Leaders Driving AI Change in their Org

2026
SDR Leaders Driving Change with AI

The last 12 months have seen a shift from AI SDRs taking over this function to leaders augmenting how AI can be used to maximise the operational value of their teams.

But what's been the real inspirational part of this shift has not been driven by vendors who are trying to sell this. It's actually been led by the SDR leaders themselves, who are building out processes and workflows. Looking at how to structure their go-to-market top-of-funnel flow and then seeing how they can use technology to improve and maximise efficiencies. Then, testing that out and purchasing technology or utilising existing technology that they already have to build out that flow.

Here are a couple of examples that I have seen:

• One use case was an SDR leader with 37 headcount who needed only 7 because of AI-enriched accounts at the account level. They were sourcing prospects, enriching them by identifying triggers and signals, and then pulling it all into one place for their SDR team to execute. Their 7 SDRs actually generated more revenue than their peers' team at 37.

• I've also seen how SDR leaders have been utilising vibe coding to build out their own training and development platforms and their own dialers via vibe coding to really maximise what their teams can do.

• And then, I've also seen how organisations have built Claude bots that pull in accounts they want to go after and use insights from their own business to quantify the lead scoring of those accounts.

Doubling down on vibe coding for a moment, this is where I see where AI is going to become a real value add for SDR leaders and those who can really figure out how to vibe code can get a leg up in terms of maximising their operational efficiencies of the teams.

So if you've got the ability to figure out how to build out your own lead scoring model, within a large language model (LLM), you're going to accelerate your team's productivity without having to go through the long sales process of buying external technologies. This could mean that the platform play will become increasingly critical for businesses, rather than just the individualised applications available on the market.

So, if I were you right now as an SDR leader, these are the things that I would be doing to really utilise AI in your own way and not be left behind in this augmentation of AI being used in the SDR organisations:

1. Our SDR leaders within our community are a great resource to get started and to ask the questions about the workflows they've been doing on Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini etc. Learn from them first, get inspiration to just do it. Nobody has got AI right yet. Whoever says that is a liar.

2. Just go and just try and write some prompts on Claude around identifying target accounts in your ideal customer profile.

3. Look to get some additional training on this. There are so many great free guides and free YouTube tutorials to really try and once you've tried to build something, iterate and improve it and get it better

To wrap this up, we as leaders are very much in control now of how we are utilising AI to maximise the outputs and efficiencies of our teams. There are so many really good free resources out there where people are showing what they're doing. Our community is a great place to learn from that as well.

Really make sure that you are not being driven by a narrative from external resources about what you think you need. You know best, you have the institutional knowledge of the organisation, you can get inspiration from others to build something that is unique and bespoke for your own business

FUNNEL
We have some speaker announcements!

Some of you might have seen on our social media pages over the last few weeks that we are going to be hosting a conference!

And today we are going to give you a sneak peak of who we will be having as some of the speakers at Funnel!

We will have Morgan Ingram kicking us off with his keynote, Angela Frackowiak, Illango Dhandayudham and Jonathan Mayer are some of the speakers we will have to be discuss how to make the transition from 2nd to 3rd line leadership and one of our workshops, led by Jay Glenn will be how to calculate CAC.

We are excited about these incredible leaders being part of our conference and to join all of you in Austin!

More announcements to come soon!

Funnel 26 will be the first of its kind, a conference where the best global VPs of sales development are going to be talking to the best heads of sales development, directors, third-line leaders sharing their strategy and their vision for how the function will look like, giving access to those that come to the best sales development leaders in the globe with workshops, with networking, with everything that is kept true to what SDR leaders of USA and EMEA does but on a far grander scale.

We're really excited to be partnering up with Anastasia Chihai from ATX SDR Leaders to deliver this conference for YOU!

So we really look forward to seeing you all there!

AGENDA
Check out what’s going on in our SDR Leadership Community