SaaStr 823: Is GTM Really Dead?! with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin

Is Go-To-Market Really Dead? The AI Era Perspective Welcome to the official SASTR podcast where you can hear some of the best SASTR speakers. This is where the cloud meets up today on the SASTR podcast. But here's The funny thing guys, if you look at who is running go to market at some of the hottest AI companies from Open AI to to Anthropic on down, you'll see folks that spoke at SASTR in the past few years. You will see the exact same people essentially running the same playbooks they ran before the AI explosion. Now, not identical, there are differences and we're going to chat about it, but literally they're the same people running somewhat upgraded versions of what worked. So here's my tough love message. A lot of things are not working quite as well as they did. Some things are working better. It's not that simple. We'll go through it. But if you think things are dead or a folks on your team are saying it's dead, or he Mumbles in the hallway that it's dead, I think it's you. I think it's you because just about everybody that is tapping into AI budget is reaccelerating. Hey everybody, it's saster. Connect data, automate busy work and empower teams like nobody's business with the one platform that grows with you every step of the way. Learn how Salesforce works for startups at salesforce.com/SMB. That's salesforce.com/SMB. Hey everybody, it's Saster. Finn is the number one AI agent for resolving complex queries like refunds, transaction disputes, and technical troubleshooting, all with speed and reliability. See how Finn can deliver the highest resolution rates and highest quality customer experience at Finn dot AI slash saster. That's FIN dot AI slash saster. Hey everybody, get excited. Saster AI London is this December, December 1st and 2nd and we're on track to completely sell out with the playbooks for AI and B to B Join 2000 plus BI and AI leaders for two days, two days of practical advice on scaling in the new year. We'll have speakers flying in from Open AI Whiz Play, Intercom Fin and all your favorite B to B companies, including yours truly with Harry Stebbins and more doing our live 20 BC podcast. It'll be fun all in the heart of London. Don't miss out, get your tickets. You can still go, go to podcast.sasterlondon.com. That's podcast.sasterlondon.com for special discount just for you. Good morning everybody. Welcome to Saster AI Live. I wanted to do something hopefully brief and specific, but then open it up to any questions you guys have on go to market sales and marketing today in the age of AI. And I really just wanted to hit on one thing. I'll give you I'll give you a whole bunch of points around it, but one thing because I just I, I see a little bit less of this on LinkedIn than I did six months ago, but man, I see way too much that go to market is dead, that outbound doesn't work anymore, that SEO is dead. What was me that and all this stuff just doesn't work in the old go to market toolkit. I would say last year was a little confusing for a variety of reasons that we'll get into. But here's The funny thing guys, If you look at who is running go to market at some of the hottest AI companies from Open AI to to Anthropic on down, you'll see folks that spoke at SAS in the past few years. You will see the exact same people essentially running the same playbooks they ran before the AI explosion. Now, not identical, there are differences and we're going to chat about it, but literally they're the same people running somewhat upgraded versions of what worked. So here's my tough love message. A lot of things are not working quite as well as they did. Some things are working better. It's not that simple. We'll go through it. But if you think things are dead or a focus on your team are saying it's dead or you hear Mumbles in the hallway that it's dead, I think it's you. I think it's you because just about everybody that is tapping into AI budget is reaccelerating now. You can see it everywhere. Notion just said they're reaccelerating at 500 million in AR as they launch their agents. Dial Pad and Talk Desk have added nine figures of incremental AR from their AI agents this year. All this NVIDIA Open AI money is trickling down to vendors that supply them. Datadog has accelerated because it sells to all those leaders, because it does all DevOps for open AI. There's just so much trickle down from this insane spending AI. The problem is you're not getting any of that spend. You're not getting into this spend. Others are. And we'll go through it. So is it dead, you know, Halloween's coming up or is it you? It's you. How AI Companies Leverage Traditional GTM Tactics OK, so a few examples and if you guys have questions, put them in the chat or save them up because I want to spend more time on questions and slides. But I wanted to present a few things. We've done a bunch of workshop Wednesdays and others, and we've got another post on this on SAS for this week on how we're using our AISDR. OK, and here's some data. Amelia put this together, but it almost doesn't matter what this is. Says This Is Us tuning up our AISDR. Yes, we replaced our human SDR team with an AI. Yes, we had to train it for a month. Yes, we have to train it for every day. But once we do it, it works. 