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

0:00 Used have about ten people full time. Now you have one point two humans, twenty agents. We have ten desks that used to be go to market people, they're all just labeled. With our agents. Rep lead for Replit, Quali for qualified, Artie for Artisan, Agent Force needs a nickname. Agents work all night and they work weekends and they work on Christmas. We're done with hiring humans in sales. We're done. The business is doing very similarly to what it was when you had 10 humans. If I had two more great humans that wanted to join, don't get me wrong, I would hire them tomorrow. But I'm not gonna hire someone that after their third Month in the job doesn't know what Saster does. I just can't do that. AI is replacing the jobs people don't want to do today, and it is displacing the mid-pack and the mediocre. How do you see the future of the sales profession? We should have$250,000 a year SDRs, but they'd be like at Vercel, they'd be managing 10 agents, not 10 people. The classic SDR junior kid that is hired at a college. College to send emails, we don't need them. Folks that qualify leads coming in, the contact me's that we see, we have no need for them today. They should be extinct next year. Someone's listening to this like, oh man, my job is in trouble. If you can go do this, you're hyper employable. Today, my guest is Jason Lemkin, founder and CEO of Saster, the world's largest community for B2B founders.

1:08 And one of my absolute Favorite sales and go to market minds on the planet. Jason is not only deeply knowledgeable about everything sales. He's also extremely articulate and direct. And is also now personally going super deep on what AI can do for a sales org.

1:25 He's transformed his own Saster sales team from around 10 SDRs and AEs. to one full time AE A part time chief of AI named Amelia. And twenty AI agents. He is seeing the same performance from his AI team as he saw with his former human team.

1:42 And he's just getting started. These are my favorite kinds of conversations because the guest is Living in the future. And comes here to show us what the future is like, where we're headed, and how we can get there ourselves, and also just how to avoid all the pitfalls that he had to deal with along the way. We cover all of the things that he has learned about where sales and go to market is going in the AI age.

2:03 He gives a bunch of advice for salespeople and the future of their careers, the future of the go to market org. How to win as an AI startup right now. What tools he's finding most useful, what it took to shift a sales team. And so much more, this episode is going to get your mind spinning in the best way possible. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously.

2:26 And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter. You get nineteen. Premium products for free for an entire year. including a year free of lovable, replit, bolt, N8N, Gamma, Linear, Devin, Postoc, Superhuman, D Script, Whisperflug, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, JPRD, Mobbin, and Stripe Atlas. Head on over to Lenny's Newsletter.com and click product pass.

2:47 With that. I bring you Jason Lemkin, after a short word from our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by DX, the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers to thrive in the AI era. Organizations need to adapt quickly. But many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions like, which tools are working?

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4:37 Jason, thank you so much for being here. Welcome back to the podcast. Lucky to be a super fan and then to get to join, right? It's it's uh it's terrific to to to be on the other side. So this is our second conversation. Uh, we did our last conversation a year and a half ago. I don't know if you know this, but it became a pretty legendary episode.

4:58 It's something people continue to share. And uh that conversation is around basically a deep dive into building your sales org. And a lot has changed. Yeah. You and the world since then. Uh

5:13 And what uh what's happened is you've gone extremely deep on what AI enables. For sales, for startups, for go to market. And what I love about conversations like this is y You're basically living in the future. And you're here to give us a glimpse of where things are heading.

5:29 And tell us how to avoid the wrong turns and just help us get there ourselves. That I think I can do. To start, yes, help us understand just the business you run this uh Saster. Yeah, what is it you sell? What is the business? What is it? What is it you do, Jason? You know, I'm still trying to figure it out, Lenny. Maybe you are too in some ways. Um, you know, I I I am a two time founder who started writing a blog

5:55 My God, in twenty twelve, about all the mistakes I made after I sold my startup to Adobe. We started doing a couple of meetups. You've done meetups. Um before anyone did this stuff, we did a big meetup in twenty fifteen. Thousands of people came. Then we do ten thousand people a year at Saster Annual. I've actually also invested almost two hundred million dollars, almost ten X lifetime.

6:17 Um Only into founders from the community. Um, but the reason I don't know is w what I If folks that do Are connected to our content. I'm just passionate about helping other founders see mistakes and make less of them. Tony, we're we're a large community.

6:33 I do invest, but w but it turned into a business. There was no revenue in the beginning. I'm sure there was no revenue for for lending in the beginning. And ours was less intentional. But we do do eight figures of revenue a year and it's work. If it's that sounds great, okay, to do eight figures. But there's a lot of costs, especially on the event side. The media side has uh almost no costs. And it's work. We have a hundred sponsors and and as you know, like you have sponsors, but There's a certain level where it becomes a lot of work. Like getting two folks to sponsor your podcast with a couple of emails, no work, right?

7:03 Uh, if you wanted to have like four Lenny podcast, like it just it just scales. So we have built Our own go to market team over time, and I've lived the frustrations. Folks have followed it and then Maybe I'm rambling a little bit. The interesting thing, the aha moment that happened to us is Going into May of this year, we had one AI agent into production called Delphi that we both use for digital Lenny and Digital Jason.

7:24 Really interesting learnings. And we went into our 10,000 person event this year with with an eight, you know, a seven figure budget and eight figure top line. And two folks on the sales team who are were paid high end of market. I have many flaws. But paying well and being loyal are not one of them. And two of them just quit at the event. They just quit on site. Okay.

7:43 And I This was like The third time I've done this, like the eighth team I've built and I and I turned to Amelia, our chief A officer, and I said, We're done with you know hiring humans and sales. We're done. We are gonna push the limits.

7:55 With agents. We're gonna put even if it doesn't quite work. Okay. And I knew from this Delphi, this general agent, that it would sort of work. Because going into annual, this general agent, this digital Jason closed a seventy K sponsorship on its own. So when I saw that a horizontal agent Not trained for sales, not trained for GTM could close one dealer like Let's

8:16 deploy a couple of these apps. We have time. And I just can't pay. A junior SGR a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year to quit. I just can't like criticize me. But I just couldn't do it one more time. I just couldn't do it one more time. And I actually think this isn't an when I talk to COs. at leading AI companies, they kinda don't want to do it.

8:35 Either. They want to have The smallest sales teams they can, as much for cultural reasons. Right, even if Even if Raplet only goes fr from zero to two hundred, it could have been two twenty with the smaller sales team, I think Omjad's okay with it, right? So It's an enduring thing, but anyhow, so we pushed the limits and now if you walk into Saster's office

8:53 It's kinda funny. We have ten desks that used to be go to market people. They're all just labeled. With our agents. Reply for Replit. Quali for qualified, Artie for artisan. Agent Force needs a nickname. Maybe we can make one up with Salesforce. There's Amelia's corner office at one end. I'm in the I'm in the back of the office and it's just agents. It's the quietest office. And net net. Lenny, it's about here's the meta learning for when we when we're recording this.

9:16 the pro the net productivity is about the same. It's not better. It's not worse. Um But it's so much more efficient and

9:27 It scales. Because software scales. So And uh we can talk about what we've learned. I think it's important that it takes time to train these agents. They don't work out of the box. Um, but when you dial them in, when you take your best person or your best script.

9:43 And you train an agent with your best person and best script. That agent can start to become a version of your best salesperson, your best person and that's what we've learned And how to perfect it. And I just think because

9:56 And criticize me, any but you or anyone watching or listening. Maybe it's not cool I didn't want to hire my uh twenty eighth rep that was gonna quit that but I just couldn't do it one more time in the age of AI. I'm like, it's time to go to the bleeding edge. And just see what we can push the limits here. Okay, I I I love all the directions we're already heading. Okay. So just to help people totally understand what your business is, basically these people are selling sponsors for your conferences.

10:23 They're selling two things to'cause it's just relevant to the deep dive. They're selling sponsorships, which average about seventy to eighty K. And then they're also selling tickets, which is the high volume for this is like the the self serve version. They're selling tickets that are anywhere from a couple hundred bucks to if you're a V C that comes the night before, could be two grand. Okay. No no gifts for VCs that decide the night before founders that decide early get Get it about ten twenty percent of cost. And And and it's work to sell these tickets, right? And so you can just post an email like you do and you probably fill up Lenny Summit.

10:54 But if you wanna max it out, you gotta do work, you gotta do drip campaigns, you gotta reach out to people. You have to reactivate. folks that came to Lenny Summit, you know, three years ago. But you want them back because they're good people. And that just requires work. And as your base scales You know, you have how many people subscribe to Lenny's newsletter now? One point two million or something. One point two million, roughly. Okay. How many as how many of those is a human willing to reach out to?

11:18 Approaching nuns. Imagine you hired a twenty one year old SDR fresh out of junior college and said, Here's my list, one point two million people, start calling them I want him to come to Lenny Summit, but anyhow, so we have this low end version, which is tickets, right, which is four or five million a year. And then we have this higher end sales cycle and they're very different and actually they have different agents. And then we have a different agent to get people to come back.

11:43 Lapsed people. So we have lapsed. High end and low end agents. And they have different workflows and we actually use different vendors for now. For now we use different vendors. Okay. And so uh previously before this future. world, how many S DRs did you have? How many salespeople

11:59 In the We would have two to three S D Rs and up to five A's. Okay. So like eight, nine people full time working on Saster to bring in sponsors and to bring in tickets. Yes, although yes. Uh a lot of it is inbound in renewals, but not but yes, to br to manage that business, to manage the sales side of that judgment. Go to market. Let's call it eight to nine and go to market. Now we have one point two. Uh one point two humans.

12:26 Human one point two humans. AI agents. One point what is a point two human? Amelia, who's our chief A officer who who runs everything, she spends twenty percent of her time managing the agents, orchestrating the agents. Okay. Which is something I think people don't they talk about, but they don't actually understand what that means. Yeah, okay. I definitely want to spend time there. Uh

12:47 Okay, so you used to have about ten people full time. Now you have one point two humans. Yeah and you said twenty agents. Twenty agents, yeah. Okay. And what you're describing is the business is doing s very similarly to what it was when you had ten humans, now you have twenty agents, the business doing the same. Yeah, now listen, if I had two more great humans that wanted to join, don't get me wrong, and this is true of every Fast and start I would hire them tomorrow. Okay.

13:10 And and if you go if you go to Versea, if you go to Replit, if you go to you're they're all gonna tell you the same. I was literally In London, we were just at our button event, we were with with with Maggie, who's in the leadership of Open AI, she said they just can't hire enough enterprise reps now. Okay. And But what what it is replacing are the mid pack and below. The ones that don't really understand what linear does. The ones that don't really know what a pull request is

13:33 Or exactly how Replet works. The AI can do better. Not than the best, right? So I would love to have more humans. But I'm not gonna hire someone That after their third month in the job doesn't know what Saster does. I just can't do that one more time. And you don't need to, I don't think you need to. So we're not doing this is the thing.

13:50 AI is replacing the jobs people don't want to do today. And it is displacing The media the mid pack and the mediocre. They are their jobs are at risk. They are at risk. The best humans. It is true that they will get superpowers from AI, but I'm not sure the rest will.

14:07 It's a it's a cautionary tip. But I would love to have more than one. But at the end of the day I One point two humans is Plus twenty A agents is doing about what ten. human GTM did. Well

14:18 Okay. I wanna spend time on the different agents you've built, but first of all, just kinda zooming out, having gone through six this experience. How do you see the the world of go to market changing next year in the coming years. All the plays work.

14:32 It's the playbooks that are kind of broken in the age of AI. All the plays work. Outbound still works, webinars still works, podcasts still work, okay? Events still work. All this stuff works. All this stuff works. Why is 11 Labs out doing a road show, right? It works. Why why do they go on Lenny's podcast? It works. So the plays all work. It's just the playbooks are broken because Uh at for folks that

14:57 aren't in the age of AI, growth has decelerated so much that nothing seems to work. Okay. It's working. It just works so much worse than twenty twenty one, but the plays still work. They just They don't have enough ROI, there's not enough budget for old school SaaS from twenty twenty one. The ones that are blowing up, right? The Vercells, the Replets, the Eleven Labs. They have

15:16 So much demand. So much demand. that you know that they're still running the plays, but they're they're doing them differently. They're doing them from a hyper PLG focus because there's so much demand. And they're often picking and choosing which prospects to talk to to Contact. So like

15:33 For example, Bolt is probably a a distant number three behind Repplin Lovable, right? But one of my old sales guys runs sales there. And I talked to him when they went from zero to fifty million in like six months. He's like We honestly just have so many leads. We just our half our job is picking which ones to respond to. Right. And he's like and he also is like We closed a seven figure deal we stole from Lovable because no one called them back at Lovable.

15:55 So your traditional B2B SaaS company, even ones of billions of revenue. Even the hub spots and the and and and and uh all of them, they don't have so many great leads, they don't call them back. So that is a different world. Um, not easy, different world. And then this this world where nothing seems to be working. Is just because the demand has evaporated, right? So Both ends have an incentive in twenty s twenty six to push the limits for AI for go to market.

16:22 The ones that are hyper growing can't touch everybody. They can't do everything. Not everyone like Verse will build their own internally. We can talk about why most folks should not build, they should buy. For the same reasons it's always been true in software, we can talk about it. At the low end, you still need humans, but ruthless efficiency is gonna be the name of the game for 2026. So anything where AI works, the demand is inexhaustible. So everyone's either looking for more efficiency.

16:47 Or they just can't service the massive amount of inbound they have. Um And so Maybe that doesn't totally answer your question or I got a little bit off track, but that's how the world's changing. Like when we first In a way, pre the AI explosion, all B to B companies were kinda the same. Like they grew at

17:04 Somewhat different rates. Some blew up faster like a Samsara. Some took longer like a UiPath. But come on, they're all they all kind of grew the same way for the same A C V for the same deal size. Now, just like in Venture and everything else, it's wildly bifurcated. Right. You've got the low end, which is all about price increases and forcing things onto the base. And at the high end, we have something we've never seen since twenty twenty, which is everyone in the market at once. Everyone in the market at once. This is something that people

17:32 don't understand why why are why are these companies doing so well? Why are they blowing up? Because they're It's not just that the software we we love this stuff, Lenny, right? All these new tools. We love'em. But it's not one law firm looking at Harvey. It's everyone. It's everyone, right? It's not a few folks looking at video on the internet. It's everyone trying to make video on the internet. Because there's a lot of pushed from the top of like we need to adopt AI, we need to be more productive. Now everyone. Not the traditional like the traditional metric was in most categories

18:00 three to five percent of prospects would be in market a year. So you'd send a trillion emails and you do cold calls, and you'd hope maybe twenty twenty six was the time they're willing to dump Salesforce for your new product. So Add all that up, five percent. In many categories we're north of fifty percent in market. So that just totally changes the plays still work, showing up in person, actually knowing what the hell you're selling. Knowing how to get through procurement, all of those are work. But

18:26 other than these weird windows, artificial windows in twenty twenty, we've never had so many people in market at once. And this is for AI products specifically or Yeah, that that have massive ROI. Mm. Yeah, productivity. I want I I need to bring a Vibcode tool into my company, Lenny.

18:42 Okay, go out and do the work. compare Replit, Lovable, and whoever else and buy one. Okay. Harve like why are Harvey and the others in the Gora doing so I mean they're great tools. But everyone's like, We need to automate how we review contracts and documents with AI now.

18:56 They want a leader and they're going to do it. And that that will slow down. Like not everybody can be in market every year. It it's exhaust an enterprise. So this this is a version of the AI bubble that will end and we will revert in some ways to old school, but when everybody's in market, it just It just changes how you run the whole thing. So the but so The fastest growing ones and the slowest growing ones both have incentives to use AI here, just if for different reasons.

19:20 How about the sales profession specifically? Are SDRs gonna be replaced fully AEs? How do you see the future of the sales profession? The classic S GR Junior Kid. That is hired out of college. to send emails

19:35 and respond to respond to inbound emails and maybe get back to them later that day or the next day. We don't need them. We're not gonna need most of them. SDRs that knock on doors? In a lot of industries.

19:47 aren't going to be displaced, right? The email based cadence SDR will be ninety percent displaced by AI next year. The People have different nomenclature. I call BDRs, folks that qualify leads coming in, the contact knees that we see. We have no need for them today. They should be extinct next year.

20:05 There is no reason in the age of AI I have to hit contact me. Wait two a day or two for a twenty one year old that doesn't know what linear does. To say hey What do you do? How much are you willing to pay me? Maybe I'll set up a call with Lenny later this week.

20:19 There is no need to do that with AI. The AI our AI alone, one of our agents fully qualifies everybody on the website. So they don't even know they're being qualified. It just sets up the meeting with the salesperson. So this SDR this Email based SDR And this human qualifying leads, which is not good for the customer. It doesn't feel good to be qualified, does it?

20:37 They will be mostly extinct next year. I'm guessing with your Now the A, the classic human Doing the sales. Most of the tools aren't there yet, for the most part.

20:48 I think Seventy percent of their jobs will be safe by the end of next year. But I think it will decline to forty or fifty. I don't think there's any reason What we're seeing in other categories A great agent can't close the deal too.

21:02 If there's not a lot to negotiate on price and the agent knows the product better than a human At least for folks like you and me. I mean, do you like to talk to a human in sales? Sometimes. Uh I'd rather I'd rather just chat chat with a yeah, a really smart AI. Yeah.

21:15 So that's all in progress now, but the classic and the tough part, and a lot of folks ask this question, Lenny, they say, um Okay, Jason, I I see that in in your data. how are we gonna build the sales profession if there's no entry level jobs and SDRs and A E's and That's a meta question across all of AI. We're already seeing AI concentrate Strength.

21:36 in sort of mid tier folks, isn't it? And we're already seeing lots of folks cut back on entry level hires. you know, Shopify's and others aside, where they'd rather have the six or seven year old engineer That's a cursor machine. rather than train some kid. It's just more efficient today. Right, I'm sure you see that across a lot of folks you talk to. It's gonna happen in sales too. So

21:55 The folks that know how to manage an agent, work with an agent, the folks that know their product for real. they're gonna become more valuable and the rest are gonna become less valuable. It's interesting because uh I'm an investor in a bunch of startups, as are you, and I'm actually seeing a lot of ask for go to market people, salespeople. Do you think this is kind of a temporary because there's so much demand, they're like, Oh, we need people to help and then this will start to become more AI over time. Where are they just looking for these really senior people that you're talking about? Well listen.

22:23 Whether you're managing humans Or orchestrating agents, you need leadership. We've yet to produce an autonomous CEO. I know folks talk about how on on Twitter that we'll AI will replace the CO, but I don't know that that's literal as much as figurative, right? So we're still gonna need the C suite, we're still gonna need VPs.

22:41 I mean it's become so much work to manage a million leads, right? A half million leads. So we we need these leaders. Whether The the question is And I've seen your call out there and I saw your tweet on it. The question is How many of the folks

22:55 That had the current playbooks. Are the right folks for The future. I'm thinking maybe twenty percent. The folks I talk to.

23:04 Twenty for are still panicking. About AI. And and I'll tell you how to not how to be in the twenty percent if you want to know. But I think Very few like the Janine from Verse are gonna make the jump.

23:16 So we'll see. There will be huge organizations, right? Like Denise just went from Slack and Salesforce after 14 years to be CRO Open AI. She's working gonna be pretty high level, right? So she may not know how to need to know how to implement the agents, but Most of the folks your companies want to hire I would just make sure they could they they really want to roll up their sleeves and do the job of twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven, right? Um just because they worked at Slack does not necessarily mean they have the skills at your startup. You said that you had some tips for folks to actually be this twenty percent. What are some if someone's listening to this like, oh man, my job is in trouble. What should I focus on?

23:51 It's gonna sound simple. It will work and most almost nobody's doing this. Pick. A tool, an agent. An agentic tool to solve.

24:00 one of your problems. It doesn't almost m just one that's the most painful. Or the one that's most acute. It could be support. It could be SDR. It could be inbound qualification. Pick one. Pick a leading vendor. I don't care which one it is. Okay, we can talk about how to pick a vendor, but pick a leading vendor.

24:16 That treats you well. That you like. And do it yourself. Train the agent, ingest the data. Do the iterations. Understand how the

24:27 Damn thing works. Okay. The folks that are lost today. have never done it. We literally We've turned into a consulting shop, Lenny. It's kinda crazy. I d I don't know what I think about it. But we literally just did a job, Amelia's chief A officer.

24:41 And and Mia, she she she she drove it. We did a call with a public B to B company worth well over ten billion that you would think is an AI leader. Okay, and we did a call with their team and they're like We're str we want to figure out this AISDR stuff. Like great. You're like we think we're just gonna buy this tool and just give it to our STRs to figure out on their own.

25:00 Okay, one, no chance. Two, we asked them How much of this have you done yourself? Like have you have you done it yourself? And it was just crickets on this call of 20 people. No one had done it theirself. So they thought they could take an untrained agent. With no training. And just magically give it to a bunch of young twenty year old STRs and and this magically would sell. on its own. It doesn't work that way, right? So

25:21 The way all these agents work. Is You There's a lot of jargon which is intimidating, ingestion, orchestration, training. It's not that hard, guys. It's just different. It's the same B to B

25:33 Stuff we've been doing for over a decade. You go to a website. Okay. You give it a URL of your website. You give it a URL of what your wiki is. You give it a URL of your training docs. Maybe you upload your prospectus. You upload a few documents. It ingests the data. And ingesting means it uploads. It means it processes the data.

25:51 And it does some other stuff you don't really need to know, some bragging, some vectoring. It really doesn't matter. You you upload some stuff. And it kind of knows it and isn't great at it. And then it will turn it into ideally it will turn it into questions. And you answer these questions and it they will be get the more you answer and train it, training is just answering questions and getting better and better. So first you

26:11 Upload a bunch of your stuff. Then you spend hours training it. Often with the help of a vendor, someone called the forward deploy engineer, which is a scary term. It means someone's gonna help you do this. You upload your stuff, you try to get it right, and then you basically have to Make sure it's right.

26:27 QA testing. And every day when that AI SGR sends out emails and do practice emails. They will say some dumb things. W maybe it's hallucinations. It really doesn't matter what the technical term is, and you correct it. And each and if you do this for thirty days.

26:42 Then every day you spend an hour or two correcting those mistakes. By the thirtieth day, it's gonna be pretty good. And This is anyone can do this that has been in B2B or SaaS. Anyone can do what I just described. It is not that different than other things we've done. It's just sequenced differently. But nobody does this. Everyone's panicked. And if you if you can go do this, pick any tool, pick pick uh agent force, pick qualified, pick artisan, pick whatever you want.

27:05 If you can go do this and get it live into production, you're hyperemployable. All the companies you talked about that need a GTM person, they will hire you. You could be a magically be their chief. Agentic GTM officer because But a almost anyone can do this if they want to. It's just gonna take a month of your time. And it might take you fifty or sixty hours plus qualifying the vendor.

27:25 Right. And in the old days, like When we d first did our podcast You'd hire an agency and disappear. That's how you do this stuff. Don't it don't work that the agencies don't know how to do this. You've got to do it yourself. But if you do, man. You a rock.

27:38 You will just you will just rock and you will learn. Right. You will learn. Um And you will learn the limits and you will learn the agent can what it can do and where it can't do. And then you will learn how to do the next one, right? So like we're pretty far on Agent Force, which is Salesforce's one, which Mark talks a lot about, but we're we're probably one of the only organizations of our size on it.

27:56 I will tell you a cheat code, which is pretty interesting. So we've got we had three of these agents working for sales. After training it and learning it and spending months time to learn it, we got it down to one prompt. And prompt is another almost intimidating word. A string of text that describes what you want this thing to do. Okay we took that prompt and gave it to Agent Force. Then a day it was pretty good.

28:18 So you will if you can do one of these, it'll be really hard. It'll be brutal. Then the second one will be easier. And then You're gonna be like the master of the universe in AI if you can do it yourself. But if you're waiting for people on your team to do it. If you're waiting for an agency to do it. I think you're gonna be out of a job. Right. So this is the like everyone comes to us as an experts.

28:38 We're not we're experts'cause we did it twenty times. I think what might be helpful here actually is to do a a tour, a kind of a quick tour of the agents that you've built and what they do, which ones have been most impactful. And then as you do that, what products you use, what what powers these agents that uh that you like and maybe don't like. If any if anyone goes to sastor.ai slash agents, we'll you'll see everything we built. It's all bulleted out. You can copy us. And I'll walk you through it, but two two caveats or things that I built a lot of stuff in Replit. We can talk about it for fun. I'm like a top one percent user. I love it. None of the GTM stuff we built ourselves. Don't build it yourself. You're not Versea. You don't have a full time wicked awesome engineer that wants to build this. Could all the stuff be built yourself?

29:21 It's the same idea of building your own notion. You could do it, but don't do it. It's these products are expensive. They're not so expensive. It's worth And then maintaining the pace of innovation is so fast, even if you can hire someone to build it internally, it will become obsolete if you're not careful in a couple months. So We've built a lot of stuff. We could talk about um

29:41 Uh I we I built a a a calculator to do startup calculations used eight hundred thousand times in ninety days. For a valuation. Yeah, for valuations. I built a pitch deck reviewer that's reviewed almost three thousand pitch deck, lots of fun stuff, but none of the GTM stuff we built ourselves. None of it. So Just a caveat, don't build it yourself. Unless you're Vercell, unless you have a reason. It that was a great pod. It was wonderful. Don't do it. Don't do that. Basically if you unless you have a awesome go to market engineers. for and they really want to do it. They're really are chomping at the bit to do it. Um don't do it. So

30:10 I started and this is not where other folks would start, but there's some learnings. I started there's an app called Delphi which makes digital clones. And um You used it for the Lenny Bot a long time ago. I saw you do it. What's that? Yeah, LennyBy dot com. Yeah, check it out. I saw it a long time ago. It was interesting.

30:25 But I I I didn't it didn't click. And then Brian Halligan, who's the founder and chairman of PubSpot, did one too. uh there's Sequoia backed and he was working at Sequoia, so he helped them early on. And then I kinda had a magic moment, and this is the way it works in AI, when I saw the combination of the two. So yours was real like people should love LennyBot because it's got it's If folks haven't tried it, try it. It is ingested. I know a scary term for some. It is ingested.

30:48 Every single interview you've ever done, right? Every word of content you've written. So and it can combine them all together. It can combine the Verse story and the And and and and and uh what what you did with at with Dylan at Figma and can synthesize the knowledge and it's pretty good. It's pretty good. What I liked about Brian's better than yours, though.

31:06 was that it was Brian. And Lenny Bot is kinda Lenny, but it's also kind of all your guests, right? I think that's the superpower of it, right? That's the way I think about it. It's not just my intelligence, the the lessons of every single person I've had on Spodcast. So it's great, but I thought, hey, maybe I could finally do one that's That's in between the two. Like I I've been a founder. And I and I've written ten thousand pieces of content. So that's a little bit like Brian, but I have more than Brian. And I'm not lenty in terms of productivity, but I've got a lot of voices. So I'm like, I'll try it.

31:32 I used Delphi. I instantly broke it'cause I had too much data to ingest. It took about a week to get going. Um And it worked and people and it's just like you people some people spend hours a day on digital Jason in another browser. And they don't do what they do with Lenny, but they'll they'll ask about their sales woes and what to do with their sales team and they'll and they'll upload Linkins and ask if they should hire people. And then a curious thing happened, which is that because we do these events, people started to use it for questions for the events. Hey, how do I get a refund?

31:59 Hey, can I get a discount? Hey. Where is the San Mateo County Fairground? So Jason Liz is really in the San Francisco Bay area, like Who's speaking or and and like There's endless questions, right? And we used to use prefin intercom.

32:12 And we're so busy we would answer like two weeks later, like it was terrible the worst support ever. And the the agent just started doing support on its own. And then it did this thing where it sold sponsorship on its own, right? So So start you can start with so one place to start if you haven't started is in support. Okay. And you don't have to buy and you don't have to buy Decacon necessarily and you don't have to buy Finn.

32:37 But One potential place to start is is your support like can you do great twenty four seven support? Can you? Most most apps can't. In fact, some of the worst defenders are AI leaders. They they have no support at all on their website. So that's one place to start. Um and then the next place we started Okay, so for us the low game for the next place we started is hey, we want to try outbound.

32:58 Okay, because we don't have one point two million names like you have, but we have like four hundred thousand. Okay, and we have data on them. So we wanted to say hey come. Come back to our Saster event. So we didn't know what to use. And I'll tell you something. So we picked a uh a Y C company called Artisan. They've gone like from like nothing to ten million this year. Um we picked them, but this important why.

33:17 They were at they were sponsored Saster. We didn't know. And they offered to help us the most. This is the critical insight. We didn't know if artisan was the I have opinions now. We hadn't deployed it. But

33:28 W another vendor argued the CRO argued with us. He said, I need a hundred K up front before I help you. Okay. Another one said they were scared of Saster, they didn't want bad PR if it failed. Fair. Oh be yeah. Certain company for that.

33:43 Okay. And artisan said we'll do it. And um We had nothing. And here's the interesting thing about a genetic stuff, it's like support. If you have nothing Like It doesn't have to like change the world. If you're literally doing nothing. and you start to do something that's high ROI, like you're gonna get return, right?

34:00 So We did that one. We trained it. It's great. We did about sixty thousand emails, um, saw pretty high rates. Um Then we said, Well, we'll try inbound. We like We don't want to have this depressing experience where a salesperson quits and it's two weeks later until they talk to so we use this vendor called qualified.

34:18 Which was founded by the XTM of Salesforce, that does a lot now, but mostly focused on qualified stuff. That immediately worked. Like we had someone at eleven PM on Saturday night that wanted to sponsor And they sponsored and it worked and it and it worked great. Uh but again they helped us. And this is an agent that is emailing with prospect, selling them on a sponsor. Well, if literally if you go to SasterAnuel.com and anyone should buy a product like this, it doesn't have to be qualified, but but

34:42 And they'll be the bubble, the intercom like bubble is tuned to to qualifying inbound prospects, folks that say, Hey, I want to sponsor Lenny's podcast. Sorry, we're sold out through twenty twenty eight. But if you want to be on the wait list. sign up here. Okay. Or or even better for us, it would qualify folks that out that weren't a good fit. Right. It would save so much time and it would do it twenty four hours, then it would just set up the meeting.

35:04 So The reason that was a great second one was because no one was willing to do that. No human was willing to pick up the phone and talk to these people. So it was such low hanging fruit. Um But the key to the first two And and

35:17 If you're gonna pick an agent, is they They offered to help the most. You're I uh at the end of the day, Lenny, these are all running on Cloud Four. They're all basically using a bunch of APIs mashed together. That's not new to software, right? Mashing a bunch of APIs under the hood. But

35:33 Deep down, I don't want to get anybody trigger anybody, many of these leader, the leaders in AI GTM, they're more similar than different. They're more similar than different under the hood. It doesn't mean the features are are parity. So Because you have to train them. Because it takes a month.

35:48 The world's best software with No help training you. is not one ninety nine percent of people should buy. So today In the old days, we would qualify the best software. We would make a matrix and we would do their thing and we would compare features and do it. You gotta do another column, which is your forward deployed engineer or solution architect or your SC.

36:06 and talk to them and say, Who is gonna help me? And Before you write a check. Get on the phone with Lenny and see if Lenny's really gonna do deployment. And if Lenny rocks. And the other vendor is better and won't help you, don't do it. And that's

36:19 Why we've had so much success is the first two we did Yeah, they were startups, right? So they worked harder. But artisan and qualified just did the work with us. And we're not stupid. But it was work. We needed help, right? And so That's what I learned is you you have this partner, the FDE and the vendor, and um and a lot of them actually might not take your business if they don't think they can help you. The best ones turn away a lot of business today, which is interesting, right?

36:40 Uh interesting learning from this. For folks is Um a lot of folks say and they would say to you if you use these lending, they'd say you have too much data. Saster is not like us. We're a startup. We're tiny. You have four hundred thousand people in your database. Lenny has one point two million. It's not like

36:56 That's I I got I I I only have three hundred customers. Okay, or two hundred customers. What I've learned is um Yeah. That's wrong.

37:04 If you have three hundred customers How many folks have come to your website ever? Thirty thousand? How many leads do you have? How many folks in your database? How many folks have you tried to reach out before? More than a human's doing.

37:16 And then they'll all of a sudden they have a ha ha moment of like, How many folks do you have in your hub spot, right? How many folks do you have in your CRM? They look it up thirty one thousand. Okay. How many folks do you have talking to them? Zero. You don't need the scale of numbers that you and I have. To make these agents work. You need a you need a little bit of scale and you need a little bit of traffic.

37:34 But not as much as you think. So All the learnings we have a lot of folks that Honestly, they don't want to do the work. They're like well Saster has a lot of scale. They have a lot of years. It's not true. And it turns out to also be Like

37:46 True with the training. I'm sure you've seen it with Lenny Bot. Like I thought having twelve years of content made the difference. Nah. It's having like a couple months of really good content and a long tail beyond that. But you don't need as deep training and as much as you think, you just need a bit to be really good. So

38:02 Anyone that has any skill whatsoever. even a couple million of revenue and up can benefit from these products, right? So we did horror general general bot. Got us to a certain place. Then we did SDR. Yeah, for outbound. Then we did inbound and then we did agent force really early with Salesforce.

38:18 And we didn't know what to do with Agent Force at first, right? Um, but we decided we would reactivate The folks. that sales decide was not worth their time. Folks. That reached out to sales.

38:30 And this is true at every startup. We even just talked about Some of the AI leaders where a human says, you know what, I don't think this is enough commission. I'm kinda busy. I got a four million dollar deal with Meta going. We just

38:42 Chuck. Asian force just on those. Okay. And and we trained it on Very similar prompt. It had seventy percent response rate. Those are people that were dying to interact with us.

38:54 Seventy percent is so good. Uh And this is something humans were not willing to do it wasn't worth their time. And I know this sounds critical, and maybe I'm gonna trigger some sales folks. But the reality is if You know, if if you're in a lead rich environment.

39:07 Okay, and there and I I I I think of there's lead rich and lead poor environments for for even big companies but startups like there's not enough but you eventually you become lead rich. Okay. Reps just don't follow up with a lot of them. It's just human nature.

39:21 It's even you. I bet more folks want to sponsor the newsletter than you can let in, right? Do you human do you pick up the phone with all of them? Uh I replied all of them and then we just tell them we're we're full. But yeah. But you see the point. Even your scale, you see the point, right? Yeah. Yeah, it gets challenging. Um And let's imagine all of a sudden you had six months of inventory available. I bet if you spooled up an agent and emailed all those folks back automatically, you'd fill up you'd fill up the docket, right? Mm-hmm. So anyone can do these sorts of you think you can't, um, unless you're so small that you have sufficient humans to talk with every potential lead, every person that touches your website, every person that clicks with anything you can benefit from AI.

40:01 So that was kind of our journey. And then we've done a lot of other niche stuff. I'll tell you at the end the the where we are today. This is a maybe this is almost too much learning is we're at the point where maybe we can't do one more. Because Right now, uh when we when we did Delphi in the beginning, when I copied you with Delphi. Even me, I spent almost an hour a day training it in the beginning.

40:23 Because w when we started to use it for support, it had an initial And started telling people the wrong dates. Okay, and we could talk about why. So I had to fix it and it made some mistakes and so When people started using it, I had to spend an hour each morning firing up Delphi, reviewing the issues and answering them. I don't have to do it anymore, it's well trained. Um, we have so many agents going and so many emails that Amelia has to spend

40:44 you know, ten to fifteen hours a week reviewing the outputs. And it's exhausting because agents work all night and they work weekends and they work on Christmas. It's a big issue. Right. This is not

40:55 Being the orchestrator or the chief AI person is not a good job for lazy people because the agents never sleep, right? So It is a so much time now to manage these twenty. This is just interesting. We can't I don't know when we're gonna do the twenty first. We may be full. And For folks that are startups, this is a reason

41:13 to go harder. Because everyone was in market this year. Okay, everyone and it's gonna keep happening. But business process change remains an issue for business software. Business process change at the end of the day. And so many founders get this wrong, and 99% of sales folks, they don't care about business process change sales forks, they just want to get their commission. Doesn't really matter what you pay for an app.

41:34 for for a customer as long as it's fair. It's all the work to do to change the way you do your business. Right. So we're even we're at the point where we're overloaded, right? And so just be aware if you're if you're a startup or even Salesforce or HubSpot Maybe maybe close those deals in the next twelve months.

41:50 'Cause the window may close where people say, Listen, that's the coolest agent I've ever seen. I'm exhausted from the last five. I had to do five last year. I just can't literally cannot bring one more app into my enterprise. And so that's gonna be a headwind. Th today everything seems like it has tailwinds, right? Everything's on fire. But people are gonna get exhausted for having so many agents. Exhaust.

42:10 Man, okay. There's so much to la to learn from in what you just shared. Something I definitely want to ask about. As people hear this, uh agents sending off emails, agents talking to your clients. Uh We get I get a ton of emails that are terrible.

42:25 Yes. Ha. What have you learned about making these outbound emails good? And not just, you know, noise. How do you make these conversations high quality? How do you It's a really, really, really good question.

42:36 So the two maybe the two biggest learnings. Um Take Your best person on your sales team, the best marketer you have. Take their email copy. And use that as the template for your AI.

42:50 If you The the the the terrible mistake people make people all everyone in twenty twenty four said these products didn't work. There were two reasons they didn't work. It was before Claude Four. Right? Net repli didn't work, lovable didn't exist. Gamma didn't really work before.

43:03 Twenty twenty five, right before claw like The LM's reached this point where they would work for these. use cases. So that was one threshold. The other thing that happened in twenty twenty four is the vendors kind of Lied. And said, Uh just turn the product on, it'll get you revenue.

43:16 No no need to train it, no need to do anything. We'll just do everything as this magic s AI savant. It's not it's not the way it works this way. What you do is An a an agent will be successful and go to market and sales today if you take what works for your best person. Train. I know this seems like a scary term, but it's not trying to

43:32 Upload that text. Okay. Train the agent on it. And let it iterate an A B test from that. Agents are really good at A B testing, they're really good at creating variants. AI like you ask Claude or chat for a variant of your best email. Say give me three versions of my best email, they'll be pretty good. That's all the agent has to do. is take your best email you ever sent. And stick it through an API. And go it's there it's

43:53 I I'm I'm making it sound simpler than it is, but not by too much. So train it. And then what and then what it'll do is then give it some data sources. And the data source could be as simple as Salesforce. Okay. And and and then if it has any data on Lenny, it can pull data. And it can lightly personalize that email. Okay.

44:12 And even better, it a lot of these products track all the visitors to your website. So it they can see what's happened. And they use other APIs and so they can personalize your emails more. And so What ends up happening is the emails that the AIs write are pretty good. Okay, if you're getting terrible emails

44:30 It's a poorly trained product from a bad vendor. You should be getting emails when you get them and you're like This isn't s as good as Jason said on Lenny's podcast, but it's pretty good. Okay. That's what AI can do today. And the magic is if a human isn't even doing that.

44:44 Or if your mediocre humans are worse. And I'll tell you You know. One of the first lessons I learned when my last startup was acquired by Adobe, Sam Blonde was one of our sales leaders, then he became Sierra of Brex and others, and he We inherited a bunch of reps from Adobe. We didn't ask for them.

45:00 And he's like, My God, I never read everyone's emails. These are the worst emails I've ever read. So the AI can do better than that. The AI can do better than than that. And so you just train it on your best and it'll be pretty good. And so so you just haven't seen a well trained agent. And then what I learned, and then another question folks ask is, Okay, Jason, that email was pretty good. It wasn't as great as you said on stage, but it was pretty good.

45:24 But do you do you tell people it's an AI or do you or do you hide it? And what we learned from sending hundreds of thousands is it doesn't matter. People. We're we're we're we're l we're we're we're in an age where People don't really care as long as the email adds value and they know they're gonna get an instant response. We've tried both. We've tried to say, hey, it's digital Amelia or digital Jason. We've tried to fake it.

45:46 And what we've learned is now we just send it. We we just send it and no one cares. And sometimes we'll get, especially founders will get an email back. They'll be like, ha ha, I can tell this is an AI, but it's pretty good. Can I do a meeting? That kinda says it all, doesn't it? Mm-hmm. So we're worrying about we're creating issues.

46:02 as excuses to not do the work. Your point about how sale human sales people's emails are not great already is really powerful. 'Cause all we're looking at is these okay emails from AI and you're saying, Okay, but humans, they're not actually that much better if you actually look at them. My God, they're not. The be listen, the best

46:20 outbound emails you've ever gotten. Um Like for example, I know you've done a bunch of investments, do a lot of them are inbound to you. They want Lenny involved, right? That's right. Some of them are just so good you can't believe it, right? A few. Yeah.

46:33 How many are that? But but a lot of them aren't, right? Right. So like the best founders and the best sales execs and the best SDRs. We'll spend two hours researching an email. Okay. Who exactly did IBM should I reach out to? What did IBM? Who else exactly is a competitor that's using them? Exactly what was the ROI? They'll give you a perfect story. Like you get the world's best story, here's your competitor, here's how they use it, here's exactly when they bought, here's the ROI. Here's the case study. That's gonna that's a great email, right? How many twenty-one year old SERs do that?

47:02 No, they they they use a t an automation tool. Whether it's outreach or gong. or sells off or Mix Max or an AI based, but they do no work, it's not gonna be that great. It's not gonna be that great. So that's why for for

47:15 People get a little confused. The bar for good enough for AI GM. It's not as high as we think. It's just like You know. A a facimile of your best person reproduced as best we can.

47:27 It's gonna beat your mid pack person. It's gonna beat the person that literally knows nothing about your product. Is this is this an opportunity for humans to continue to thrive this layer of much better emails? Uh, this came up when we had Jen Abel on the podcast. She I asked her like what tools do you use, what do you use? She's like, Nothing. I just write it out artisanally.

47:45 Uh and it works really well because everyone's sending AI emails. Is this just like where go to market salespeople still can exist? That's much better email. Or is that also. High performing.

47:58 human team hunting high dollar value logos. And when we're this is classic stuff. Lenny and I and Jen are in a in a conference room. We put a whiteboard of the fifty best folks that we want to sponsor Lenny's podcast. There's only fifty, okay? And we write Notion and we write Linear and we write Raplet. There's only fifty. It's a three and that we're all trying to sell'em these new sponsorships. They're they're they're half a million bucks.

48:20 For two years. Take it or leave it. Okay. And I give we divide them up and we say Lenny's best at this, Jason's best as Jen, and we each take fifteen or seventeen. Dude, no need for AI there, is there? Agreed.

48:32 There'll be for any of the today. Because the RY is really high. Yeah, and we're gonna and we're great and and we know that the three of us are we're different. The three of us are really different. It's gonna crush, and we don't need any of it. Maybe One of us will take our emails and run it through Claude real quick just to make it better, right? Or or what I do is I do it for more research. Like I write the world's best email and then I say Claude. How could I make this better? Do a little research. It will still be better. So that's an AI boost Jen should be doing. I love Jen, but she should be, she should at least be making it better.

48:58 But for our forty five, fifty fifty best ones, we don't need it. What if it's five thousand? Her approach just doesn't work. So Yes, a lot of the stuff we're talking about lends itself to higher volume sales. But as everyone gets bigger, it's all higher volume. it's all there's just so much volume as you scale, right? So yes, if you're tiny and you have three prospects

49:18 And you're you're just getting into Y Combinator, maybe you don't need these tools, but We we graduate out of that more quickly and and the bespoke thing for Jen, I think Well work for hide Dollar value enterprise. But is

49:32 Outside of that. I don't know, man. Uh it's uh you just can't touch enough people. Humans can't touch enough people. And humans don't want to do the work. They don't want to talk. to the mediocre leads. They literally don't I'll tell you an ex Like when I was in London

49:49 I wanted to buy a ten thousand dollar product. Okay. And I'm literally in London. I and we're doing South London. I don't have any time, right? And I I get confused with the time zones, Lenny. I don't know if you do I don't even know what time it is in in the area. So I just emailed this rap, it's in the air, I'm like, just send me the contract, I want to buy it. But I have two questions. I have two questions I want answered. And I told them these two questions. And they weren't even about price. Took'em three days to get back to me. And he introduced me to someone else on his team.

50:14 It wasn't worth his time. Ten grand wasn't enough because of not enough commission for him, right? So introduced someone else to me, and the other guy said, I can't answer your questions unless you'll get on the phone. And I said, I'm in London, I'm traveling, if you will Ordinarily I would have ended this, but I'm I'm it's a journey. I'm like if you answer my two questions I will buy your product for ten K is like, I need to get on the phone. Like

50:34 AI's better than that. This is not Jen's and the whiteboard's thing of doing it. So Um, it will f it at least it will fill the even if Jen's processes right, AI can fill all the gaps. What about all the sponsors we uh the the leads we didn't follow up with that we got a seventy percent response rate?

50:51 Right. I mean The gems are diamond and a rough and it di whatever the expression of the diamond, there's not that many of them. There's not that many of them. So Uh I I love her and I love what she says and I agree with ninety nine percent of it. But h here's a p uh a a related point.

51:08 Most of us. All don't have the hottest brands. And we don't have the most elite CROs running them. So we end up Settling for not the best sales team.

51:20 That's the truth. Most ninety nine percent of the best sales reps wanna work Just at the hottest brands. And the minute you're not the minute your star fades just a little bit. they don't want to work they they immediately want to jump to the next one. It's just there's a lot of reasons why.

