Our Agents Drove Our Salesforce Bill Up 80%, Marketo Hates Agents, and We Stealth-Churned Off Notion

it's not a replacement for what we do. Like, there is a chatbot, there's Amelia AI on SaaS Re:Annual, which sometimes people chat there as our customers. They still email us, either me, David, anybody on our production team. They still email us and we still respond, you know, as quickly as we can. It's not a replacement. Just having a chatbot on your website is not a replacement for actually fixing the problem. I think it's worse if there's no chatbot because then you just have nothing, to your point, or you get a contact us form like a Marketo. But having that does not— that should not exclude you from actually backfilling support, from finding FTEs, from finding folks that know the product, from finding people that can actually solve your customers' problems. I feel like too, the irony is that too many folks have said, oh, I've got a chatbot, so, you know, people will just figure it out themselves. I'm like, no, especially for agents. This is why I'm not a fan of self-serve with agents either. Like, you need support to get these up and running. As good as Jason and I are, we need FTEs at all these top companies to help us get them, you know, and maintained, right? We've needed some help with maintenance from our FTEs. So I feel like, yeah, that's really the true irony of the April of 2026.

It's an irony. I will say, and you're right, I will say even before that, just at a deflection level, I am shocked how many products just don't have a well-trained support agent. It's so easy. Go buy one. Or we just built, like Amelia asked me the other day if we could have a, do a good AI chatbot on Qubier, right? The customer success. I said, I could build for that for you in 5 minutes. So we did it in 5 minutes and then we told it to train on the data it had, and then we had to keep training it with top questions and then build a document and retrain it. So it takes a while, but there is no excuse to not have a, a support agent that is trained on all of your website documentation that ideally is connected to some sort of backend to get some resolution for customers. Most folks pre-AI have this, okay? Everyone in e-commerce has this, but I'm shocked how many AI folks, yes, you need a human, you need escalation, you need all this, but I'm, but they either have nothing or it's untrained. It's, they literally, they buy a tool 'cause they don't care and they stick it, stick the JavaScript on their website and they ignore it. Just like we talk about, these are AI leaders. So, just buy any support tool on planet Earth and then have someone's job to train it and then to update it every week. Like, just at least do that, right? At least do that.

Especially when you get that right, it will route the cases to the right humans, right? Like, that's the magic of our Qualify and our Qubi right now is it's not one, it's our replacement, but two, since it's like it will give people answers, but if it gets stuck or if it thinks this person still needs help, it will route it to the right person on our team, not just a generic, oh, we're, you know, we're going to route you just to all of customer success and we'll get back to you, or all of customer support and we'll get back to you. It's, yeah, okay, I've tried to solve this person's issue, I've given them some live help versus just sending them resource links, like I've tried to triage them by, you know, chatting with them, they still need some help, here's their specific problem, here's the right person that it needs to be escalated to.

Yeah. Okay, the last one, and maybe we've hit some of it, uh, and then we can wrap, but just because this was super popular on SaaStr, we, I wrote up a Redpoint report. Redpoint Ventures, top VC fund, investor and owner that we talked about, and many other leaders, Stripe and others. They did, they just surveyed 141 CEOs the other day, and 54% said they're consolidating vendors. They want to shrink the number of B2B vendors they have. And that 45%, 45% of all this AI budget, which is leading to explosion, explosion in cloud, explosion in hot legal startups, explosion, everything. 45% of that is coming, it's displacement. In other words, it's being stolen from old vendors that they're either canceling or cutting back the number of seats or cutting back the— that's massive. 54% are consolidating vendors and 45% are grabbing budget for all of their spend. It's not from net new budget. 45% is not net new budget. In other words, 45% of AI spend is that CIOs are trying to grab from existing vendors. And they listed, and I just want to get Emilio's quick thoughts, we can talk about it and then we can break, because we hit some of them. And what are they consolidating the most? Customer service, we talked about. Finance operations, we can do a quick update on. Project management, we can talk about. And sales automation, which we've done a lot of. So customer service, I mean, we have spun up pretty good agents on our AI VP of Marketing, our AI Customer Success, Digital Jason M. Lemkin and Digital Amelia And we haven't used any legacy vendors. Not— did you ever think to use Zendesk? Did you ever think to, to set a time with a Zendesk rep's Calendly for next month?

