SaaStr 838: The Present and Future of AI in Sales and GTM with SaaStr's CEO and Owner's CRO
episode
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
56 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 16 days ago
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Why did Jason Lemkin stop hiring SDRs and turn to AI agents?
Welcome to the official Saster Podcast, where you can hear some of the best Saster speakers. This is where the cloud meets. Up today on the Saster Podcast. The reason we push the envelope when I have 20 agents running now was because, and listen, criticize me. I was just exasperated with turnover. I was exasperated with overpaying, not helping, not working. And I just couldn't do it one more time in my career. Now, if I was you and I had a large team and I had 200 million I wanted to spend, maybe I would come to a different conclusion. So I'm pushing the envelope. on how AI can replace not the best folks, not the best sales teams, not your team, but mo ninety-nine percent of the world that can't hire your team.
And it's better. This should scare people that don't want to work harder and smarter than a year ago. RAI agents are better than a mid-pack AE or SDR or BDR. Better than a mid-pack. Not maybe not mid-packet owner, but I've been doing this for a while. Better than the mid-pack people I've worked over in my career. Not better than the best.
Hey Sasser, imagine having agents for every support tab. One that triages tickets, another that catches duplicates, one that spots churn risk. That'd be pretty amazing, right? Happy Fox just made it real was autopilot. These pre-built AI agents deploy in about 60 seconds and run for as low as two cents per successful action. All of it sits inside the Happy Fox Omnichannel AI first support stack, chatbot, copilot, and autopilot working as one. Check them out at happyfox.com slash saster.
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It will
Will rock. Today's guest is uh the one and only Mr. Jason Lemkin. And Jason is one of the OGs of B2B SAS. He runs uh one of the most important and prolific media companies in SaaS, which is Saster. That's where I learned all about uh tech when I first broke into this space over 10 years ago. He's got the very best podcast in the market, which is Thursdays. with Harry Stebbings on 20 VC and Rory Old Driscoll, which everybody should listen to every every week. It is it is a must-listen for me, including all the Saster content on their own feed. And uh Jason has been an investor and owner since the very beginning. He led the seed round when uh Adam was probably like seventeen years old or something crazy like that.
And Jason has had had a pretty prolific hit rate. And that Jason's been incredibly helpful for me personally along along my journey to owner. And so I'm really excited for this one. And we're going to talk about the future of go to market, which you've been talking a lot about. So welcome and thanks for doing this. Thanks, man. So one of the questions is The like recursive learning in and like when you have all of these tools, what one of this is one of the questions I'm grappling with today. So we've got one mind and we've got like an SMS follow-up agent that we're building. We've got X and Y. How do you send how are you thinking about centralizing the context engineering, the the learning loop? Because the one of the questions we're asking is like, do we build one?
mega model of our own to power all of the customer journey from AI BDR all the way through to AI support? Or do you have a a mix of all these tools, but how do they share insight from one another? Like have you thought about that?
It's a uh if you're as far as we are or further or where you are, it's one of the great questions you'll start to ask.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why did Jason Lemkin stop hiring SDRs and turn to AI agents?
0:01–8:53
2
What caused the frustration with sales team turnover that led to AI adoption?
8:53–16:48
3
How did Owner deploy 20 AI agents in under a year and what were the results?
16:48–24:50
4
What are the common reasons AI agent deployments fail and how to avoid them?
24:50–31:23
5
How should you pick your first AI vendor and why talk to a forward‑deployed engineer?
31:23–38:20
6
Why is Salesforce becoming the hub for AI agents and what does that mean for GTM teams?
38:20–46:03
7
What is the future of mid‑pack sales jobs and why are they in terminal decline?
46:03–53:33
8
How can revenue leaders get started with AI agents when the CFO won’t approve the budget?
53:33–56:08
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
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SaaStr 863: The Enterprise AI Reality Check: From Dashboard Graveyards to 30-Day Migrations with Databricks' Co-Founder and SVP of Field Engineering
SaaStr 853: The Agents #004: Tragedy Apps, Too Many AI SDRs, and Why Your Next Hire Should Report to an Agent
SaaStr 852: The Agents #003, Our Agent Now Runs Campaigns on Weekends, Plus Why We Pay More for Salesforce Than Ever Before
SaaStr 851: The Agents, Episode 002. Managing 20+ AI Agents: Lazy Agents, Stealth Churn & the Death of 60% Solutions