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Will AI Replace Sales Development Representatives? Our exploration with ChatGPT, GPT-4, and Copy.ai

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AI has reimagined a handful of careers. With their already-daunting power in the early stages of their development, will AI be able to replace the role of a Sales Development Representative (SDR)? Here’s what we found out: 

But first, 

 

What Does An Sales Development Representative Do?

 

Sales Development Representatives are the unsung heroes of the sales world. They perform sales prospecting by employing sales tools and software to conduct customer research and collect essential sales data. As time passes, their potential prospect roster expands exponentially, reaching hundreds of thousands of individuals.

As such, they usually deal with an average of 200-500 at a time. With the help of the vast set of AI tools that claim to help them make their lives easier, Sales Development Representatives can produce hundreds of personalised emails a day that are connected and backed by data!

With AI being capable of all that, naturally questions will be raised regarding it being able to eventually take over the role completely.


We explored 3 different AI softwares: the worldwide-known ChatGPT, its new edition GPT-4, and copy.ai that was designed for chatbot functions.

 

Below are our findings on how well the following AI tools perform in terms of message quality, personalisation, and scalability on a scale from 1 to 10. 

 

ChatGPT Ratings: 

 

  • Quality: 7
  • Personalisation: 5
  • Scalability: 3

 

Each AI tool will require a prompt of some sort- with ChatGPT, it is best to provide as much details as possible along with specific guidelines for how you want your email to look.

 

“Compose a concise (less than 100 words) three-part email series aimed at persuading Anderson Park to schedule a meeting with me. All the essential details are provided, and please ensure the subject line of the initial email is attention-grabbing.

 

  • Anderson Park is currently the Head of Human Resources at SalesWorks
  • SalesWorks is a premier subscription activation agency that specialises in face-to-face marketing and professional customer acquisition.
  • He received a promotion but has also switched around his responsibilities and job scope.
  • SalesWorks raised $56M in quarter 3 in 2022
  • His first ever job was as an Inside Sales Representative.
  • My name is Sam Young.
  • My company is Gather.
  • Gather streamlines processes for human resource teams in small to mid-sized companies. It is an HR system that handles claims, reimbursements, attendance, leave management, and payroll in one place.”

 

We needed to rephrase and reword our prompts a few times to make our instructions as concise as possible before ChatGPT rendered us the result below:

ChatGPT initially gave us and ‘email 2’ and ‘email 3’, but those got lost on the way while trying to touch up the emails with follow-up corrections. Besides that, ChatGPT managed to put together a decent email. 

However, it would not be able to run automatically without an Sales Development Representative to research and input the required details and prompts. Moreover, one would most likely make a few edits and tweaks before sending the e-mail out. This makes ChatGPT no contender for scalability. Safe to say, ChatGPT will not be replacing you!

 

GPT-4 Ratings: 

 

  • Quality: 7
  • Personalisation: 8
  • Scalability: 3

 

With the same prompt used for ChatGPT, GPT-4 generated the result below: 

The opening email that GPT-4 curated was of good quality, and it personalises it with the details we provided. It also generated more follows-up emails that were cohesive and logical.

However, the emails were a tad bit long and we would personally cut them shorter to make them more concise. However, GPT-4 seems to have adopted a more conversational tone without us having to prompt it, compared to when we use ChatGPT.

Scalability wise, GPT-4 will not be able to get information on most private individuals. You would have to manually put in their details in the system for it to generate the email. Overall, good launching pad for making emails, but not good for scalability. We wouldn’t count on it to replace Sales Development Representatives. 

 

Copy.ai Ratings: 

 

  • Quality: 3
  • Personalisation: 3
  • Scalability: 2

 

With the same prompt, copy.ai generated the result below: 

However, when we input the same information into copy.ai’s cold outreached email template, the information got lost in translation.

Copy.ai was able to give a variety of options. However, even with a special template provided for cold outreach emails, the AI mixes up the details about the receiver’s company and interprets it as information about the senders company. This concludes an overall low score for quality, personalisation, and scalability. Definitely not taking anyone’s job soon!

 

Conclusion

 

While AI has given us killer email templates to save time and get better results, Sales Development Representative jobs will not be taken over by AI, and probably never will be. 

The first contact between your business and another individual should always have a human touch, and SalesWorks’ experts can help with that! With over 25 years in the industry and experience in over 8 market, you can confidently leave your Sales Development Representative worries with our professionals. Click here to see which Sales Development Representative activities work for your company!