# Why AI Won’t Replace Great Salespeople With Jack Porter From BirdDog (getbirddog.ai)

- Podcast: [The GTM Game podcast](https://thegtmgame.com/podcast), episode 2
- Hosted by: [Tom Grainger](https://thegtmgame.com/tom)
- Guest: Jack Porter from BirdDog ([BirdDog](https://getbirddog.ai))
- Published: 18 February 2026
- Length: 45:32
- Watch: [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsm0QAaP3yM)
- Listen: [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6szMGv5HOHFxsyvJKSLDzh) · [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-ai-wont-replace-great-salespeople-with-jack-porter/id1876268662?i=1000750327775)
- Topics: [AI SDRs and automation](https://thegtmgame.com/topics/ai-sdrs-and-automation), [Outbound and cold outreach](https://thegtmgame.com/topics/outbound)

## What it's about

Jack Porter tells the story of BirdDog, from starting out as an investing platform to its pivot into a sales tool, and the challenges and growth strategies along the way.

He and Tom talk about BirdDog’s social ABM approach, making content people actually want to engage with, growing a quality audience on LinkedIn and the shift from outbound to inbound. The second half covers AI and automation in sales, where the human element still matters, trends in sales tooling, and volume versus depth in outbound.

## Chapters

- [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsm0QAaP3yM) The birth of BirdDog
- [05:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsm0QAaP3yM&t=357s) Challenges and growth
- [11:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsm0QAaP3yM&t=715s) Content creation and analysis
- [17:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsm0QAaP3yM&t=1077s) Social ABM approach
- [24:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsm0QAaP3yM&t=1472s) Future plans and expansion
- [31:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsm0QAaP3yM&t=1890s) The role of AI in sales
- [37:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsm0QAaP3yM&t=2228s) Trends in sales tooling

## Transcript

> Auto-generated transcript, made from YouTube’s automatic captions. Filler words are removed and a couple of misheard company names are corrected, but it hasn’t been checked word for word and speakers aren’t labelled (each paragraph is roughly one person speaking). Check the video before quoting anyone.


### The birth of BirdDog

[0:03] Jack, welcome. How's it going?

[0:06] Good. Thanks for having me, D.

[0:08] Awesome. Really glad to have you on. Let's dive straight into it, Jack. So, give me an idea of what is it that you're doing right now. Give me an idea of yourself, of Bird Dog, and what that looks like.

[0:20] Yeah. So, I guess about two years ago, I decided to start a startup with my buddy Noah. Which is ultimately turned into bird dog, which we can get into, but I really had no intention of getting here. I had never worked in sales before. I had never known anyone who worked in sales. And somehow now we're building a sales tool that's largely started to pick up some traction. And so really all this started out as an investing platform like almost 2 and a half years ago. And then that's kind of the early days of Bird Dog. That was the early ideas. And after a series of twists and turns and explosions, we ended up here.

[1:03] Wow. Cool. So I mean, let's look at let's look at that journey. So you mentioned that it first started out as as an investing platform.

[1:10] Yeah. Wow.

[1:11] So we let's put this right. Best place to start. Noah and I met at school. We both went to the University of Michigan. We had lived together for a couple years. We had, you know, been been close buddies. Like we had all the typical college stuff, hanging out, nonsense. And so when he and I graduated, we kind of parted ways. And there's always something both in us where he was like, I mean, when I talk about Noah, it's just one of the most impressive people as a co-founder, right? He had started a hedge fund in college. She had wrote poetry and sold books. You name it, he has done it.

And so there was always something in us both where like when we graduated and he went on to go run the hedge fund and I went on to go get a job. It's like, oh, we want to do something more like we want to do something else. And so we started coming up with ideas and mulling on it. And he had started actually a company for his hedge fund. He's like, "Oh, I want to build software for my hedge fund. I need these tools to help run it. And so I was like, "Hey, like can I help you do that? Like this seems cool what you're doing.

Like I'm bored on the weekends? Like got some extra time? Like I would love to help." And so this was let's call it 3 years ago. We graduate from Michigan. We start kicking tires on this investing idea. I join them to start this with a couple other guys and it takes off. The caveat is Tom, we had no paying users. We're adding users, adding users, adding users. People are posting about it on Twitter, which is super active in finance, and we have zero paying

[2:52] Zero. And so I I get on the phone, I'm like, "Hey guys, like we have like x months before we run out of money and like need to shut this all down. Like we need to start like figuring out how to get people to pay for this, upgrading, give them a pro plan, something. And I remember getting on the phone and trying to pitch this pro plan to our best users, like cuz we're tracking retention. We're tracking who's referring who. I call our best user. I'm like, "Hey man, like really love what you're doing. Like keep in mind this guy literally had our company name in his Twitter bio.

