AI, SDRs, and the New GTM Engine

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers. If this is your first time listening, welcome. If you're a regular listener, welcome back. You're about to listen to an expert huddle, where experts share their insights into topics of critical importance to our flocking awesome CMO Huddles community. In this episode, Amanda Kahlow, founder of 1mind, challenges us to rethink the future of SDRs in an AI-first world. She explores what changes when revenue teams stop optimizing for handoffs and start optimizing for outcomes, why pipeline can be a misleading metric, and why speed to lead still matters a lot more than most companies want to admit. She also brings it to life with Mindy, 1mind's AI Superhuman, offering a glimpse into where all of this is headed. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be helping our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. All right, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through — proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Hello, huddlers. Some of you had the good fortune to meet Amanda Kahlow during our recent East Coast Strategy Labs, where she challenged us to rethink go-to-market from a clean slate in an AI-first world. Amanda has been pushing this industry forward for years, from co-founding 6sense to now building 1mind, and her message during the labs was clear: incremental tweaks to the old go-to-market model just won't cut it. Today, we're going to continue that conversation and explore what the future of SDRs actually looks like, and then at the end, Amanda is going to show us how 1mind is quite literally drinking its own champagne with Mindy, their superhuman teammate, who is already driving pipeline. All right. Hello, Amanda. How are you? And where are you this fine day?

Amanda: I am great, thanks for having me, Drew. Always a pleasure to see you. I am in Northern California, just north of San Francisco, in Marin County, in Mill Valley.

Drew: I love it. Okay. Well, so let's get to this, and just in case our audience needs to leave early, or we need to convince them to stay — if you would be so kind as to list three mistakes you see marketing and revenue leaders making when it comes to the SDR teams and their bigger go-to-market strategies, as I mentioned in this AI-first world.

Amanda: Yeah, I'll take it as the larger question around the go-to-market for marketing. The three biggest mistakes: one, philosophically, that we are aligning our playbooks and our processes around humans instead of around outcomes — and in a world where AI actually drives outcomes, we should be aligned around outcomes. Number two, around thinking about measuring to the top of the funnel pipeline versus the bottom of the funnel revenue, deal size, etc. And number three, speed to lead. I think we've talked about it for a really long time, but we are not hitting it on the head and addressing it in a way that is possible today.

Drew: Okay, I love the fact that these are big things, these are really big things. So, let's go through the first one — the philosophy about aligning around humans as opposed to outcomes. Talk about why this is such a big problem, and then we can go into details in terms of ultimately, I know we're going to solve it here too.

Amanda: If you go back in history, where we've evolved, everything we did was around a human, right? So, a human had to take the call. A human is doing the selling. Everything that we were building, we had systems of record to support humans. So, you have Salesforce and SAP and Oracle, and all of those systems of record, so that humans could go in and get the reports and the analytics and know where the deal is and get my pipeline and understand what's happening. Then we built systems of engagement — so we built systems like Outreach and Gong and 6sense and SalesLoft, all those systems of engagement. Again, those too were so humans could engage their buyers, but we've now moved to a world where AI can work autonomously for us. The shift that we need to be thinking about is the systems of outcome, and that is where we really can move to a world of hyper-personalization — and I'm not talking about 1mind here either. There are so many tools right now that can actually build content for you and hyper-personalize every touch across the buyer's journey. And so if we really think about the end state of hyper-personalization and systems of outcome versus systems of engagement or humans being the center, we want to think about outcomes being the center. We flip our thinking and what we would actually put in place at our organization. So I always say, if you could — and the hardest thing as an executive to do is think from the state of first principles — if I had a clean slate today with the tools that I have available, what would I do and how would I do it? And then work backward into how you'll get there. Of course, as a large organization, you're not going to get there on day one, and you can't rip everything out, but you can slowly, instead of saying how can I make today better — I think most people are saying how can I make what I'm doing today better — and that will only give you incremental gains versus exponential gains.

Drew: And it's so interesting, because I know we've talked about this in the labs and so forth, that companies that are smaller, that are not burdened by as many people and as many systems, are making these giant leaps forward both out of necessity, but because they can. They don't have those constraints, and so that's just so interesting. Okay, so if you start with outcomes, you might completely redesign your go-to-market strategy from start to finish, no doubt. And then I know where all of this is going, but let's get to the second one, which is measuring. I wasn't sure when you said we're measuring pipeline instead of measuring revenue — what's the issue, and what are you proposing?

