Is The Classic GTM Playbook Really Dead? with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
Transcript of a SaaStr AI Live talk by Jason M. Lemkin arguing that classic go-to-market (GTM) playbooks are not dead but have been remixed and intensified by AI. Lemkin reviews evidence across outbound, pilots, SEO, brand, events and AI-powered SDR/agents, emphasizing that mediocre tactics no longer work, AI creates new high-demand product categories, and teams must ‘make it awesome’ and deliver near-instant ROI to tap AI budgets.
Chapters
But here's the funny thing, guys. If you look at who is running, go to market at some of the hottest AI companies from OpenAI to Anthropic on down, you'll see folks that spoke at Saster in the past few years. You will see the exact same people essentially running the same playbooks they ran before the AI explosion. Now, not identical, there are differences and we're going to chat about it, but literally they're the same people running somewhat upgraded versions of what worked. So here's my tough love message. A lot of things are not working quite as well as they did. Some things are working better. It's not that simple. We'll go through it. But if you think things are dead, or if folks on your team are saying it's dead or you hear mumbles in the hallway that it's dead, I think it's you. I think it's you. Because just about everybody that is tapping into AI budget is re accelerating. Hey everybody, it's Saster. Connect data, automate busy work and empower teams like nobody's business with the one platform that grows with you every step of the way. Learn how Salesforce works for startups@salesforce.com SMB that's salesforce.com SMB. Hey everybody. At Saster, Fin is the number one AI agent for resolving complex queries like refunds, transaction disputes and technical troubleshooting, all with speed and reliability. See how Fin can deliver the highest resolution rates and highest quality customer experience at Fin AI Saster. That's Fin AI Saster. Hey everybody, get excited. Saster AI London is this December, December 1st and 2nd and we're on track to completely sell out with the playbooks for AI and B2B. Join 2000/BI and AI leaders for two days. Two days of practical advice on scaling in the new year. We'll have speakers flying in from OpenAI, Wiz, Play, Intercom, Fin and all your favorite B2B companies, including yours truly with Harry Stebbings and more doing our live 20 DC podcast. It'll be fun. All in the heart of London. Don't miss out. Get your tickets, you can still go. Go to podcast.saster London.com that's podcast.saster London.com for special discount just for you. Good morning everybody. Welcome to Saster AI Live. I wanted to do something hopefully brief and specific, but then open it up to any questions you guys have on go to market, sales and marketing today in the age of AI. And I really just wanted to hit on one thing. I'll give you, I'll give you a whole bunch of points around it. But one thing, because I just, I, I see a little bit less of this on LinkedIn than I did six months ago. But man, I see way too much that go to market is dead, that outbound doesn't work anymore, that SEO is dead. Woe is me that all this stuff just doesn't work in the old go to market toolkit. I would say last year was a little confusing for a variety of reasons that we'll get into. But here's the funny thing, guys. If you look at who is running go to market at some of the hottest AI companies from OpenAI to Anthropic on down, you'll see folks that spoke at Saster in the past few years, you will see the exact same people essentially running the same playbooks they ran before the AI explosion. Now, not identical. There are differences and we're going to chat about it, but literally they're the same people running somewhat upgraded versions of what worked. So here's my tough love message. A lot of things are not working quite as well as they did. Some things are working better. It's not that simple. We'll go through it. But if you think things are dead or if folks on your team are saying it's dead or you hear mumbles in the hallway that it's dead, I think it's you. I think it's you. Because just about everybody that is tapping into AI budget is re accelerating now. You can see it everywhere. Notion just said they're re accelerating at 500 million in AR as they launch their agents. Dialpad and Talkdesk have added nine figures of incremental AR from their AI agents this year. All this Nvidia open AI money is trickling down to vendors that supply them. Datadog has accelerated because it sells to all those leaders, because it does all of DevOps for OpenAI. There's just so much trickle down from this insane spend in AI. The problem is you're not getting any of that spend. You're not getting into the spend. Others are and we'll go through it. So is it dead? You know, Halloween's coming up or is it you? It's you. Okay, so a few examples and if you guys have questions, put them in the chat or save them up because I want to spend more time on questions than slides. But I wanted to present a few things. We've done a bunch of workshop Wednesdays and others and we've got another post on this on Sasser this week. On how we're using our aisdr. Okay. And here's some data. Amelia put this together but it almost doesn't matter what this says. This is us tuning up our aisdr. Yes, we replaced our human SDR team with an AI. Yes, we had to train it for a month. Yes, we have to train it for every day. But once we do works. 