Like I loved it." Yeah.

[3:26] Like, "Hey man,

[3:28] I see you love what we do. Like, "Thanks for that. We launch this paid program. It's going to be pro. It has all these features. XYZ. It's going to be a dollar a month." And he was like,

[3:39] "A dollar a month?" Yeah.

[3:41] He's like, "No."

[3:43] I was like, "Oh." And so we had four or five calls go exactly that way where no one would pay us even a dollar to have our software. And so I talked to the guys. I was like, "Hey, I don't think this is going to work. Like I think we need to shut this investing thing down, figure out a different angle, sell it, something, right? Because obviously we can't get anyone to even pay us a dollar. Like

[4:08] There's nothing here. And so right at the end of that, two sales guys came to us. They're like, "Hey, we're using your tool, but not for investment research.

[4:19] We're using it for prospecting."

[4:22] I was like, one, I was like, "What is who who is an AE like who are you? Like I don't know who you are.

[4:31] What do you do? And so they ultimately like yeah we're using it for sales. Like we're using to figure out who to go after for our sales team. I'm like that's interesting. Do you need any features? Like yeah can you build us this thing? We'll pay you Keep in mind we couldn't sell anything for a dollar. So my head was like,

[4:56] Mind explosion." We're like, "Yes, we'll build it for you like right now."

[4:59] And so everyone started working on this feature. We get it out. They paid us and we're like, "Oh my god, this is the first revenue we've ever had. Like maybe there's something here." And so then through a series of like essentially running the mom test, which we can get into that more

[5:15] Through a series of like customer interviews and discovery. I mean, we did like was 500 kind of discovery sessions and then about 200 calls.

[5:25] We like figured out that this was a pretty large problem in sales.

[5:29] Grew it. That business ultimately ended up not working out. And then Noah and I started Bird Dog kind of come summer of 2024. Took us about 6 months to get the product. And then from January, so wintertime last year, it's essentially grown anywhere between 20 and 50% per month depending on the month. But there was a period of like four or five months where it just flatlined revenue.


### Challenges and growth

[5:58] So like January up, February up, and then just flatline for 4 months.

[6:03] Wow. So what was the reason behind the Well, it was so we had figured out like because we had just built the product, right? So come think about this. We're coming off the summer of 24. So no and I had just launched the company. We had an idea for what worked. We didn't really figure out the pieces in the last company. We didn't like get a good software product or anything that really like worked and we could tell like hey users really liked it. So we took a shot. We built a platform kind of first six months, launched it, and in January and February, we onboarded our first kind of paying users, maybe even a little bit early.

I think we might have gotten our first one right before the holidays, but needless to say, got our first feedback coming off that platform. And Tom, I will tell you, I much like I'm also not a sales guy, I am not a UI And so, no. And I were bootstrapping. So, we had no VC funding, no backing. He and I literally wired in $1,500 each to start the company. So, I could not afford to pay a UI designer. My UI designer was clog coded. Like, hey, can you help me make an image and then I'll go build it? Like, I just want to see a bunch of ideas.

And so, we built the platform and it did not work. Like, it was not good. Like, it was really not good. And so we in that kind of flatlined period of revenue, we just kept testing, rebuilding like we bring on a customer, record them, get their feedback, add new features, right? And then that's why it was so we were just turnurning through different features and ideas and essentially rebuilt the product a number of times in that span.

[7:46] It's crazy. So what was it during that during that phase when you you'd kind of flatlined you were bringing on customers you were you know working through feedback getting features in place did you find that there was a common trend amongst those customers that there was a specific thing that they were looking for in the platform that then once you've implemented that sort of kickstarted the growth again. Yeah, I think there was kind of two things. One, there was like the simplicity of the information, right? So like how can I figure out like my best five to 10 opportunities right now, right? So when we rebuilt the new platform, we just made that clear, like abundantly clear as soon as you log in or you go in your Here are your top 10 opportunities based on the signals we found today or yesterday or maybe two days ago.

The other thing was just like the way to set it up, right? Like how many steps did it take to actually onboard you and then how simple was it to do that?

[8:43] And so that was the other big thing too just like in the early days as you bring people in just making sure they get like

[8:49] Really quick time to value and understand like what you're doing very

[8:53] Okay, awesome. So you guys are a pretty lean mean team. So give me an idea of you know what does your go to market look like? Because the first time I ever saw you was on LinkedIn. You had a post that was super viral and I was like, "Who the hell is this guy? What's going on here?"

[9:12] Yeah. So, there was no, let's put this way, we kind of stumbled into our go to market strategy, which has, I think, now become very popular.

[9:22] We found it by luck.

[9:24] So, like you said, the team is just no and I, right, that's it.