51:34 So Bear in mind, ninety nine percent of all of the world cannot attract a team of gens or better. It's just practice even I can't. Even you could Lenny, you're so great. But even a lot of folks that would want to go work for you if you want to hire someone, they'd be like, Well, I love the but what do I have to do? I've got to sell.

51:50 Newsletter spot like no no no no no no I want to be CRO at at Lovable. Uh uh I love Lenny, but Is that really gonna get me there, right? Yeah. So We AI can AI can beat those. Mm-hmm.

52:03 But AI can't beat the enterprise thing. AI, I I have no idea how AI is gonna do in person sales. I uh someone smarter than me is gonna have to answer that. But um A lot of I you know, you have such a huge audience, Lenny, but I still think most of your folks are in tech and doing tech sales. Tech is the largest segment of our economy and growing, right? So for the most part, these tools will work for tech sales.

52:25 Tech sales is Over the zoom, over the phone, over email. We're not we should knock on more doors. We should do more in person. All the data I've ever collected shows Everything closes at a high rate if you go on person. It's just not, but in tech, it's basically as much automation as we can get away with in GTM. What I think might be helpful is just like let me zoom out it for a second and describe what you've gone through here.

52:45 So you used to have I love this visual you had of the desks of the sales folks in your office. uh where you had inbound SDRs, you had outbound SDRs, maybe a support person. And three or four AEs accounting. Okay, and three or four AEs who kind of take these leads and then close the deal. And so now in s just like instead of humans, there's an agent doing each of these jobs. Yeah. They have this inbound, this outbound, uh Agent that's just sending emails trying to find

53:12 Potential leads. uh an inbound agent that's talking to people that are interested, trying Get them. Uh more excited. And then is there an AE agent or I forget what I'm doing? No, we have it that's one I'm still learning. We have one full time AE.

53:26 Plus twenty percent of Amelia's time, so it's one point two, doing what five or six AEs do. I see. And no S DR BDRs. Got it. So basically all the top of funnels is AI. Yes. And there's one human now that takes all this all the great stuff and just closes the deals, negotiates pricing.

53:44 Things like that. Yeah. Maybe one point two just to say it, but but yeah, one point. Yeah. So that's where I wanted to go. So Amelia, so that feels really important. Just somebody Not necessarily full time, but just staying on top of These agents watching the emails, making sure quality's high, making sure they're running correctly. Talk about just like how important that part is to this whole operation. It it's critical. It it's critical and

54:05 You know, people are posting on LinkedIn that they want to hire these GTM engineers or I don't think that role exists today. I I I I worry when I see these roles. I think today And listen, if we get together in 18 months, we'll we'll update this because it the world's changing so fast, right? I think today 95% of a hundred You've gotta promote someone internally. It's gotta be a nerd.

54:26 Someone that likes marketing and sales and is quant. You know, a lot of B to C people are frankly good at this stuff because in B to C, sales and marketing are kinda the same thing, you know? But someone that's a nerd that loves to sit in front of data for a couple hours a day. and and route data and manage these agents. And uh they could come out of product, they could come out of marketing. But Maybe they could come out of RevOps.

54:49 But they better be nerdy. Odds they come out of regular sales approach zero. So I would find someone on my team That raises their hand and says

54:58 I've already done this, okay. I I've already I've already written ten apps in Replit. And I and I and I love Vercelle. And I did this and I've already tried these ones on my own. Can I please manage these for you? And then have them be your Chief Orchestration Office. But it is a new skill set.

55:13 It it really is, and and ultimately finding someone that's gonna spend an hour to two a day to manage these agents is the new new frontier for us to figure out they they do not They they operate autonomously, but w not without constant oversight and iteration. That's the confusing part. It and and you just if you just

55:32 buy one of these products and disappear, you will have zero ROI. So maybe too long of an answer, but that's critical. And I just think unfortunately You're gonna you have to grow this Resource at home today. You have to. Even it with between the verse hell that basically grew the resource in home. Right. We're not over sale, but

55:48 I just haven't seen it. Everyone's hosting for this job. Um But we need veterans. We don't have veterans yet.

55:56 Right. And going back earlier in the conversation, if that is you You're gonna be super employable next year. You're gonna have so many job offers you're not gonna know what to you're gonna have to beat them off. And when you think of is Amelia, would you describe her as a go to market engineer, or do you is that a different role chief uh chief officer? Yeah. Okay. But she knows the product's cold.

56:16 Mm. She knows how the all the quirks work, how all the agents work. In here's a this is This is a A complicated issue, but an interesting one. If you're running multiple agents

56:27 Okay, someone's got a segment which of the base the agents are working with or they're gonna have tons of conflict. You need someone smart enough. And any like really nerdy demand gen marketer that loves data can do this, but you've got to segment your base. Otherwise it just becomes a mess. There are no

56:44 People on X and the internet talk about these master agents that can manage agents, that can manage agents. We're not there yet. Okay. Maybe. Like I'm excited for it, but we're not there yet. So Just even figuring out how to segment your base so you can do inbound, retargeting, remarketing, new marketing, like so it's so That that is complicated. But most

57:03 Badass marketers kinda understand it. They're already doing A B testing, segmenting their bases. This is not new, is it? No. No. Yeah. But turning it on with zero work is a F. Like there's just no chance. This episode is brought to you by Data Dog, now home to Epo.

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58:24 Datadog is more than engineering metrics. It's where great product teams learn faster. Fick smarter and ship with confidence. Request a demo at datadog HQ dot com slash Lenny. That's datadog hq dot com slash lenny. I'm looking back at some notes I took as you were talking of just like advice for each function almost of how to be successful in this future that you're seeing. So I'll try to summarize briefly. So your advice for salespeople is use the agents, build one yourself, try to train it.

58:53 Help it run, run alongside you so that you understand these tools and be the person within the sales organs. Uh for met for leadership, I advise that. For leaders. I don't know that if your average S D R or junior salesperson is gonna get budget for their own agent. If they do roll Th run with it. The problem, Lenny, is that all these agents that work today

59:11 They have forward deployed engineers, they have training, so they're all like fifty grand and up. fifty grand, eighty grand. I mean people pay more, don't get me wrong. But kind of the entry level point for these is sort of like Fifty grand plus twenty five K for the F D E or seventy five, like they want even Clay, I think starts at a hundred K a year. So if you're a bigger organization, that's cheaper than a human, right? It's it's a tall, but But there are no ninety nine dollar a month.

59:36 uh products which has a lot of it they're they're trying and and I think it's gonna come. They don't auto train yet. particularly well. And so I don't know that Junior folks are gonna have access to a 100k budget, unfortunately. Right. So that advice is for the VPs, the folks that are worried.

59:52 A lot of them are where that I'm obsolete. Right, that I'm obsolete, that I'm not gonna get that role at Versea or Open AI. Um So keep keep going. My the advice for the junior folks

1:00:04 Is to embrace it. You if you Whatever tools your organization is using, become the best person at working with that agent, and you will automatically get more efficient. Yeah, is it annoying that the that you walk into work and the agent set up four calls for you and maybe you only wanted to do two of them? Embrace it.

1:00:24 Embrace it,'cause you'll be twice as productive. Right. I was literally Talking yesterday, there's a company I'm on the board of called owner.com, which is kinda like AI for restaurants are crossing a hundred million in in revenue going really quickly. It's got a hundred folks on the sales team, Kyle. With AI, he's trying he's targeting three to five million in revenue per rep.

1:00:43 Three to five million. Honestly. If this was three or four years ago for a similar company, it would be three to five hundred K. That's An order of magnitude more efficiency. Still a hundred reps, right? A hundred reps. Uh he's gonna need more to hit the number for next year.

1:00:57 But three to five million per rep. So if you're that guy that can work with those tools. you become more valuable. But if you fight it. If you don't want to do that extra meeting, if you fight it. Um

1:01:10 There's a there's a there's a tool another tool we use for RevOps. There's two we use the the one's called momentum. One's called attention. They're both great. They're very similar. And what it does is every single thing a human does is automatically tracked in your CRM instantly. Every community real time. There have been tools that have done some of this before.

1:01:28 But literally everything in and When we rolled it out and it happened with a few other folks I know, one of the folks on that old team quit that day. quit the day we rolled out the the AI rev ops. You know why? Hadn't done anything in thirty days. The gig was up.

1:01:42 Oh wow. Every day he would show up to our stand up and he'd said, Yeah, I'm doing outbound. And I'm really working on that deal with Verseau. And nothing would close. And then we said, Oh, we're we're and he quit that day. So my point is he didn't lean into it, right? Lead into it. Now you're gonna have full total transparency on your day. You know, granola is a you know a side example for everything, but but A is gonna track everything you do. Like if you want to fight it.

1:02:05 You wanna fight the future, good luck to you. But embrace it and you will you will leap ahead of your peers that aren't embracing this. Embrace all the transparency, all the leads, all the work it makes you do, because you can't close ten times as much doing the same amount of work, can you? Nope. We do more work with AI. I'm working the hardest I've ever worked. That's with all these agents and all the output they create, and Amelia does a lot of it, but even I am working the hardest.

1:02:30 But but it but it's better, but it's not less work. It's the h it's more work. The agents are so productive you have to keep up. So I'd so Sorry to interrupt for the for the for the managers. Buy an agent, deploy it yourself. Don't have someone else do it. Do everything from training to ingestion to orchestration, and those terms will be less scary to you. For the junior folks,

1:02:49 Be the guy, the gal, the person. That loves these tools. And that is the first person to embrace whatever it is. Don't fight it. Awesome.

1:02:57 Okay. For founders in startups, what I'm hearing is the um be that for deployed engineer, have that person that's sales engineer that's sitting there helping companies. This is basically an opportunity to to uh compete with bigger players where you're actually there helping them set things up. Like all the companies you mentioned, none of them are big companies. They're all startups, which is really interesting. It is true. I will say it is working with Salesforce the way we are.

1:03:21 It's the way I haven't worked with Salesforce since it was the first product I bought. I mean twenty years ago, dude. Um When I bought Salesforce twenty years ago, I got everything was hands on. I bought two seats. I remember back in the day talking to my rep, I'm like Don't talk to me. You don't have time. You work at Salesforce. I'm buying two seats.

1:03:36 It's like no no no, this is what we do. I'm here for you. I'm gonna help you get your app on the app exchange, gonna do all of it and that one away. It's kind of back, right? And Mark's got two thousand folks doing this at Salesforce now. So we have a forward deployed engineer. I'm not even sure it makes economic sense. And maybe in two years someone like you or I would not get an F D, but but But the Big companies are figuring it out. But

1:03:57 Yes, pick a vendor. that will make you a success with with an FDE, right? And and um people throw this term out, but again, it's it's just someone that's gonna make sure you get trained and onboarded with your product for real. But yeah, so start startups have a motivation to do this in a way that maybe some of the incumbents really are still figuring out. Right. Which is a big opportunity for startups to actually do this and and this actually resonates uh very Uh closely to what Jen suggested for startups, which is sell services initially. Just like do work for them, solve their problem, not with software to get things started.

1:04:29 grow that into a massive contract with them. That is software. You mean the mean land and expand, start with a smaller deal and grow it? Start no, like like afford like a person sitting there doing this work with them. Essentially what you're describing. Don't just like we have software, go try using it. It's like we will Have someone on our team helping you figure this out and And maybe there's not even software yet to do all these things, but we'll have them do it for you.

1:04:52 And then the software will take on more and more of that work over time. I think that's always been great advice. And startups have always been great at this, like in the early days you the CO does it, is it's doing support. The CO's onboarding you. I think what's different today is The agent will fail without training and onboarding this product. It it it will fail. Like it will never it will never work. So it it becomes an imperative if you want to win. Like you need

1:05:16 I I uh you This term's been bandied about too much, but you need a team of humans. We can call them forward deployed engineers. That make a hundred percent sure that when the agent is turned on It's awesome. That's your job as a founder. Make sure it's awesome.

1:05:29 Versus in the old days that even when I built uh one of the first e signature services that was so easy to use. We'd have some customers take them two years to go live. Big customers. That's just not okay in the age of AI. Right. Yeah.

1:05:41 And these for deploy engineers, is that just another name for sales engineer or is that a different sort of background? It can be and I think All this nomenclature is confusing, man. All this orchestration and ingestion. I think we're we're we're confused. Palantir is obviously the single most successful public B2B company at the moment, right? Maybe maybe Databricks and a few others will beat them. in the next wave of IPOs, but their idea for forward deployed engineers is similar, but these are nine figure deals. Most of us aren't doing hundred million dollar deals. So the idea that you'll have Gary Tan and an army of folks out in the office for six months getting the software to work. That that that sort of inspires the idea.

1:06:16 But it's really sure it could be a sales engineer or solution architect, but the difference is The S that a lot of us worked with in the days were resources. And often they're like Th there was also on a classic resource of like eight sales reps to one SE. So the eight reps would there'd be a pod. And one SC would be responsible and you'd kinda have to fight to get Jason or Lenny's time to help the eight reps.

1:06:36 This is inverted. The FTE's number one job is to make the customer a success. Okay. A presentation an AI leader that closed a three million dollar deal. Um, the FDE did it all himself.

1:06:51 Sales wasn't even involved in the deal. They went on site. They got the deployment going, they tuned it everything. All sales did was manage it through the procurement process. Okay. That's pretty different than a guy answering some questions for the humans, right? So It is a combination of customer success. And

1:07:07 S T or whatever, but it is it is really on I mean, frankly, it's just being a a classic consultant. That gets the Product done on day one. On on day one. That's the difference. Is that when you go live, it works. When you go live it works.

1:07:22 That's so that and it's a fancy name for A bunch of folks on your team. And when it goes live, the AI agent actually works. So you have a hundred percent success rate instead of like the five percent rate of twenty twenty four. So those people but they do need to be tech technical. I don't know if they need to be engineers. It can really vary based on you know I love it when they're kinda like mediocre engineers.

1:07:42 That are like in love with the product. That's my favorite type of FD. Like their own They don't really want to code much anymore. But they did code and they like just love your product. Um, but uh I don't think it can be someone with no product chops, but it could all different folks can work, but they've they've gotta know the product hold. But um

1:07:59 Yeah, I would Startups like I mean the term is starting around. You need four folks that will just make sure that On Go Live the product works, your Gentec product works. That's what you need. I think we might be

1:08:09 useful to close out this conversation is to kind of go through What are the things that are changing? Like maybe a handful of things that that are changed. That are now gonna be different in the world of sales go to market. And what are a few things that are just gonna stay the same? Yeah, let's go through it. Obviously s support is the first one to have changed. It's our obviously permanently changed with AI, right?

1:08:29 Whatever vendor you look at, fifty to eighty percent of support is done by AI. And we don't always think about support as GTM, but it is. It's the start of a customer journey. It's very important to the customer journey. So if you're skeptical, go look at you know support has changed permanently. So that that trains left the station. Really, uh as we record this, not much has changed in sales. I mean, I do think the stuff we've talked about is the bleeding edge. I do think the classic

1:08:54 Cadence based SGR running campaigns through a through a tool, him or herself. will be mostly extinct with twelve months. There is no reason AI can't do a better job than that role. the classic qualifier qualifying inbound leads, which is a crappy experience for customers. should be similarly extinct with info mostly extinct.

1:09:15 Um In twelve months. The rest we're we're we're we're going to wait and see. I think What we do know for reps, for sales reps. Everyone wants to be even more efficient in the next twelve months.

1:09:27 There's a lot of reasons people want to be at again at the bottom end, it's it's it's cost, it's profitability pressures. At the high end, it's cultural. We just don't want two hundred reps running around Versea, a repo that don't know what the product does. Everyone just the the company owner, three to five million per rep is a lot different than three to five hundred thousand. So you have to adjust as a rep. You still have there's still Every AI leader can't hire enough reps like we talked about, but you're gonna have to adjust to being Geometrically, if not exponentially, more productive with help from AI. So you have to embrace these tools for real.

1:09:58 And everyone a lot of folks lot of old school GTM leaders are like, you know, AI isn't gonna hurt sales reps, it's just gonna make them give them superpowers. The best ones, yes. The mediocre are just gonna be like more mediocre. Right.

1:10:14 Um So The I think the AE is w we will always have salespeople, but being a people person is not enough anymore. You know how you can tell a mediocre salesperson? Money?

1:10:25 You ask'em what they're really good at. I'm a people person, money. You know how you can you know how you know how you can you know how good I am, Lenny? I I I'm on text with ten of my best customers. I'm a people person. Um What are the toughest technical objections you have at your product?

1:10:38 What? What? they don't they don't know but they're a people person. You know, this is like golf three point oh. It just it's not enough. Like it's it's it's insufficient. So people people are becoming obsolete in sales.

1:10:51 Um Field sales, no idea how AI is gonna impact that if you're out in the field. I mean You know, the enterprise leaders are hiring more field sales people than ever. Salesforce is hiring more than ever. Um and knocking on doors still works, man.

1:11:05 So don't don't know the answers there. But the office worker And the work from home worker. AI is gonna take as much of your job or make you as much better as it can and you gotta embrace it. So that that's a f I would say from support. To knocking on doors.

1:11:19 You know, we're gonna go from eighty percent to zero percent. Uh What about phone calls? You know, f it's a great question and we should have hit it. Obviously there's There's plenty of robocall and regulatory issues around it. Um, certainly a lot of star ups are breaking the rules anyway. I would say this, listen.

1:11:37 There are There's phone calls and there's even SMS. There's limits to how much SMS you can automate, right? A lot of old school businesses. don't even check emails, right? I mean you're working in the shop floor. So Those are unanswered questions. People are breaking the rules. Open AI still breaks the rules, right? Um Now it's licensing Disney content. It used to just

1:11:56 Borrow Disney content. W we will see. Um, so I don't I don't know the answers to that. I think in in Europe it'll certainly be much slower than in the US, but startups are gonna push the limits. They're gonna push the limits on what we can do with AI calls. AI enhanced, whether a human's kind of on the line.

1:12:14 But AI's doing all the work, maybe that, maybe that's legal, right? getting more consent for SMS than we typically get. So to think that the typical barriers to RoboCalling and SMS is gonna that startups aren't gonna bend the rules in the age of AI. I I'm I'm dubious. But it's a good question. It's harder to do the one thing I will add is um And that's a good objection to all of this. And and I'd love to get Jen's thoughts too, but

1:12:38 If you talk to the startups you'd invest in Uh Lenny. Fewer of them are good at outbound phone calls than you'd think. Right. We had um We had multiple many of the heads of uh revenue at um Rippling.

1:12:51 Speak it's Saster. The old CRO worked on my team and others. They were late to develop Uh Cold calling because we never did it back in the day. The CRO was on my team. So we had to we had to bring in someone that had worked with Sam Blonde at Brex who had done it. It is a real art to pick up the phone and close business. It is a specialized skill. And so if you if if that's your specialized skill and there's no way for AI to benefit, so be it. But I don't think

1:13:14 For most tech calls that that is as impactful as we pretend it is. I don't think it's a Most of the startups you and I work with and most of the folks listening to this Do not close the majority of their revenue with cold. human cold calls. It's it is a

1:13:27 It is a craft that works, but man, it you gotta be good at it. Yeah, this line somewhere that if you can close on a text message, AI can close it. Yeah. Yes. It is I'm being facetious in the sense that

1:13:41 People say that I think have weaker relationships with customers. This is why A is a shrub. People have weaker relationships with their customers. Than they think. Yeah, and if it's so easy to close the deal on a text message. And We've done hundreds of thousands of these and founder folks don't mind if it's an AI if it's a good AI. Well I wanna close it on the text message.

1:13:59 Right? AI can be people, people too. It really can't. If you don't believe me, folks, go to Lennybot. Is that the U Lennybot.com? Lennybot.com. If you don't think AI can be people people, go sp people spend hours on Lennybot, don't they? Yeah, and uh the best part is you could talk to talk to Lenny Bot uh with voice. There's a voice feature that sounds exactly like me. It's unbelievable. Yeah. So it and and One a meta reason to go use Lenny Bot Go in with a learning a learn in mind. Don't go in biased. You will find that AI can be people people.

1:14:30 People spend hours. Our best who are our best therapists today as we record this? Chat GPT is our best th best therapist on planet Earth. It's a people person. I mean it sounds silly, but If if that is your best defense in sales that you're a people person.

1:14:43 Uh you you're the the sands are the the sands are sinking beneath you right now. It's it's not enough of a skill. It's people person is great when people buy enterprise software. that's gonna take two years to roll out and they have no idea how it works and it's a hope and a prayer. When you expect The

1:15:02 Agent. To work. During the pilot. Before the big check comes, people person is insufficient. Terrific.

1:15:12 Talk tell me the person that's gonna launch my agent. train it and get into production for me. Before I even pay you. It was you know, it is this is the dream, Lenny. This is maybe this is one of the biggest changes of all I let when when I talk with Mark Benioff and Salesforce is the biggest, right? It's forty four billion. It's the biggest ship to to turn, right?

1:15:30 He's like the number one thing I envy in Palantir. One is their high deal sizes. He made that joke in all the media and all the press. But the other thing is I w he said, I wish I could. I can't it today. I wish every Salesforce customer now could go live before they pay. That is so different from how we've been trained.

1:15:47 In many ways to almost rip off the customer. to get them to buy the product. Uh tr first try to avoid a pilot, then have the smallest pilot we can. Then roll it out over years to different people. AI has up the bar in terms of what customers expect. And that's why the best ones are blowing up.

1:16:03 Because the the ROI is so high. Um and so you've you've gotta deliver the ROI before the document is e signed today. That will People that haven't fully Embrace that. All right. public companies growing eight percent.

1:16:20 They're still trying to play games. What are some other things that you think are gonna change that people may not be thinking about that's gonna change the way we do sales in the next couple of years? Net, net, we're gonna need more sales and go to market professionals than ever. because the winners are growing so quickly. That even if they're more efficient.

1:16:38 They will need more human beings than ever. I I I I I we'd have to put together a spreadsheet to see the crossover point. Obviously many folks are Shrinking head cap. Microsoft's already said they're past peak employee. They will never, they'll never gonna be bigger. You're we're seeing this all across the companies we work, but they don't want to be, they want to be as lean as they can.

1:16:56 But AI is such a huge part of our economy already. Right? And it's such It's such a force of nature, and everyone is you know, everyone eventually goes enterprise, everyone eventually has a sales team, everyone eventually does it. It's happening faster. You know, eleven labs.

1:17:10 Um, fifty percent of their sales is through enterprise now. Right. I mean, I don't know everybody. Um, the fact that Versea just added Janine means they're going more enterprise by definition, right? I think Replit just added a sales team a couple months ago for real. And now they've added another CR. So they got to a hundred and something million. with no traditional sales team, but at a billion it's gonna be

1:17:30 Flooded with salespeople. So If you get great at this stuff, if you go buy an agent Today, when you listen to this and deploy it yourself and do the hard work and train it and ingest it and iterate it every day and get ahead of it and then get two agents, then three, and then four. You may become more valuable.