12106 leads to saster from this, from 505,216 messages. That's pretty good, 136 responses. So that's a pretty high direct connect rate and 52 positive. Well, I guess somewhere negative or neutral, but this works. This is sending 5200 messages out and getting 52 folks that want to buy from us pretty good. Out of 1200 leads, really 52 out of 1200 is pretty high. Are there challenges? You know, first, we all, we all, you know, if we, let's be honest, a couple years ago we were loading up a bunch of random purchase names into sales loft and outreach in France and just spamming everybody in the same cadences. And we all saw that decline well before the age of AI. With AI it's worse because we're getting more of it. In fact, with AI is making more of more of it mediocre rather than terrible. It makes more of it mediocre. There's fewer typos, but it's still not very good. And yes, is that stuff performing worse? Yes. But send an e-mail and add value to the customer. They're going to open it. It's not dead. Outbound is not dead. It's you and your team true just a fun one Maggie Hot who's also coming to saster AI London in December be there that's going to share how open AI does it's go to market. I asked an AI version of her what are the top go to market things that that you do to top go to market tips and it's the same stuff I like this one. A lot of folks think pilots don't work anymore customers are are aren't paying our pilots aren't converting blah blah blah. Open AI does pilots now open AI, the hottest company on planet Earth argue another NVIDIA to close big deals. They have to do pilots. In fact, here's the thing folks, if you listen to if you listen to the recent 20 VC, Harry, Rory and I did with Marc Benioff, he wants to do more pilots. Everyone wants to is talking about forward deployed engineers. We could do a whole workshop Wednesday on that. But Mark had a good point. I asked him what he thought about Marc Benioff, what he thought about forward deployed engineers and he's like, I love it. I want to have my team, before customer even signs a contract, be in production with a great AI agent. I want it already working. The old school version of this is sort of try a pilot, sign the contract and maybe over 2 years we'll roll it out to everybody. Even Mark wants to go hard on day one, but they wanna do it. Pilots still work folks. So folks are saying it's not working. It's because they don't really want your product anymore, or at least they don't want more of it, which we'll chat about. OK, three. What about old school stuff like webinars and case studies? Man, those can't work. Well, here's Anthropic and Cursor partnering on a webinar to produce case studies. I mean, this stuff works. People discover you. They want social proof. They want to know who else is using your app. In fact, in many ways, all this stuff, in my experience, works better today than it did 18 to 24 months ago. Why? Well, we've seen a vendor explosion. I can't tell you how many times a day I get questions which AISDR should I use again? And I, I'm always like, we'll Google it. We did like 11 webinars on this. But I get it every day, OK, every day. And what is that? It's just, it's a birth of new discovery. Like for years our vendors were kind of fixed. Or should I do Salesforce or HubSpot for ZRM and show you Zoom info or Apollo? Now there's a hundred AI fueled vendors and and a lot of them are new. What should I use for video? Should I use Higgs field? Should I use RE for images? Companies you didn't even hear of 12 months ago. So people are doing more discovery than they have in our work lifetimes. And that's why this stuff helps because I want to know who else is using that app? Who else is using gamma? Who else is using Artisan? So webinars and case studies aren't a dated check. All the leading AI guys have got it all over the website and they're doing it with each other. OK, here's a a subtle one that's not so subtle brand. Why are all the AI leaders everywhere? Why are are Greg Jensen and Sam on the left here doing this this week? Why does I'm done from replit on Joe Rogan? I mean, you know, craziness and Austin, this aside, you know replit is in it brutally category. You know, replit's 1 to 150 million this year. I mean, pick your jaw off the table, but lovable's almost as fast Bolts, it's 60, we're not Wicks, but base 44 and they're growing almost as quickly. Now. This is a brutally competitive space. I just saw a new one, a new competitor launched on YC today. I just asked it to redo the SAS or London site better today. It did an OK job in about 5 minutes. There's so much competition and again when I'm deciding which product to use, I want constant reinforcement of who the winners are. Brand still matters. This stuff works. This is the go to go to market playbook. It may even be even more critical today when PLG and there's so much AI demand that we need more help making that decision quickly and may be more important than it's ever been because they're just aren't the same defaults. Why Low-Energy GTM Strategies Fail Today OK, another one here is here's Figma. Figma config thousands and thousands of its customers together. Events still work. In fact, if you talk to a lot of marketers at faster growing tech companies today, they're actually quietly doubling down on events if they can get their teams to do them because they know it works. Being in person with prospects and customers, they know it works. In an era of so many vendors and so much noise and so much confusion that connecting with people in person works better than ever. Some marketers are struggling that their team doesn't really want to do the work anymore. They don't want to build the booth, they don't want to show up, they don't want to spend the time. But it works better than ever. And you know, on the tech side, look at how many hackathons everyone's doing. Lovable, Bolt, Revenue Cat, everybody. You just, I mean, you can't walk 60 feet in San Francisco and not stumble into a hackathon morning, noon or night. I mean, they're everywhere. And there's a lot of things going on here. But it's also marketing. It's also marketing. Get folks building. The more folks you can get building on lovable, the more folks are going to stay with lovable events in IRL. They still work. OK, here's one that a lot of folks are complaining about on the LinkedIn too. OSE OS dead. You know I, I got all my customers from SEO. Well, let's slow down guys. OK, first of all, here's Saster itself. I honestly don't know why, but our SEO is up depending on where I look, 3X to 5X in the last 12 months. OK, it's just up it, it is up now other now it it is, is it perfect? Is ChatGPT and others also taking traffic away? Yes, both