Today’s plays › All plays › Prospecting & research
Run a 30-day AI pilot on one SDR workflow and measure only outcomes
Picked and checked by Olga Pearson, SalesUpLevel
Get tomorrow’s play in your inbox. Free ↓
Reported after 30 days: account research time down 56%, outbound volume up 18%, meetings booked up 22%. Prep went from about 12 minutes to 3 minutes per account.
Most AI pilots "prove curiosity". Kill every idea but one, write a hypothesis with a number, get v1 live in 10 days inside the tool reps already use, track three outcomes only, and have managers ask about it in pipeline meetings. His acronym: PLAN (Prioritize one lever, Launch in weeks, Adoption in live workflows, Normalize only after ROI).
By Jake Dunlap (LinkedIn /in/jakedunlap), CEO, Skaled Consulting; host, AI-Powered Seller podcast · Jake Dunlap on LinkedIn ↗ · Apr 6, 2026
If you sell: run it before your 10am
- Pick one workflow that eats time (his: SDRs spent 8 to 10 hours a week on manual account research).
- Write the hypothesis: cut research 50%, so more touches per rep, so meetings +10%.
- Put the AI brief inside the workflow reps already use; live in 10 days, not perfect.
- Track only: time saved per account, outbound volume per rep, meetings booked. Not logins.
- Weeks 3 to 4: managers ask in pipeline meetings "Did you use the AI brief? How much time did it save?"
- Day 30: scale it, fix it or kill it.
Research [company website] and [contact LinkedIn URL] for a cold outreach. In under 150 words give me: what the company does and sells, 2 recent changes (news, hiring, funding, leadership) with links, the likely priority for a [contact title], one reason to reach out now that connects to [what we sell], and one opening question. Mark anything you could not confirm with a link as "unverified".
If you lead a team: roll it out
- Use the PLAN checklist before approving any AI tool spend: one problem, one owner, one metric, one decision date.
Watch out for
- A consulting client's results told by the consultant; client unnamed; 30 days, one team.
- Skaled sells this kind of work, so it doubles as marketing.
Source: Jake Dunlap, Jake Dunlap on LinkedIn, Apr 6, 2026. Results are as reported by the source; we did not measure them.
Get tomorrow’s play before your first call
Free. One sourced play a day.