Short YouTube Q&A where Jason M. Lemkin advises founders and sales leaders on positioning AI services when potential buyers fear job loss. Core counsel: be honest and embrace the concern; position AI as an enabler for top performers (best SDRs/AEs) who will gain productivity and focus on higher-value work, while acknowledging many will not evolve into "mech AEs" and may fall behind. The recommended honest message is that AI benefits the best, not everyone.
Chapters
When you're trying to sell new AI services, some of the people that are buying are actually fearing the AI for taking their jobs. So from a sales perspective, penetrating the organization to influence them to buy AI, what are some themes that you're seeing in the market for influencing and what stakeholders are they?
I don't have all the answers, but what I've learned, I think from most founders I've worked with, is embrace it, be honest about it. Yeah. And the answer is always some version of this. Look for the best folks on your team. This is an enabler for the best folks. The best SDRs, these tools are going to be good. The best AES are going to benefit from all this. Selling the best everything. And in your vertical thing, maybe you won't need everybody on the team, but your best folks will benefit from it. They'll be able to work on the highest value things, they'll be able to provide the highest value solutions and they won't be doing monotonous things. And so, you know, a lot of folks on LinkedIn say this thing and it's just not true that AI agents are going to be wonderful for sales folks because it's going to just make them all into superstars, you know, And I called this the mech AE a while ago on Saster and it's true, but it's only true for a subset of folks are going to be mech AES. Most are not going to evolve, they're not going to become product experts, they're not going to become many forward deployed engineers or solution architects and they're going to fall behind. And I think you just got to play into the fact that not everyone will benefit, but your best folks will benefit. I found a vertical SaaS. That message, it's honest and it works and it's not your whole, it's not going to rip through your whole team. It's going to benefit the best and not the rest. That's the best, the best advice I have for today. You're the boss.