Amanda: I'm basically proposing that MQLs are dead. The idea — and this is what we're all driving towards — we're driving towards that pipeline number, and then we hand it to sales. I actually think we're moving through a world where sales should report to marketing.

Drew: Wait, wait, full stop. Let's hear a big round of applause on that one. Sales is going to report to marketing. Okay, thumbs up on that. Okay, great. How do we get there?

Amanda: Because if marketing can control the conversation from first touch to close — right now marketing controls the conversation from awareness to first touch to lead, and then they pass it off and say, "Okay, sales, now you go take it." If marketing is completely controlling the narrative and can actually do the selling — which is actually one of the challenges when I get into what we're working on — I typically will sell to somebody in marketing, but I'm asking the marketing team to create a sales experience. So I'm asking my buyers to think about how would you engage your customers to sell, not to market, not to try to explain what your differences are, but actually have the best solution selling, use the best sales methodologies, use MEDDIC in conversation to drive the lead forward, to actually handle objections, to do all the things that you teach your sellers to do. We're seeing this just in the beginning stages — like this is early innings — but I have customers using our superhumans, and there are other agents like this, and this isn't about just superhumans, but taking from first touch on your website all the way to close and then onboarding. So when marketing owns not just awareness and pipeline but is owning all the way to close — we've seen agents close deals up to $100,000. And so, if that's possible, the art of the possible is all possible today. It's just a matter of using technology and putting these agents and other superhumans in place to take the conversation and own the full life cycle. So when I go back to what we're talking about — what we should measure today — you're going to the board measuring pipeline, but our customers, like one of the largest business social networks — I can't say who they are, it's a customer of ours — they said we shortened their sales cycle by 23 days and doubled their ACV. So closing deals, SMB, and commercial deals through an agent tech experience is not about measuring pipeline. Who cares about pipeline? They're not trying to create leads, they're actually trying to close deals, close business, and shorten the sales cycle. So if it is an enterprise or commercial enterprise or strategic deal, of course it may not go all the way to close today, but what we should be measuring towards is that when we're having a conversation early with an agentic-like experience — like a superhuman — deal cycles are shrinking and shortening, and ACV is going up, and we're delivering more revenue as a result. Your pipeline is going to go down because you don't need the leads if it's actually doing that. If it's skipping stages, you may actually have fewer leads at the top of the funnel, but the bottom of the funnel will be exponentially more healthy.

Drew: It's interesting. I mean, I think there are a number of folks that are listening right now or listening later who will say MQLs have been dead for a while, and we buried them before, but I don't think they made the leap that you have made — because I think what they've done is they've said the only thing that matters is pipeline.

Amanda: I'm saying pipeline is dead.

Drew: Right, you're going all the way to revenue. And it's interesting — boy, it is hard mentally for folks to wrap their minds around this, because

Amanda: 100% incremental. Like, here's the way to think of it: you're a big company, you can't do it on day one. You're probably looking at me and going, "Amanda, yeah right, I can't do that. My company, there's no way. We have too many processes, there are too many things." Take, find an example where there is no business model for a human today.

Drew: Right.

Amanda: So, what is that segment where you can't engage with them with humans, and then prove it there? Or, for example — I don't know if I'm allowed to say their name right now — but we've had crazy results for one of our customers, and until I get approval, I'm not going to share their company name, but it's a go-to-market tech company, it's a publicly traded company, and they came back and said they took the segment that they would never put their sellers on — they wouldn't even put their SMB or commercial sellers there — it was in a region they're never going to touch, but they had leads coming in, and they said, "You go try to close those." In a matter of weeks, we created not pipeline but 10 figures in revenue as a result of being able to pick up those — what you would call dead leads, or they don't qualify — to give us the non-qualified ones, the ones that you're going to throw away anyway, and see if we can shake something out. There is something in there. We can have a conversation and move that forward. Let's prove it there, and then move to, okay, now let's prove it with more of our commercial or SMB sellers. Then let's go up market to the enterprise.

Drew: I was thinking, as much as — I was just talking to a CMO today. We were talking about how they want to have more impact on pipeline. They don't own BDRs and SDRs today. They were thinking, "Okay, I would want to own BDRs," and it's so interesting because that framework alone is going to get you to a place that is not the future — it's going to lead to behavior that's in the past. I mean, it's a good goal — to own revenue or own pipeline and be able to do that — and what's interesting, I think the parallel here for any of the PLG brands where there's an e-commerce component and they're closing on the website, the CMO immediately goes, "Oh, yeah, well, I run e-commerce, I have revenue." And in fact, someone goes to their website and buys — the human intervention was that you created this sales experience that allowed them to close. What you're talking about is replacing the human to do what I just described, that e-commerce is already doing. It's almost turning it into e-commerce.

