Most revenue leaders are making a critical mistake with AI: using it to do more of the same, just at greater scale. They're taking the same outbound playbook (sequenced emails, generic value props, and spray-and-pray targeting) and applying AI to make it marginally more personalized or efficient. World class sales development leaders like Florin Tatulea, Head of Sales Development at Common Room, are approaching this opportunity in a fundamentally different way.
We're not just witnessing a tool upgrade; we're at the beginning of a complete paradigm shift from "Outbound 1.0" (spray-and-pray sequencers) to "Outbound 3.0" (signal-based precision targeting) as Florin describes. This shift doesn't just improve efficiency, it completely rewrites the economics of pipeline generation and who should be doing it. That’s driving the rise of the ‘10X SDR’.
Florin first gained recognition for scaling Loopio's sales team as their first sales hire, eventually building and leading their outbound motion. Many of you likely know him from his LinkedIn and Substack "Sales Flo - Prospecting from the Trenches" where he's established himself as one of the sharpest minds on BDR strategy, outbound, and AI-driven demand generation. I’m consistently learning from his content so I would encourage you to subscribe and follow.
Listen to Florin's episode on Apple and Spotify.
1. The Evolution from Outbound 1.0 to 3.0
The outbound landscape has evolved dramatically over the past decade. Florin breaks this down into three distinct phases:
Outbound 1.0 (2013-2015): The rise of sequencers like Outreach and SalesLoft that allowed teams to message their entire TAM at scale, hoping to catch prospects at the right time. The tradeoff was burning through potential customers who weren't ready to buy.
Outbound 2.0 (2016-2021): Account-level intent platforms like 6sense and Demandbase that identified which accounts were showing buying signals, but couldn't pinpoint the exact people behind that intent.
Outbound 3.0 (2022-Present): AI-powered systems that can perform mass research at scale, identify the specific people behind digital footprints through identity resolution, and tie various digital breadcrumbs together for hyper-personalized outreach.
What's fascinating is that the fundamental buyer journey hasn't changed — there have always been prospects at different stages of awareness and interest. What's changed is our ability to identify exactly where each prospect is in their journey and reach them with precision.
2. Understanding Signals vs Intent in the Buyer Awareness Funnel
One crucial distinction Florin makes is between signals and intent, which are terms that are often conflated but represent very different levels of buyer readiness.
Intent is the warmest possible type of signal, where prospects are actively on your website, interacting with your brand or a competitor’s, or potentially using your product in a PLG scenario. These people know about you specifically and are likely problem-aware, solution-aware, or even actively in sales cycles.
Signals, by contrast, are events or happenings at a company that indicate potential interest (funding rounds, strategic hires, or other publicly available indicators that might make your solution relevant).
Florin overlays this with a buyer awareness framework that segments your market into four buckets:
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3%: Actively evaluating solutions and likely coming inbound
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7%: Know about the problem and interested, but haven't raised their hands
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30%: Somewhat aware of the problem but need more education
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60%: Not thinking about you or the problem at all
This framework reframes how we think about pipeline generation. Your SDR/BDR function should focus primarily on that 7% slice (prospects who know about the problem and need a little push) and the 30% who could be warmed up with proper education. This is where signal-based outbound creates its greatest impact.
The 60% group is primarily the domain of broader marketing efforts, creator content, and influence-building. Outbound can play a role but it’s a much longer time horizon.
3. The Changing Profile of BDR/SDR Teams in an AI Era
Here's where conventional wisdom gets completely upended: AI is fundamentally changing the profile of effective SDR/BDR teams. With AI handling the low-value work of list building and research, the human element becomes more crucial in ways that entry-level reps often struggle with.
Florin has made a bold bet at Common Room by hiring more senior sales development reps (even former BDR managers and directors) who understand the buyer's problems deeply, have experience in the industry, and can leverage research to create highly contextual messages. The cost profile of these hires is very different than a new grad SDR.