1206 leads to Saster from this from 5005216 messages. That's pretty good. 136 responses. So that's a pretty high direct connect rate. And 52 positive. I guess some were negative or neutral but this works. This is sending 5200 messages out and getting 52 folks that want to buy from us pretty good out of 1200 leads. Really 52 out of 1200 is pretty high. Are there challenges? You know first we all, we all, you know if we. Let's be honest, a couple years ago we were loading up a bunch of random purchase names into sales loft and outreach and friends and just spamming everybody in the same cadences and we all saw that decline well before the age of AI. With AI it's worse because we're getting more of it. In fact with AI is making more of our more of it mediocre rather than terrible. It makes more of it mediocre. There's fewer typos but it's still not very good. And yes, is that stuff performing worse? Yes. But send an email and add value to the customer. They're going to open it. It's not dead. Outbound is not dead. It's you and your team. Two just a fun one. Maggie Hot who's also coming to Saster AI London in December. Be there that's going to share how OpenAI does its go to market. I asked an AI version of her. What are the top go to market things that you do? Top go to market tips and it's the same stuff. I like this one. A lot of folks think pilots don't work anymore. Customers aren't paying, our pilots aren't converting, blah blah blah, OpenAI does pilots now. OpenAI the hottest company on planet earth arguing other than video to close big deals they have to do pilots. In fact here's the thing folks if you listen to this, if you listen to the recent 20 VC Harry, Rory and I did with Marc Benioff, he wants to do more pilots. Everyone wants is talking about forward deployed engineers. We could do a whole workshop Wednesday on that. But Mark had a good point. I asked him what he thought about Mark Bennev what he thought about for deployed engineers. And he's like, I love it. I want to have my team before a customer even signs a contract, be in production with a great AI agent. I want it already working. The old school version of this is sort of try a pilot, sign the contract, and maybe over two years, we'll roll it out to everybody. Even Mark wants to go hard on day one, but they want to do it. Pilots still work, folks. So folks are saying it's not working. It's because they don't really want your product anymore. Or at least they don't want more of it, which we'll chat about. Okay, three, what about old school stuff like webinars and case studies? Man, those can't work. Well, here's anthropic and cursor partnering on a webinar to produce case studies. I mean, this stuff works. People discover you. They want social proof. They want to know who else is using your app. In fact, in many ways, all this stuff, in my experience works better today than it did 18 to 24 months ago. Why? Well, we've seen a vendor explosion. I can't tell you how many times a day I get questions, which AI SDR should I use again? And I, I'm always like, well, Google it. We did like 11 webinars on this. But I get it every day. Okay? Every day. And what is that? It's just, it's a birth of new discovery. Like, for years, our vendors were kind of fixed. Oh, should I do Salesforce or HubSpot for CRM? And should I use Zoom Info or Apollo? Now there's a hundred AI fueled vendors and a lot of them are new. What should I use for video? Should I use Higsfield? Should I use RE for images companies you didn't even hear of 12 months ago? So people are doing more discovery than they have in our work lifetimes. And that's why this stuff helps, because I want to know who else is using that app? Who else is using Gamma? Who else is using Artisan? So webinars and case studies aren't dated. Check all the leading AI guys. They've got it all over their website and they're doing it with each other. Okay, here's a subtle one that's not so subtle. Brand. Why are all the AI leaders everywhere? Why are Greg Jensen and Sam on the left here doing this this week? Why does Amjad from Replit on Joe Rogan? I mean, you know, craziness. And Austin, this aside, you know, Replit is in a Brutally category. You know, Replit's 1 to 150 million this year. I mean, pick your jaw off the table, but lovable is almost as fast. Bolts at 60. Believe it or not, Wix bought base 44 and they're growing almost as quickly now. This is a brutally competitive space. I just saw a new one, a new competitor launched on YC today. I just asked it to redo the Saster London site better today. It did an okay job in about five minutes. There's so much competition and again, when I'm deciding which product to use, I want constant reinforcement of who the winners are. Brand still matters. This stuff works. This is the go to go to market playbook. It may even be more critical today when plg and there's so much AI demand that we need more help making that decision quickly. Brand may be more important than it's ever been because there just aren't the same defaults. Okay, another one. Here's. Here's Figma. Figma can big thousands and thousands of its customers together events still work. In fact, if you talk to a lot of marketers at faster growing tech companies today, they're actually quietly doubling down on events if they can get their teams to do them because they know it works. Being in person with prospects and customers, they know it works. In an era of so many vendors and so much noise and so much confusion that connecting with people in person works better than ever. Some marketers are struggling that their team doesn't really want to do the work anymore. They don't want to build the booth, they don't want to show up, they don't want to spend the time. But it works better than ever. And you know, on the tech side, look at how many hackathons everyone's doing. Lovable, bolt, revenue, cat, everybody. You just, I mean, you can't walk 60ft in San Francisco and not stumble into a hackathon