Amanda: It's in a world — so if you think about a PLG motion where you go to free trial, you get a ton of people to sign up, and most free trial PLG companies have mass amounts of people sign up, right? Conversion from free to paid is one to ten percent if you're lucky. What if I could turn that one percent into two percent? That's a billion-dollar company, right? Because what you're doing is in that moment you're engaging the buyer and you're saying, "Hey, let me show you how to do this. Let me show you somebody else who built something similar with our tool, or used the tool in this way. Who looks like you? Oh, I see you're from this industry, this vertical. You've got this pain point. Let me actually relate to your needs and have an empathetic conversation," and then show you — and then literally get into the product and have AI click around, screen navigate, give a live demo, and show you how to use it and help you get unstuck. For example, at HubSpot — they're a customer of ours, they've been using us for a little over a year, they have four live superhumans right now — we initially set out to service their SMB business. Actually, that's where it lives: there's one place where the first superhuman lives behind the form when somebody says they want a demo, and then we're never going to give them a human because they're a small segment — it's the SMB and super-SMB, very SMB side of their business. And so what she does is give a live demo, and then she drives them to sign up, and then she drives them to actually start paying. But what they noticed is that 25% of their audience started asking questions about support, and "How do I use this?" So right away, marketing — that's what I was saying — marketing can't just be about creating leads. Marketing is about supporting the customer. It's about being the CSM, like a real presence on the website, taking them through and showing them how to use the product so that they can move forward. And then they want to buy. If you get them unstuck, you're going to move them to the next stage of their journey. So there is no single role. The one thing I'm also trying to get people to stop thinking about is, "Oh, I want to use AI for this particular role."

Drew: Right?

Amanda: Buyers don't come and will have, like, "I need an SDR question answered." No, they have questions, they want a solution, they want to buy, and they want to, in that same session, upsell and start using it and get value out of it. So how can I get to value as soon as possible through a marketing-led experience?

Drew: And I think that your third point, or third mistake, was speed to lead, and I feel like that's what you're describing, right? You just described it, but I just want to make sure that we've covered it. Because we had the three points at the beginning of the philosophical design around human versus outcomes measuring, but speed to lead really is, is what—

Amanda: I mean, in no world should we make anyone wait if they have filled out a form. There are many different tools out there that can engage your buyer right there and give the live demo, answer their questions, solution with them. Why are we waiting to hand them to a junior SDR? Because that junior SDR can't answer the tough technical questions, can't actually give the demo — they're only there to qualify. And if we think of what we're doing with an SDR today, especially — I'm talking specifically about an inbound SDR — what we're doing is we're making them go to a human who is not there to serve your buyer, so not creating a delightful experience. And best intentions of that junior SDR and that team, they're doing their job, but they have capacity limitations, they don't understand the product well enough to give that demo, they can't solution like a sales engineer, a solutions engineer. But imagine on that first touch you can provide — you can bring your solutions engineer, you can bring your first-call AE and your SDR, who's going to do the MEDDPICC qualification — all combined into one to meet that buyer. They're active, they're ready, they're engaged. Speed to lead is not 10 minutes, it's instant. It needs to be right away. And buyers are going to start demanding this, as there are so many tools right now — like us being one of them, but there's more. I'm not saying go do the diligence of what's best for your business, but there are so many tools who, right there in the moment, can meet their needs and give them the answers and the questions that they have, so that you can move them forward faster, which then again shrinks the deal cycle. At the end of the day,

Drew: it's so interesting. I mean, philosophically, as I think about CMOs in the role as leaders of the organization, the goal of putting the customer at the center — which all CMOs will say, yes, the customer should be at the center, and we believe that — but when you described at the Strategy Lab what the typical sales experience is, it's the opposite, right? I mean, are you good enough? Do you have a big enough budget to buy our product right now before I can even get you to a salesperson who you don't want to talk to? You're going to have to answer these questions and pick up the phone and deal with me, and I know nothing. And then you get to a salesperson, and you still can't really buy the product. I mean, the whole description that you described of a sales experience is the opposite of putting the customer at the center.