The economics of this approach make increasing sense as AI tools advance:
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Five years ago, BDRs spent 30-50% of their time on low-value work like list building and finding prospects
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AI now delivers in-market leads on a silver platter, making execution and sales craft the primary value-add
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Higher-paid, more experienced reps can deliver significantly better execution and generate more pipeline because there’s more leverage now
The challenge is that most companies still position BDR leaders as more junior than AE leaders, despite pipeline generation being arguably the most important function in the business. This compensation and prestige gap leads to constant talent drain as the best BDR leaders graduate to AE leadership roles.
This reflects a fundamental misalignment in how we value pipeline generation versus closing. As the complexity of effective outbound increases, we need to reconsider the career path, compensation, and organizational importance of sales development leaders. At Owner, we place a significant premium on XDR leadership and are investing significantly there.
4. Signal-Based Outbound Plays That Actually Convert
One of the most common traps in outbound today is relying exclusively on commoditized data. When everyone has access to the same funding announcements, hiring updates, and 10-K reports, your outreach becomes indistinguishable from every other vendor.
Florin shared several high-impact signal-based plays that leverage both commoditized and proprietary data:
The Competitive Website Play: At Common Room, they take screenshots from SEMrush or Similar Web showing a prospect's top competitor has 3x their web traffic. Then they explain that while tripling web traffic in three months may be unrealistic, your solution can help them "fish in a pond instead of an ocean" by de-anonymizing existing traffic. Quantify exactly how many potential leads this represents.
The Open Source Monitoring Play: For companies with GitHub repositories, use starhistory.com to show trend lines of competitive repositories that are surging. Then explain how de-anonymizing users of those repositories could create a targeted lead list of people already engaged with similar technology.
The Strategic Initiative Play: Learn the internal code names of a prospect's strategic initiatives by speaking with lower-level employees. If you discover a project named "Leviathan" and can tie your value proposition directly to that initiative, your outreach will immediately stand out. "That's likely what they're comped on. It's likely their top priority. They're thinking about it every day." This often relies on bottoms up BDR prospecting effort.
What differentiates these plays is their combination of publicly available data with insights that require human intelligence to uncover. While AI can crawl the web, it can't learn what was shared at an SKO, overhear office conversations, or pick up on internal politics — giving human SDRs a lasting advantage.
5. Organizational Ownership of Signal-Based Outbound Strategy
One of the most difficult questions for CROs is determining who should own this transformation. The most sophisticated organizations typically assign this responsibility to RevOps, GTM Ops, or Marketing Ops.
Even then, it requires close collaboration across multiple functions. Common Room uses a task force that includes the head of SDR, Growth, Demand Gen, GTM Strategy, and the VP of Sales.
The challenge is that this requires a rare blend of skills:
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Technical acumen to understand the tooling landscape
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Sales craft to design effective plays
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Data analysis capabilities to measure signal effectiveness
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Strategic vision to align efforts across teams
This combination is exceedingly rare. Many organizations have either technically-oriented ops leaders who lack sales acumen or sales leaders who lack technical depth. The ideal person has both, which Florin frames as a systems engineering mindset paired with go-to-market choreography understanding.
For CROs without this expertise internally, Florin recommends looking to their growth and marketing teams first, as they've typically been the earliest adopters of AI technologies. External consultants can help, but the knowledge gap they leave behind creates significant risk when engagements end.
The Future of Outbound
As AI-powered outbound becomes increasingly sophisticated, what's next? Florin believes the next frontier will be the activities AI can't easily replicate: in-person events, unscalable human interactions, and network-based referrals.
I'm already seeing this at Owner.com where our organic content strategy has generated more Instagram followers than our publicly traded competitors. Brand, creator-driven marketing, and founder influence are becoming critical differentiators.
We may be approaching a paradoxical future where hyper-relevant AI-driven outreach becomes so common that it loses its effectiveness, pushing us back toward high-trust, relationship-based motions that resist automation.
But right now, most companies are still playing catch-up with Outbound 2.0 tactics while the market leaders are already leveraging AI to identify precise signals of interest and create hyper-personalized touches. This gap represents a massive competitive advantage for those willing to invest in the right technology, people, and processes.
The future belongs to revenue leaders who can blend AI's scale with human insight's depth.
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