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THE INTERVIEW
WEDNESDAY
STATE
OF SALES
The State of Sales right now….
We're living in a very different world to three years ago. I don't believe AI is going to negatively impact the SDR role, but it will highlight the best reps from the worst reps very, very clearly. If anything, it's putting sales reps on steroids.
THE SETUP
Bruno Broughton is Regional Director of Sales Development at Synthesia, the AI video platform, where the SDR team gets to run its own product on itself: role play agents, interactive onboarding and automated coaching feedback. He walked us through what an AI-native SDR operation actually looks like day to day.
THE 60-SECOND VERSION
AI slop broke email trust, so the phones are converting better than ever.
Sequences should be fluid: next steps generated from what actually happened in the account.
Role play agents from day two, scored automatically, feeding a 12-category development plan.
Land at 20k and expand. Let first-party product signals nominate your cold accounts.
3 THINGS YOU'LL STEAL FROM THIS
A role play system that coaches reps automatically from their second day
The 12-category IDP that turns SDR promotion from vibes into evidence
The first-party signals that tell you exactly which cold account to break into
01 · AI slop broke email. The phone got the inheritance
Bruno traces the trust problem back to the first sequencing boom, when email spam went through the roof. Now buyers assume the personalisation itself is machine-made.
Even if they get a highly personalised email, most people know it's probably been generated by Clay or Claude. I get fewer cold calls now than I did a year ago, but more emails than I ever did. We're seeing more success than we've ever seen on the phones.
The team's answer is to spend AI's dividend on the human channel: account research and persona targeting poured into talk tracks and call questions, so the rep on the phone sounds like the most prepared person the prospect has spoken to all week.
DO THIS THIS WEEK
Take your best account research prompt and point its output at your call opener, never your email template. That's where standing out still pays.
02 · Sequences that think for themselves
Synthesia recently moved from Outreach to Gong flows, and Bruno described something quietly radical: the fixed day-one, day-two sequence is gone.
It creates steps based on what's happening within the account. If we know the number's wrong, it won't keep prompting call tasks. It'll say find a new number, or rely on a LinkedIn voice note for this contact.
The design principles his team follows:
Fewer written touches. Less email, more voice: LinkedIn voice notes and calls.
Fluid, never fixed. Next steps generated from the last conversation.
Answer-likelihood routing. Contacts more likely to pick up get more call steps.
STEAL THIS
Even without the tooling, run the logic manually: every Friday, have reps re-sort next week's tasks by what actually happened this week, instead of marching through stale steps.
03 · Role play agents from day two, and an IDP that means something
Bruno's onboarding philosophy is to get people doing the job fast. A previous two-week classroom programme left new starters in week three having never picked up a phone, so the current model flips it: interactive video enablement in week one, and role play with AI persona agents from day two or three, with automated scoring that tells the manager exactly what the next session should target.
The career side is just as structured. Every SDR has an IDP breaking the role into 12 or 13 subcategories: account research, discovery questions, competitor knowledge and so on.
To get promoted over their 12 to 18 months, they have to be a level four at each subcategory. They end up with a development profile of everything they've worked on, so we're giving people runway into AE with a fully completed IDP.
TRY THIS THIS MONTH
Break your SDR role into ten scoreable subcategories and grade your team once. The gaps you find are your coaching calendar.
04 · Land at 20k, expand everywhere, and let the product tell you where
Big buying committees and no-decision deals are strangling the classic six-figure land. Bruno's team mostly refuses to play that game.
We're not trying to sign a contract for 100k straight away. We might close it for 20k, five licenses, and then expand. When the L&D team already uses us, that's a very easy conversation starter with marketing.
Feeding that motion is first-party intent. Synthesia's freemium base means product signals map back to target accounts: six freemium users inside one department of a non-customer suggests real pain, a user hitting their minutes allowance suggests timing, someone trying a feature their plan doesn't include suggests both. Cold outbound still exists, but as the lowest priority in an allbound model where signals nominate the accounts worth breaking into.
THE MOVE
Before your team picks its next tier-one target, ask what data point nominated it. "It's a great logo" is how deals die in committee.
THE ONE THING
If what you're doing isn't directly improving your performance or your mindset, automate it.
MORE FROM THE FIELD
How HubSpot rebuilt outbound around signals, shared agents and human-led calls (add link once live)
Darktrace's Claudio DellaVista on why mass-produced AI outreach is costing you deals (add link once live)
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Every week we sit down with the operators actually moving revenue.