are happening. Both are happening and there's no question many leaders, if you look at what G2's saying, we just did, Amelia and Guillaume just did a saster session with with their CMO Sidney Sloan the other day. Their SEO is down, like parts of their SEO are down, but it's not zero guys. I don't know anyone that had like great SEO that wrote some of the most canonical best content teaching you how to do something really important who a year ago millions of people are reading it and today it's zero. I just don't know anybody. So one, it may not be down. OK, 2 sure, LLMS and chat GP are taking some of that adjust the world changes, but three, it still works. This, it still works. So if somebody's telling you woe is me, SEO is dead, it's just another excuse. It's you. It's you. You're not producing enough high quality content that the Internet wants to hear what you have to say. Produce great content. It works. And I actually think that's what's happening with Sasser on a variety of reasons. For what it's worth, if you look at this little chart on the right, I'd actually never looked at this data until like a month ago. That's what happens with a small team. But our average position in Google SEO is only 28. Like that's pretty bad. If if you talk to, you know, an SEO marketer, they want you to be #1 or #2 or #3 we are #1 or number two or three for some things, but overall we're 28. But actually, I think if you look at what everyone says out there, SEM Rush and others actually chat, CBT and friends benefit you if you have high authority, but you're lower, lower in Google because they don't care. They're just looking for the best piece of content to answer a question. So we've probably benefited from that, not because in the old days we had lots of, we were number one for how to hire AVP of sales, but saster's got 10,000 posts on just about everything, everything you could possibly imagine in DTM. So we're going up. So I'm sorry if you're outsourced agency content farm strategy from 2023 doesn't work today, but that doesn't mean SEO is dead, right? But let me summarize it and then dig into a few things that maybe are working differently today. One thing is clear and I have a lot of data I just shared on outbound and SEO and others. I don't have the perfect date here, but I can tell you from just about every startup I work worth or invest in or our own stuff is like crappy is working less good. Crappy is clearly working less good. Crappy Outbound, we don't want it, right? We're blocking folks crappy PR if you guys want, if you guys recognize that PR has changed like dramatically, but you want it, you want to be at SAS or you want to be on Joe Rogan, you want to be profiled. It's worse than ever because these AI tools have actually made mediocre PR so easy. I don't know, I used to get like a now I probably get 20 emails a day with stuff that's embargoed and mediocre and some AI that writes a pretty good e-mail saying that someone I've never heard of wants to be in our podcast. Like it's easier than ever to do crap and it's just not working right. The third thing, what I see, this is where I see so many, especially marketers struggle with CR OS too. The low energy crap that still kind of worked a few years ago. The the, the cloned boring campaigns that that, that there's no reason I would go low energy stuff, incredibly boring events with recycled speakers, boring digital events. It just doesn't work. Like we don't, we don't. We've lost patience for the 11 thousandth thing or the 10 thousandth ROI calculators aren't good enough. So I definitely think running the same in many ways, running the same playbook from two or three years ago with less energy, you would think it nothing works because that stuff don't work, at least not in my experience. Audit and Optimize: The Remixed AI GTM Playbook So here's a couple challenges to think about. Some of the sounds Captain Obvious, but I got to tell you, I don't see enough people doing it. If you think something's not working, instead of complaining or giving up on it or investing this energy, what about making it awesome? What about making it awesome? Audit. Just like we've said on Saster for the better part of the decade, you have to read your sales team's emails because they're probably terrible. Even today, they're terrible. Even with AI, they're probably terrible. Slow down and audit everything. OK, make it awesome. So for example, we've done a bunch of sessions on our AI agents. Amelia's done a bunch with Gamma, which we're super fans of. And one of the things that Gamma lets us do is take our own sales collateral that we use for SASR events. And we have to close 10 + 1,000,000 of SASR sponsors just to keep the lights on because our events are so expensive. That's our annual 10,000 people. We got to, we do have to close some sales and we, you know, we used to have a terrible prospectus that we would finish like four months late. Then we had something that was OK. Then we made it really, really good and polished. It took and we had a designer do it, but then it was static for you. Like we couldn't really change much. And then sometimes someone on their sales team would use an old one or they would move it around or break it. It was terrible. Now we use Gamma which does dynamic decks with AI it's and everyone gets a custom deck now. Now, sometimes there are a few downsides. The what we can do with design is not quite as great as we can do with the designer. But if someone wants a booth in this, we instantly tell them how does the booth work? What's the ROI, Who are similar sponsors, who are similar people that have been doing it? Everyone, instead of getting an OK piece of collateral, get something awesome. Make your collateral awesome, make your outbound awesome, right? Ask yourself if this stuff's actually any good. It's probably not any good. Ask yourself if you would take that meeting, if you would go to that webinar, dust it off. Get the best person from the hottest customer you have to come to. You do