Amanda: We take them through this journey of all these handoffs from one to the next. From our website — if we actually take it all the way back — it's from like search on Google or an LLM. They then end up getting to a website, if you're lucky, they make it to your website, you know, if you're doing things right with AEO, GEO, paid. And then they go to an SDR who's just there to qualify, and then an AE that's only there to pitch, and then you get a tough technical question and you get an SE, and then you buy, you get a CSM, and then you get an account manager. And what we do to buyers is absolutely awful. So my whole philosophy is: how can we collapse that? How can we serve the buyer? How can we have unlimited memory recall, no capacity limitations, not think about these different roles? The roles are there because humans have limitations — they have time limitations, recall limitations, can only do so much. Looks like Andy has a question.

Drew: Yes, okay. We have Andy Weiss from New York City. Andy, bring a good one. I got a lot more. What do you got?

Andy: Okay, so Amanda, I heard you talk at the Strategy Lab, and this time around I think you and Drew hit on an analogy that I think resonated for a lot of us, and that's the e-commerce one — like we've been there and done that trying to sell in e-commerce. And I think there was a lot of head-nodding with that, and a lot of cheers when you talked about marketing owning sales. So where I'm going with this is, whether it's with 1mind or something similar, using your customers as a proxy, how do we lead our organizations to this scenario where we're skipping over MQLs? It's no longer pipeline, it's the speed to lead, and it's this painting, this picture that you've got us all kind of nodding toward. How are you seeing that success, and how can we kind of replicate

Drew: that?

Amanda: Pick — so what I was saying before is take a segment of your business where you wouldn't put a human, or where there is no business model right now to go towards the human experience. So think about those leads that you can throw away, right? Don't you have the disqualified leads where you know there are some good ones in there? So why don't you try that? Start there. All it is is upside. If it works, it's gravy, right? Then give me the commercial SMB segment, right? Then give me that down-market segment. So let me try to start doing some — let the superhuman work those that the humans aren't doing today, so we're not disruptive. We can prove this works, prove the conversion rates, show you subjectively and objectively the quality of the conversations. Because at the end of the day, you want to know that your buyers are happy, and they're having like 18 turns on average. HubSpot's turns are 18 — 18 turns — which means the conversations are on average like 14 minutes in length, which is just freaking mind-blowing, even to me. Like, it is beyond what I expected. And that's what they did. They took that segment that they would never put a human and they said, all right, let's put the superhuman. Now she's earning the right to talk to their enterprise accounts and talk to everyone and do the speed to lead, like I was saying, and qualify every buyer in the moment. So start with those places that are like — you are going to this — it's only up, we'd only get upside if you can service that business. Now I'm not saying if you can't service it because it's a down-market segment and you don't have that product, then it may not be something there. Then we talk about: all right, let's take one of your inbound reps, take the traffic from one inbound rep that you have right now and push it over to a superhuman-type experience.

Drew: Andy, thank you for that question, and it really sets up this interesting notion, because the biggest threat folks will be thinking is, "Well, you're going to be replacing humans," and there are going to be a lot of people who are going to push back on this. But if you think about it as a path to innovation and how those things work — if you think about this as a skunk works and you say, "I'm going to create a P&L over here for a target that we are not going after, but we know we could" — so it's a separate unit. There's no people assigned to that right now, and we're going to do it. If it works, this is the math of it, and you can sort of demonstrate value and initiative and AI-forward. I feel like that's an interesting place to go, Amanda. Except,

Amanda: yeah, and there's so many more jobs that are going to be created. So yes, I am absolutely taking jobs and wiping out categories, and that is our goal. And I would be lying and doing the world a disservice if I said anything otherwise. But I also believe there are so many new jobs that are going to be created. So, for example, we have another product that I don't necessarily always talk about here — because more we sell into sales on this one — but where the superhuman joins the call, and she's what we call the ride-along sales engineer. In fact, I should have brought her on the call, I don't know why I didn't — miss on my part. But basically she can be here, and when you ask me a technical question — or Andy, if your question came in, and I was like, "I don't know what I'm going to say to that" — I'm like, "Hey Mindy, what do you think?" And she jumps in and she answers, she gives the demo, she answers the legal, the security, the compliance, all the really tough questions you would bring in a solutions engineer for. So I think there are places that you can put this that it doesn't have to be a direct human replacement. And then there are so many more jobs, right? So the job now — we had our sales engineer, who used to be on calls with us before we had this product — now maintains and owns the brain of our superhuman sales engineer, so he has a full-time job. Because right now he's got all the questions and the answers and the content going in the brain. Next is all the live demos going in the brain. Next is going to be able to create the ROI analysis and the business case in real time with the customer through the superhuman. So it's never-ending where you could go with this — so many more jobs to maintain things like the agents. So we will wipe out the way we have done things historically, but I do think there's going to be — you know, if you look at the jobs reports, AI is putting on exponentially more jobs than it's taking away.