morning, noon or night. I mean, they're everywhere and there's a lot of things going on here, but it's also marketing. It's also marketing. Get folks building. The more folks you can get building on lovable, the more folks are going to stay with lovable events and irl. They still work. Okay, here's one that a lot of folks are complaining about on the LinkedIn too. Oh, SEO's dead. You know, I got all my customers from SEO. Well, let's slow down guys. Okay, first of all, here's Sasser itself. I honestly don't know why, but our SEO is up depending on where I look, 3x to 5x in the last 12 months. Okay, it's just up. It, it is up now. Other now is, is it perfect? Is chat, GPT and others also taking traffic away? Yes, both are happening. Both are happening. And there's no question many leaders, if you look at what G2 is saying, we just did, Amelia and Guillaume just did a, a Saster session with, with their cmo Sydney Sloan the other day. Their SEO is down. Like parts of their SEO are down, but it's not zero. Guys, I don't know anyone that had like great SEO that wrote some of the most canonical best content teaching you how to do something really important. Who a year ago millions of people are reading it and today it's zero. I just don't know anybody. So one, it may not be down. Okay, two, sure, LLMs and ChatGPT are taking some of that adjust, the world changes. But three, it still works. This, it still works. So if somebody's telling you woe is me, SEO is dead, it's just another excuse. It's you, it's you. You're not producing enough high quality content that the Internet wants to hear what you have to say. Produce great content, it works. And I actually think that's what's happening with Sasser on a variety of reasons. For what it's worth, if you look at this little chart on the right, I actually never looked at this data until like a month ago. That's what happens with a small team. But our average position in Google SEO is only 28. Like that's pretty bad. If, if you talk to, you know, an SEO marketer, they want you to be number one or number two or number three. We are number one or number two or three for some things, but overall we're 28. But actually, I think if you look at what everyone says out there, Semrush and others actually Chat, CBT and friends benefit you if you have high authority, but you're lower, lower in Google because they don't care. They're just looking for the best piece of content to answer a question. So we've probably benefited from that. Not because in the days we had lots of, we were number one for how to hire a VP of Sales. But Sapster's got 10,000 posts on just about everything, everything you could possibly imagine in dtm. So we're going up. So I'm sorry if your outsourced agency content farm strategy from 2023 doesn't work today, but that doesn't mean SEO is dead. Right? But let me Summarize it and then dig into a few things that maybe are working differently today. One thing is clear, and I have a lot of data I just shared on Outbound and SEO and others. I don't have the perfect date here, but I can tell you from just about every startup I work with or invest in or our own stuff is like, crappy is working less good. Crappy is clearly working less good. Crappy Outbound, we don't want it, right? We're blocking folks. Crappy pr. If you guys want. If you guys recognize that PR has changed like dramatically, but you want it. You want to be at Sass or you want to be on Joe Rogan, you want to be profiled, it's worse than ever because these AI tools have actually made mediocre PR so easy. I don't know, I used to get like a. Now I probably get 20 emails a day with stuff that's embargoed and mediocre and some AI that writes a pretty good email saying that someone I've never heard of wants to be on our podcast. Like it's easier than ever to do crap and it's just not working right. The third thing, what I see, this is where I see so many, especially marketers, struggle. But CROs too, the low energy crap that still kind of worked a few years ago, the cloned boring campaigns that there's no reason I would go. Low energy stuff, incredibly boring events with recycled speakers, boring digital events, it just doesn't work. We've lost patience for the 11,000 thing or the 10,000th ROI. Calculators aren't good enough. So I definitely think running the same, in many ways running the same playbook from two or three years ago with less energy, you would think it nothing works because that stuff don't work. At least not in my experience. So here's a couple challenges to think about. Some of this sounds Captain obvious, but I gotta tell you, I don't see enough people doing it. If you think something's not working, instead of complaining or giving up on it or investing less energy, what about making it awesome? What about making it awesome? Audit. Just like we've said on Saster for the better part of a decade, you have to read your sales team's emails because they're probably terrible. Even today, they're terrible. Even with AI, they're probably terrible. Terrible. Slow down and audit everything. Okay? Make it awesome. So for example, we've done a bunch of sessions on our AI agents. Amelia's done a bunch with Gamma, which we're super fans of and one of the things that Gamma lets us do is take our own sales collateral that we use for Sasser events. And we have to close 10 + million of Sasser sponsors just to keep the lights on because our events are so expensive. Sasser annual 10,000 people. We gotta, we do have to close some sales and we, you know we used to have a terrible prospectus that we would finish like four months late. Then we had something that was okay. Then we made it really, really good and polished. It took and we had a designer do it. But