No, never.

It's just, if we, if I can vibe code for you a very strong AI-powered customer success agent for Qubi, it's pretty disruptive.

It's disruptive. He also, with any third-party tool, it's gonna be out of the box, right? Everything. That you do that's custom to you, you have to kind of force through or find a way to do. And the magic of our AI VP of Marketing and our AI VP of Customer Success is it's built fully custom from the ground up for us, for Saastr, just for us, for our customers. The way that we have unique customers who are sponsors and media sponsors, like in our, you know, segment vertical, like everything is hyper-personalized. Both to SaaStr plus our customers, plus, you know, the attendees who are customers of us as well. So everything is hyper-personalized to them. Now, now we've always said too, like, we're still in the 90%, you know, buy versus build mode, and that is still true, right? But I feel like when it comes to cutting things or, or reallocation of budget, I've— we're reallocating budget right now. Like, we were just talking about how we've we've reallocated some— now this is a slightly different example, but we've reallocated some budget from other tools to increase our Salesforce, um, tooling. But I took from other tools we were using that we don't use anymore, put it up to Salesforce. There are other tools we don't use anymore that I reallocated into things like ours and Monaco. Like, we're, we're doing a bit of both, right? Like, we are doubling down our spend for one of our legacy tools in Salesforce, and we're also reallocating budget right now that used to be in salaries and people into these AI tools. And I feel like folks will start to see that. You've already seen it in the data, but I think we'll start to see more of that. But I, you know, to our point though, on customer service, I feel like that's where maybe people take it a little bit too far of they're like, okay, I've got an AI chatbot that fixes all the problems. Maybe for e-commerce you still need humans, especially if you're an agentic product. You still need a lot of humans and a lot of FTEs, however you, however you classify them, to get your customers up and running.

All right. The second one that CEOs are consulting is finance operations. Right now we're Brex, Bill, and I guess some QuickBooks is sort of our slightly embarrassing stack for finance. Am I missing any finance apps that you can think of?

No, those are the—

those are those at risk. Do you think Brex and Bill have and QuickBooks have a GenTech risk? A little team SaaS-er?

Yeah, and I'll tell you why. I mean, QuickBooks is for me as a non-finance person. Listen, I have, I've always had, I've had a login for the last few years. It's like the, it's like the Salesforce example. Like I haven't tried to hook up their API yet, but if it sucks, I'm getting off it. Like I need some sort of agentic API that I can use with my agency.

Oh my God, I need that too.

Wait, does that mean—

when I ask that, like some of the external finance folks, it could be a month or two until I get an answer.

Not only that, they're so, as we've said, they're so bad at collections.

And yeah, collections is the number one issue that we have, right?

So collections is the number one issue. So I haven't even tried to hook up QuickBooks. I'll see if I have time to before our next recording of this, but I'm going to find if that doesn't work, which I suspect it's going to be dated because even the platform itself is pretty dated, like I suspect much like Marketo, if I can hook up the API, it's going to be fairly limited. So I'm probably going to move off of it, but I'm going to find something that is at least the API can talk to our agents. But also the thing about finance is it has to be secure, dude. Like, I can't have you leaking billing information and banking, banking information. Like, that's hypersensitive, right? So That's the double-edged sword on the finance piece, which is, I think it's, that's, that piece is why it's so surprising that the finance thing is so high, 'cause you're like, that's maybe the most sensitive data all of us have is our finance data.

Yeah, I don't know if folks are, are necessarily thinking of replacing their ERPs or QuickBooks. I think they're, they're pro, but may, maybe they are. I think it's, it's the rest of the stack maybe that, that's at risk, right? Well, like, for sure. If we, when we build an Agentic accounts receivable agent, what will that displace? Will it displace QuickBooks? Will it displace Brex? Brex, Bill, and QuickBooks have a lot of data in them. So there, they have moats and they have a double moat. Bill and QuickBooks have a double moat in that our third, our contractors and our agencies know them well, like accountants and stuff know Bill and QuickBooks like the back of their hand. So moving off to that, to Bob and to some hot company from like Comdata instead of QuickBooks and Bill is a— like, we're creating massive friction with, with, uh, with our contractors and agencies, right?

