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 OpenAI to Anthropic on down, you'll see folks that spoke at SaaStr 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 if folks 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 re-accelerating.
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Good morning, everybody. Welcome to SaaStr 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 a whole bunch of points around it, but one thing, because I just 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, woe is me, that 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 OpenAI to Anthropic on down, you'll see folks that spoke at SaaStr 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 if folks 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 re-accelerating now.
You can see it everywhere. Notion just said they're re-accelerating at $500 million in ARR as they launched their agents. Dialpad and Talkdesk have added nine figures of incremental ARR from their AI agents this year. All this NVIDIA, OpenAI money is trickling down to vendors that supply them. Datadog has accelerated because it sells to all those leaders, because it does all of DevOps for OpenAI. There's just so much trickle-down from this insane spend in 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.
Okay, 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 than 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 SaaStr this week on how we're using our AI SDR. Okay. And here's some data. Amelia put this together. But it almost doesn't matter what this says. This is us tuning up our AI SDR. 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 every day. But once we do it, it works. 206 leads to SaaStr from this, from 5,216 messages. That's pretty good. 136 responses. So that's a pretty high direct connect rate, and 52 positive. Well, I guess some were negative or neutral, but this works. This is sending 5,200 messages out and getting 52 folks that want to buy from us. Pretty good out of 206 leads. Really, 52 out of 206 is pretty high.
Are there challenges? You know, first, we all, you know, if we let's be honest, a couple years ago, we were loading up a bunch of random purchased names into Salesloft and Outreach and friends 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, AI is making 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 email 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.
Two, just a fun one. Maggie Hott, who's also coming to SaaStr AI London in December, be there, that's going to share how OpenAI does its go-to-market. I asked an AI version of her, what are the top go-to-market things that you do? 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 aren't paying. Our pilots aren't converting. Blah blah blah. OpenAI does pilots now. OpenAI, the hottest company on planet Earth, arguing over video to close big deals, they have to do pilots.
In fact, here's the thing, folks. If you listen to this, if you listen to the recent 20VC Harry, Rory, and I did with Marc Benioff, he wants to do more pilots. Everyone is talking about forward-deployed engineers. We could do a whole Workshop Wednesday on that. But Marc had a good point. I asked him what he thought about forward-deployed engineers, and he's like, I love it. I want to have my team, before a 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 two years we'll roll it out to everybody. Even Marc wants to go hard on day one, but they want to do it. Pilots still work, folks. So if 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.
Okay. 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 AI SDR should I use again? And I'm always like, well, Google it. We did like 11 webinars on this. But I get it every day. Okay. Every day. And what is that? It's just a birth of new discovery. Like for years, our vendors were kind of fixed. Oh, should I do Salesforce or HubSpot for CRM? And should I use ZoomInfo or Apollo?
Now there's a hundred AI-fueled vendors, and a lot of them are new. What should I use for video? Should I use HeyGen? Should I use Reef 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 dated. Check all the leading AI guys. They've got it all over the website, and they're doing it with each other.
Okay, here's a subtle one that's not so subtle. Brand. Why are all the AI leaders everywhere? Why are Greg Jensen and Sam on the left here doing this this week? Why is Amjad from Replit on Joe Rogan? I mean, you know, craziness and Austinness aside, you know, Replit is in a brutally competitive space. Bolt's at 60. Wix, believe it or not, Wix bought Base44, 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 SaaStr London site better today. It did an okay job in about five 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-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 maybe more important than it's ever been because there just aren't the same defaults.
Okay, another one. Here's Figma. Figma convenes 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 and IRL, they still work.
Okay, here's one that a lot of folks are complaining about on LinkedIn too. Oh, SEO is dead. You know, I got all my customers from SEO. Well, let's slow down, guys. Okay, first of all, here's SaaStr 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. Okay, it's just up. It is up. Now, 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 is saying, we just did, Amelia and Guillaume just did a SaaS session with their CMO, Sydney 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, okay. Two, sure, LLMs and chatbots are taking some of that, as 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 SaaStr for a variety of reasons, for what it's worth.
If you look at this little chart on the right, I 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 you talk to, you know, an SEO marketer, they want you to be number one or number two or number three. We are number one 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, SEMrush and others, actually ChatGPT and friends benefit you if you have high authority but you're 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 a VP of sales, but SaaStr's got 10,000 posts on just about everything, everything you could possibly imagine in GTM. So, we're going up. So, I'm sorry if your 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 data here, but I can tell you from just about every startup I work with 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 recognize that PR has changed like dramatically, but you want it, you want to be at SaaStr 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 email saying that someone I've never heard of wants to be on 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, but CROs too. The low-energy crap that still kind of worked a few years ago. The cloned, boring campaigns 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've lost patience for the 11,000th thing or the 10,000th 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 nothing works because that stuff don't work. At least not in my experience.