[9:28] No VC funding. So, I can't like we couldn't afford to bring on anyone for a long time.

[9:34] Yeah. And so we had to figure out like how do we book meetings? How do we get people in the door? How do we get even just people to test it, right? Like at some point we didn't even need like customers. We just needed people to give us feedback so we could get a really good product. And so what it started out with was kind of in that first 6 months when no was building out the platform, I was just doing a ton of cold outreach.

[9:56] Mhm. All through DMs and send a couple emails, but really through LinkedIn DMs, just finding kind of our target personas, right, at target companies, ask them were they doing cold outreach, how it was going, that kind of stuff. And then after a while, we nurtured enough of those relationships that like they became the early testers for the product. We probably got our first kind of call 10 users from that. Not all of them were paying, but like we were able to generate enough testing to get like some early feedback, right? Not a ton, but enough to like give us some confidence and some early wins in the early days.

And so that cold email or cold outbound strategy ultimately started to transition into LinkedIn content. And so kind of as we started the company, I had started for fun making some LinkedIn posts, right? Just sharing what was working, what wasn't, you know, how things were going, because I had heard this like build in public kind of narrative that it's like really cool. It's like up and coming. It's a great way to drive business. And I was like, "Oh, this this sounds kind of fun. Like, let's let's give it a go." And so started making posts and t for like literally I don't even know six to maybe even longer months like no traction.

Like no demos, no likes. Like if you go back to the early posts, they are absolutely horrendous.

[11:22] They were so bad,

[11:23] But they they got no engagement, nothing. And so we were essentially just learning, growing, studying, hey, what makes a really good post? What makes really good content? And then throughout that whole time, right, because I had secretly started another LinkedIn while working at my day job. So like this account that everyone sees now wasn't actually my real real account, right? I had like sunset that other account and I was just using this LinkedIn one that was for bird dog and so I had to grow from like no social network. So like every week connecting with 100 people connecting with 100 people connecting with 100 people. So like as we're connecting with more and more people the posts start to get a little more traction as they get better.

And all of a sudden, like that snowball grew enough. We did enough studying that like I think we had our first viral post right before the holidays that first year we started. And then that was like the first big moment where we're like, "Oh boy, like that led to the growth in January, that led to the growth in February. Like maybe there's something here." And then there was a series of other ones kind of the next big one was in May with the Zoom info debacle. Yeah.


### Content creation and analysis

[12:37] And then we had a number of other ones throughout the summer that kind of just accelerated the growth. But that's really been our go to market strategy now is just

[12:46] Sharing the stories, right? Sharing the failures, sharing the successes of building a startup because it's one very interesting, right? I write the posts like it's what I would have liked to know maybe two or three years ago right before starting all this sharing like the things that no one will say but like everyone goes through right because most content is kind of just like

[13:08] Like it's it kind of could be generic but I like sharing the things that like

[13:12] Yeah it's very corporate and like LinkedIn in general is very corporate

[13:16] So I like sharing like the ins and outs of actually building it and what goes into building a startup the wins and the losses because I think It's very important not just to show a bunch of highlight reels because that's not the reality of what we're doing here.

[13:29] Yeah. And do you find sometimes that sharing maybe the the losses versus the wins, does it perform better than the wins or I'm curious what what performs better for you?

[13:40] I don't know. It really depends on the topic of how bad the like

[13:45] The the post about the guy who said booked a meeting and said f you like

[13:50] Okay that one did pretty well but that's like a crazy phenomenon and like I think that happens to a lot of people right like that happens I'm sure things have happened like that to you people shot you a DM and said you suck like

[14:04] That stuff happens all the time

[14:06] But no one shares it so like when you start a company or you start going after something you really want to do, right? Things like that inevitably happen, but no one tells you that they're going to

[14:18] And so, I don't know if like the good performs versus the bad, it's it really is a toss up there. But the more interesting, the more unique, the less corporate, the better content does because it's it's truly unique. It's truly interesting. It's truly helpful to people to share something that no one else is sharing or hasn't shared 50 other times about the same topic.

[14:41] I I completely agree with you and I think what you said around the you know the person that said you or the when they booked in the meeting. It's super relatable to sales people cuz they get that you know it's like your right of passage when you're cold calling someone. You're always going to call someone who's tells you to piss off or you or whatever it is. So I think that's great. But I also think there's an there's a there's a slight controversy element to it as well, which is so important in in content. You see it with the best content creators in the world. There's always that like little hook or that little controversial element which stops you scrolling and makes you actually go and read it.

So I can see that in your content. I think it's I think it's really cool.

