The Cost of Unqualified Demos

Traditional lead qualification in B2B sales can be hit or miss. Here's the thing: many leads that sales teams talk to aren't ready to buy—or they're not the right fit. Imagine nearly 8 out of 10 sales conversations going nowhere because the leads weren't qualified properly from the start. That's a lot of wasted time and effort.

The GTM Demo Fallacy

Let’s go back to the beginning before the internet existed. If you want to purchase something you’d have to physically go to a store and talk to a salesperson. They would provide you with information on the product you were looking to buy and then you’d make a decision based on details provided, price, and the time to acquire the product. The “power”, as defined by access to information, was all in the hands of the seller.

Fast forward to today and the internet has exploded. Between social media, review sites, Slack groups, and websites you can find out almost anything you need about a given product or solution. Often the only two pieces of information not available are the price and a visual demo of the product. With buyers now having access to all of this data, the “power” has clearly shifted to their favor.

However, sellers still seem to be stuck in the dark ages following a legacy process of hoarding information and hiding behind huge demo forms. Buyers, knowing full well that filling out such a demo request will trigger a barrage of sales calls, emails, and messages, will avoid entering this process at all costs. This has clearly created a chasm between buyers and sellers which is quickly becoming a bigger problem for the sellers.

The Cost of GTM Waste

Imagine for a moment that you are a buyer and you did in fact request a demo from a vendor’s website. You want to know if their solution can cover two use cases that you have in mind for a project that is slated for the end of the year. You fill out your contact information, hit submit, and quickly enter a workflow that looks like this:

• A Sales Development Representative (SDR) calls your phone wanting to “qualify” you using some programmatic framework like BANT
• After asking half a dozen questions from what sounds like a script, the SDR books a meeting with the Account Executive (AE) for you to have a further discussion
• You now enter your second meeting, this time with the AE who further “qualifies” you with a bunch of additional questions (including ones the SDR already asked you because the AE didn’t read any of the notes)
• Then you are told that only the Solutions Engineer (SE) can give a demo so that will be a third meeting
• The third meeting is often the longest with a formal presentation and demo of the product in which you are only able to ask questions once the demo is finished
• When all is said and done you get to ask about your two use cases, only one of which they can cover, and you wrap up the meeting even more confused than when you started this demo process
• The AE will then continue to follow up with emails and phone calls even though the product doesn’t fully meet your needs and you clearly told them the project isn’t slated to happen for months

Sadly this legacy workflow is how too many sellers are still operating today. The number of Go-to-Market (GTM) resources that execute this workflow create a ridiculous amount of waste in both time and money for vendors. Let’s look at some quick figures to see exactly how bad the problem really is.

• The average salary for an SDR is $60k per year or $28.85 per hour
• The average salary for an AE is $95k per year or $45.67 per hour
• The average salary for an SE is $110k per year or $52.88 per hour

The SDR takes the initial 30 minute meeting, the AE takes the second 30 minute meeting, and the SE takes the final 60 minute meeting. The SDR often sits in on the subsequent meetings with the AE and SE (likewise for the AE). So let’s do some quick math:

• SDR x 2 hours in meetings = $57.70
• AE x 1.5 hours in meetings = 68.51
• SE x 1 hour in meetings = $52.88

In total the GTM team wastes 2 hours and $179 for every unqualified lead that they talk to. If you expand this out across all teams and multiple conversations per week then the amount wasted begins to add up quickly. Also keep in mind that these numbers are averages, if you employ more seasoned resources then your costs can go up significantly.

A Shift to AI Qualified Leads (AQL)

At this point you hopefully can see that there has to be a better way to engage with buyers than just wasting time and money across your GTM resources. So let’s start by framing how we think about the problem. If we acknowledge all the data and information that buyers have access to and that forcing them into a demo workflow as their only option isn’t working…how can we re-shape the process to be more efficient and buyer-led at the same time?

One option would be to ungate the content and video assets that exist on our website today to give buyers better access to information (without them having to go out and find it themselves). This could help boost awareness, however accessing content or downloading it is not a good indication that someone has intent to move into a buying motion. At best we get some visibility into their interests as a seller, but we still run the risk of GTM waste without further context.

Chatbots were created as a way to solve this problem, but at the time of their creation technology wasn’t advanced enough to support natural conversations. However, with the explosion of AI all of that has changed. Now, as sellers, we have the ability to feed all of our existing content into an AI model (also called an LLM) which would allow a buyer to not only have a more natural conversation, but have the AI surface content suggestions that are more relevant to what a buyer is asking for. Being able to bring this context into a conversation isn’t a replacement for human interaction, but it is a great next step in the evolution of how buyers access information without being forced into a sales workflow.

As buyers engage in more AI driven conversations, you’ll be able to discern patterns around topics that hold the highest level of intent for moving someone into a sales workflow. This increase in efficiency will not only eliminate GTM waste, but it will allow sellers to run a more efficient and scalable GTM organization overall.

Moreover, the job of the AI is not limited to just answering questions and surfacing content. The AI can also be trained to lead the conversation, ask questions, and do discovery and qualification directly. This is the holy grail of GTM waste cleanup.

See for yourself how Buyer Copilot is enabling more buyer-led GTM motions without the expense or impact to existing GTM resources.