your webinar. No one wants to go to the low energy stuff. Try making it awesome. OK, just a few more points. The it's not though. If you look at the hottest sort of AIB to B and AI startups, it's not that they're running different playbooks, but they are remixed. They are different and a few obvious points, but it's worth bringing up how they are different. I would say almost if you look at most of the hottest AI fuel B to B companies, many of them have the sales motion right. The whole the whole open AI presentation from Maggot annual and the one she's going to update in London. It's all about how the go to market team and sales team works, right? There are plenty of sales teams at Anthropic. There are plenty of sales, sales folks at Open AI, but it many of them there's fewer. So we had the Chief business officer of Perplexity at SAS or this year you can read the post hit five folks on the sales team, 5 folks on the sales team. The sales teams, there are sales teams at Repple and Lovable and Bolt and others, but they're small. We're gonna have an upcoming session with Versal, their their chief business officer. They have one human SDR and 10 agents. OK, so the teams are often smaller, but it doesn't mean they're not working. It's just it's just AI fueled and the Third Point, and this is confusing. What's going on. I mean, you're like, you turn around and you're like, Oh my God, how did how did replica go from 1 to 150 million? And how did Hicksville go from, you know, zero to 50 million in five months and gamma 60 million this year from nothing? It's like there must be these great marketers or great. No, I what they have, and I know this is obvious, is this is just the strongest demand and PLG we've ever had. They're just running PLG on steroids. They're trying to do everything, create some virality, create brand awareness, create this and that to keep the engine going. But if you can provide insane value with AI and B to B and you can get the word out, the demand may be insane. So that is different and fueling that demand is different, but it's ultimately deep down to just PLG on steroids. And again, my last challenge to you, when you when you scratch your head and you look around at these folks that are that are running circles around you just realize it's like, do it, go on LinkedIn and see who's who's their head of sales, who's their head of marketing. You're going to see folks that worked it wherever Brex and Rippling and Ramp and Datadog and Mongo. You're not gonna see folks that have been doing AI since they were in grammar school or anything like that. You're gonna be seeing folks again. You're gonna if you look at half of the top SAS for executives that is presented at annual and online over the last decade. Most of the best ones are still in the game, but many of them are at the hottest AI companies. So it's it's not like they've created an LLM on their own, right? It's not, it's not a lot of the stuff they're running versions of the same playbook. But this PLG poll is insane. Unlocking Enterprise AI Budgets with Instant ROI OK, so just a couple points to summarize and then then I'll take questions on. So that's what's the same but on steroids. What's not working and what's different? I know a lot of you know this, but it's worth slowing this down. One, we just talked about it, so I won't spend more time, but the demand for these high ROIAA products is insane. It is insane. And I can just tell you what some of the ones we use they're because we can do something incredibly valuable we could not do before. So we spend a couple 100 bucks a month on Replict. Now what do we have? A new saster AIA, new homepage, a new saster valuation calculator that anyone can use to value startups. We've had over 300,000 people use it in five weeks, 300,000 valuations, maybe not maybe fewer people, but 300,000 valuations. We just launched an AI that reviews your VC pitch decks. It's free. It it's pretty awesome. What we should cross 1000 folks have used it by the weekend. So you know the the like gamma at first when gamma came out for for decks, I'm like I said to Emilia, Oh, this is like a cool AI tool for decks, right? I didn't totally get it, but it's not just a better PowerPoint or Google Slides or Canva. No, it lets us create dynamic decks for sponsors for sales we could never do before. That's a new use case. It's like super powerful or the videos we make on Higgs field. So This is why, and I have this at the end, This is why copilots are like a failure. No one wants to pay for the Office Copilot that does a little bit extra for another 20 bucks a month. They want something that does something incredibly powerful and very meaningful with almost instant ROI. But if you have that, the demand is like we've never seen before. This is sort of end user demand. The second point, which I know everybody knows, but I see too many people still banging their head against the wall in the enterprise Oregon, once you're budgeted, once you, once you're at the CIO or even in an SME, a bigger company, there's budget and listen to anybody on the Internet, any CIO out there, they're going to tell you the same thing. I'm, and actually, there's too much demand for AI tools across my organization. There's too much demand. I, I don't even know what to do today, but I can't turn it off today. Everyone wants more AI tools across my company, but I'm still cutting the efficiency tools. I've still got 200 classic SAS tools for pipeline management and this and that. I want to end the year with 200 or less. And even worse, Salesforce just raised prices again the other day. Everyone's raising prices. Zoom just raised prices again, everyone's raising prices. So they want to hold the line on the efficiency budget in software. But even worse, even if there is any extra budget, it's all being taken up by price increases, which what does that mean for you? Again, if all your app is is an ROI calculator, If all it is is you're trying to show how to make the sales teams 10% more efficient, that