[15:22] Yeah, I think that's one of the most important things. Like I was reading a blog post yesterday and it was like the hook is two to three times more important than the actual content you write because if you don't stop someone from scrolling

[15:38] They're never going to see any of the rest of it. So the hook is like of the utmost importance to really get that dialed in. And I think a lot of people go overboard and and make them untruthful or wrong or

[15:51] Stretch it, right? But like you can just dial that in with facts, statistics, numbers, quotes, that kind of stuff. And that's a great way to do it. And that performs a lot better than just like here's a list of 10 things to go after

[16:04] Yeah. I I I also noticed as well when you make it like I focused. So the first letter, the first sorry, the first it's I noticed or I've seen or I'm doing or something and making that like you said, making that hook really really tight in your content. It it it makes the difference because you can have the best post in the world, but if the hook is not there, you're not g nobody's going to see it. So, yeah, it's it's it's really interesting.

[16:30] Yeah, that that's really the probably the most important thing. And like that was how we learned how to make content for like what we call now our social ABM strategy, right? Which is how we're driving all these leads.

[16:42] Is like I just started looking at the post like I would scroll like I mean it sounds terrible but like I would just scroll through all the LinkedIn posts and go like

[16:51] You know this one has 20 likes obviously didn't do too great. This one has 400 likes that one did pretty good. Like what makes this post different than the 20 like one? Okay. Like I see a pattern, right? And you do that enough times over and over again like you're doing, right? You'll pick up on the patterns like I works better, right? Stories work better, specific facts work better, right? This kind of topic works better. And then after enough repetitions, you really start to build kind of your own style of content that does perform well.

[17:20] And is this something that you're doing like manually yourself or are you using AI to do this? Are you feeding your posts into AI or I mean curious what that looks like?

[17:29] Yeah. So, I mean to learn and see what other people are doing. That's all manually. Just like scrolling through like finding what people are doing, see what's interesting, but then like maybe every kind of quarter, every couple months, I always like to feed in to like a chat GTP like all the posts. Like I just copy them all in with like the impressions and the likes and like, "Hey, are there any interesting patterns here? Like any additional topics we can talk about that may kind of work with these?" Mhm.

[17:56] And then sometimes like I have a post this week where I did that and like I just dumped all the stats from the AI into it. So you'll see that coming out too where it's like you know maybe it's even out already at the time of this podcast. But like it has all the stats of everything that the AI thought was interesting. The unique patterns what made a great post versus bad post.


### Social ABM approach

[18:18] So I think

[18:19] Turning the analysis into a post as well. So it's almost creating content out of out of everything. And I think that's something that a lot of people struggle with when they go to post. It's a it's an overanalysis of oh my god, what do I post? But you can literally post about every single thing that you're doing within a business because it's interesting to somebody.

[18:36] Yes. Well, it's stuff that like you would never think about if you were starting a company, but that's in reality what goes into it. It's like all these random little adventures into trying to figure out what works, right? Tweaking, adjusting, learning, right? And all that is helpful and grows the business. Agreed. Agreed. So, you mentioned that you call the strategy a social ABM approach. So, I'm curious. We've talked about content quite a lot, but what else goes into it?

[19:04] Yeah. So, the key, well, there's kind of two keys that I think most people don't get and then it actually really hurts their performance on LinkedIn. Mhm.

[19:14] So if you're a founder or a saleserson or you know anyone else really trying to drive business through LinkedIn and through content really on largely any platform but particularly focused on LinkedIn because that's where I have some experience is we do what we now like call our social ABM strategy right which is we identify like kind of our top prospects right and this is how we really got started in the early days this is how we were doing those kind of 100 connections per week

[19:42] Right identify your top prospects connect with them, right? These are the people that are thought leaders in the industry that you could sell to that fit your ICP. These are people that maybe are engaging actively on LinkedIn that can help boost your content.

[19:57] You want to fill your network with those kind of people, right? You want the highest density. Like if you have 5,000 followers on LinkedIn, you want 490 of them to be people you could sell to that are in your ICP and the other hundred are probably your friends and family and

[20:17] But the way the LinkedIn algorithm works is it shows your posts first to your first connections. So that 4,000 people or 4,900 people, it's going to show them your post.

[20:29] Right. And those thousand impressions you get or 500 impressions you get on your first few posts, like that's 500 people in your ICP that are seeing your content, it's it's marketing to your team. And so the more you build your network and fill it up with those people, right, identifying who are your top prospects, right, connecting with them and then actually just making content towards their pain points.

[20:54] Mhm. Well, I mean any post you put out is probably going to get at least 100 impressions, right? So like that's a hundred more people that know about your business than did yesterday. And so doing that day after day after day and improving your content, right? So more and more of the people in your network see it and then people outside your network even see it.

