Mark and Jason M. Lemkin argue that AI agents will trigger a mass exodus from the SDR role within 12-24 months, with those workers moving into direct sales and engineering. Mark's organization cut support staff from 8,000 to 3,000 and redeployed them to sales, a pattern he sees spreading across enterprise and SMB segments.
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And now you're like, and I have a dozen agents. There is gonna be a radical explosion of small and medium businesses like yours because entrepreneurs like you can do more than ever. So while the enterprises are kind of trying to figure out, are they gonna DIY it and are they gonna do this or are they gonna do that? Look at you and look at all the entrepreneurs like you who can boom, boom, boom, go right into the future. And like, we're gonna see, you know, an order of magnitude more SMBs, 'cause SMBs can do more than ever.
Every week we hear from Jason M. Lemkin that SDRs are screwed, that if you're 23 to 35, à la poubelle in European terms, to the trash, you know, you don't have a future. Uh, you, uh, have said before in this conversation, oh, human and agent, and very much suggested a pairing between the two. Jason has presented an idea that in the next 12 to 24 months, actually, we'll see this mass exodus of the SDR class. Do you think Jason's wrong?
Well, like I said, I think that— and I'll tell you what I'm doing, which is that, you know, we have all these leads that we just, just systemically have not called back. And now we are. That gives me the ability now to rebalance my headcount and to really say, hey, I want to take all these folks and make them sales folks. And I think that in all of the segments of the business that we do business in, not just government, that was one segment, not just the enterprise, the high-end enterprise, the 5,000+ world, you know, but the mid-market and the small business. We're a company that's going after all of those segments, right?
We don't leave a segment behind. So you're saying that the SDRs will remain and it'll just allow you to cater to the ones that you couldn't cater with before? Because Jason, just to be annoying and British, but it's meant—
No, I think Mark might be saying, Mark said his support team went from 8,000 to 3,000 and you redeployed them into other areas. I think about that number. I think the same thing happened with the SDRs. Right down to 5,000. That's exactly Exactly right. Yeah, I think we'll redeploy— I think Salesforce— I don't know how many like entry-level SDR Salesforce has, but I bet you redeploy 70% of that headcount into enterprise reps or forward-deployed engineers. That headcount just becomes more valued with, with agent for sales. I bet you, I bet you don't need—
what you're saying is so important, Jason, because what you're saying is that the fundamental architecture of an enterprise software company in the future is not exactly as it was in the past. That the fundamental architecture of the company will be different. And all of us grew up in SaaS and the applications and all this over the last 25 years. But, and so we saw how the applications have changed and evolved, but now we're saying is it's not just that, it's also the companies as well. And that is different.