was the game in 2021. No one has any budget or interest in that today, no matter how great your app is, there just isn't any budget at the CIO office. It's all being consumed by AI and price increases. Listen, if you break out and do something no one's ever done before, you'll get budget. But that's really no different than AI. There's still always experimentation and new budget, but there just isn't any budget for another 20 sales tools today. There just isn't OK. And the last point, why so many folks aren't getting AI budget out there, If I look across startups I work with or invested in is it just has to work. It just has to work. And This is why so many mediocre copilots, so many sort of pseudo AI or hey, we added a little bit to our app. It just doesn't work like the, you know, the classic B to B was, hey, you know, this is going to create efficiency in your company. Try it a little bit. And then over the over a year, you'll see it roll out across the org. Now, there's still some truth in that in AI apps, but we're expecting magic upfront and going back to all forward deployed engineer Marc Benioff's point, we're expecting the vendor to do most of the work to train this app and to get huge ROI upfront. I mean, we were again, we, we essentially replaced 2 human SDR's with our AISDR. But it's not that simple. It's not just paying money and walking away. It's a lot of work and it has to work or there's no point in it. So you could kind of a sales team and a little bit of marketing fluff could promise a lot of efficiency benefits in the old days. No longer. You've got to deliver this ROI almost instantly. That's what everyone's expecting. So no lame Co pilots. If you if you're wondering why your product isn't growing fast from the age of AI, you have a lame copilot that doesn't change the game almost on day 0. Even Marc Benioff wants to do that. He doesn't know how he had today, but even he wants to do that. Reaccelerate Your Business by Tapping AI Budgets So by last I know slightly annoying kick in the arse and then we can take questions if if we have any Amelia. But be honest, everyone that has something good today in B to B that can tap into AI budgets, OK, one way or another, Either they can tap direct like at that prosumer level where there's just end user demand, or they can tap into it at the CI OS budget because it provides that value. They're all getting lifts. And I think if you talk to any investor and I just had this conversation at YC Demo Day, you'll hear the same thing. They'll tell you, look, half of my companies, my pre AIB to B companies are accelerating now. Half of them are accelerating and half aren't. And it's not just again, a lame copilot or adding, you know, a little AI calculator, It's fundamentally adding insane more value than you can do before that taps into AI budget. So if that's not you hit hit, it's almost too late, but it's not hit. Stop, hit pause and figure out what what's changing in the industry and tap into this budget and look at this fun one on the right. This company file Vine CEO has been part of the saster community for 10 years. So over a 10 year old company doing case management for law firms always had product market fit. He reached out to me over the years. The numbers were always strong, but but it was an ordinary vertical SAS company. And then boom, they just leaned in and legal deep, deep on how to change case management with AI. Now it's worth 3 billion and it's accelerating and I think the founder's going to come to London in December and and share how they really did it for real, how they really AI natified A10 plus year old product. But if you do it, the budget's there. You do it the budget there. It's there for Notion, it's there for File Vine, even stuffs that are hard, you know, Intercom said Finn as a standalone product has already crossed 50 million. OK, it'd be nice if it was 500 million, but that's from zero to 50 million by leaning into where the budget is, right, Dial Paddock said they're accelerating earlier this year, 300 million, right? It does work, but don't pretend if you're not seeing re acceleration now in in the end of 2025, it is you, you are not tapping into where the budgets and customers are in the age of AI. So go, go figure it out before, before it's too late. Deep Dive: AI SDR Training, Monitoring, and Human Replacement So that's just my my analysis of why it's all still working. So I don't know if we have any questions, Emilia, but we could, we could open it up if we do. Speaker 2 Yeah, First question, I know we covered in a bit, but I think it's an interesting nuance. So the question from Cheryl is about our faster AISDR agent that we use. We've got a few. Can you share more about what you trained it on? Was it only past successful emails? Did it go through an exercise to identify what it did look like? I'll give my take on it real quick just having trained the agents a bit and then just can share his learnings on it too. I think the interesting nuance here, even though we've covered this is that you actually don't, you can't or totally don't upload your good emails to any of these AI and CR platforms. Like literally none of them that I've looked at, none of the ones that we use, even some of our AI agents that do like meetings, bookings with our inbound didn't ask us what like good outbound or what good inbound look like. So I think that's kind of maybe the counterintuitive learning. None of these really do that when you train them like that's almost a like prior to 2025 way of thinking about, you know, how if I'm going to train a person, right, if that's a, if that's an outbound SDR, I'm going to train them on all the best sales calls. I'm going to get all the best gone calls, whatever it is. I'm going to find all the best e-mail from our team, train this person on that so that they can duplicate that. And where the AI is fundamentally different, it doesn't necessarily need to know these things or want to know these things to bias the AI because it's going to make