[21:16] Mhm. Is the best way because it's I mean it's running ABM campaigns which are you know historically probably one of the better ways to drive business if you have enough money but they cost a fortune I mean they cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to

[21:30] But on social media right and LinkedIn in particular you can run them for free right just connect with your target market and then post content and that's an ABM strategy in of itself and that's really I mean that's how we're driving all of our

[21:43] De outside of referrals refer. So a big a big focus then on quality of the audience is growing that LinkedIn audience. So a lot of people when they start their LinkedIn accounts it's just like spamming everybody and let's see how much let's see if I can get over that 500 connection you know connections limit. But you're you're focusing really strongly on who your ICP is and growing that network so that every time you post, even if a post isn't going viral, you know, like you said, that 100 impressions, if you were to get that from advertisement, from paid ads, you know, think of the cost of that, even get a 100 impressions is is is is considerable cost there.

And then when you push that up into the thousands and millions of impressions, you know, it's it's getting really really considerable. So there's a big focus from your side then on the quality of the audience that you're trying to

[22:34] Yes. Yeah. It's probably the most important thing to get right because if you're not if you don't have that right, your posts are not going to the right

[22:43] Yeah. So you guys are essentially all inbound at the moment. So people just coming coming to you guys and then

[22:51] Yeah. Maybe this summer it started to switch over. Like we were doing a lot of like LinkedIn DMing and that kind of I call it like cold outbound but it's not truly cold because like you're obviously connected to that person. You may have had one or two conversations before

[23:07] Maybe in the summer or maybe even a little bit earlier. It started to flip from like the hybrid where people are coming in off the content to the content picked up so much

[23:18] That like we had enough demos coming in

[23:21] That like

[23:22] I mean it literally became the point where like we don't have time to actually even send outbound anymore

[23:27] Which is a great problem to have but like being a team of two right we have to be very like cognizant of like I mean we we have 48 hours each day between Noah and I

[23:38] And so like we got to be cognizant of How much time are we spending like on net new business,

[23:43] Customer support, new product upgrades? Because we don't have a team of 20 or 30 supporting us where like that's their sole job like many startups. And so we're being very creative with like how many demos do we take in a day? How much time do we block off to spend with current customers? Like how much time do we block off just to like walk outside and take a breath? Like

[24:03] That kind of stuff. So it is very interesting. But now it's like almost all inbound, right? It's inbound primarily and like obviously some nurturing of leads that are coming in and like if you don't fully book, you know, we go through an education process to say like here's what we do. So there's a lot of stuff in the back end to create this funnel, but you know, that's largely where it's all coming from now is is either LinkedIn or referrals or happy customers talking to other people.


### Future plans and expansion

[24:33] Yeah. I mean that's great. I mean, it shows you that you've got got something great if you don't have to sort of force it through cold outbound. That's that's fantastic. But what's the plan over the next sort of 6 to 12 months then? I'm assuming there's there's a plan that eventually you'll expand the team and and go outbound.

[24:50] Yeah. So, we have a big drive. Well, we have a big revenue number for this year that Noah and I are trying to hit. Like, it's going to be it would be very exciting if we hit it. So we have to do a number of things to actually make that happen, right? We have a clear number of clients we need to add each month, right, at a certain price point, right? And so the function for Noah and I and we made this change last month is like we were priced too low for the volume of clients we were bringing in through LinkedIn DM. So we had to close such a high percentage, let's call it like

[25:27] I 20 new customers per month between the two of us.

[25:31] Yeah. Right. And so at that price point, our close rate was not high enough, right? We couldn't bring in enough qualified demos to hit our goal. So we had to adjust. And so like we lowered the floor for our pricing, which allowed us to bring in a lower number of clients per month. And now we're at a rate where like based on the number of demos I roughly can generate per month, right? The number of referrals we get, the number of partner introductions we get, we bring in enough qualified leads and close them at a high enough rate and then keep them long enough, right? Ideally for over a year or two that we should be able to hit our end of the year goal, but like we're constantly course correcting, right?

And so as I think towards towards like really locking in the end of the year goal, I think we'll probably look at maybe hiring someone this summer and then pushing outbound hard, right? Cuz I think we have some more product tweaks to make. I think we got to make it support bigger teams better, right? Right? So if you have a team of 100, 200, 400, bringing these large enterprise deals where outbound becomes very important where you have to start drumming up that business with outbound like those deals are not coming inbound to you that we have to build the product to be able to support that.

Right? Right now it supports you know midsize teams very well. It supports small teams. Awesome. But for those large enterprise clients, like we have some more wood to chop. And so I imagine it changes sometime in the summer where we attack on an additional person, right? Or an additional third party to help us here, drive some of these enterprise deals as the product catches up to support those deals. And then I think that will really lock in our goal for the end of the year.

