, [00:34:00] it's relying on the prospect taking the first step, which means they must already be in the journey. Cold outbound and specifically unity based cold outbound is where you get the highest leverage on the best close rate, the highest average deal size, and full control, and it's infinitely scalable.

[00:34:23] Tito Bohrt: Because if I have one SDR only focusing on cold outbound with Unity and he can generate eight meetings and I have 87 different plays, I can put another SDR generating another eight and another SDR, another eight, another SDR, another eight. And if we can turn those into revenue at a high, at a high clip, call it 15% each SDR can close one outbound demo every month.

[00:34:48] Tito Bohrt: If your average deals as is 30 K, 50 K, 70 K, or above. Holy cow. At a hundred K, you would have one SDR produce $1.2 million in revenue every year. [00:35:00] My investors would go bananas over each SDR producing 1.2 million in revenue. The problem is everybody's caught up in the little signals and more tools and who picks up the phone and like, let's grab the hot numbers and let's grab the, it's all shortcuts, but those shortcuts are not never scalable.

[00:35:21] Tito Bohrt: So it's short boosts boost, bo, you know, boom, bust, boom, bust, boom, bust it. And we never become great because we're not looking at strategically what's scalable. 

[00:35:34] Emir Atli: Yeah. You know, this is great. If you wanna talk more about the agency, I want to do that before we wrap up. Do you wanna give people like where, where they can reach out?

[00:35:44] Emir Atli: Where they can find out about it? 

[00:35:46] Tito Bohrt: I'll say two quick things because I don't do these sessions to, you know, demand capture. I do these sessions to educate the market and hopefully I'm a, I'm a new resource for all of you listening. So follow me on LinkedIn. Regardless, I always post interesting [00:36:00] thoughts about the world of outbound and how to win.

[00:36:02] Tito Bohrt: And then I have three things for people who might be interested on this. I know it's only 2 or 3% of the listeners, so I'll keep it short and sweet. Number one, I run a sales development agency. I only have space for two more customers right now. We design and build the outbound for our customers. About 80% of my customers already have an SDR team.

[00:36:22] Tito Bohrt: So you can think of us like a consulting company, but if you're starting from scratch, um, we can, we also do it for you. We design it from scratch and we'd run it for you. So we'll give you one SDR, all the tools, all the ideas, all the sequences and all that, so, if you're interested, altisales.com is where you find that.

[00:36:40] Tito Bohrt: Number two, if you're running on outreach.io or SalesLoft for your internal SDR team and you have more than six SDRs, I have a tool that will help you understand what is working and what is not. All sorts of interesting data-driven metrics that will make your team more efficient on a coaching platform.

[00:36:59] Tito Bohrt: It all comes [00:37:00] in one piece of software. You can find that on altsales.io. Altisales.io is how you learn to make your SDR team better sale. Uh, the outreach integration is, uh, in a PLG motion. You can go in and connect. If you wanna do Salesloft, submit a demo request and we're in a beta and you'll be able to see it.

[00:37:22] Tito Bohrt: Then number three, if you're an early stage founder, seed or pre-seed, you're about to raise a seed. You're about to go raise a series A talk to me. I invest in a lot of B2B SaaS companies that are very early stage, and I take 'em to the moon. I'm about to get my first unicorn. Their latest valuation is $800 million, but I love meeting with very smart founders that want to go through the moon, and I hope I'm along the journey.

[00:37:46] Tito Bohrt: Advisory for free if you need services at a discount, if you need my software for free, all that stuff. Uh, but I'm really passionate about building pipeline and creating value. So thanks everybody for, uh, your a few minutes to listen [00:38:00] to what I have to offer as well. 

[00:38:02] Emir Atli: Awesome. Tito thank you very much. This is awesome.

[00:38:05] Tito Bohrt: Thank you, Emir.