AI Bringing the MDR Back? A Marketing / Sales Alignment Opportunity
Prediction: AI Outreach Might Fix Sales Marketing Alignment... the MDR comeback
The Market Development Rep (aka the MDR, aka the predecessor to the SDR and BDR) is primed to make a come back thanks to AI.
Most sales outreach is focused on "pitching" a product, a meeting, etc. The power of AI is that we have an opportunity to create hyper specific marketing content recommendations to help guide the user's journey.
The future of sales and marketing alignment is right in front of us, we just need to execute.
Meeting buyers where they are
Newsflash: Your buyer probably isn't in market. They probably aren't thinking "I need to solve this problem today". Yet, all messaging strategy and outbound is designed around getting people to a meeting.
What if instead, we met the buyer where they are with content? We usually think of this as "inbound". But, inbound requires them to find you. With social media feeds optimizing for paid content, this is opening a new opportunity for outbound.
Why didn't this work before?
Outbounding with helpful content hasn't been great historically because pushing content via outbound is generic. The cost of spending a sellers time crafting a 1:1 message is too high if the next step in the journey is them reading a blog.
Email conversion rates are too low for this to make sense. It might be higher than an advertisement, so you see teams pushing automated outreach flows connected to a content download. But, the flow is typically still focused on driving a conversion to a meeting.
Here's an example from our Guide to Inbound:
Hey Julia, saw you downloaded our State of Email report. What’d you think?
If there’s something you’re trying to dig deeper into, I’m happy to send over more specific research.
This email example is solid. But, any automated content suggestions that follow are only based on the context of that single download.
AI enables teams to contextualize (between 1st and 3rd party data) why the content could be useful to them. It enables a richer fabric of context without taking time away from the rep.
What content works?
Events, guides, videos, blogs, etc. there's never been a more interesting time to use these tools to pull folks into your orbit instead of trying to drive a down funnel conversion before they're ready.
Buyers say they want to learn first without the seller. This motion enables this.
This idea didn't come out of the blue. It's been sitting in the back of my head since Jen Allen-Knuth got a cold email when she first joined our company to lead on community and partnerships.
Someone saw her past experiences and instead of pitching their stuff... they said "hey, here's something that would be really useful as you get up to speed."
While most emailed with something that said "congrats, here's my stuff. Want to buy?", this email met the reader on their timeline.
Cultivate your TAM > Burning your TAM
We often hear buyers state they're in "research mode", this is because they're meeting with vendors to learn what's possible. Yet, we rarely consider how can we meet more buyers in the earliest stages of research mode.
The TAM (total addressable market) is likely not shopping. But, if you can see the world from their POV, and bring them contextualized content that can help them.
Folks that master this give > take ethos first are going to see a better alignment between their sales and marketing teams and are going to generate a much truer development of their overall TAM.
How to action
Below are some easy steps to bring this program to life:
- Work with Marketing to audit your content - in what situations could your content help? Who is it built for?
- Build the outbound program
- You'll want to use a secondary inbox/domain to run this campaign given the volume needs. You don't want this volume eating away at the safe volume of your sellers' primary inboxes. More info on setting that up in our Deliverability 101 Guide.
- If you're not using Ora, you'll want to map signals and triggers to specific content pieces. You'll then want to craft a short (1-2) email sequence designed to introduce the content and then a follow up that asks if the resource was helpful.
- If you're using Ora, you'll just build the campaign with the content assets in the instructions with context from the audit on why and where they'll be helpful. Then you'll instruct the agent to only push the content and to see if they found it helpful based on Ora's research on the prospect.
Things to consider
This is a rethink of email as a hyper thoughtful advertising channel. Like all things ads, the question will be "can the CAC support the distribution practice?". My belief is that the answer can be yes, if the system is thoughtfully designed around the campaign.
Ads are expensive, but they can't contextualize the recommendation. The 1:1 touch can.