[27:22] Awesome. And then I guess leveraging Bird Dog to do that as well with the

[27:26] With your signals and you know given your given whoever you've brought on board the

[27:31] The best in the market I guess.

[27:33] Yeah, for sure. And I think it's you know one of those things where it's like whether it's bird dog or something else. The trend over the last couple years has been like how do I stand out from AI, right? Like as a salesperson, how do you literally stand out from like the guy in the Philippines like sending out 5,000 messages that are all personalized, right, using clay? You tell me. Like probably pretty hard. And so it's like how can you research better? How can you find the angle? How can you come not with a personalized message, but with a relevant message? Because relevance requires an understanding of the product you're selling and an understanding of essentially business like execution or you essentially are a consultant

[28:21] To say like hey I see you're going through X Y and Z problems.

[28:25] Here's what I've seen other people do to solve those.

[28:29] Here's how we can help.

[28:30] And that's relevance in a nutshell. And that's the best performing outbound now versus the personalized which AI can largely do and automate.

[28:39] Well, it's table stakes now. Everybody, you know, said if the person in the Philippines can can can put that together, you know, anybody in the world can it's democratized now. Automation is table stakes, anybody can do it. So the thing that gives you the advantage is one the rep. So like how good is that rep at having conversations and two the system that you build that rep. So like how much of their time is able to be spent on revenue generating activities instead of doing that manual account research instead of you know bu pulling lists together running through getting a really low connect rate but instead of that building out a system that allows them to get a high connect rate and when they actually get on the phone with someone and speak to someone they've got the context to be able to have a really strong conversation specifically focused to the pain points that they solve and I think that's where where you guys come in.

So you know while everyone is looking towards AI for automation and and you know how much volume can we send you know I I think where you're going and especially at the enterprise level where conversations are going to be so important where you know they're almost 5 to 10 years behind just because of the compliance side of things. You know, they're getting spammed with with hundreds of thousands of emails. Having that really strong conversation piece and that context behind that conversation, it's going to really allow reps to stand out and and just have better conversations.

[30:06] Yeah. You want to equip them with like essentially a one up on AI, right? Like our whole theme that and even at like the bottom of our website, like our goal is not to replace human reps, right? Like I think actual AISDRs or fully automated sales systems like I don't see that taking over the market for larger deals.

[30:29] I can't imagine someone spending 20 50 100 a million dollars after getting a message from a bot. Right.

[30:38] But for the small market maybe, right? For more transactional sales maybe. Right. But for these larger deals, like if you're selling anything really over 20,000 is like kind of where we manual sales provides like a very unique opportunity, right? Because if you can stand out, you can come with a very tight message and have like a essentially a POV, like a point of view on that person's business and how you can help, right? Like shoot, I mean, I've seen people crush it with that. Book more meetings in a couple hours than even the best systems would do. U but that's you know few and far between.

I think it's becoming a bigger trend as you know people and sales teams say like how are we going to deal with AI right? How how are we going to use the human capacity we have to outperform you know an AI system.


### The role of AI in sales

[31:32] Yeah I think it's about you know just making like super soldiers. That's that's what it is. You know what I mean? You're not actually get rid of you're not you're not replacing them with robots. You're just giving them the best equipment. You turn them into Iron Man. You know what I mean? Like you're giving them the suit in order to 10x their capabilities versus what they were able to do previously. So instead of an organization scaling headcount to increase the the amount of velocity that they're getting, they're focusing on individual reps. And it's almost like it's it's almost like where I see it going is like it's going to be like pro sports.

Do you know what I mean? It's going to be if you look at like the top football players or you know rugby players or basketball players or whatever it may be you know nowadays they've all got teams around them that are managing their nutrition, their clothing, their houses, their financing, you know, their stretching, their defense, their attack, whatever it may be. They pretty much don't have to think about anything apart from the performance of themselves on the actual day and turning up and and executing, you know, what their body does the best. I think that's going to be the same way for sales people, you know, removing all of the that surrounds it right now with the admin and all the crap and just allowing them to do revenue generating activities and having conversations and giving them the best system possible to do that.

[32:52] Yeah. I mean, like I think the way I've heard some really smart people think about it is maybe three to five years ago, your best sales rep was maybe two or 3x better than your worst, right?

[33:07] Your best sales rep's probably at 300% of quota, right? Cool. Today like and what's possible with AI. I mean that sales rep could be 10 20 100 times better than the bottom performing sales rep if they're using it smartly.

[33:24] And I think we're just seeing the early innings of that. I don't think we've fully even gotten to 10x yet.

