A short multi-speaker discussion (YouTube #shorts) led by Jason M. Lemkin and Mark about how advances in agents/automation will enable a large increase in SMB activity and change sales orgs. Speakers argue entrepreneurs/SMBs can scale faster, and that many entry-level SDR roles will be redeployed (example: support headcount 8,000→3,000; Mark cites 5,000) into higher-value roles like enterprise reps or forward-deployed engineers. The panel asserts the fundamental architecture of enterprise software companies will shift as a result.
Chapters
And now you're like, and I have a dozen agents. There is going to 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 going to DIY it and are they going to do this or are they going to 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 going to see, you know, in order of.
Magnitude more SMBs because SMBs can do more than ever.
Every week we hear From Jason, the SDRs are screwed. That if you're 23 to 35 a la poo bell in European terms to the trash, you know, you, you don't have a future. You 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, 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 plus 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.
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.
No, I think Mark might be saying.
Mark said his support team went from 8,000 to 3,000 and redeployed him into other areas. I think about that number. I think the same thing.
5,000. That's exactly.
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. 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.