it a lot more personalized to whatever's going on with that person today to add value. So the way we train our AIFDRS specifically for outbound is I never loaded into the platform. OK, here's some of our past very good outbound emails. Honestly, they're fine. But you look at your past outbound emails that like eventually led to close one deals from a human SDR, I'm like, they're always just OK, like they were, they're OK. And then the AISDR, what we trained it on and said was not what a good look like. We just trained it on OK, here are different personas. Here are core personas. We trained it on our core personas. We trained it on OK based on past knowledge, what do we think would be the best way to add value to them? Train the AI on that. The AI will scrape any of these tools will scrape what they're doing now, right? It's going to look at their LinkedIn profile. It's going to look at their website. It's going to look at any funding news. It's going to look at any announcements they've done. It's going to look at their company exit account. It's going to look at their personal LinkedIn. It's going to look at their professional company LinkedIn. And so when you train it on based on adding value, that's where the bulk of the training is. It's not what good looks like necessarily. Now you could argue that because you're training it so much on adding value, that is what good looks like, sure, but it's different than traditional like, hey, let me upload to the AI platform a little screenshot. You know that Mikey did fatigue to book a deal. It's training it on adding value to the customer and then letting it do its magic, which is it can scrape all these data signals in a way that no human can right like that I can't the Jason can't. But no, no human SDR that you ever hire will ever be able to do because they don't have access to all these datas and insights and Chad and Claude and whatever to go see what this person is doing, right. And so that's where it will then formulate a sequence for you to reach out to this person on a way more personalized level. And I think, again, the nuance there is that good looks different to every single person, right? And versus training it on like what good may look like for five personas, you're basically teaching the AI how to get it good for the thousands of people versus just like 10 emails are pretty good and the rest are great. Speaker 1 That's a good that is a good inside that the one thing I, I I think got layered on top of that one, those great emails are the past, right? They're helpful, but there's relatively smaller data point than you might think, right? Two, you're ingesting lots of signals, right, almost in real time. But three, here's the thing that I didn't get until the other day until a new platform was demoed to me. It's Captain Obvious, but they're all running multi variant tests. So The thing is 1 it's great that you have one e-mail, but they're running 3456 different a tasks and then they're iterated and then they're attempting to personalize it, right? You can put multiple, you can run multiple tasks in a way it's no humans ever going to do, right? I've never met a human SDR that can run 5 multi variant versions of an e-mail and iterated and make an improvement and see how it interacts with signals. They're just cutting and pasting often in three different colors in two different fonts, right? So the the training is as much about the iteration of the data that comes out of it as it is all the history of what's worked in the past. That's a pretty that's a non intuitive and pretty small part of it. Would you agree with that? Speaker 2 Yeah, I would say so. It's a combination of thinking about it as it's going to take probably the same amount of time as it would to train a human being, but the training is not the same, right? Like in the way that you would train a human STR on good emails, good calls, you know what brand, right? It's much different on how you're telling an AI to go about and do this because it has just so much data. Often times I find myself telling our AIS to keep it simple, right? Like add value and like, here's my laundry list of things you could say. And you do want to put in all these variables because again, goodwill look different and custom to each every single person versus like bucket. But at the end of the day, like you want to arm it with those things, but like it will decide for you, right? A lot of these AI platforms, especially for outbound, you can put in like I think we have like 20 different things than ours in right now that it could pull up on. If I want to try and book a meeting for sale, there's like 20 different data points from SAS sponsors literally in the last like 2 months, But I'm not going to tell it, hey, use that one when you're outbounding dial pad. Use this one when you're outbounding Zoom. I let it decide it and it will decide it based on what they're talking about, right? So that's just another nuance. And like we, we're overtly explicit to all of our AIS that we always wanted to add value. And so we've set it up to be very conservative on how much it talks about saster and we keep it simple and we typically talk about them a bit more and then it surfaces some of the sats of how we can help them. OK, cool. Matt, there's the next question, which is related. A few folks have asked what are we driving towards with the AISDR? Is it a meeting with an AE? Speaker 1 One small point out there's there's so much we could talk about here that it isn't I don't you know, the on the qualified side, right on essentially the, the, the inbound, right. What I really like that. And and again, there are a lot of things you you you could do this pre IR with other tools. It's just much better now. Is that now the it's not perfect, but the AI will qualify the prospect on its own right. So there's nothing I hate more than a qualification step, which is not with the seller, right? It's just awful. So we don't do that anymore. And then as it does it without without seeing