Drew: And I love that philosophically. It was interesting — we had a conversation with Denise Pearson of Snowflake, and one of the things that she asked about was: SDRs have an entry-level position, and those people end up going up the organization in a lot of different ways — into sales, into marketing, into field. And she actually mentioned someone on her team that was like killing it in events, for example, who came up through SDRs. And the question then will be, "Well, where's my human pipeline for roles that will be human in the foreseeable future?"

Amanda: We're going to have to train people a new way. I don't have the answer to that, but there will be a new training ground in a way — you know, we all were junior at one point in our lives, right?

Drew: Yeah, there's got to be a way. All right, so we'll put that aside for a second.

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Amanda: Okay, so here's Mindy. I'm going to have her come on really quick, but just to give a quick context before I jump in — I'm going to stop her from talking really quick. This is our superhuman. She lives on our website. We eat our own dog food. Our entire website is our superhuman, right? So we don't expect that you're going to put a superhuman and take over your whole website. However, I will say we're building some things that are quite interesting to think about, like an AI-first experience versus a traditional web experience. So with all the same content you would put into the superhuman, we're actually building the ability to create — think of it like more of an AI-native experience for your buyers when they land on your site — or having that as an option, just like on Google when you have that as an option: you can go to the AI version, or you could go to the old web version. So it's Mindy — she's our inbound, if you will. She's here, she can qualify, she can pitch, she can give demos. But I'm just going to have a quick chat with her. Hey Mindy, can you hear me?

Mindy: I'm here, ready to rock. What brought you to 1mind today?

Amanda: Ah, so I'm sitting here with a group of amazing CMOs with Drew from CMO Huddles, and they just want to know the art of the possible. Who are you? What can you do?

Mindy: Thanks for sharing. I'd love to set the stage and show you what a great superhuman experience is like. I'm going to show you I'm a great seller — I can help uncover your pain solution with you, and hopefully get you excited about putting a superhuman to work for your business. At 1mind, we build superhumans like me: AI-powered digital teammates that can engage buyers, answer questions, qualify opportunities, run demos, and move conversations forward across the customer lifecycle. What kind of buying or customer experience challenge is most top of mind for this group?

Amanda: Well, we were talking about speed to lead to start with as a core question. So how would you address that?

Mindy: Heck yeah, that's a real one. When speed to lead breaks, marketing does the hard work to create demand and then pipeline leaks out the bottom. Where are you seeing the biggest drop today?

Amanda: I see where you're going with this, but you're asking me qualifying questions to understand pain. Wait — I see Drew has a question for you.

Drew: I do, and hopefully, Mindy — one of the things that we were talking about before you joined us was that there's an opportunity for marketing executives to have sales report to them. That's a vision that many folks are salivating at. I'm curious how you see your role in helping a CMO, for example, have sales underneath marketing.

Mindy: Alrighty, let's break this down a bit. 1mind helps collapse the gap between demand creation and revenue execution, because the same superhuman can engage inbound, qualify, pitch, demo, and hand rich context straight into the next motion, which gives marketing far more control over pipeline quality and buyer experience. Where would you want that control most? First touch, qualification, or conversion?

Drew: I would like all of the above, Mindy. I want all of it, all of it. I want to control the world. Please help me.

Mindy: Sorry, it looks like your message got cut off. Could you finish your thought or let me know what you were going to say?

Amanda: He said all of the world and asked you to help, Mindy, but I'm going to take you on a different path really quick. Hey, Mindy, you said something about being able to give a live demo. Could you bring that to life for me? Can you tell me what you mean by that?

Mindy: Absolutely. I can walk someone through software step by step, answer questions live, and adapt the demo based on what matters to them, instead of forcing them through a canned path. I can actually show you that with an interactive example demo from my brain using Notebook LM as the sample product. Want me to pull that up?

Amanda: Yeah, let's do it.