1:17:50 have a better experience in DTM and I believe, I hope, actually be better paid. Like I've talked about that We should have two hundred fifty thousand dollar a year SDRs. But they'd be like at Vercelle, they'd be managing ten agents, not ten people. Then they're worth two hundred fifty grand. Instead of eighty grand or ninety grand. It's it's not that much, is it?

1:18:07 So there is a great world coming. These are the best of times, aren't they, Lenny, for product and business, right? Just it's not evenly distributed. So You wanna be you wanna have if you have those skills. Even though we're not gonna need these S DRs and even though not gonna be B DRs, even though we can get rid of half of A E's.

1:18:24 There is so The amount of revenue and growth in AI leaders is so phenomenal. Right. Not not just at the startups, at the Google Clouds, at everywhere. The m the Azure. There I They're hiring so many humans that net net it's a positive for the profession.

1:18:39 But not for the way we've done it. In the past. You're at risk. That is really interesting. Though we're still hiring and and h and And this is what I've seen too, just like everyone's hiring salespeople go to market people.

1:18:50 Do you think there's like gonna be this peak in the next couple of years of just okay, now that AI is doing more and more of this. Or is it or is it just hard to predict because who knows how big AI gets, how big these companies get? I mean IT's over a trillion dollars. I don't see any We and and it's accelerating. The amount of AI is is Increasing the amount

1:19:08 Gartner says next year will be the fastest acceleration of money deployed into IT and software. In a decade. It's reaccelated. Can that last forever? No. Eventually we we consume a hundred percent of the global GDP, there's no money left to buy. So like there there are some some limits. But I I think for f I don't think you and I and anyone any of the millions of people that follow you.

1:19:28 I don't think we gotta think too much more than three to four years out here. It's too much. There's too much change. If you if you become a master of the universe and AI You will be hyper employable the next two to three years. And if you stay with a learner's mind That will just compound.

1:19:43 And so you will you will have a uh A job that I think is far more interesting, even if more tiring, than than than we used to have. But the days of working twenty hours a week. And kinda phoning it in. And getting a few deals uh, you know, I I think those are forever behind that that was a great time.

1:20:00 Um, even you had a little bit of that. You're I think you're working harder than you used to, aren't you? I am. I am. I mean the classic Lenny Vibe at a hundred thousand subscribers was Kinda leave me alone. I take a lot of vacations. I do some good work. I mean it's still part of your vibe, but I I think you're working harder. I'm working incredibly. The original idea was create this like like ch like chill newsletter life. I'm just gonna write a newsletter once a week. Life's gonna be good.

1:20:25 And uh it was just it's just hard to pass up on really cool opportunities and And do more, help it grow. Bigger. Like it's just a I couldn't resist. So yeah, I'm working on the And all of us though. Like we should you should be feel if you're not feeling what you said. Or even a version of what I said, then then you're not you're not living you're not on the right you're not living the AI dream today.

1:20:45 It is more work. It should be tired. It should be like it's if nothing even if it's better in some ways, it is just more work. Um, but but it this is the most exciting time of our lifetime to be in software. I mean, good God, unre I like I can't even code Letty and I've built twelve apps on Repplet in the last hundred and fifty days used by a million million times. I've been waiting ten years for some of these folks to build some of these apps. I just did it myself. Right. I literally just when I was in London

1:21:09 I built a whole app where you can sell you can practice selling Harvey Cursor. Replit and chat GPT Enterprise and it works. Like we couldn't this wasn't even possible at the start of the year, was it? These are magical times and we ha the fact that we can

1:21:25 We can run an eight figure business with three people and twenty agents. It's like, you know, get get excited or like go join one of these really slow growing But if I I my advice is pick one of two paths today. Either be working harder like even you and I are, right? We don't have to. Um or honestly

1:21:44 I will say the truth is the the Th there were a thousand unicorns born in twenty twenty one, right? Eight hundred of them are going pretty slowly, will never IPO, may not have an exit. But they're okay with eight percent or fifteen percent growth. If you don't wanna be on the journey we talked about. I'm not judging. I get it. We're humans, right? We have families. Not all of us are obsessed.

1:22:03 I think I'm kind of obsessed. I think you've become more obsessed. If that's not you Join join something more slow growing. They still need people? Not as many, they still need people. But I would pick I would pick a lane for next year. Don't pretend that there's this middle path going to start because it don't exist in GTM.

1:22:19 I don't think it exists in product or engineering either. I love just how excited you are about this. Just like you could tell on Twitter Just how fun this is for you, just learning and sharing and Uh, and I love that you're sharing it, but I think it's just a symptom of your just So excited about what's happening and what you're learning. And it's just like you can't help but share it. I'm in the same way. I'm just like, oh shit. I just go to this really cool thing. I got to tweet about it.

1:22:41 It's just it is just magical That Our ability to build things that we couldn't build before or build in ways and paces. It it's just It it's and it's accelerating.

1:22:54 It's so I mean We could talk about it forever, but even for me for like I I just picked Rep I picked Replit because Twitter told me to. I could have picked another tool. Like I'm not an investor and I'm not I'm not even biased, but I'm in the top one percent. Just to double down what you said, you're one top one percent user of Replit. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

1:23:10 So it really didn't work well when I started about a hundred and seventy days ago. Then a V two came out. And it got better, the hallucinations went away. And then this is just like you gotta get excited about folks may not know this and other tools do when V three came out, I don't know, 45 days ago. Now it has agents talking to agents.

1:23:28 So what happens is when you when you when and I again I can't really code. So when I have an issue and I'm trying to figure out how to do something, the agent calls in an architect or another agent and they debate and argue with it. And they come up with the right answer. The first time this happened, I just fell out of my chair. It's just so c Not only is it magical, I mean great, you can do a prompt and build a crappy app that doesn't work. Now Like 150 days later, you have agents debating how to build better code with each other, and you don't even need to know how to code.

1:23:53 I mean, this is the greatest uh the only greater time is gonna be next year. Right. I've been waiting. I've been waiting, right? Um and uh You know, and just the the things that you can build today and The other I mean you know this, but other folks I mean

1:24:08 That's me building without being able to code. The other captain obvious thing, you know, if you're building any wh why are folks so productive on all these tools? I mean, every bit of open source software in the world is in these tools. If you want to build something that's been built before. It's so easy. N the novel stuff's really hard, right? It's not any easier, but

1:24:28 Man, it's just these are these are great. And so And maybe I may maybe And so for GTM for sales. It's it's it's a couple beats behind.

1:24:39 Um there's probably a bunch of reasons for it. Some of it is, I think ironically, is just where founders are interested. So Marketing is behind sales for AI. Like the AI SGR has exploded. I don't really know why. I invested in a couple of pre AA tools.

1:24:54 Um, I invest in sales off, which was sold for two and a half billion is like the last deal of the twenty twenty ones, like the seed investment. No one wanted to be in that category. Now everyone in the world wants to build an AI, S D R A, R C R M. But marketing is slower just because They really people don't really want to build the cursor for marketing. People say they do, but but it it's just not it, but it it will get there. But um The innovation will just accelerate.

1:25:16 It's just gonna accelerate. So so don't be a skeptic on this stuff. Like if you're not as excited as me. Then Here's my last bit of advice on this for folks. If you're not if you don't feel what I feel. Here's my advice over the holidays. When you have a quiet moment when you're having your mold wine or your hot chocolate or whatever. Go.

1:25:35 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.

1:25:45 Try to contact sales. Sign up for the newsletter. Do everything. Try your product. If you do this quietly, your heart, you're gonna cry about some of the things you've seen. You're gonna cry how bad your support is. You're gonna cry how long it takes sales to get back to you. You're gonna cry about a couple of things.

1:26:02 Pick the thing that makes you cry the most over your mold wine and go buy that agent and fix it. And and Then you will have the passion that we have. You this w I always c counsel people to do this. It just wasn't as actionable before AI But so many fat you just get lost. You forget about what these things you forget about the onboarding workflow and you forget about support and you forget how bad contact me and you're so lost in the strategic. So you got it once a year.

1:26:26 ideally once a quarter, just do this incognito mode test and E even for N Letty's newsletter, I bet we can find some part you forgot to touch. Nope. Uh not gonna happen. I'm just I'm just joking. You're like, Oh my God, I can't believe I t I didn't touch that since I launched the sub stack. It doesn't even go to the right that's it's a four oh four.

1:26:46 I'm gonna do this over the holidays. And I I love that this like usually the advice would have been okay, email your product manager and tell him he found all these bugs. What you're saying here is no, find an agent to take care of this in the future. Like make this a much better experience for everyone always. Yeah. Yeah, and if it's the one that makes you cry, it may motivate you to do it. Yeah.

1:27:04 And you don't it's not like you have to Publish it to production. It's not like you have to have your, you know, CO approve this thing. It's just like Show them what you might be able to do. Here's what I did over the weekend. Uh Maybe we should explore doing this thing with our site.

1:27:16 Yeah, the jaw is just my job. Yeah. Yeah. Oh man. Jason, I feel like I could chat with you for hours.

1:27:23 But uh I think it's this is a good point to to wrap things up. Is there anything that you wanted to share or is there anything you want to leave listeners with? One last thing maybe that comes up, what w w that I've learned that that are on people's minds that we can break is A lot of folks are concerned, hey, this will impact people's jobs.

1:27:41 Do I do like okay? I want I I did what you said, I did the incognito mode. I'm gonna bring in this this agent, this sales agent, or this support agent. I've tried, I've even Did it but but I'm worried I'm gonna get pushback and people are gonna lose their jobs. Um I don't I I don't have the perfect answer to this one. But I think

1:27:58 Be honest about it. Be be honest that for the best people, it will make them more productive. For the best people, it it it will be even fun for the best people, they will be better at their job and Yeah. It is a threat to some of the folks on the team. The future is coming anyway. We might as well embrace it. So

1:28:16 It's just when I hear and I I I wouldn't just I would be positive about it. I would explain it helps the best people. Um, but I I don't think dancing around it is the right answer in your organization. It it will result in change and If it if some jobs change from one world to the other, that that's life in the age of AI. Don't don't hide it. I don't think it helps. I love that in your case and in uh Jean's case at Verse It's not like you let anyone go. In your case, the SDRs quit.

1:28:41 Uh, and in her case, she moved them from, I believe, from inbound to outbound or outbound to inbound. She just kind of reshuffled them to do to have higher impact somewhere else. I think that's an important A really important point. the media creates too much drama on I don't think AI is not I mean

1:28:58 AI has led to some layoffs. Um, but even though most of the ones we read, it's just a justification to do layoffs. It's just it's just a reason to to blame it on it. Um Uh Well it's a much bigger issue is that people just won't be backfilled with humans. We will use AI to backfield. That's what we did, but we didn't fire I've never fired anyone my whole career other than for

1:29:16 Inappropriate. conduct a few times, right? That's that you fired today for that stuff. But pretty much I've never fired anyone that didn't do something inappropriate. They just when they go, this time we just said now it's the agents, right? And so that's a much bigger force of nature. Then some random layoffs, which probably aren't really due to AI, right? It's probably not because you brought in twenty agents in twenty twenty five. It's probably because you just want to downsize anyway. And this is the excuse. Um, so it's not It's not a tr it's probably less of a threat to you than you think, AI.

