Sales Cold Calling AIs Probably Aren’t a Long-Term Thing
At least every other week, I get asked about AI sales cold calling software and which one is best. I haven’t tried them, and I respond honestly in that, but then I add that I don’t think they’ll work.
Imagine you’re running a sales organization, and you want to sell more, but you don’t want to hire more people, so you hire an AI cold calling service. Hypothetically (definitely – I’ve heard the numbers.) that service costs $25,000 per month, and it’ll double your cold calling output. The AI even sounds just like a human with perfectly timed “ums” and “uhs” and small chuckles.
Cha Ching! You’re in!
Now imagine you’re a senior leader receiving this call. You pick up, have a nice conversation, advance through the funnel and you sign up for a product or service only to find out later that the first call you received was a robocall where the AI wasn’t disclosed. What’s the foundation of your relationship? Some percentage of those companies will discontinue their contracts, and other portions will most certainly need to hire more humans to build relationships and repair any mistrust.
Now imagine you’re the human sales rep for the AI sales agent companies (at some point, for a service that high-ticket and most certainly requires advanced setup, a human is needed). You need to hit quota quarter after quarter, so you need to both upsell existing clients on more calls and get new clients to buy your service. Over time, the space gets commodified and instead of charging $25,000 per month you charge $5,000 per month, so 10X or 100x the number of businesses can use your software.
The total number of calls made per day increases quadratically, because every business exponentially grows their AI calling sales force and the number of businesses using this technology expands exponentially.
Now imagine you’re literally anyone on planet earth, now getting bombarded by cold calls all day by AI sales agents. What will you do? Simply not answer your phone anymore if it’s an unknown number.
This is the exact reason why AI sales call companies won’t work at the scale they’re being promised. They rely on you, the prospect, answering the phone, which you won’t do as soon as more than like 1000 companies are using this software and your phone never stops ringing.
Calls are way more invasive than emails and banner ads. They take up your entire phone screen and incessantly buzz your smart watch, and then the caller leaves a voice message or, worse, boldly calls again.
I get the AI-agent cold emailing strategy. I actually think that’s worthwhile, because email inboxes already have spam filters to filter out all the emails it thinks you don’t want to see. The way they work is you have AI agents that find and qualify prospects, and then the send the prospect a cold email tailored to that prospect’s background and company. Smart! This is a less robotic process than most humans SDRs do, at least from my experience.
But phone lines don’t filter out spam as well. Or, maybe mine doesn’t, considering I get like 10 spam calls per day.
I think AI agent inbound customer service reps will be huge. That’ll bring 10X productivity for businesses and it’ll bring a 10X better customer experience. Everyone wins! Apple already does this, and the one time I called them and was greeted by the AI, it was delightful.
That said, on the sales side, my hunch is that people will answer their phones even less than they did before.
Before Apple released the “Silence unknown callers” feature, I paid for a service called Robokiller which identified spam calls and would answer the call on my phone using a bot specifically programmed to waste the time of the spammer calling me. Usually, the conversations, which were recorded and I could listen to afterward, would be 3 or 4 minutes. It made me feel good to know that I was playing a small role in saving someone else from having their time wasted.
So my guess is the final step in this saga for AI sales cold calling agents is that our AI spam-blocking-time-waster apps will talk to the AI sales agents and NVIDIA, AWS, Azure, and GCP will get way richer than they already are thanks to insane compute usage those services require.
Thanks to Miranda Wagner for reading a draft of this essay.
Feature Image Credit: ChatGPT 4 with the following prompt: An image of a computer making a sales call on the telephone.