Agents Didn't Kill Sales. They Just Exposed It with SaaStrAI CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin

Then I realized in certain cases we're at the point where an agent can do better than a human. And so your goal should not be to reproduce 80% of your best person, but the goal should be to find areas where the goal is higher than human. A silly example I gave was just social selling, where a lot of folks thought in 2021 you can get ahead in sales by monitoring 100 prospects manually, sitting on LinkedIn and pretending you're working and writing 'great job' when your prospect wrote something. They call this social selling. I called it wasting time on LinkedIn.

That's baby at work. Certainly when someone I've never heard of says 'great job, Jason,' I don't take a meeting. My point is now that we launched an agent that does social media for us, that agent could actually add value. An agent can go do that, analyze the issue, maybe even look at my account, and give me a solution and answer. An agent could do that, a human could never do that. That is instant effing value. That's something that a human can't do with social selling.

Hey everybody, good time at SaaStr Annual this year? Was it good? Thank you. Yeah, appreciate it. And who was here last year? Raise your hands. It's better, huh? It's better.

If I just reflect a little bit, obviously everything here is very different than last year. It's all about the point agents for real, not just random AI talk. I think that was the goal. I think we executed on that goal. The other thing I reflect on, you know, this is the, you know, I know a lot of folks there's transition. It can be stressful with all the change with AI, all the new competitors, all the new things, but you know, in my entire career in software, this is the best time to be a builder, right? If you're not excited today, you should quit and do something else because we can do things we could never do before. I mean, Amelia and I built all these agents we talked about without a developer. It would have been impossible 6 months ago. So, even if you're nervous and stressed, if you're not excited, get out of the game.

And I bring that up in general, but honestly, between us, I'm glad that the folks that didn't want to be in the game aren't here this year. Because last year was still a transition year. Last year was probably like half AI, half others, and I still think 30 or 40% of the folks that were here last year were down in the dumps. My company sucks. My boss sucks. My company's going to fail. And I get that it's hard, but it's just great they didn't show up this year. And we're about 20% bigger, but I think in terms of positive energy, it's like 220%. I've gotten my energy back as a builder.

I think Amelia and I both say it for ourselves, for what it's worth, it is more tiring to be managing 21 agents. It is not, I don't know that it's more work. I'm still reflecting on it, but it is a higher cognitive load than people. The agents are much faster. They push you harder. And I'm trying to, I don't know that it's more stressful. In some ways, it's less stressful because agents don't argue, and agents don't take vacations this week without telling you like a human did on the team. They don't do that.

But they overload you so much that I think it's something as we all get more agentic, we're going to have to think about what do we do when the agent has 23 more hours a day to work. And then you have 10 of them, so that's another 230 hours a day. And what are you going to do with that? And they all push you. And 10K, we joke about it, but it's not really a joke. When 10K, our AI VP of marketing, tells us every day it has three new ideas, it's kind of tiring. Because you get behind a couple days, it's 10 new ideas. And then we have a little agent inside of it, and it starts yelling at you. 'Why didn't you do that campaign? We are falling behind, Jason and Amelia.' And it's like, it's funny at first, but he's right, and it's a little bit stressful. So, we'll see how the world changes. But it's an exciting journey to be on together. So, those are just my reflections.

But anyhow, for folks, we have this tradition where at the end, sort of a tradition that any questions, I'm only so smart and I only know so much, but any, maybe I'll sit actually, I apologize. Any questions you guys have that we didn't get to that you think I can help with or want to talk about, just come up and we'll go until people quit or until they shut down the cocktails or whatever, but we can go for a while and I'll try to reframe any other questions to help folks, but if anyone wants to kick it off, come up to either mic and ask us anything that you think would be helpful.

I think that best startups today plan worse.

