We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here's what happened next | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)

Jason Lemkin · 1h 42m · youtube.com ↗

24 korrents from this recording

Jason Lemkin did not write this page.

Every claim below is a statement made in this recording, quoted word for word and linked to the second it was said, so you can hear it rather than take our word for it. The wording comes from the transcript published alongside the recording; the sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording.

0:00:30 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
AI is not taking the jobs people wanted; it is taking the jobs nobody wanted and the careers of everyone who is merely average.

Their wordsAI is replacing the jobs people don't want to do today, and it is displacing the midpack and the mediocre.
9 min later
0:09:33 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
AI sales agents do not work out of the box; the training is the product.

Their wordsI think it's important that it takes time to train these agents. They don't work out of the box.
9 min later
0:18:09 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
In many software categories more than half of all prospects are now in market at once, against a historical three to five percent.

Their wordsSo, add all that up, 5%. In many categories, we're north of 50% in market. So, that just totally changes.
2 min later
0:19:47 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The email-based sales development rep will be ninety percent displaced by AI within a year.

Their wordsThe emailbased cadence SDR will be 90% displaced by AI next year.
0:19:58 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Having a human qualify inbound leads is already obsolete, and the role should be extinct within a year.

Their wordsThe contact mess that we see, we have no need for them today. They should be extinct next year.
9 min later
0:29:11 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Almost nobody should build their own AI go-to-market tools; buy them, the way you would buy any other software.

Their wordsDon't build it yourself. You're not Versel. You don't have a full-time wicked awesome engineer that wants to build this.
7 min later
0:35:43 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Choosing an AI vendor on features is the wrong criterion: the best software with nobody to help you train it is the wrong purchase for almost everyone.

Their wordsbecause you have to train them because it takes a month, the world's best software with no help training you is not one 99% of people should buy.
2 min later
0:37:24 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
You need far less scale than you think for AI sales agents to pay for themselves.

Their wordsYou don't need the scale of numbers that you and I have to make these agents work. You need you need a little bit of scale and you need a little bit of traffic, but not as much as you think.
3 min later
0:40:47 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The real cost of an agent workforce is that it never stops: agents work nights, weekends and holidays, and somebody has to review all of it.

Their wordsit's exhausting because agents work all night and they work weekends and they work on Christmas.
1 min later
0:42:00 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The next constraint on AI adoption is not what the agents can do but how many of them a company can absorb.

Their wordsAnd so that's going to be a headwind that today everything seems like it has tailwinds, right? Everything's on fire. But people are going to get exhausted for having so many agents.
2 min later
0:44:20 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
A badly written AI outbound email is evidence of a bad vendor, not of a limit of AI.

Their wordsAnd so what ends up happening is the emails that the AI write are pretty good. Okay? If you're getting terrible emails, it's a poorly trained product from a bad vendor.
1 min later
0:45:46 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Recipients do not care whether a sales email was written by an AI, so there is no point disclosing or disguising it.

Their wordsAnd what we've learned is now we just send it. We We just send it and no one cares.
1 min later
0:47:15 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The bar an AI go-to-market agent has to clear is lower than people think, because it only has to beat the average rep.

Their wordsThe bar for good enough for AI GTM is not as high as we think.
5 min later
0:52:28 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Everything closes at a higher rate in person, and tech sales is automating anyway.

Their wordsWe should knock on more doors. We should do more in person. All the data I've ever collected shows everything closes at a higher rate if you go in person.
2 min later
0:54:23 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The person who orchestrates a company's AI agents has to be promoted from inside, and it will not be someone from sales.

Their wordsyou've got to promote someone internally. It's got to be a nerd, someone that likes marketing and sales and is quant.
6 min later
1:00:36 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
AI is raising what a single sales rep is expected to produce by an order of magnitude.

Their wordsWith AI, he's trying he's targeting 3 to five million in revenue per rep. 3 to 5 million. Honestly, if this was three or four years ago for a similar company, it would be 3 to 500K. That's an order of magnitude more efficiency.
2 min later
1:02:20 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Running a business on AI agents is more work than running it on people, not less.

Their wordsWe do more work with AI. I'm working the hardest I've ever worked.
4 min later
1:06:36 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The forward-deployed engineer inverts the old sales-engineer model: their first job is the customer's success, not supporting the reps.

Their wordsThis is inverted. The FDE's number one job is to make the customer a success.
3 min later
1:09:58 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
AI will not give every salesperson superpowers; it will give the best ones superpowers and make the mediocre ones more mediocre.

Their wordsa lot of old school GTM leaders are like, you know, AI isn't going to hurt sales reps. It's just going to make them give them superpowers. The best ones, yes, the mediocre are just going to be like more mediocre, right?
1:10:13 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Being a people person is no longer a sufficient qualification for a sales job.

Their wordswe will always have salespeople, but being a people person is not enough anymore.
6 min later
1:16:29 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
AI will leave the world needing more go-to-market people than ever, because the winners grow faster than the efficiency gains.

Their wordsNet net, we're going to need more sales and go to market professionals than ever because the winners are growing so quickly that even if they're more efficient, they will need more human beings than ever.
9 min later
1:25:33 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The way to find where AI belongs in your company is to go through your own product anonymously and see which part makes you cry.

Their wordsgo fire up your browser. Do it in incognito. Go to your app and do everything with a fresh Gmail address. Try support. See how your support is. Try to contact sales.
5 min later
1:30:50 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The go-to-market plays all still work; it is the playbooks built around them that have stopped working.

Their wordsSo, so many of these GTM books are playbooks, especially folks selling courses and stuff, but they're playbooks. Run from the playbooks. Embrace the plays.
6 min later
1:36:58 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
It is still early in AI go-to-market: the markets have not hardened and the good tools do not exist yet.

Their wordsWe don't even have great AI marketing tools. We're really early on these AIS SDRs. The markets have not hardened.