For sure. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Might be hard. All right, project management is a third category. I mean, we're not going to ever buy a project management— I mean, we, we do use Notion, right? But Notion, even for us, is at the edge of stealth churn, isn't it? I mean, we barely use Notion anymore, do we? We even need Notion?

I don't use it anymore. We've definitely stealth churned off Well, it's funny.

Oh yeah, we don't even use Notion for our standup because Notion used to be our standup right now. And I didn't realize our AI VP of Marketing has replaced Notion as the head of our standup each— we don't need— I've— you're right, I don't think I've used Notion in months.

Yeah, there was a few weeks of overlap when I first built our 10K VP, because again, I built it as a dashboard store. I built it as— I couldn't get— and this is just a failing— I don't think this is a failing on Notion, more of a failing on me. I couldn't for the life of me for one more week log into something and manually update numbers. I was like, you know what, if I can vibe code— this is where 10K started— if I can vibe code an AIVP of marketing just for dashboards that has all of my ticket data, all my revenue data from Salesforce, all of my everything of like where, you know, and if David on our sales team doesn't have to update it because Salesforce just pulls his pipeline automatically. Wouldn't that be awesome to save me an hour every Sunday so I don't have to do it on Sunday? And so it was for selfish reasons, because I was tired of literally copy pasting into Notion, that I originally built our AI VP of Marketing. And so for a few weeks we had overlap because, as we've shared, our Salesforce integration kept disconnecting. It's now been fixed, but since it's been fixed for the last couple months, we— I haven't logged into Notion. You just realized you haven't either.

I mean, we probably pay $100 for Notion, right? Or $200 a month, right? So, but yeah, we stealth churned. We both, we didn't, I, we months, we stealth churned when we built our, now it's interesting, Notion does have a lot of agents and that is, they've re, they're accelerating. I don't know what they do. It's possible if we hadn't started on our journey earlier and weren't good at vibe coding our own agents, maybe we would've futzed with Notion's agents. And maybe if we have time, we will. I, you know, Look, Notion remains a great pre-AI product. So if you can get the agents to do it, like if, if our Notion could have connected to our Salesforce and built dashboards that random people couldn't delete and all the other issues we have with Notion, like if we could have built it in Notion before we built it, we might have. But now we're gone. Like we're not going back to Notion. There's no chance we're going back to Notion. Like we're gone for, we're sti— they don't know it in the bill, but you know, I made this point on 20VC to everybody, dudes, you gotta look at the mows and dows and wows. You gotta in the stealth churn area because if you're feeling all confident because your product's cheap, so people don't, so there is a laziness to churn off credit card payments, right? For a lot of reasons or whose credit card is it on? Uh, there's the prisoner dilemma with like a Bill or a QuickBooks for us. But look at those DAOs and WOWs because our DAOs and WOWs and NOWs are zero for Notion. And I used to think these were like B2C consumer metrics. Now I think they're the number one most important in B2B.

Yep.

Because you're under threat everywhere from stealth churn, from agents doing part of your workforce. Our dows and wows and mows, if you include API calls for Salesforce, are like 100 times a year ago, right? That's as green as you get on the health meter, right?

Yeah.

They went from red to green. But our Notion one, like, I know no one's gonna care to follow up with us for $100 a month, but we've been red light for 90 days and no one's even emailed us. That's an F, isn't it?

That's a wild ass thing.

Even my, I haven't even logged into Canva. I've logged into Canva twice, I think, in the last 60 days. I haven't gotten any email or anything from any agent. These are, these are like, you gotta track the thousand wells and mountains. These are stealth churn everywhere. I didn't even know we'd stealth churned off Notion, but now that I've been like that, oh, cancel. I don't care. Do a quick export, but I haven't even looked at the dashboard in a couple months. I don't care. I don't care. It's not as good as 10K. I don't care.

I don't know my log anymore.

Stealth churn, man. That's brutal. Okay. Project management. We already changed our whole stack. I didn't even realize it. Goodbye. Love you, Notion, but goodbye, I don't need you anymore, right? You were great when you were great, but we don't— okay. Last one that folks are consolidating or turning is sales automation. Look, we've talked about headless Salesforce on this. We've talked a million times about our AI SDR stack, including today, just, and you and I haven't discussed it, but is there anything else we're thinking of adding beyond this to our sales automation stack that would even more reduce lead to change or consolidation? What are we, what are we thinking in sales automation as our final point?