[33:29] Yeah. But you know in the coming five to 10 years is these systems for supporting the team like a like a professional sports team where the rep does not have to think about CRM updates about you know any research right they literally just send spend their time on meetings making cold calls and writing hyperpersonalized emails with their kind of business context and if they spend their time on those kind of three things

[33:56] Each one of those activities is the most important thing they could be doing to drive their business,

[34:00] Right? Anything else is not revenue

[34:04] And so like you said, I think that's going to be a very common trend is turning essentially these sales people into Iron Man where you're not replacing, you're augmenting.

[34:14] Yeah. And it's funny because everyone's worried about AI stealing jobs. But it's almost going to allow I think with AI and automation over the next couple years, it's almost going to allow people to become more human in a sense. And and what I mean by that is, you know, hard skills are now, you know, not a major differentiator. Like, you know, if you're a coder, unfortunately, you know, it's pretty much going to disappear in the next couple of years. You know, but soft skills are something that AI can't replace. You know, how do you interact with a person? How do you build relationships? How do you speak?

What is your tonality looking like? You know, and that is what I think is going to be the big big differentiator in the next couple of years is like you said, all of that admin in the background gets automated. It gets wiped out from from the stack of a from a of a of an outbound rep. And just allow them to really focus on those soft skills.

[35:06] Yeah. I think being humans increasingly becoming more valuable.

[35:11] Right. And that's like the end of the day like either you use AI and figure out how to augment all your time so you can just focus on the most important

[35:22] Or the thing I'm really concerned about is the people who don't learn to use AI

[35:27] Correctly getting left behind. Like I think that's going to be one of the biggest challenges we face as society is for the people who can't learn or don't end up learning, they're now 10x or 20x behind the rest of us, right? And that gets really really important to solve very quickly. Because you can't have just people left out of the game. Like that's not that's not a good way to build society. It's not the way for any

[36:01] I don't know

[36:03] It doesn't lead to good things is the way to put it and and that's something I'm very worried about but

[36:07] I think it's very important that like people get content out there about how important it is what the potentials are right like we now have like I don't want to say old guys but like old sales reps on bird dog because they saw it on LinkedIn right and they're starting to learn how like you could use AI to essentially make their job easier and they're picking it up like they're starting to get to it. And like the more people that that happens for, the less likely, you know, you get left behind and in a spot that you don't want to be.

[36:37] And imagine their experience as well. Like, you know, you've got some a veteran 20, 30 years in the sales game. Imagine their soft skills, their experience, and now they're able to again get rid of all that Like, they're going to be they're going to be rock stars up into their 70s and 80s. So, yeah, it's going to be crazy.

[36:53] Yeah, I'm excited. I I've I think it's going to be one of the coolest things that's ever happened to us in our lives.

[36:59] I think it is also one of the most disruptive. So, it's just like a catch

[37:04] Like it's really good, but then there's also a lot of, you know, downsides that could potentially occur.


### Trends in sales tooling

[37:09] Yeah. Well, I just got I guess we've got to see just how how it plays out. So going back to to to go to market obviously you speak to you know a lot of teams a lot of sales leaders a lot of revenue leaders you know what are you seeing as a trend or what is something that people say to you that like makes you cringe like what do you think teams are overinvesting in or what's overrated right now?

[37:32] Yeah. So, I'll go into a couple things that just come to mind. And for context, like I think we did 1,131 demos in 2025. So, we talked to everyone from the smallest of the small startups, solo founders who are just learning how to do sales all the way up to CRO of publicly traded companies, right? And everything in between there. And I think there's a couple common trends. One, outbound is getting increasingly hard, right? Across the board, everyone is saying that connect rates are down, response rates are down, close rates are down, meeting book rates are down across the board. The other thing with that is legacy tooling is largely getting disrupted, right?

So teams, there's now this trend for teams to have less tools, less login, right? Because I think in the like 2020, 2021, 2022, all these sales tools exploded because the strategy was just send as many emails as possible. It worked, right? Because everyone had money, everyone was investing. But now, as the economy started to slow down, people are being more selective about what tools they're buying. And teams are also consolidating their tool stacks. And so we're seeing a lot of disruption in people cancelling contracts that maybe 5 to 10 years ago you never thought you would cancel, replacing them with tools that are either in-house or built by another sales tool and now are just rolled a part of a big offering.

So we're seeing a lot of struggle out there at least among sales tool providers, right? I think that's one of the things that I think most people underappreciate at least being a salesperson. You think like all these sales tools are doing very well. The reality is most of them are suffering from very high churn, right? Because if you like promise any sort of outbound outcome like, hey, you're going to book x number of it's a really hard promise to live up to, right? And think about how often sales people get fired, right? Or get let go.

[39:38] You're essentially just selling a virtual salesperson, right? And so your turn is through the roof. If you're selling like let's say contact data, largely the cost of that has gone to zero, right? It's like Apollo is giving away emails for free. People are starting to cut the cost on phone numbers to win business. And so you're seeing margins get eaten alive, right? So like Zoom Info stock is down.