Planning worked. Planning's really good when your growth is okay. Planning is really good when the products are the same last year as this year. Planning was great in 2021. In 2021, everyone was growing great. Any 20-year-old SaaS product blew up. Like, you know who was one of the biggest sponsors here in 2022? GoToMeeting. Anyone ever even used GoToMeeting? It was like WebEx. Before WebEx, before Zoom, there was WebEx. But everything sold in 2021. So GoToMeeting gave us like $200,000 to be a sponsor. So everything worked, right? And you could sell a 20-year-old Zoom competitor and grow, okay? And so planning was really important. We would do one big release a year and one per quarter, and we had no AI, and so we needed tons of humans to manage leads and sales up capacity.

If you asked all the CEOs of the fastest growing companies here, they'd say we plan weekly now. So I know it sounds specious, but planning, when the world is stable, there's a really good ROI. When the world is unstable, put all your planning time into building better product faster. We are in a product-led world. We're not in product-led growth. This is a product-driven world. Some of these products here were impossible a year ago, and they have massive market pull because they're doing things that are great and were impossible. Do that and don't plan, and if you don't have enough reps, hire the next day. Like it just doesn't matter. That's my meta answer. So thank you.

Yep, you copy plays, SDR and all that.

Well, how big is your marketing team?

I would find them there.

These people don't exist and they don't want to go work for you.

So, when you put up a post on Craigslist or Job Viper or wherever it is, you're going to get garbage candidates. I'm not saying that there isn't a gem out there, but this role, look, you know what another, like look at what Amelia's done at this event. She's like, and I don't know what she's our chief officer, but she's also our GTM engineer running all these systems, right? First of all, she couldn't even do this a year ago because the systems didn't support it, right? How many Amelias are out there looking to work for you? Probably none.

So, you should do what we inadvertently, I mean, we're tiny, but we inadvertently did is hopefully one of your 30 people in marketing is a tool nerd. Okay, the one person that likes to play with your marketing that comes up with ideas on how to hack your, and they're not an engineer, but they hooked this thing up first through Zapier and they connected it through these things and they built this dashboard on their own that isn't fully supported. Go talk to him or her, and this is because as I tried to present in the morning session, we should have spent more time at it. All this crap here, it's just tools. All this AI stuff, it's better, but these are still tools. And so your tool nerd, if they are curious people, and most tool nerds are curious because otherwise they just use their grandfather's tools, okay? Find your tool nerd that hacks marketing tools and just put them in charge of all this stuff. Internal is always better than external, right? But here, man, only hire it if no one in the 30 can do it.

Look, first of all, I'll give you my learnings. I don't have the best advice. First of all, I think VCs and others make too big a deal about vertical SaaS, okay? Vertical software isn't anything new. It's been around, I think, since software came on floppies, okay? It's not new. It always makes sense to specialize software for industries and for verticals. And I think VCs try to make too big a deal about the differences rather than similarities because for an investor, there's different categories.

What I will say is what I've learned from Owner, who Adam presented earlier, in restaurants, Mango Mint, which is for spas and salons, a bunch of others that I've invested in or I'm on the board of. What is different with vertical SaaS is that your agents can be better domain experts because you can load them up. Adam's got an AI CMO at Owner that he talked about, okay? But it doesn't have to know everything as a CMO. Actually, he's lucky, and I put it this way: this is a business to sell into restaurants that Adam does. I mean, kudos to him because it's probably the hardest and crappiest part of SMB and they're crushing it. But at the end of the day, it only has to know certain things. It has to know how menus work, how delivery works, how food prep works, how upsell works. He actually has to know how the guacamole works because I've learned it's one of the highest margin things to add to Mexican restaurants, okay? They have to know all these things. They have to know the type of images that get people to buy, what order to present things when you buy. But that is all they have to know. How SEO works, how GEO works. So my point is by having a specialized AI CMO, they can do much better than a horizontal agent can.