obnoxious, it then does create the appointment and sets up the meeting and puts it in the calendar of the Rep, right? That's a huge positive rather than, you know, even today in 2025, I can't tell you how many times I inbound to a vendor and it's like a week before I can get a meeting set or someone tries to qualify me out. It's just unacceptable today, right? I mean, literally there's a vendor, there's a, there's a pretty cool tool, a niche tool that I literally love. I hadn't seen anyone automate this before. So I, I reached out to them on Twitter and I said, listen, if you can get this to work for me, I'll be, I'll be in your homepage. Like I will tell everyone to buy your product. It's so great. And then a week later I get Adm from the CEO. What happened? I mean, what do you mean what happened? You did nothing. He's like, oh, we emailed you. I'm like, I don't know who on your team said they emailed you, but like, I got no emails. It was a week later and he's like, and then finally the CEO sends me the e-mail himself. I'm like I I love you, but that last week I'm I'm too busy. You lost your window, right? So if you if that that tragedy you can eliminate instantly with AI like that should not happen. The the stealth qualification. You can pull all the data. You can pull all the signals you can. It'll hook up all the data on the API. Don't really know who you are right for the for the company for us, right. That meeting should be set in real time. Like they just lost me. I might do this in a month or two, but like I'm pretty busy until after Halloween now. So they lost their like super fan customer like I would have been there, you know, and if we really back somebody at SAS, so we're not perfect, but we do have reach and we do it because we believe in it. Not not for any other reason. When we back someone hard it, you know it, it works. So I missed opportunity today. I can instantly solve. So a niche point, but that's one of the things I love about it, right? There's no cut, no prospects left behind, no prospect is left behind, and I can't tell you how many sales motions I see participated in watch where anything other than the easiest low hanging leads even in 2025 are left behind. And there's just no excuse. Speaker 2 Yep, there's a few related questions. We're all of your AI agents trained on the data aggregated from over the years? Or was it new data? So like far outbound and we're trying to get questions in the chat on like how we train our outbound like amount agents different differently. Again, if you remember, inbound is much higher intent. They're coming to your website. They probably already have a sense of what you do. They're there for different use cases. So we've trained them much differently on one versus the other. So I'm seeing that question come up now, but just to the point on the data of what we trained our AIFCRS on, our inbound agent is trained on a lot more than our outbound, which again maybe sounds counterintuitive for folks as you would, you'd think, OK, don't I need, don't I need it to know more to do outbound because it's cold, they don't know me as well. And maybe, but like honestly what we found is keeping it simple and adding value. So historical data has nothing to do with that like adding value to a person. Sure. Is it nice to know that they sponsored before or that they came to saster? Yes. And some of our outbound does does do that. But honestly, I found people switch companies so often, especially in B to B at SAS that a lot of the context we give our AI is almost useless because we have 13 years of data. But this person may have just started at Cursor Anthropic and they don't know that they spoke. It's after annual this year. They may not know all these things. And so for us, we try and again we've tuned ours like all the way to the Max on the slider of adding value to the person versus it talking about faster from like historic context or what we've done with them on outbound. It bounds a lot different, like if they're coming to us, we've determined that as a signal of, OK, they're coming to us, they're having a conversation with us. In that case, because they're coming to us, maybe it is actually more beneficial to have our AI fill them in on other things their company's doing. And typically it'll be like, OK, your company's attended in the past, you sponsored in the past, but also, hey, did you know your company's like been on our website a lot lately. Those kinds of signals are a lot better on an inbound where they already kind of know you and you're filling in the blanks versus like trying to educate them more so on the outbound side. Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a good, that's a great, that's, that's the great answer right there. Very minor, but it's interesting. We, you know, we do, we do use this app called Delphi as our general AI agent, right. It's the first one we did. It is trained on 20 million words of SAS for content. It's updated almost in real time everyday. So this will be in, this will be automatically ingested into that general AI later today. Everything I wrote today will be ingested. So it is updated, but it was interesting. I wrote up this week, the CEO came even gave a presentation on a million chats between my AI Brian Halligan's from HubSpot, Keith Raboy and and Lenny's and the the the captain of one of the many captain obvious learnings was the value radically declines after X months. Like the old stuff that Brian did, the old stuff that I did, there is value there, right? But you almost want to re promote it and edit it, which we do on Sasser. I edit old content and update it because the value in that agent of old content is very, very low. So. Just like Amelia said, you don't need a trillion great emails that worked in the past. Just one or two is enough to get this multi variant engine going, right? You, you may need a smaller body of higher quality recent content to make this work then as large a body as you think. And a lot of folks have have come to our