Dmitry Shevelenko from Perplexity talks with Jason Lemkin and Sam Blonde about how AI is reshaping SaaS sales. Speed is now a competitive advantage. Sellers should use AI to prepare discovery questions beforehand and move faster than competitors.
Speed is the new moat, right? So if there's one takeaway, you have no excuse to not be moving faster. Right? And really you now have these superpowers at your fingertips. And you know, I think something I like to tell folks is every question that you would ask in a meeting with some, you know, third party and an external party, you can be asking those questions of perplexity of different AIs in advance, right? So there's no excuse to not be informed. You should not actually be doing the discovery like you shouldn't be learning the discovery questions in real time. But I think the imperative is to move faster because your competitors are moving faster.
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Excited to be here. Another incredible Saster annual. Big shout out to Jason Limkin and Amelia and the whole Saster team every year. Bigger and better than the last somehow. Thrilled to be here. My name is Sam Blonde. I have a series through Saster called CRO Confidential. I'm also the founder of a startup that's in stealth that's an end to end revenue platform. Enough about me. We have one of the coolest guests from one of the hottest tech companies in the world right now. Dmitri Shevalenko is chief business officer at Perplexity. I won't talk much about you or the business because I won't do it justice. Before we jump in, maybe just tell us a little bit about your background and tell us what verplexity is and then we're going to talk a lot about how folks should be leveraging AI in sales and more.
Awesome. Well, thanks everybody for coming. Thanks Sam for doing this. Hopefully we have some fun. I'm Dimitri, CBO at Perplexity. For those that haven't tried Perplexity, it's an answer machine. You bring your hard questions and we do our best to answer them for you. Grounding it in the high quality sources from the Internet, from inside your organization, from high quality external sources. And it's been a real privilege to be part of the Perplexity journey. I started my career at Facebook, was at LinkedIn, was at Uber, had tastes of hypergrowth and got addicted to that feeling and excited to be creating it once again with Perplexity.
Awesome. Well, thank you for doing this. So let's see. Coming into the show, I often do some research on the guests, listen to some podcasts, those sorts of things. For this one, I started with just asking. Perplexity gave it a prompt around this is who I am. This is a little bit about the show. This is my guest day, Demetri and his role. What are the most important topics that we could include in the list of things to discuss today? And Perplexity basically just built the show for us. And so, you know, they talk about like AI coming for your job. This is one that I think is pretty quickly being disrupted. With that in mind, there were two really exceptional topics that I think you'll have maybe the most sophisticated view on than anyone in the world. The first is like, you know, you're at this cutting edge AI company, you're also a former founder. And so one of the things that I want to do is talk about where we are today and how companies, specifically tech companies, should be leveraging AI within their go to market organizations. So that's topic one. We'll move on to the sort of intersection of product led growth and sales assisted customer acquisition. I think Perplexity has a lot of revenue with a mix of sort of product led or folks coming directly to the website and signing up. Also sales assisted. I think that's true across like, you know, many if not most companies that are formed around AI and in B2B. So let's start with the former of the topics. If you are a startup founder, today, you're starting a new business. You've been a startup founder before. Most of what there is to know about AI's capabilities today, the products that exist in the market and more. What are the things that you are leveraging.
