AI email agents are the subject of much discussion across sales and marketing. Some people say they work great; others report that the complete opposite is true. Like every marketing strategy or technology, what works for one company may not work for another. What is important is that you consider all the options and test and trial yourself.
That's what Simpro, a Field Service Management SaaS provider focused on serving core trade services, such as plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and security, did. What it found is that email agents did work. Here's why.
Rachel Truair has been the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Simpro for the last two years. She has experience working with 6sense, a Revenue Intelligence platform, implementing it at three different companies. Her initial interest in implementing it at Simpro in early 2023 was understanding intent signals and building an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) program around their key segments. They also wanted to target the buying committees that make up enterprise deals.
But Simpro also has a healthy 'volume-and-velocity' business focused on the lower-to-mid market. These are typically quick deals that can be created and closed in a day, with the average sales cycle being around one and a half months. It's not the traditional enterprise sales motion that 6sense tends to focus on, but Truair was curious to know if she could use it for this market:
When I was exploring 6sense originally, I had some questions about how could I use it for targeting the SMB (Small and Medium Business), and what I found is everything just moves faster. You're still able to identify those accounts that are in-market. There's usually quite a higher volume of them than you might see on an enterprise go-to-market motion within 6sense, but moving them through the stages of the funnel is just compressed, just like the sales cycle itself. So that was one thing that I was pleasantly surprised by. I was able to still get the same insights about not just what accounts are in-market, but the scope of the market.
In the US, Field Service is a large, fragmented market with low barriers to entry. Simpro wanted to identify the scale of the audience in the US market, and 6sense helped do that early on. The firm started building out an upmarket motion with dedicated outbound motions that included Business Development Representatives (BDR) and sales teams focused on named account strategies in both their volume/velocity and strategic enterprise businesses.
Shifting the BDR org from Marketing to Sales
For two years, the BDR team reported to the head of growth in the Marketing organization. Truair said that the closer the business is to a product-led-growth (PLG) motion or a self-service motion on the Sales side, the more it makes sense to have BDRs in marketing, which was what they were focused on with their volume/velocity businesses.
However, as the business shifted into a more sophisticated enterprise sales process, as well as going after outbound using AI and BDRs, it made more sense for the BDR organization to be part of Sales. Simpro hired a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at the end of last year, along with a new BDR leader to run its global BDR organization, and shifted reporting to the CRO:
Specific to Simpro, the interesting thing that's going on with us is a lot of what we're doing with AI agents and automation, there's a lot of work happening in the Marketing organization to support that. Running and managing a BDR organization, our focus also has shifted. We're focused on how do we start to automate some of this so that BDRs can work on some of the more strategic and meaty things around outbound and persona research and building the right kind of talk track for who they're reaching out to? So the resources that I had focused on managing and running the BDR organization have been re-focused on, how do we scale this and leverage AI? The Sales team is now partnered and accountable to the success of the BDRs, which I think is also related."
There's a myth that BDRs think they are being replaced by AI, so they resist using it, says Truair, but her experience is the opposite. The BDRs Truair has worked with are young and early in their careers. They use technology to make their lives easier:
They're like, 'Oh, great! Now these people are going to raise their hands, and it kicks over to me automatically to schedule a meeting, and I'm off and running, awesome. Like, I'm not having to do all of that routine work anymore, and I get to do other, more interesting things and hit my goals.' That's a win for them.
Truair first heard about 6sense's AI email agent capability at a Forrester Research conference. She was interested, but wasn't sure where it fit. Then ChatGPT came out, and she knew there was something there. After talking about possible use cases with her team (and there were a few), the firm decided to do a pilot. This was in December of last year, a tough time to run a pilot, but they wanted to know if they should invest in these agents in the new year.
Initially, Truair said the company considered piloting the AI email agent against low-priority/low-value leads, but she decided instead to put Danielle, as the agent was dubbed, in as a fifth BDR in one region to compare how it did across the entire BDR team. The agent was put in the rotation, and leads were assigned in a round-robin style. Within the first week, Danielle surfaced two opportunities, one of which was closed the following week, recalls Truair:
One of the benefits of being in a volume/velocity business is, we were able to test and experiment pretty rapidly. And so as soon as that happened, we're like, 'OK, this is as successful as a new BDR that we would hire and train. They might take a month or two to ramp up. And Danielle has already surfaced an opportunity. It got past the AE. It's been closed/won. This is great. This is a no-brainer'. So we then said, 'Yes, we're going to keep going with this into next year'.
One metric Simpro tracks in Marketing is the reasons for lost Marketing Quaified Leads (MQLs). Rather than losing MQLs and disqualifying them because they couldn't reach them, they were able to reduce the excuse of 'could not get a hold of them' by 80% using an AI email agent. Truair says the agent was very effective at quick, contextual follow-up. Using the agent also takes the friction out of moving MQL from lead to meeting scheduled.
Truair has heard from prospects that they often miss first emails, so the persistent, contextual follow-up does work. The AI email agent is always learning and adapting how it communicates.
Truair could not have predicted how much Simpro would end up using the 6sense AI email agents. The use cases that the firm is thinking of now go well beyond the initial ones defined. Once the company started using the agent, it found many more ways and places to use it. Now, everything done starts with thinking about where an agent might be used. Truair argues that it's easy to spin up agents and presents low risk.
AI email agents are also adding value in other areas of the company. Simpro is now working with Customer Success to see how the agents can help that team, while other business areas are also raising their hands to use them.
Implementing AI agents may seem straightforward from the outside, but there are things you need to think about apart from the actual implementation of the agents. Truair says it has been a learning curve for her around AI in general. When the firm did the pilot, she knew it might work, but what she didn't consider was how it would change what she needed as she planned for the following year.
One discovery was the need for more technical skills. She had a technical team member on the marketing operations team already, but she now needed more than one to support all the demand for the agents. In hindsight, Truair said she would have planned for two to three technical people in total:
"It's not hyper-technical, but it's got to be someone that's experienced with the platform, or experience with email marketing that can also navigate that conversation with maybe some of the strategic players in the team. Because the other thing you might see is someone saying, I want it for this post-sales thing. You still have to kind of get to the basic questions, like, 'Who is getting this? Who is the segment? What are the personas? What's the base cadence that we're going to initially give it to follow?'. You can't just click a button and have it figured out."
She also found that she now needed a human analyst to help with compiling and assessing the data on how the agents are working:
To pull together a holistic view of how everything's doing and how it's performing, and do the reporting and provide that up and down into the organization, that's a full-time job in and of itself....We're recruiting right now for an analyst, a role that we didn't have last year. Part of that person's job is going to be pulling together across our different AI tools and agents how different programs are performing.
As an early adopter of AI, Truair understands there's a lot of thinking and planning that needs to go with implementing any AI, but especially gen AI. A few months ago, she created an AI vision roadmap, which includes a maturity model for Simpro. The model includes Simpro's stages of growth and what she has seen in terms of culture shifts needed and how AI impacts strategy and execution.
She also devised what she calls "moon shoots" for fiscal year 2025. Each quarter now has identified plans to be worked on for incorporating AI. Q1 was all about automating outbound communications. Q2 is outbound and supporting BDRs through AI email agents and AI-based research tools. Q3 will focus on their next phase of AI maturity related to content and SEO, while Q4 will focus on lifecycle communications, determining where they can leverage AI more effectively for post sales. Truair explains:
