Putting Demand Gen Powers in the SDR Team's Hands
Joe of Influ2 argues that outbound is back as the top go-to-market focus while 73% of SDR teams sit under quota, leaving reps to fight for attention in a saturated market.
Founder Dmitri Lisitski then demos the closed beta of Super Cadences, a product that pulls sequences from Salesloft or Outreach and lets SDRs sync person-based ads to specific cadence steps — starting an ad on day one, swapping it on day six, and automatically removing prospects who respond.
Because the ads that work are simple messages featuring the SDR's own face rather than polished designs, SDRs can craft them without involving marketing.
In one publicly traded SaaS customer's data, cold buying groups converted at 9.9% while accounts with an ad click converted at roughly 25%.
The Q&A covers Influ2's cookie-free, IP-free matching approach (about 98% accurate), a ~50% US match rate, and an average of one to two impressions per person per day.
so I want to introduce Joe he's withinflute 2 they're sponsoring our event in October in Austin and um and they're doing really cool stuff with sequences uh Joe I'm gonna mess up the numbers you just correct me after this they grew a company to 800 million yeah eight to 100 billion sorry eight to a hundred million yeah okay 8 200 million through collab and so he has a great uh background in outbound he's very familiar with it and uh inflatoon's doing cool Innovation and outbound which we're always really excited to see so he's going to talk a little bit about that and um and yeah I think I'll just let Joe take it away from here yeah good to meet everybody uh I see a lot of familiar names in the in the crowd so uh thrilled to be talking to an audience of SDR leaders and sales leaders as a whole I think I saw Jesse Parker in there Patrick Bonner we're uh we're a catalyst customer so thanks Mark
um but you know this is really this is really cool for me to join because uh to me I believe that scaling pipeline generation is like the biggest challenge to an organization that's trying to to drive towards hyper growth so so I really love to help companies rise to that challenge um the good news for all of us is that outbound is back I'll bounce back in it never left but uh according to Paul uh pavilion's June pulse survey uh they asked go to market leaders what their primary focus was for H2 and outbound was the top answer quite a lot and and I have a theory about that so I think you know with with a lot of focus comes a lot of pressure right and I think I think a lot of this is because you know when the market was inflated with capital uh plg and inbound kind of seemed like a cheat code those were like very prominent very popular and as the market has has sort of gotten tighter those channels have gotten a lot less reliable a lot less controllable and a lot more expensive right and that's why
in my opinion outbound has become a lot more important and you know they said the old saying is the what the best way to hit your bookings Target tomorrow is to hit your pipeline Target today and what I'm seeing in outbound is is the challenges I see a lot of teams building an outbound function that aren't getting enough support right they hire an SDR they buy Outreach or sales Loft and then they just try to pound their target audience with sequences that may not be original may not be great right I think I see some Smiles some people resonate with that right you know as of last November 73 of SDR teams were under quota sdrs are are responsible for a big part of the SAS pipeline right and to me the SDR function doesn't get enough support from the organization so you know it feels like when outbound teams fall behind there's always a lot of pressure from from leadership for more volume right and this increased pressure has really created a saturated Market where it's hard to capture prospects attention right call volume email volume has never been higher conversions have never been lower and in that environment
like differentiation becomes Paramount right but at what cost a lot of forms of differentiation whether it's custom videos Direct Mail there's trade-offs right where it's if I'm going to create a custom if your SDR is going to create a custom video within every sequence like how much less can they do in a day because they're doing that right so it's like how how does is the lift worth the efficiency squeeze and so really that's the essence of what influ 2 has built here right so so our primary product what we started out with is is we sell a platform to marketers that allows them to Target specific individual with digital ads individuals with digital ads right and what happens is we provide contact level intent because we filter the engagement from those individual ads back to the contact record in the CRM this helps sdrs and SDR teams Target the most engaged folks it helps them reach out to the warmest folks and then it helps you know add a media type to their outbound cadences to help conversion rates