1:29:43 Um but it what it does mean is if you're not Don't want to embrace it. Money, maybe don't leave your current job. Yeah, I was just gonna be able to do it. Because the new place might not be hiring for this role.

1:29:55 Yeah, I have a God, I have I have a s a sales exec who I love. I worked I've known for many years and He went from a hundred K job, then almost an eight hundred K job, then down to a two hundred K job. then left that one'cause he didn't like it and now he can't get a job at all. He's back in school. So maybe stay.

1:30:13 We all AP stick. No shame and stain, is there? Yeah. Like that. Well, with that, Jason, we have reached our very exciting lightning round. This is your second time going through a lightning round, so I'll make it uh I'll make it quick.

1:30:25 First question, what are a couple of books you often find yourself recommending to other people? I was recently asked to write a forward for a book from one of the revenue leaders I have the most respect for in the world. I read a little bit of it. I couldn't do it because as good as it was, it was dated. It wasn't current enough in AI. And there's just Mm.

1:30:45 I don't know if we said it this w it might have been before we started the pod. The plays all work, but the playbooks don't really work as well. Some so many of these GTM books are playbooks. Especially folks selling courses and stuff, but their playbooks Mm. run from the playbooks, embrace the plays. And so read all these

1:31:02 Go to market and sells books. And take take great items from them, which was always the goal from a book, right? Pick three two or three things out of it. But uh I'm I I think I I'm w waiting for the next level of books and GM and twenty twenty six books, everything I've read. It's it's just too backwards looking. So just be a sceptic.

1:31:19 Grab the plays, but don't adopt the playbook. I just had uh had a growth from lovable, uh, Elena Verner on the podcast. She had the same advice. Then all these playbooks that she's used over the last twenty years in growth just don't work anymore in A companies. Uh, next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or T V show? That you have really enjoyed. Uh what's this one called what's it called? Pluribus? Is that what it's called? Pluribus, yeah.

1:31:41 Watching that. It's and and this is So it's a good show. This is what I realized. is why you should be excited about AI and GTM.

1:31:50 His purpose. Pl in Pluribus. There's like a hive mind, right? We're all connec all the people except eleven people or thirteen people, they're all connected. People don't get this. This is why a a right now, the whole point when we're doing this, maybe maybe we'll do a third one if I'm lucky. the whole point is just get your AI agents to be almost as good as humans, but working twenty four seven and at scale. That's pretty damn good.

1:32:12 If it can do ten or a hundred times more work. twenty four seven as pretty good as your human, that's a resource you don't even have today. It's not that complicated. When AI really is the hive mind, when it can share all of the data across all of your agents and knows everything that happens. Then

1:32:27 Humans are at risk in GTM. They're gonna be so much better when they're the hive mind. Right now our hive Uh and and there's a bit of a renaissance for Salesforce as a CRM. There's a bunch of reasons, even though it's old, right? It's founded in the nineties. It has become the hub for these AI GTM agents. They all plug into so Salesforce has become the database for all these. So so that's a little hint of the Pluribus Hive Mind. But when all these agents can talk with each other

1:32:51 for real and share all their GTM data and all the customer data and everything on the one point next time we do it, the three point eight million people that read Lenny's and all the agents can share data together. No hum that that that's I don't mean to turn turn Plerbus into an AI GTM show, but uh there's my connection, but but it's it's pretty good, right? I get it. I get it. Oh man, that show's so good. I feel like every episode I get these pushes from Apple TV like there's new episode of Player Bus. I'm like, I can't wait to go watch that. They just leave the each episode ends in like oh I can't wait to see what happens next. Okay. Is there a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? Like an app or uh Gadget or clothing.

1:33:28 Maybe not the last two weeks. I'll just give a small one just just for GTM one. There is 'Cause everyone's about Sora this and all of this and video, and I love it. Um, I get it. But there is uh an app called Reve. It used to be revar, it's for imaging. And it is the folks that build it built their own image LMs on their own. And the reason I bring this up, I use it every single day.

1:33:51 is because it can do a lot of cool things with a prompt, right? But if you want to do cool stuff for marketing. If you want to create a great image. I have a CMMO buying my product doing this. I don't know a tool that is better for that kind of stuff. That stuff that we used to torture, we used to fire up Canva and try to create things, or even worse.

1:34:10 Wait four days for someone to do it for you. I just you th this is one of my cheat sheets. I have a couple Two tools that I use that people don't get, but um now it's app dot revei. It changed its name. But it's just a simple prompt, go to it, type in whatever image you want to make. And for a lot of the boring B to B stuff we like to do, uh, I find it's the best.

1:34:31 And it's R Dot com. Yeah. R E V E I'm looking at it right now. Copy bar delivering matcha through a quiet mask garden. App dot R E V E dot com. Yeah, sweet. Oh you oh you're making the image, you said. I'm just like they're giving me examples here on my well on the website here. Yeah. This is great. And you're saying this is better than like nano banana and all these other for this use case.

1:34:51 And you and I we just want to do I wanna do a thumb I want an image for my article. I want it I just did I just my niche thing content I just wanna do. I've got to do it. I just don't think there's anything better for for this use case. I use it two or three times a day and I use all the stuff. Okay. The alpha. More alpha uh to to share with the audience. Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often find yourself coming back to in work or in life? that you often maybe even share with other people.

1:35:17 I'll just tell you one in the weird time we're at. Um This is probably your best startup. Just talking yesterday with a friend of mine Startup just raised twenty million from a top. Two or three V C founder just quit the next day.

1:35:34 Just on the call. The other day. Yesterday CO of a company at two hundred fifty million just just just just quit. uh no success or no anyone to join a uh hot AI startup. Ma maybe, maybe, maybe.

1:35:48 Most of the time there are there there are times and places to just quit when you have customers when you have a million or two million or five or ten million of revenue. But we we often think it's easier to get back to get back to that ten million of revenue to get back to a hundred happy customers or two hundred p it might seem easier to quit. In the age of AI. But I'd rather take those five hundred happy customers, build that badass AI product and sell it to five hundred happy customers and go after find them from scratch. Go off to find that ten or twenty million. So

1:36:16 That's I I literally had a third conversation with a founder just crossing a hundred million that wanted to leave and do a robotic startup after ten years. I'm like, I get it, man, but like This is you know, you have nine figures of equity in this company. Maybe go to the next level. So there's so much going on. They're decelerating, accelerating. I just usually think the best startup.

1:36:36 As found for founders. N not necessarily for everybody else. is the one you're already working at. And if you're not happy, turn that into your a hot AI startup. It's not here's the thing, it's not too late, Lenny. Sometimes it feels like it's too late on social media.

1:36:49 Maybe it's too late. to build the next chat GBT. On the cheap. Okay. But for most stuff, it's it's it's not too late. It's so it's still so early. We don't even have great AI marketing tools. We're really ear on these AI SGRs. The markets have not hardened.

1:37:04 Um, the LMs are getting so much better. It is, dude, if you want it. It's not too late. So the best startup you're ever gonna have. probably is the one you're working at today. Don't quit. Don't quit if you have happy customers. Maybe that's how they don't quit if you have happy customers.

1:37:20 They'll buy more from you. I love advice like that. That's uh empowering and optimistic and And uh Destresses people, I think, in a lot of ways. So uh that is great. Uh final question. How many

1:37:32 So how many sasters have you done at this point? Like how many years of sasters have there been? Good God. Uh we've done the first big um we did some meetups. You know that, right? And then we did the first bigger one in twenty fifteen. So twenty sixteen Uh we did we did take a break in twenty twenty, uh we did in twenty twenty one. We're the only event in the barrier in twenty twenty one. Um, so is that Twelve of them?

1:37:54 Twelve years? It's a long time, man. And then how many talks have there been across those, do would you say? Total. And we and then we've done uh seven in Europe. So twelve in twelve in the US and seven in Europe. Yes, about twenty okay, twenty events. Twenty bigger events, yeah. Yeah. Uh, I don't know. Like at the the annual one probably if you count the smaller ones, three hundred.

1:38:13 So thou three thousand? Four thousand over the years. So then here's the question, is there talk that You think is the one that you

1:38:21 Like what's your favorite talk across all those events is the one you're like, Oh, this one really stood out. This is one I always share with people. One that you think people might You'd want people to check out if they were to check out one talk. across all Saster. It it's interesting. It's like a lot of things in B to B. Everything was pretty much the same for ten years and then all of a sudden everything's out of date.

1:38:39 Right. If you wanted to watch an older one. not that old, but old in internet AI time that I think will change the way you think. Watch the one I did with Ben Chestnut. Um

1:38:51 Right after they got acquired. 'Cause that's a magical time. It's called Everything That Breaks on the Way to One Billion. It's only got twenty three thousand views. That's nothing for Lenny, but for me that's pretty good. Okay. And it's a moment in time right after he sold the billion dollar company where he talks about how the deal almost fell apart, where he challenges almost every B2B metric we know. How did what you know, running a profitable business at that scale, not really caring about

1:39:13 CLTV and CAC or any of these things, what really matters for customers. Is MailChimp as cutting edge as it was today, right? Maybe not. That's one way to look at it,'cause everything everything's kinda the same. We don't

1:39:26 We don't really get challenged in the way we think. Everyone's talking their book, right? You're so good at getting people to not talk their book. Um, but But that one I think is a great one. And then If people wanted to watch a GTM one, just some favorite ones.

1:39:41 We do this one, it's a recent one. Matt Plan because these guys were on my team, Matt Plancusier of Ripley. Did one with San Blonde who was N Cero of Brex. It's called Rippling Secrets to Hyper Growth. It sounds like a commercial for Rippling, which is okay, right? But because Sam was They work together and now Sam's on the board and all like they have a fluency of two CROs who

1:39:59 are honest and have a learner a Lenny style learner's mindset. This one on the re the revenue playbook from Rippling. It's it's a it's a fourteen for for GTM. I just uh had Mad McGinnis on the podcast. Okay, former COO, now CPO at Rippling. Uh so that would be a good combo with those two.

1:40:16 Uh, Jason, I don't know if you know this, but you're you're the perfect podcast guest. Because You have such deep uh experience in the space. That you just have answers to everything I ask?

1:40:28 Plus You're now just living in this future that we're all heading towards and You're like hands on telling us here's How the future what will be. And here's how it works, and here's how you can get there, and here's what you shouldn't do, and here's what will break.

1:40:41 So I'm just so thankful that you're here sharing all this advice with us. I'm excited for many more. Podcast conversations. So Uh, so thanks for doing this. All right, Lena, you're the best. I'm I'm uh I'm I'm just a super fan. I'm lucky to be here. So thank you. Uh let me just ask you how can listeners be useful to you as a closing question? The fun thing for me, we have we We have two websites, Saster.com and Saster.ai. Just go to Saster dot AI and just play with the tools we built.

1:41:04 Play with the valuation calculator we talked about. Play with the AI V C, play with any of our tools and and just have fun and share share any feedback. Um, because I've waited ten years to build tools for the Sastra community. Now I want to build the Like twenty, so On a side, we've talked about tools you should go by, but building your own stuff's pretty fun too. So

1:41:22 Try our tools and give me a Kind but critical feedback. But but with some kindness. Okay, and it's S A A. S T RI engines. Yeah, which I'm still trying to figure out the AI versus the com. We got a SEO issue, so I can't really move it over, but uh It looks great. It works, it works. It's shorter too.

1:41:40 It is shorter. Jason, thank you so much for being here. All right, Lenny, you are the best. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

1:42:00 You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show. at Lenny's podcast dot com. See you in the next episode.

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