So here's a couple challenges to think about. Some of this 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 less energy, what about making it awesome? What about making it awesome? Audit. Just like we've said on SaaStr for the better part of a 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. Okay? Make it awesome.
So, for example, we've done a bunch of sessions on our AI agents. Amelia has 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 SaaStr events, and we have to close 10-plus million of SaaStr sponsors just to keep the lights on because our events are so expensive. That's our annual 10,000 people. 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 okay. Then we made it really, really good and polished. It took, and we had a designer do it. But then it was static for a year. Like, we couldn't really change much, and then sometimes someone on the 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. And everyone gets a custom deck now. Now, sometimes there are a few downsides. 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 okay piece of collateral, gets 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 do your webinar. No one wants to go to the low-energy stuff. Try making it awesome.
Okay, just a few more points. It's not though, if you look at the hottest sort of AI B2B 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-fueled B2B companies, many of them have a sales motion, right? The whole OpenAI presentation from Maggie Hott 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 folks at OpenAI, but many of them, there's fewer.
So we had the chief business officer of Perplexity at SaaStr this year. You can read the post. He had five folks on the sales team. Five folks on the sales team. The sales teams, there are sales teams at Replit and Lovable and Bolt and others, but they're small. We're going to have an upcoming session with Vercel. They're, their chief business officer. They have one human SDR and 10 agents. Okay. Okay, 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 Replit go from 1 to 150 million? And how did HeyGen go from, you know, 0 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, what they have, and I know this is obvious, is this is just the strongest demand in 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 B2B 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, it's just PLG on steroids.
And again, my last challenge to you, when you scratch your head and you look around at these folks that are running circles around you, just realize this. Like, do go on LinkedIn and see who's their head of sales, who's their head of marketing. You're going to see folks that worked at wherever, Brex and Rippling and Ramp and Datadog. And you're not going to see folks that have been doing AI since they were in grammar school or anything like that. You're going to be seeing folks again, you're going to, if you look at half of the top SaaS executives that have 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 not like they've created an LLM on their own, right? It's not none of this stuff. They're running versions of the same playbook, but this PLG pull is insane.
Okay, so just a couple points to summarize, and then I'll take questions. 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-ROI AI products is insane. It is insane. And I can just tell you with some of the ones we use, because we can do something incredibly valuable we could not do before. So, we spend a couple hundred bucks a month on Replit. Now, what do we have? A new SaaStr AI, a new homepage, a new SaaStr 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 fewer people, but 300,000 valuations.
We just launched an AI that reviews your VC pitch decks. It's free. It's pretty awesome. We should cross a thousand folks have used it by the weekend. So, you know, like Gamma, at first when Gamma came out for decks, I said to Amelia, 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 HeyGen. So, this is why, and I have this at the end, this is why, so 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, or once you're budgeted, once you're at the CIO or even in 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 actually, there's too much demand for AI tools across my organization. There's too much demand. 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 SaaS 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 team 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.
Okay. And the last point why so many folks aren't getting AI budget out there, if I look across startups I've worked with or invested in, is it just has to work. It just has to work. And this is why so many mediocre co-pilots, 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 B2B 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 the whole 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 up front. I mean, we again we we essentially replace two human SDRs with our AI SDR, 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 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 co-pilot that doesn't change the game almost on day zero. Even Marc Benioff wants to do that. He doesn't know how yet today, but even he wants to do that. So, my last I know slightly annoying kick in the arse and then we can take questions if if we have any, Amelia. Be honest. Everyone that has something good today in B2B that can tap into AI budgets, okay, one way or another, either they can tap direct like at the promoter level where there's just end user demand or they can tap into it at the CIO's 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-AI B2B companies are accelerating now. Half of them are accelerating and half aren't. And it's not just again a lame co-pilot 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 your industry and tap into this budget.
And look at this fun one on the right. This company, Filevine, has been part of the SaaStr community for 10 years. It's over 10-year-old company doing case management for law firms. Always had product market fit. He reached out to me over years. The numbers were always strong, but but it was an ordinary vertical SaaS company. And then boom, they just leaned in and legal deep deep on how to change case management with AI. Now it's worth three billion and it's accelerating. And I think the founder is going to come to London in December and share how they really did it for real. How they really AI nativeified a 10 plus year old product. But if you do it, the budget's there. You do it, the budget's there. It's there for Notion. It's there for Filevine. Even stuffs that are hard, you know, Intercom said Fin as a standalone product has already crossed 50 million. Okay. It'd be nice if it was 500 million, but that's from 0 to 50 million by leaning into where the budget is, right? Dialpad said they're accelerating earlier this year 300 million, right? It does work. But don't pretend if you're not seeing reacceleration 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. So that's just my my analysis of why it's all still working. So I don't know if we have any questions, Amelia, but we could we could open it up if we do.