then it was static for a year. Like we couldn't really change much. And then sometimes someone on their sales team would use an old one or they would move it around or break it. It was terrible. Now we use Gamma which does dynamic decks with AI. It's. And everyone gets a custom deck. Now, now sometimes there are a few downsides. What we can do with design is not quite as great as we can do with the designer. But if someone wants a booth in this we instantly tell them how does the booth work? What's the roi? Who are similar sponsors who are similar people that have been doing it. Everyone instead of getting an okay piece of collateral, get something awesome. Make your collateral awesome. Make your outbound awesome. Right? Ask yourself that this stuff's actually any good. It's probably not any good. Ask yourself if you would take that meeting, if you would go to that webinar, dust it off, get the best person from the hottest customer you have to come to. You do your webinar. No one wants to go to the low energy stuff. Try making it awesome. Okay, just a few more points. The it's not though. If you look at the hottest sort of AI B2B and AI startups, it's not that they're running different playbooks, but they are remixed. They are different and a few obvious points but it's worth bringing up how they are different. I would say almost. If you look at most of the hottest AI fuel B2B companies, many of them have the sales motion, right? The whole, the whole OpenAI presentation from Maggot Annual and the one she's going to update in London, it's all about how the go to market team and sales team works, right? There are plenty of sales teams that anthropic. There are plenty of sales sales folks at OpenAI but at many of them there's fewer. So we had the chief business officer of perplexity at Sasser this year. You can read the post had five folks on the sales Team five, folks in the sales team. The sales teams. There are sales teams at Replit and Lovable and Bolt and others, but they're small. We're going to have an upcoming session with Vercel, their, their chief business officer. They have one human SDR and 10 agents. Okay, so the teams are often smaller, but it doesn't mean they're not working. It's just, it's just AI fueled. And the third point, and this is confusing what's going on? I mean, you're like, you turn around and you're like, oh my God, how did, how did replica go from 1 to 150 million? And how did Hicksfield go from, you know, 0 to 50 million in five months and gamma 60 million this year from nothing? It's like, there must be these great marketers or great. No, I. What they have, and I know this is obvious, is this is just the strongest demand in PLG we've ever had. They're just running PLG on steroids. They're trying to do everything, create some virality, create brand awareness, create this and that to keep the engine going. But if you can provide insane value with AI and B2B and you can get the word out, the demand may be insane, so that is different. And fueling that demand is different. But it's ultimately, deep down, it's just PLG on steroids. And again, my last challenge to you, when you, when you scratch your head and you look around these folks that are, that are running circles around you, just realize this, like, do it. Go on LinkedIn and see who's, who's their head of sales, who's their head of marketing. You're going to see folks that worked it wherever Brax and Rippling and Ramp and Datadog and Mongo. You're not going to see folks that have been doing AI since they were in grammar school or anything like that. You're going to be seeing folks again. You're going to. If you look at half of the top SAS executives that has presented at annual and online over the last decade, most of the best ones are still in the game, but many of them are at the hottest AI companies. So it's not like they've created an LLM on their own.
Right?
It's not, it's not none of the stuff they're running versions of the same playbook. But this PLG poll is insane. Okay, so just a couple points to summarize and then, then I'll take questions on. So that's what's the same. But on Steroids, what's not working and what's different. I know a lot of you know this, but it's worth slowing this down. One, we just talked about it so I won't spend more time, but the demand for these high Roya products is insane. It is insane. And I can just tell you what, some of the ones we use, they're because we can do something incredibly valuable we could not do before. So we spend a couple hundred bucks a month on replit. Now what do we have? A new Saster AI, a new homepage, a new Saster valuation calculator that anyone can use to value startups. We've had over 300,000 people use it in five weeks. 300,000 valuations? Maybe not, maybe fewer people, but 300,000 valuations. We just launched an AI that reviews your VC pitch decks. It's free, it's pretty awesome. We should cross a thousand folks have used it by the weekend. So Gamma, at first, when Gamma came out for Dex, I'm like, I said to Emilia, oh, this is a cool AI tool for Dax, right. I didn't totally get it. But it's not just a better PowerPoint or Google Slides or Canva. No, it lets us create dynamic decks for sponsors, for sales we could never do before. That's a new use case. It's like super powerful. Or the videos we make on Higgs Field. So this is why, and I have this at the end, this is why co pilots are like a failure. No one wants to pay for the office co pilot that does a little bit extra for another 20 bucks a month. They want something that does something incredibly powerful and very meaningful with almost instant roi. But if you have that, the demand is like we've never seen before. This is sort of end user demand. The second