Yeah, I think where, where we're pushing this all now is how much can we get it to self-sell. And so right now, right, with all of our different AI SDRs that we have, we don't— maybe you guys have noticed, we don't have an AI VP of sales. Like We do not have a VP of sales by definition. That is, that's one kind of— we have Momentum, which is running all the calls, which is great because it'll send me, you know, summaries, it'll give us action items, it'll move stages for deals for us in Salesforce. But it's not at that point of a true human VP of sales where it can join the call, say, hey, I also joined this other call and this is how you should do the follow-up to this person. Like, we get that very lightly right now from our current staff. Very light, right? But right now it's still a human taking the call. Our AI agents do.

So sorry, there's a lot going on there. You want to figure out how we can close without a human, close a $50K or $100K deal without a human, or what are you saying by that? What's your goal?

Yeah, I would, I would maybe not for $50K or $100K, but I think for something like our— sometimes we do these add-ons for SaaStr, something like an add-on, something like a media, a podcast, sponsor our newsletter, right?

Which is sponsor our newsletter, right? Fixed work to do.

Fixed pricing, right? Fixed, fixed availability based on like our current calendar, right? Of like how—

like, yeah, that should all be automated away, right?

Yeah. This month for April, we're really full in May and like June's getting really like— just take all that data and instead of me or David having to get on with these deals, can't the agent get them either fully to close or Maybe to contract where we just send the contract and say thank you to the agent for the commissions. That's where I want to see how much we can push the limits there, because I feel like our tools are really good and they are helping us close a lot of deals. But at the end of the day, we've still, you know, a human has closed the deal and sent the contract. So I want to just push the limits there and see how much.

That's it. So one is, can we, can we get, can we get our agents to close more? Like $45K and below routine.

Higher ACV deals.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's like right now is closing. Our agents have closed a lot of ticket revenue, right? Like hundreds, hundreds of thousands now of ticket revenue.

Maybe probably 7 figures.

Probably 7 figures now. Right. Yeah. Because that's what I looked at a couple of months ago. So, but the ACV on a ticket previously was sub $1,000. Now it's $1,000. Right. So low ACV, it can close it on its own. It can send people the code, it can follow up with them. It's already doing a very light ACV version of this. So the challenge to myself now is can I get that to work for a higher, for real ACV? That's like more like $25K to $50K. Can we get that to work?

And so I think that's enough for today. I guess, you know, the last one and it didn't make your list, so it's telling all these terms, orchestration and this, they all drive me nuts. They're too even training. But the idea of having an agentic fabric at least in sales that can manage all of our GTM and sales agents. That would be nice, right? Is that, is that on the— do we think we could do that this year or do we think having a true Agentic fabric that can manage all of our sales and GTM agents, do we think that that's just not a solvable problem we're solving this calendar year?

I would like to. I think I call it more of like an Agentic sales aura, if you will, of like something that's just always there, right? Like, could I hook up our, let's say, 5 core different sales and now CS agents? That's part of sales. Could I hook them all together enough, either using Salesforce or something we custom build on top of our Salesforce and our other agents to be always there like an aura, like in the background, like an aura.

But what— but it would have to be— it would have to also manage all the other agents too for it to fully achieve its goals, right? I like the aura idea too. Don't get me wrong. It's always there, right?

That's my hope is by, you know, fall maybe of 2026, we could get to a sales aura that's always present, always on, can sell, can escalate to human in the way we've done with some of our other, you know, lower ACV or, or marketing things that we've done. I, I hope we can get there and I hope it's in a way that can truly manage all the agents together because right now that's our biggest roadblock, right? It takes saves you and I a lot of human hours to manually manage all of our agents.

Does. All right. Sales are— I love it. Okay, we'll wrap on that. If you've made it this far to the end, thank you. And if you are on YouTube or go to YouTube, literally put in a comment your question for me and Amelia. I can't promise you Amelia's busy, but if you, if you look at what I do with Harry and Rory on 20VC, I literally respond to every comment there. It's a very efficient way. Like, put a comment in the agents on YouTube, questions you want answered on your agents. And as long as you don't mind them answered somewhat in public, at least I commit to doing my best. So thanks, everybody. We'll see you next week. Amelia, you're the best, and we'll keep learning and try and make this better. Thanks, everybody.