S2E5: Will AI Kill the SDR or Just Make Them Smarter? | Adam Schoenfeld (Keyplay)

We sat down with Adam Schoenfeld, co-founder and CEO of Keyplay, to explore how AI is transforming account selection and go-to-market strategies. Adam has taken his years of experience building Simply Measured and turned it into solving one of B2B's most persistent problems: figuring out which companies to actually sell to.

While everyone else is trying to use AI to spam more people, Adam sees a different future. "The biggest trap that a lot of people are falling into is they're seeing this as kind of a volume game. The best people are gonna use it to create more value for a more targeted group of people."

Keyplay's new AI agents are doing something remarkably different from traditional account scoring. Instead of just looking at firmographics like company size and industry, these agents can answer nuanced questions like "What's the security maturity of this company?" or "How do they prefer to buy software - legacy or modern?" As Adam points out, "A smart AE would take their territory and they go research these accounts. They really think about, like, what's the org dynamics? What's the kind of buying posture?"

One of the most eye-opening parts of our conversation was about the hidden costs of bad targeting. Adam shared how companies are burning massive amounts on LinkedIn ads targeting companies that will never buy from them. "How much of that spend is actually going to accounts that are legitimately never going to buy from you?" he asks. Keyplay can identify and eliminate that waste while helping teams focus on higher-quality accounts.

The pricing journey has been particularly interesting. They started with flat fees but quickly realized different use cases had vastly different complexities. "Some are super complicated and they're running across like a million records and some are very simple and they're running across 3000 records," Adam explains. This led them to adopt a credit-based model, though he admits "it does take some translation" to help customers understand the value.

What's refreshing about Adam's approach is his candid admission that this is all a work in progress. When I asked about convincing RevOps leaders who might be threatened by AI reducing headcount, he had an interesting observation: "I don't feel like I'm having to convince people of that too hard... they want outcomes. They want to do creative work. They want to be the one who understands the customer and has great taste."

Perhaps most valuable was Adam's masterclass on building an audience before building a product. Through his Pure Signal newsletter, he spent months researching go-to-market challenges and sharing insights, which ultimately led to discovering the problem Keyplay now solves. "I basically built like a mini media brand where people would subscribe to my newsletter... that led to discovering the problem that Keyplay solves now, because people would come in and they'd want to talk."

Looking ahead, Adam sees a future where Keyplay could orchestrate entire go-to-market campaigns, from identifying the right accounts to actually placing the ads. "It would be incredible if we could just say, yeah, turn on Keyplay, we will each month rejigger the accounts you're targeting and we'll just deliver you pipeline."

Whether you're in RevOps, sales, marketing, or building an AI company, this conversation offers crucial insights into how AI is reshaping B2B go-to-market strategies - not by doing more of the same, but by fundamentally rethinking how we identify and pursue the right customers.

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