Jason M. Lemkin stopped hiring salespeople and deployed AI agents instead after dealing with constant turnover. One agent closed a $70K sponsorship deal. He says productivity is similar to human reps but agents scale better and don't leave.
$70K sponsorship.
Two of them just quit at the event. They just quit on site. Okay. And I. This is like the third time I've done this. Like the eighth team I built. And I turned to Amelia, our chief 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 dealer, 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 cos 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 Saster'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 reply for replit quality for qualified arty for artisan agent Force 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, but it's so much more efficient. And it scales because software scales. So. And 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, 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.