right the the challenge we've seen is that there's a lot of interest with SDR leadership and there's a lot of demand from SDR leadership but marketing budgets are Lean Marketing teams are leaner and it's hard to get bandwidth from marketing at times to support this right so our next release we're looking at releasing this product to directly to sdrs right so so allowing sdrs to create their own digital ad within their sequence to add it to their sequences and to Target their prospects with these digital ads the individual Prospect right and then these ads will provide that contact level intent so they can see the warmth they're quote they can see who the most engaged prospects are right I have the chart on here from sales Loft about the uh media types and affecting conversion rates so I think you know from there it should really help your sdrs add this another media type another Channel differentiate themselves without adding additional bandwidth it actually can help them be a bit more efficient so we're lucky enough
to have our RCL and founder Dimitri who is kind of the brainchild of this uh come with and he's going to show a quick demo uh shouldn't be too long of how this functions and then and then I'll be back in a couple minutes so Dimitri you want to take it from here yeah thank you Joe um yeah so so yeah so I'll just really quickly show what what we have built and this is close beta of the project so we did not announce it yet and uh you know like we adjusted ourselves as well and yeah the idea was like very straightforward so we really struggled a lot like making marketing People Help sales development people to work to do their job so that we thought okay what if we try to build a product for sales development teams specifically for self-development leadership and sales Ops so they can leverage the power ads without the need to actually talk to their marketing teams so it's kind of crazy little crazy idea but it feels like it's working very well and I've
explained why why we think it's going to work for many of you and yeah we would love to hear your feedback obviously uh if if not now then maybe we'll try to collect your feedback later on but definitely it's kind of cool but we are still shaping the product yeah and I would love to hear what you see whether I think about it so yeah so let me quickly share the screen um yeah so so yeah so our we call this product super guidance and the idea is pretty straightforward we like you know like we connect ourselves a lot or Outreach and just pull your cadences or sequences depending what you use from the system so you can actually see what you have like this cadences that you already have in your system and and then basically our job is to help you you know add advertising as an element to the sequences right like the element of the conversation right so we really believe that ads can really be like just regular email just like your sales call it can
be not just another sales channel right so like it's not marketing channel anymore it's a sales Channel uh so the way it works is like yeah you have your cadences here you you can you can make it super Cadence loading sorry it's kind of a little slow it's very hard to do it on Zoom sorry guys yeah so this is just in regular Cadence that you would normally have um and you just have steps and days like we just pull it directly from from uh sales loft or Outreach and then you say okay where you want to see ads and we can address you want to add here so you
can say okay what's on day one of these Cadence I want to add you know advertising right and then I launch it on day one you can stop it in the day six or change it to a different one right and then you you might say okay what after j15 I don't don't want to show any ads anymore so basically we connect ads and actually we show as to exactly the same people you have in the Cadence right it's not what marketing people do they just show as to someone and then hope that you know the guys will see it this is exactly same people right exactly same people that enroll in this Cadence they will see ads and you will be able to to show one ad on the day one change it on day six as a as you can see here here and then step on the day 15. so it goes in syncreased Credence if someone you know raises their hand or responds you like this person will be removed from the Cadence and then automatically will remove from advertising campaigns so it goes just like like in connection with your sales sequence right and then the main
question you might you might have is like okay but who like how can they like we need to create ads right so this is this it seems like an impossible problem because you like normally like with info 2 you like the response would be okay you still need to talk to a marketing team to create these campaigns for you uh with super cannons we think that you can skip this so actually you can make your ads yourself and or actually sdrs can make it himself and and that is very simple in fact if you look back like long time ago like some people still remember marketing used to own you know email as a channel as a conversation channel so you know sales people you know normally would not do cold Outreach without approval marketing teams and like all kind of all bonuses where in marketing hands and you know like now like no one would even you know challenge this idea that hey you know if the Arts can do much more personalized Outreach make make more meaningful conversations from the day one from the
cold Outreach yes step so why like exactly the same thing should happen advertising so actually we believe that sdrs can craft their own you know ads without actually marketing team being really involved and and this is very interesting and simple idea so actually if you look at the type of ads we are talking about it's not that you expect from typical ads when you have a lot of beautiful design and that's like we have like more than six years of experience with info too and we discovered that the ads at work are not beautiful are not designed amazingly well they talk about the right stuff right they deliver they convey specific meaning that is important and um the meaning above above the design above the you know marketing you know beauty is what really makes advertising work well for our clients right now for two and we really believe that this is something that sells teams or cell development teams
can can begin so yeah so ads are very simple and yeah and and yeah we can just show you a couple of examples of what they're talking about so like the the typical layout would look like this right so it's like it's a phase of sales development person and obviously it's the same person will reach out to you by email uh you know like there's a couple days after the response rate will be much higher because people already know this person and uh we have again like a lot of data supporting the idea I said if you if you show as before you do scold Outreach it's not called anymore you know your audience or your prospects already know these people and they respond better and basically the messages you craft and the the words you you put here is exactly the same approaches you do with emails so you can basically it's all about the ideas the meaning the assumptions that cage delivers the value of to your prospects so so yeah we believe is there should be able to to you know to craft it and
that's exactly what we do ourselves for our to support our info2 product and this is how we will promote super cadences it will go you know public and to public for better and we'll be able to kind of start enrolling more and more clients and and and provide Outreach to the to make sure to use our own product to drive a suspect line for supercadence and then finally just a few if you obviously you won't understand the results so the way we think about it is like okay you know like people who see ads typically convert better and you know Joe will have a couple of more slice about this but overall we report you know how much better people who we managed to engage through ads convert from being conducted to to responder to meeting books to opportunity created so we just follow the same path and again like because we deliver us to specific people we can trace the success for each individual Prospect and then we'll be able to you know to collect all this information so you know exactly how much extra sales pipeline you manage to generate
thanks to the fact that you're using ads to support it so this is really brief demo hope it was cleared okay awesome very cool um Joe do you want to respond to any questions we had in the chat if yes yeah I think uh I saw Eric had a question about attribution um I think I'll go over that real quick just because you know the way we look at it is we look at influence right and since we have a which I'm gonna show on the right screen here yes I am um since we have a direct integration into the CRM we simply look at the accounts that you're targeting that haven't been influenced by ads versus the accounts that you are and then we look at the prospecting conversion rates for those right and like I zoomed in on one customer's data here this is a publicly traded multi-billion dollar SAS company you know this was a quarter's worth of data and this is looking at the account level so when they were targeting cold buying groups so that's
individuals from an account they had about a 9.9 conversion rate when there was a click from one of the ads within one of those accounts it went to about 25 right we can look at this a bunch of different ways but that's just how we a b tested and then just to show that it's not it's not for big or small companies it's just a cross-section of our customer data where by employee size of what the Boost and prospecting conversion rates has been and like personally what I see with our customers is the better their outbound process is without us the the more structured it is the better the audience the better the Boost is once once they add us so it's really like like this isn't a magic pill right like in this I tell this marketing all the time right like just because you're you're targeting ads you're not going to be showered in pipeline right you need to have good fundamentals in your your outbound process already you need to have good SDR structure good audience alignment but then if you add this as another Channel it can just enhance what's already working to help scale a bit
awesome all right another question from Brian you want to take that Joe yeah let me see it yeah I can actually jump there are a couple of questions about Integrations so maybe I can legally quickly cover this So currently we have sales a lot of integration already and we are working on Outreach integration as well uh and yes we have a ball in our own map and you know overall the mindset of this is like we connect to your sales engagement software uh we for this product we we don't anticipate to connect it to any marketing information software or CRM because we assume our customers already using some sales engagement software and our job is just to to boost their performance by adding advertising as an element to whatever you're doing through either our teach or sales loft or a poll in the future uh and you know like you
