☀️ I argued to cut the SDR team. The companies winning doubled theirs.

For its first CTV campaign, Jennifer Aniston’s DTC haircare brand LolaVie had a few non-negotiables. The campaign had to be simple. It had to demonstrate measurable impact. And it had to be full-funnel.

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The campaign included an Action Ad overlay that let viewers shop directly from their TVs by clicking OK on their Roku remote. This guided them to the website to buy LolaVie products.

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The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more.

GM to the Top 1% ☕

Two years ago I sat in a room and made the case for a smaller development team. I had the math. Research time was collapsing, sequencing was automated, list building took minutes. Every hour we were paying for had a cheaper substitute.

The slide was clean. Nobody argued with it. And I was wrong in a way that took eighteen months to become visible.

Here is the number that made it visible. Thirty six percent of B2B software companies reduced SDR and BDR headcount over the past year, the biggest cut of any sales role, and only nineteen percent grew those teams. Then the second number landed. Across the broader market SDR hiring fell about twenty one percent, while AI-native companies more than doubled their development headcount in the same window.

Same technology. Opposite decision. Only one group is growing.

💡 THE CUT THAT LOOKED LIKE SAVINGS

The mistake in my business case was the question I asked. I asked what the technology replaced. The right question was what the technology released.

When research and list building and first-draft sequencing stop consuming a person's day, you have not eliminated the person. You have freed roughly sixty percent of their week. What you do with that sixty percent is the entire decision, and there are only two options. You can hand it back to the income statement, or you can point it at work that was previously impossible to staff.

The companies that handed it back got what they asked for. Cost per qualified meeting dropped forty to sixty percent in the first ninety days, the line item shrank, and then pipeline flattened, because a smaller team running better tools eventually hits the ceiling of a smaller team.

The companies that pointed it at work bought something different. Account research that goes three layers deep on twenty accounts instead of one layer on two hundred. Real multithreading. Follow up that survives a buyer going quiet for five weeks. That work never got done before, not because nobody wanted it, but because no human had the hours. Now it is affordable, and the teams doing it are the ones hiring.

Automation did not make the headcount unnecessary. It made the headcount worth more. Most companies read the first half of that sentence and stopped.

🔧 THE REALLOCATION TEST

Whether you run a team or run your own territory, this is the audit.

1. Name the freed hours: Write down the tasks that took you ten hours a week two years ago and take you two now. Be specific and honest. Most sellers land somewhere between eight and fourteen hours.

2. Follow where they went: Look at last week's calendar and find those hours. If you cannot account for them, they went into more of the same activity, which is the invisible version of handing them back.

3. Name the impossible work: List the two things you have always known would move deals and never had time to do. Deep executive research. A real point of view on the buyer's industry. A quarterly business review nobody asked you for.

4. Book it before it evaporates: Put four of those freed hours on the calendar this week against one item from step three. Freed capacity that is not scheduled gets reabsorbed within a month, every single time.

🎯 THIS WEEK'S HOMEWORK

Find the hours automation gave you and physically schedule four of them against work you could not previously afford to do. Not more outreach. Work with a different shape. If you cannot find the hours on your calendar, you already gave them back and nobody told you.

❓ QUESTION OF THE DAY

How many hours a week did AI actually give you back, and what specifically is sitting in those hours now?

Reply with both. The second answer is the one that predicts your next two years.

See you tomorrow.

Edward

Founder, Morning Sales

P.S. Reallocating hours is easy to agree with and hard to execute, because the impossible work has no template. The 500 AI Sales Prompts manual is the library I built for that gap, covering deep account research, executive point of view, and stakeholder mapping, so the freed hours produce something instead of quietly refilling with email. 27 dollars: https://store.edwardgorbis.com