Jason M. Lemkin stopped hiring human salespeople after a digital "Jason" agent closed a $70,000 sponsorship deal with no training. His company now uses AI agents named Repli, Quali, and Arti to handle revenue conversations, matching human reps' productivity but with unlimited scalability.
Chapters
2 of them just quit at the event. They just quit on site. Okay. And I, this was like the 3rd time I've done this, like the 8th team I've built. And I turned to Amelia, our chief A officer, and I said, we're done with hiring humans in sales. We're done. We are going to push the limits with agents. We're going to 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 $70K sponsorship on its own. So when I saw that a horizontal agent, not trained for sales, not trained for GTM, could close one deal, we're like, let's deploy a couple of these apps. We have time. And I just can't pay a junior SDR $150,000 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. And I actually think this isn't, when I talk to CEOs at leading AI companies, they kind of don't want to do it. Either. They want to have the smallest sales teams they can, as much for cultural reasons. Right now, if you walk into Saastr's office, it's kind of funny. We have 10 desks that used to be go-to-market people. They're all just labeled with our agents. Repli for Replit, Quali for Qualified, Arti for Artisan. AgentForce 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. 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 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 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, and criticize me, anybody, you or anyone watching or listening, maybe it's not cool. I didn't want to hire my 28th rep that was going to 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.