you like we don't see success of like you know not using sales engagement software as a primary tool like and we believe this is a this is where you want to start before you start using ads as additional booster for yourself self-development effort yeah so I see I see Glenn and Brian both have questions around the house so Glenn the difference between us and like the role Works The Sixth Sense the demand bases are you know their ad platforms are targeting accounts by IP address and they can filter uh engagement data back to an individual in that individual's cookie right we don't require any cookies we don't require any IPS we do it we do it entirely different like we have a matching algorithm to match the the specific people to the to the ad campaigns and then what we do is the the engagement data goes to to Dimitri correct me if if I you know I I have the the non-developer version of this answer but it goes to an anonymized database and we use like a predictive
algorithm to predict the person that that it goes back to and we only assign the engagement that we are over like at a very high threshold of certainty is the right person the last time we tested it I think we were 98 accurate so it's a big difference between the the cookied individuals we're doing in an entirely different way yeah and yeah the the simple explanation of like how is different is we deliver us to specific people we know exactly who is clicking our ads so basically the the main difference and this is prerequisite for to make a successful self-development their cover because you guys are connecting your teams are connecting to specific prospects right it's not accounts there's a specific Prospect specific people in the companies and like if you think about even like smaller or average accounts you still potentially Target companies with like thousands of employees well you care about couple of people right so our technology tells you exactly who engaged who
clicked on your ads and this is critical to make it successful right so you know ABM progress are amazing and the emergency is doing a very good job when they do like a compass marketing but when it comes to sell like providing support for sales development we believe this is critical to deliver us to specific individuals not just you know some people in the account level hey just really quickly I should have brought this up earlier is influ 2 is looking for a few just like a couple people today to test this this hasn't gone to market yet and so if you're interested in that just comment me in the comments and we'll sort that out later um yeah you could also you can also feel free to reach out to me directly on LinkedIn um or email right like whether it's it's about this or you just want to talk shop happy to uh nerd out over Str stuff um and then Brian on your on your last question on the guaranteeing x amount of AD speed Landing so so just like anything else I think we can't match everyone I think our match rate in the US is around is around 50 and then impressions are really dependent on an
individual's media consumption right we can't show ads where people are not but on average we we average about one to two Impressions a day we try to like balance that secret sauce of like making sure they know that you are targeting them but not not over targeting them because that's when you deal with unsubscribers and things like that it's not that different from from email so on average for the people we match it's about an impression or two a day foreign any other questions great well if anybody thinks of anything that feel free to reach out to me directly but appreciate the time it was good to see to see some of you I haven't seen in a while awesome well cool well thanks so much and yeah always cool to see people innovating uh in the outbound space and uh really appreciate you guys jumping on
cool all right thanks all [Music]
Key takeaways
Chapters
Q&A
Joe explains they measure influence via a direct CRM integration, comparing prospecting conversion rates for targeted accounts with and without ad engagement. In one publicly traded SaaS customer's quarterly data, cold buying groups converted at 9.9% versus about 25% when someone in the account clicked an ad. — Joe McNeill
Dmitri says the Salesloft integration is live, an Outreach integration is in progress, and Apollo is on the roadmap. The product deliberately connects only to sales engagement software — not marketing automation or CRM — since it assumes customers already run outbound through those tools. — Dmitri Lisitski
Those platforms target accounts by IP address and cookies; Influ2 requires neither. A matching algorithm delivers ads to specific individuals and assigns engagement back only at a high certainty threshold — about 98% accuracy in their last test — which they argue is critical for supporting sales development rather than account-level ABM. — Joe McNeill
No — not everyone can be matched (US match rate is around 50%) and impressions depend on individual media consumption. For matched people they average one to two impressions per day, deliberately balanced so prospects notice the targeting without feeling over-targeted. — Joe McNeill
Quotes
“The best way to hit your bookings target tomorrow is to hit your pipeline target today.” — Joe McNeill
“It's not a marketing channel anymore — it's a sales channel.” — Dmitri Lisitski
“The ads that work are not beautiful, are not designed amazingly well — they talk about the right stuff.” — Dmitri Lisitski
“This isn't a magic pill. Just because you're targeting ads, you're not going to be showered in pipeline. You need to have good fundamentals in your outbound process already.” — Joe McNeill