Why Outbound Phone Still Wins When Selling Gets Hard with Greg Casale

Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon. In this replay segment, Greg Casale, founder and CEO of Reveneer, breaks down why outbound calling remains one of the few channels that still creates real conversations in a market flooded with automation. He explains how AI-driven outreach has increased volume but reduced conversion and why companies that commit to building a disciplined outbound phone motion gain an advantage while selling conditions tighten. For leaders, this is a clear look at where productivity is actually coming from and what it takes to build a channel that performs under pressure. Let's dive in.

Yeah, we talked about it a little bit or we touched on it. And a lot of people listening to this are probably thinking because it's like this huge influx of AI tools directed at replacing SDRs. And I'm sure you hear this all the time. So what are some of your thoughts of what the AI tools, current AI tools are going to do or future AI tools are going to do with respect to the SDR role and pipeline generation?

yeah and and obviously there's a topic that i'm really interested in right sure something came was like hey this is going to replace the sdr like you know i want to i want to know about that um here's the way i think about it the first thing i think is i think blanket statements and sales don't make any sense a go-to-market for a company is a fingerprint it's a unique fingerprint for that company there's so many parameters to a go-to-market, when you get into the size of company they're going after, the unique profile of the personas that they're trying to bring to the table, the value proposition, the product itself, so many things are different. So to make a statement that, hey, AI, you know, an SDR is going to be replaced with an AI, it sort of dismisses all that. What I would say is if an SDR, let's just take a simple example. If an SDR is in is managing inbound leads in a B2C model, I would say, yeah, probably that doesn't need to be done, right? Highly automated call centers, you have interested people who want to get some information, I would say AI all day long. You could probably take the human element out of that. But that's very that's not related to what we're all talking about here. When you get into what's called tech sales and you're talking about mid-market commercial enterprise, the activities that an SDR is doing on a day to day basis, there is a probably a good chunk of that that absolutely can be automated. And it is being automated, right? I mean, if you think about, and there's a huge negative repercussion to this, but automation is probably what's caused more of the elimination of conversion than anything else. But you have SDRs in many companies that are just emailing, right? Because they've been told, we don't care how you get the meetings, just get the meetings and here's the number you have to get. So if that's what you're telling your team, then they're going to use tools that will automate and scale what they do up and up and up and up. Those tools are readily available to SDRs, and they'll go ask their manager for that. They'll ask a manager, hey, there's an AI