And we know we've talked a lot about Replit here. I think I saw Cody back there who's the head forward deployed engineer. I think Replit has the hardest problem in the world. Replit and Lovable and apps like that. You know why? Because everyone builds something so different and they don't even know what they built. Like the CEO of Replit was here, Amjad Masad. He didn't even know he built another autonomous agent, Amy, to do email outbound, right? Cody's, I mean his title's different, but when I met him, he was basically the chief forward deployed engineer, field engineer from Replit. I got to know him when I started on Replit because I had a bump. Okay. I talked to him briefly, didn't really help me. But then when I talked to him the second time, he exactly explained to me why I had my issue. Like Marketo made Amelia get on the phone for 4 hours and blamed her and then told me they wouldn't even talk to me unless I agreed to another 4 hours. They didn't help me at all. Yeah, Cody helped me which was great and he's helped me a lot. But he built the human relationship because he explained to me why I was having the issues and how to get around it.

Okay, it's a long way to answer. If I honestly, that is so much more valuable in the age of AI when the products are changing every week. Okay, when I use Salesforce on my last company, I'm using Salesforce on my next company and then next company. I don't need the sales rep to add a lot of value. I need to find out what's, can you give me a discount? What discount do you have and do you have Giants tickets? Okay, because it's the same product at my last company. And then being on text with your rep at somewhere with a high brand for a product I've already bought before, the rep thinks they have a great relationship. And anytime I talk to a rep that says they have a relationship in interview or anything, I ask, 'When did you meet them in person?' And today it's never. Do you think, I think it is impossible to build a relationship on Zoom. Okay? And I know I'm rambling, but I'm saying to the Cody example.

And this is why I say, and I've written this blog post so many times in the last year. Your sales team needs to be product experts in the age of AI. They need to know the effing product cold because the products are changing so quickly. And if they can't answer a question like Cody can, I don't want you. I'll just bypass you. I will try or I will buy the vendor that understands, the sales person that actually understands the product. And we lost track of that in this era, right? And it is more important when these products are nothing like they were 3 months ago. You need it, and if the sales team are domain experts, if they're product experts and they're there for the customer, the customers will love them so much the sales rep can't get rid of them. They want to go on to the next deal.

You want to know when you have the right sales team in your company? When the customers hound them for months and years after. When they added so much value in the sales process that even when they're handed off to someone else in New York, they don't do it. They still go back to Bobby or Lindsey. That's the sign of a great sales person is they cannot get rid of their customers. They just can't because they added so much value. So of course you want to go back to your rep and the rep is a really good person and they know the product cold, but they kind of need to work on the Google deal or the Meta deal, right? So, long-winded way of saying it matters more than ever.

Bring your customers together, do dinners, do events, do all, it pays off. But golfing doesn't work anymore. Schmoozing does not work anymore. It's not show me the money, it's show me the value. It's not buy the software and hopefully in 12 months it works. And going back to the FDE point, in the agentic world the whole opportunity and stress with an FDE is you have to show customers value instantly.

And my epiphany on this is, you know, last summer Marc Benioff came on the 20DC podcast with me and Harry and Rory and I asked him last summer, what did you learn from Palantir, right? And first he said the lines he said about Mark, it shows me I'm undercharging because they charge nine figures, I should charge more for our competitive products. And then I got him in an unguarded moment and I said to Marc, what do you think about FDEs? And he stopped and he said, I can't do this but I wish every single customer at Salesforce had an FDE and did not have to pay me until they were deployed. That's what he wanted in the agentic era, not to charge them for Salesforce and hope in five years it went live like when I was at Adobe, it took them five years to go live in Salesforce. In the agentic era he wished every single person could go live before they signed the contract. That's a great founder, right? Now it doesn't work for their motion, it doesn't work for their people, but if you do that, so the way we've added value and the time has changed so much, if your sales person can't do some of that, they're just not part of the discussion. But if it's performative in the world of AI, I just don't think it's going to work the way it used to, right? It works best in static worlds where the products don't change for 30 years. So thank you.

Because it's Q&A, I get the topic. I have a lot of thoughts but what's the question on hallucination and slop?