An SDR who I shared some tips with messaged me the other day and told me they've been totally blackpilled by everything I do with Claude Code and Cursor.
They can't unsee the efficiency gains. And they can't unsee the insanity of all the manual processes around them.
I have a similar experience anytime someone tells me about manual work they're doing. I feel like I'm living in bizarro world. Once you've worked with tools like Clay and Claude Code, it really is like taking the red pill and waking up from the Matrix. You realize that everybody around you is just going through the motions of their life, asleep at the wheel. Like, it's almost a breach of your fiduciary duty to be doing a lot of manual GTM work.
Every lead list someone's building by hand. Every email being written from scratch that could be templatized and personalized through an API call. It's all just part of the performative work sellers do to convince themselves they're being productive.
They asked me how they might be able to socialize this stuff within their team.
Here's what I told them:
"Fuck No" Is a Reasonable First Reaction
They'd asked their manager if they could hook up the Apollo API to Cursor to automate some of their longer-form workflows, specifically around lead list building. They were basically told no without much explanation.
And honestly? I get why.
If somebody with six months of sales experience comes up to you and says, "Hey, let me hook up the most sensitive part of the whole GTM stack to some non-secure AI tool to just yolo the fucking data," fuck no is a reasonable first reaction. There are real security concerns. Real compliance questions.
I won't get into detail about our security posture at Cyft, but I did find a way to manage these tools and data in a secure fashion. And everybody else needs to go figure this out too. Because I keep hearing this stuff about security concerns, and they're not invalid. But the mitigation is really quite simple. You're shooting yourself in the foot by hand-waving about security when you could be fixing it, moving on, and actually utilizing the efficiency gains these tools provide.
But at this point, using these tools is not optional. That's just the reality.
Don't Be Weird
And if you're the SDR in this story, if you're relating to this, that feeling of frustration isn't a problem. It's a signal. You're early. You're not going to get replaced by AI because you're going to be the one using it.
I know because I've been that weird SDR.
I was laid off from a company a few years back. They said it was a layoff, but I'm pretty sure I was fired. And if I'm being honest with myself, part of it was that I was always making these weird suggestions in team meetings. Putting in tickets with the CRM team for shit nobody understood. Pushing for things that made sense to me but landed like noise to everyone else.
Before I was let go, I'd been having some interpersonal issues at the company. The CEO pulled me aside and told me something I didn't want to hear. He said, "Ben, you have good ideas, but you don't know how to leverage political capital."
I hated that when he said it.
But he was right. And sometimes it takes a while to realize these things.
So learn from my mistakes.
Institutional Change Is a Sales Cycle
You're not going to walk into your manager's office and pitch a revolution. That's how you get a polite "no" and a reputation as the weird one. Trust me.
Instead, multithread. Sell bottoms-up.
Start with your peers. Drop an article in the team Slack channel. "Hey, have you guys seen this?" Share something in a team meeting. Get two or three people curious. Let them start asking their own questions.
If you do this, your manager starts getting the same questions from multiple people. And now it's not "that one SDR asking about weird shit again," it's a pattern. It makes its way to the director meeting. Someone says, "Wait, you're telling me you can just connect Claude Code to Apollo and automate all of this?" And now the conversation is happening at a level where things actually change.
Will it work every time? No.
But you'll be able to sleep at night knowing you tried to do something for yourself and your company. And the skills you're building in the meantime? Those are yours forever.
Your Competition Is Already Doing This
If you zoom out, what's happening on a macro scale in SaaS is that the cost of building software is going to zero. Distribution, security, compliance, customer service, all the enterprise readiness stuff, that's what's becoming the real challenge. The playing field is being leveled. Every company's software is at a different stage, and they all have different edges in the market. But those edges are eroding fast because of the efficiency gains people are getting from these tools, especially in GTM.
A lot of people are being lulled into a false sense of security right now. Meanwhile, their competition is getting leaner and more agile. Smaller teams are producing the sales output of much larger ones. Whether it's pipeline management, outbound activity, or post-sales support, companies that have adopted these tools are building a compounding velocity advantage. And they are going to use it to destroy you.
That's why this matters whether you're a director wondering what all the noise is about or an SDR trying to socialize these tools through your org.
If you're a sales director, a sales manager, a RevOps leader, and you haven't used Claude Code or Cursor, if you don't even know what the applications are, you need to go familiarize yourself. Google it. It's not hard to find.
I'm not usually a doomer about this stuff. But this isn't doom, it's just the current state of play. The gap between teams that adopt these tools and teams that don't is widening every single day, and it's not going to slow down for anyone.
Institutional change is a sales cycle. Like everything else.
I write about this stuff regularly. If you need talking points to socialize these ideas in your org, DM me. If you want help figuring out how to actually make this happen at your company, DM me. I'll see if I can help.