Mindy: Wonderful. Give me just a few seconds to pull up the demo.

Amanda: The reason she's saying a few seconds is there are multiple agents running behind the scenes. Now she's dropping in another.

Mindy: I need to show you how to use Notebook LM to bring up this example, since obviously we all love AI here. It'll help me show you how I'd walk through a product or software as we go. Just say "continue" and I'll keep moving, or stop me if you want to double-click anywhere. First, you create a new notebook, and that becomes your workspace for a topic or project.

Amanda: Okay, Mindy, this is great. I'm going to interrupt you. Let's — I've got a bunch of notebooks and I can't figure out how to rename them. How do I do that?

Mindy: Easy fix. Just click the notebook title at the top and type over it.

Amanda: That's great. Now, how do I create a podcast?

Mindy: Nice. Now we're in the fun part. In the studio panel, click "Audio Overview" and Notebook LM will generate a podcast-style conversation based on your sources.

Amanda: Okay, continue. I get it. I see where you're going. I see you're giving the demo. Okay, one more last question for this audience. Mindy, you're kind of weird. Where people actually talk to you, how do I feel comfortable that buyers will actually engage with a superhuman?

Mindy: Fair question, and it comes up all the time. Buyers will engage when the experience is fast, accurate, helpful, and on their terms, and that's exactly why superhumans work better than old chat or rigid bots. What would this group need to believe in order to feel comfortable putting a superhuman in front of buyers?

Amanda: All right, I can pause it and see if there are any questions you guys can throw at her, so you can see that I'm not leading the witness.

Drew: I will. Mindy, most of the CMOs that I talked to still think that humans aren't going to want to talk to you, and I know you just tried to answer that, but there's just an inherent sense that people want to talk with people, and people buy from people, and yet you're doing a lot of good things, so I'm just curious — how do you really make them see that they're wrong, that people will be very happy talking to you?

Mindy: The shift is not that humans stop mattering, it's that more and more buying happens digitally and self-serve first. So, the job of the superhuman is to earn trust early with expert, immediate help, then bring humans in where relationships matter most. What would make that feel credible enough for this group to lean in?

Amanda: She's continuing to try to engage you here, Drew, to ask the questions and tease out where the objection is really coming from and where it is happening. So the natural flow is like part of our secret sauce too, right? So she can keep asking these questions — she's trying to understand your pain so that she can report that now. When the salesperson gets on the call, they're going to have a second call, not a first call, because they understand what your pain points are, what you came in thinking about, because she's teasing all that out and she's updating CRM, so that when it does get passed off as a lead to sales, they can come in equipped to have a really relevant conversation.

Drew: Yeah, and I think that's a really good transition on this for a moment, which is — so if the AI can do the research, identify buyer intent, and personalize at scale, where is the human advantage for sales and marketing? When does the human come into the loop in this process?

Amanda: Yeah, I mean, I would say I should put Mindy back to answer the question, but I would say the human comes into the loop where there's the relationship — it's the empathy, it's the navigating of the org, right? It's for the larger. I still believe in events myself. I think that they will still be around as long as there are human buyers. I think as long as we have human buyers in the equation, we're still going to have some human sellers. I don't know that we will always have human buyers. I actually believe we will be very fast moving to a world of agent to agent, so we're building for that as well. So it's having all of the content ready to talk to agents or to talk to humans. This is a human skin on top of getting this information. We're building at the underneath of all of this — what's driving this is a rich context graph at the account level about your buyers, right? So we know everything about your buyers with all of your product information, company knowledge, etc. So that knowledge base will live and then serve agents versus serving humans the way it is today.

Drew: Yeah, it'll be interesting — you know, we have very little loyalty in e-commerce, right? That's simply transactional, and we'll go, and it becomes a sort of commodity purchase, right? So it'd be interesting to see how — because I do think that when humans are in the loop, there's "hey, I like this person, I trust this person, I believe this person," and therefore I stake my reputation at my organization to invest in this one. So there's got to be at some point, particularly in enterprise — otherwise, my guess is there's going to be very little personal intent investment in the purchase decision. It's just going to be this rational thing.

