Anna Baird
Anna Baird joined Madrona in 2022 and advises fast-growing portfolio companies on go-to-market, finance and operations. She was most recently chief revenue officer and earlier COO at Outreach, spent 17 years at KPMG where she became a partner, and was an SVP at McAfee.
AI Adoption Drives Top Tech Firms to Hire More SDRs, Not Replace Them
Contrary to predictions that autonomous AI will replace sales development reps (SDRs), top companies — especially frontier tech firms — are increasing SDR headcount as they adopt AI, because automation augments rather than eliminates the need for human outreach. The article explains where automation succeeds and fails, the key AE-to-SDR metric to watch, how to detect gaming of conversion rates, and a domain risk that can undermine outbound programs.
Why AI Made Your Buyers Harder to Sell To
After leaving a long sales career, David Rubenstein spent a year meeting more than 300 founders across 41 countries and turned what he heard into a framework for how companies sell now. In this episode of Founded & Funded, David sits down with Madrona's Anna Baird and Eric Wong to dig into why AI left buyers with more information and less clarity, why deals stall out of fear rather than disinterest, and how founders can cut through. The conversation covers selling against build-it-yourself AI objections, the return of in-person selling, and why the founder's own brand is more important to…
Organizations
Education
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CSU, Fresno BS, Accounting
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Executive courses at Harvard and Wharton