events in the past that Oh well, we could never catch up with SAS. Or you have 20 million words of content. Well, the Delphi example is probably you don't really need 20 million, right. You might need 20,000 great words of content that are recent on your product. It might be enough to make the AI great. You don't really need what and we got this wrong in the beginning because we, we were very early here and we had our general agent everywhere. It was set, it was qualifying accidentally, it was doing customer support, it was asking founder questions and it was so good. And it was calling back some old stuff. But I think we missed the fact that it, it wasn't, it was a little bit great because it has 20 million words of content, but it was especially good just because we were keeping it constantly updated every day with three to four new pieces of relevant content. I think that was more powerful than the long tail and I I got that wrong. Speaker 2 Yeah. Last question earlier on this topic, question from Kelly. With how much time do we spend monitoring the AISDRS interactions with customers and prospects? Is it more or less than human? Speaker 1 It's more, right. There's so much resistance to sharing data, inputting data. Emilia may see it differently that because it's all measurable and we can see it. We spend much more time just because it's, it's it's visible. One other cap and obvious comment. I was watching a a demo the other day of the next generation AISDR product that is designed for new founders that haven't done sales to take none of their time up right. This is the next generation idea. It's interesting, but the, the, the and what the reason I bring that up is if I think about if I think about one of the reminders from AISDRS is founders especially vastly underestimate the amount of management time it takes for human sales reps They that they don't understand how much time a good VP of sales and my God, AVP of outbound or SDR development spends with their team. It's a mammoth amount of time. And so in that founder run state, founder LED stage, very few folks can survive in that environment without enough oversight and coaching and therapy from they just don't. You just don't have enough time. And you can do a lot of this with AI. In fact, you could probably do almost 100% of STR, but you got to put in more time because you weren't putting in enough. Wait until you have a human great STRI mean sales leader. You will see they're spending so much time coaching, fixing, backfilling, reading, reviewing, listening to their team and no founders have the time to put into it. So you're going to have to make more time to Amelia's point to get this right, not less. This is you will get more benefits, but you do not get time back. You lose time. You lose time with these agents. Speaker 2 Yep, there's a, there's more of a comment with real question in the chat and then maybe we can break on any final thoughts. But Felicia has said some of the problem too with training humans versus a is, is that you'll train them, you'll invest in them, and then a few months they'll leave you for a quote, UN quote better company, which my comment back was unless you cancel your contract for your AI agents, it's not going to leave you willingly so. Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, this is one of the things I talked about, but I think people miss. We talked about it. We want AI to like, we want to press a button, have it do things we we can't find people for, right? We want to do that. And we wanted to produce massive uplifts in revenue. You know, the reason we got started on the saster journey. And I think people are missing this million. I didn't want to use AI to to to make saster better. We wanted to use AI because people kept quitting that didn't want to do the work. The reason we replaced our human SDRS with AIS is not because we didn't. We asked them all to stay, but after a couple years, they didn't want to do it. They all went off and wanted to be VPS of sales and typically failed almost immediately or other things, but they just didn't want to do the job and it was exhausting to replace them. And so we just started replacing different humans and then our content team like got tired of reviewing 2000 speaker sessions each year, so they quit on us. And so we replace that with an AI. And so we didn't do this to increase revenue or to save money. We did it because we were burnt out with people just just with change and especially post 2022 change. And so that's a start. But what's really the next wave, next year is there just aren't enough people that want to do the type of work we need them to do. It's hard. People don't want to do it anymore. Young and medium old, retired. It's just the honest truth. And so we're going to be using more. We are, we're early on this on Saskar. We're all going to be using these AI tools, not so much because they're better, but because they are there, because they work, because they don't quit, because you, you can't find the humans. You can't find anyone that's good enough to be worth giving those precious leads to. Leads are precious for many, many, many years, and it's better to give a precious lead to an to AB plus AI than to give it to someone in sales that's going to quit, not show up or screw up the deal. That's what's happening. We're going to use AI to replace the roles that people don't want to do. Even if they pretend they want to do a LinkedIn, they don't want to do it. And that's why it's going to radically accelerate the next 24 months. So thanks everybody for all the time. We'll do another one of these very soon. You didn't create a startup to run a small business. Let Salesforce help you connect data, automate busy work, and empower employees on the only platform you will ever need. No matter how big you get with smarter AI and built in collaboration tools like SoC, which we use and you use, the sky is the limit. Learn how Salesforce works for startups at salesforce.com/SMB. That's salesforce.com/SMB.