[40:03] I was just going to say a lot of the publicly traded sales tools, you're seeing that, you know, you're seeing their stock prices drop and drop.

[40:10] Yeah. HubSpot too. Like there's a lot of disruption going on right now in software generally, but particularly in the sales space

[40:18] As we've seen this shift that you're talking about where like how do we do less admin? How do we spend less time in the CRM? How do we spend more time with our reps doing the things that matter? And so this is causing a huge shift in the sales tooling space. One from a consolidation standpoint, but two from like actual businesses like not failing but like seeing definitely decreases. So two trends like kind of off bat is you know one you're obviously seeing outbound's getting harder with that sales tooling is getting harder. I think the third piece is like it's become more important to figure out what works in outbound now.

And there's kind of two philosophies, right? One is do more volume, right? Just send more messages, right? With AI, we can personalize. We can send a million you send a billion messages. You can send email to everyone

[41:13] In the world if you wanted to.

[41:15] Yeah. If you wanted to, right?

[41:17] And so that's one thought camp. The other thought camp is how do we research better? How do we get better signaling? How do we get better intent to figure out who to target and then focus all of our efforts on winning that business? Right? So like emailing them multiple times, calling them multiple times, going and visiting their office, going to the conference that they're going to because once you've identified an opportunity is big enough, it's worth the time to go win that business, right? So there's kind of these two camps. There's like one go very deep and try to win the business. The others go very wide and surface level and just send one email and hope it connects with that person at the right time.

And so you're seeing tools arise in both sides of that, right? You're seeing the AISDRs pop up, the email automation tools explode on the kind of volume side and then on the other part of this like you're seeing signaling tools explode. You're seeing like admin tools that you know essentially remove all the CRM inputs you need to do explode. You're seeing intent data maybe not explode, but like people are asking more about it. They're saying like, "Does this work? Does this matter?" You're seeing like chat GTP for research and like getting basic company details like really take off, right? So, there's kind of two camps and there's pros and cons to each, but we're going to have to see how this plays out over the next couple years.

Obviously, I know what side I've picked on going very deep.

[42:43] Yeah. But, you know, I think there's probably valid use cases for both, right? I think particularly on the SMB side, like volume makes sense, right? Because there isn't a lot to target on, right? They don't have a lot of news articles, they don't have a lot of CEO interviews, they don't have a lot of job postings. You can't build the internal case. And from a opportunity size, like those deals are just worth a lot less. So, you need to spend less time to win each one to make a positive ROI. But for these big deals, you can spend a lot of time. You can spend a couple months like trying to figure out how to win this business.

I mean, shoot, like one of our favorite mentors, like this sales guy, he sells for like a Fortune 500 to other Fortune 500s, and he was saying he spends like two or three years trying to win one deal.

[43:30] One deal. That's it. That's all he works on for two or three years. So people like that, like equipping them with the knowledge and the resources and the insights to effectively monitor a

[43:42] And figure out what their door is, right? How are they going to get in

[43:46] Yeah. No, I agree. I agree completely. Yeah. And I think what you said, it is very dependent on the business. You know, if you've got an offer that is very tangible, very easy to understand, very quick win. Automate, go for it. You know what I and your your TAM is a million businesses, you know, you might as well try and have a conversation with each of them or send them a message to each of them. But, you know, like you said, if you're doing Fortune 500 to Fortune 500, there's very little point in doing automated outbound, it's not going to work. So, having that, you know, really personalized almost like a project management approach.

[44:18] If it's taken two or three years, you know, that's not really a sales process. That is a project. Do you know what I mean? It's a project management. There's going to be PMs. There's going to be like, you know, maybe a hundred people involved in that process for these huge huge deals, maybe more. So, yeah, I think it's a I think it's a a really interesting really interesting time. And I think you've I think you've discussed that that split really well, that that split between the two sort of camps going on right now. And I think we'll see over the next year how that how that develops.

And I I think we are agreed on on where we think that's going to go. I think I think most people are secretly. I just think that there's a handful of very loud voices in the

[45:01] The spray and prey camp, but there is a place in time for it. I will say that like there is definitely a place in

[45:08] Awesome. Well, Jack, look, thank you very much. Really appreciate your time. Anything that you want to plug?

[45:14] No, no, I appreciate Tom. If anyone wants to check out Bird Dog, you know, happy to set up a demo and run some research. Otherwise, you know, happy to point you in the direction of other tools that do.

[45:25] Perfect. All right, Jack. Well, thank you very much for your time.

[45:28] Thanks, Tom. Appreciate it.

[45:31] Awesome, mate. I was

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