Amanda: Yeah, I think that when we cross the chasm of trust — right now we trust humans more than we trust AI, because there's a lot of hallucinations and stories — once we start to actually realize that vertical-specific applications of AI, where you have it on tight guardrails like this, you will start to trust the AI more than you trust the human. Because I actually, at the end of the day, love to say, when people ask me if they trust AI — if your superhuman hallucinates, I'm like, do your humans hallucinate, and do they do so knowingly, nefariously, to get the deal done? So, once buyers actually realize that they're going to get a better, more accurate answer from AI, that's going to happen faster than we know it. And so my warning shot across the bow to the world is: be ready, because your buyers are going to expect it, and if your competitors are doing it, you're going to be left behind.

Drew: Right.

Amanda: They don't want — who gets excited to talk to a salesperson? Like nobody. Nobody said that ever, right? Like, we love our salespeople, I love my sales team, but buyers don't get excited to jump on — "Oh my god, I got to take this pitch." Like, I don't want to take this pitch. We're still taking them, and I still have a sales team today as well. AE will be the last role to go. SDRs first, then customer success and sales engineers — those we're already doing right now. I believe that the AE, the strategic seller, the relationship sales, it's still there because you have buyers on the other side that are human.

Drew: Okay, we've got a couple more questions. We've got Sherehan Ross from Atlanta. Sherehan, what's up?

Sherehan: Good to see you again, Amanda. How are you?

Amanda: Nice to see you as well.

Sherehan: So, the question is, everything that I have experimented with Mindy in 1mind is amazing, and I get that she knows everything from 1mind, so she has all the information. She can ask qualifying questions to lead the conversation. This is all very inbound. Where does outbound happen? Can it happen? Do we have the technology where Mindy can, on the spot, learn about the company that is coming in and asking her questions? Can she eventually go out into messages, and like maybe being part of the outreach instead of just the inbound? What does that look like? When will that happen?

Amanda: Yeah, I mean, we have companies like New Relic — they're a customer of ours — that puts their superhuman in their outbound messages and in their outbound campaigns, so you can put her in the campaign. So, instead of going out with a message that's "book a meeting with me," or sending out a white paper or piece of content, put a superhuman there. We're also working on the ability to send emails; the superhuman can send them back and forth after the conversation, right? To start, and then copy in the rep of the account as she's having those conversations, so you bring the human into the loop. So that's super exciting. Like, I don't ever want to be in the world where we're spamming people, and I think a lot of outbound is spam right now, and so my north star for the team is we have to build a better buying experience, and if it's not that, it's not going to serve the buyers. I don't want to do it, even if it serves my buyer, which would be you.

Drew: Okay, great, Sherehan. Next question — we've got Eliot Johnson. Eliot, go for it.

Eliot: Thanks, Drew. Hi, Amanda. Really nice to meet you. Been a big follower of Mindy. I've played with her many times. She's really, she's really great to interact with. But, you know, one of the things we've talked a lot about is the unit economics and the financials behind it, and how she works with sales. How do you think about Mindy as an extension of the brand? I actually think about this almost every day, because I do envision a world where, you know, the technology gets better and better, and it starts to be omnipresent. I could see so many use cases for an avatar-based, you know, bot like this. But how do you think about that as an extension of the brand? And I'm curious if any of your customers are starting to think about applications that might be more consumer-facing or more brand-related.

Amanda: Yeah, I mean, I'm just showing this really quick to answer that question. It doesn't always have to be a face — I think some companies, and I maybe, if I'm interpreting the question correctly, that a face can sometimes be jarring. LinkedIn, they don't use a face, right? They just use a basic waveform. They are a network and community of humans. And this one — this is monday.com — they use a llama; that's their brand and that's how they want to represent, and it's a male's voice. So you get to, as you're basically building whatever the experience is — we are not wed to face or no face, and we actually even have a chat experience as well. You can do chat only and no voice. However, if you're doing things like screen navigation and demos, you kind of have to have voice. It's absolutely really hard to take it to that next level without voice. Our goal is to try to help embody whatever brand experience you want, whether it's boring and straightforward or innovative and leading, bleeding on the edge. And so you're creating that superhuman that mirrors that.

Eliot: I'm actually thinking about the other direction, like doubling down on the face and creating a personality for your brand.

Amanda: Of course.

Drew: Yeah.

Amanda: I mean, like, Jocko from Winning by Design cloned himself. I'm not really in the business of cloning, but we can, if it makes sense. I don't — I actually don't think it's a good idea for most companies. For him, that is his company, that is his brand; it made sense. So, yeah, you could come up with a — we, you basically can take it wherever. We had one company, Alteryx — the CRO of Alteryx wanted to do a head nod to their founder's wife, so we took a picture of her and we made a likeness of her, not an exact replica — it was just like, kind of looks like her, kind of talks like her, but it's not her, right? And so that was like a really clever way to, you know, just give her a nod, pay her some respect, which I thought was really cool.

