About This Constellation ShortList™

While artificial intelligence (AI) tools have been injected into the sales process for some time, a new wrinkle is deploying Ai-powered digital “SDR agents” to cover some, or all, of the sales prospecting process. AI SDR agents are an evolution from the “chatbot” concept in that they can be more proactive, multi-channel, and handle significantly more complex exchanges with potential and existing customers. These “agents” can have access to entire (and sometimes highly complex) product catalogs, pricing models, etc. to better educate and engage with potential buyers across web, email, SMS, etc.

Th benefit to users is that these agents can be “always on” versus the limitations of solely human sales development teams. They can leverage multiple channels to engage 24/7. Also, AI-powered SDRs can be multi-lingual. This both increases the productivity of SDR teams, but also allows companies to expand their sales reach without significant human capital expenditure. Many of these tools are easy to configure and offer out of the box integrations with CRM systems, to provide a fast time to value.

This is still a somewhat nascent area of development, and buyers should tread carefully. As with other generative AI tools, these agents are only as good as their tuning and administration and can be prone to making some mistakes/hallucinations or present other AI-created toxicity to the customer.  We recommend using AI agents in conjunction with, not as replacements for, human SDR teams in the sales organization.

Threshold Criteria

Constellation considers the following criteria for these solutions:

  • Integration with key systems, such as CRM, product catalog/CPQ and ERP to provide accurate and timely product and pricing responses 
  • Autonomous ability to make low-level decisions and move conversations forward 
  • Provide built-in guardrails and monitoring tools to ensure effectiveness, safety and security 
  • Unified communication capabilities across email, web chat, SMS, WhatsApp, etc. to facilitate a 24/7 response and outreach channel 
  • Offer multi-lingual capabilities to expand SDR team outreach on a global level 
  • Automated workflow and tasks management, to ensure requests for information and other pre-sales tasks are quickly addressed by either systems or by humans 
  • Automated meeting scheduling to provide convenience to prospective buyers
  • Ability to generate follow up communications, either to be sent by a human or the system 
  • Creation of interaction summaries for use by humans later in the sales cycle; automatically stored in the CRM

The Constellation ShortList™

Constellation evaluates around 20 solutions categorized in this market. This Constellation ShortList is determined by client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects, market share and internal research.

  • 11x
  • Artisan
  • AiSDR 
  • Full Context
  • Relevance.ai
  • Regie.ai
  • Salesforce Einstein SDR Agent

Frequency of Evaluation

Each Constellation ShortList is updated at least once per year. Updates may occur after six months if deemed necessary.

Evaluation Services

Constellation clients can work with the analyst and research team to conduct a more thorough discussion of this Constellation ShortList. Constellation can also provide guidance in vendor selection and contract negotiation.

 

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