Drew: Okay, thank you, Eliot — that was great. If folks have questions for you, what is the best way for them to follow up with you, other than to go on the website and ask Mindy?

Amanda: The best place to find me is LinkedIn — slash Amanda Kahlow. So just find me there, follow me, and reach out to me there is the best place.

Drew: Okay, I've got to ask — let Andy De in. Andy, what's your question? Come on board real fast.

Andy: Amanda, this is amazing. So what is the future of sales and marketing, right? When you logically extend this, what happens to sellers and marketers going forward?

Drew: Well, I mean—

Andy: —I'm contemplating turning into a coach, right, for precisely that reason.

Amanda: Yeah, I mean, I think the future is very different, right? Like, we have to be managing and maintaining these agentic experiences, and I still think there are going to be humans that will be, you know, basically pulling the strings and acting as the puppet master of the full agentic experience — end to end of what you're trying to build — and that's everything from hyper-personalized content all the way through to, you know, on the left side of the funnel all the way through to onboarding experiences for our customers. So, yeah, I think the roles and the jobs are very different in the future, and it's scary and super exciting at the same time.

Andy: Thank you.

Drew: Yeah, scary and super exciting, which kind of sums up the role of CMO — period, always, but even more so now. Amanda, I'm wondering, as we wrap up, if you could give us only two key takeaways that you want every CMO listening today to remember about redesigning go-to-market and the future of SDRs. So, give us two key takeaways.

Amanda: Start with a beginner's mindset — like, really stop trying to make what you're doing today better. What you're doing today is broken and wrong in today's world with most companies. And I think it's just about leaning into things with — I always like to think of this as, you can choose love or fear, right? You can be afraid of what's happening, or you can lean into it and embrace it, and be ahead of it. And obviously, if you're not doing it, you're going to be behind. And I honestly feel like the experimental era is over — we are moving out of the "try it" phase; this stuff is working, whether it's 1mind or something else, and so if you're not doing it, you're behind.

Drew: You know, at the same time, I think a big unlock for me is — I mean, particularly if you're a billion-dollar organization, you are not going to stop doing the business that you're doing, presumably because it's working — but there are probably really easy ways to set up a skunk works-type thing where you're going to target a new group, you might refine the product a little bit too, so it's not threatening, but you're going to go after it, you're going to test it, you're going to prove it. And so my question for you is, from green light to getting up and going, what is the distance? So that if someone wanted to set up a Mindy for a specific target and specific product, how long would it take?

Amanda: Yeah, so it used to take us a good three to four months. Used to take us a really long time to get these superhumans up and running — get all the content in, index it, have multiple goals and roles linked into your systems. We now, for the last 20 customers, have them live within four weeks, at the max. Typically, we try to go between three to four weeks. We've automated the whole ingestion process, the setting up of goals, made it really easy. We're about to launch complete self-serve to our customers, so you can build it yourself, you can test, you can iterate. It's a super exciting time. But yes, it used to take forever. My competitors love to say that it used to take us a while, but also we are doing, I believe, exponentially more across the lifecycle. We've now collapsed that time and really hyper-focused on it.

Drew: But I also imagine that it's only as good as the input that you have available — so if you're learning from the website and the website isn't up to date and doesn't have the Q&As and doesn't have the information that you need, that's going to be where the rub will be.

Amanda: Yeah, but we could also take core pitch decks — your sales team has it. Like, we are a team of, you know, now coming up on 100 employees — but a couple of weeks ago we were at 60 employees, so we were growing really fast. But we had one core pitch deck when we started Mindy, and Mindy put on — I don't want to get the numbers wrong right now — but in the last quarter, like $12 million of pipeline for us. Like, qualified pipeline, real opportunities that we are working, and she did it all herself, right. So, you know, we're moving into a different world.

Drew: I love it. All right, well, Amanda Kahlow — 1mind founder and superhuman promoter — thank you for joining us. Really, really, really appreciate your insights, and look forward to continuing the conversation with our community as we reimagine the future of go-to-market.

Amanda: Thank you. It's always a pleasure, Drew.

 

Drew: If you're a B2B CMO and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring, and daring CMOs at cmohuddles.com.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!