point, which I know everybody knows, but I see too many people still banging their head against the wall in the enterprise or once you're budgeted, once you, once you're at the CIO or even in an SME, a bigger company, there's budget. And listen to anybody on the Internet. Any CIO out there, they're going to tell you the same thing. I'm actually, there's too much demand for AI tools across my organization. There's too much demand. I don't even know what to do today, but I can't turn it off today. Everyone wants more AI tools across my company, but I'm still cutting the efficiency tools. I've still got 200 classic SaaS tools for pipeline management and this and that. I want to end the year with 200 or less. And even worse, Salesforce just raised prices again the other day. Everyone's raising prices. Zoom just raised prices again. Everyone's raising prices. So they want to hold the line on the efficiency budget in software. But even worse, even if there is any extra budget, it's all being taken up by price increases. Which what does that mean for you? Again, if all your app is is an ROI calculator, if all it is is you're trying to show how to make the sales team 10% more efficient. That was the game in 2021. No one has any budget or interest in that today. No matter how great your app is, there just isn't any budget at the CIO office. It's all being consumed by AI and price increases. Listen out and do something no one's ever done before. You'll get budget, but that's really no different than AI. There's still always experimentation, new budget, but there just isn't any budget for another 20 sales tools today. There just isn't. Okay, and the last point, why so many folks aren't getting AI budget out there, if I look across startups I've worked with or invested in is it just has to work. It just has to work. And this is why so many mediocre copilots, so many sort of pseudo AI or hey, we added a little bit to our app. It just doesn't work like the, you know, the classic B2B was, hey, you know, this is going to create efficiency in your company. Try it a little bit. And then over the over a year, you'll see it roll out across the org. Now there's still some truth in that in AI apps, but we're expecting magic up front. And going back to the whole forward deployed engineer Mark Benioff's point, we're expecting the vendor to do most of the work to train this app and to get huge ROI upfron. I mean we were again, we, we essentially replaced two human SDRs with our AI SDR. But it's not that simple. It's not just paying money and walking away. It's a lot of work and it has to work or there's no point in it. So you could kind of a sales team and a little bit of marketing fluff could promise a lot of efficiency benefits in the old days. No longer. You got to deliver this ROI almost instantly. That's what everyone's expecting. So no lame copilots. If you, if you're wondering why your product isn't growing Fast from the age of AI, you have a lame copilot pilot that doesn't change the game almost on day zero. Even Mark Benoff wants to do that. He doesn't know how yet today, but even he wants to do that. So my last I know, slightly annoying kick in the arse and then we can take questions if, if we have any. Amelia. But be honest, everyone that has something good today in B2B that can tap into AI budgets, okay, one way or another, either they can tap direct like at that prosumer level where there's just enduser demand, or they can tap into it at the CIO's budget because it provides that value. They're all getting lifts. And I think if you talk to any investor and I just had this conversation at YC demo day, you'll hear the same thing. They'll tell you, look, half of my Companies, my pre AI B2B companies are accelerating now. Half of them are accelerating and half aren't. And it's not just again a lame copilot or adding, you know, a little AI calculator, it's fundamentally adding insane more value than you can do before that taps into AI budget. So if that's not you hit, hit, it's almost too late, but it's not hit, stop, hit, pause and figure out what, what's changing in your industry and tap into this budget and look at this fun one on the right. This company file Vine CEO has been part of the Saster community for 10 years. So over 10 year old company doing case management for law firms always had product market fit. He reached out to me over years, the numbers were always strong but, but it was an ordinary vertical SAS company and then boom, they just leaned in and legal deep, deep on how to change case management with AI. Now it's worth 3 billion and it's accelerating and I think the founder is going to come to London in December and share how they really did it for real, how they really AI natified a 10 plus year old product. But if you do it, the budget's there. You do it, the budget's there, it's there for notion, it's there for filevine, even stuffs that are hard, you know. Intercom said Fin as a standalone product has already crossed 50 million. Okay, it'd be nice if it was 500 million but that's from 0 to 50 million. By leaning into where the budget it is, right? Dial Paddock said they're accelerating earlier this year. 300 million. Right, it does work. But don't pretend if you're not seeing re acceleration now in, in the end of 2025, it is you, you are not tapping into where the budgets and customers are in the age of AI. So go, go figure it out before, before it's too late. So that's just my, my analysis of why it's all still working. So I don't know if we have any questions, Amelia, but we could, we could open it up if we do.
Yeah, first question. I know we covered it a bit, but I think it's an interesting nuance. So the question from Cheryl is about our faster AI SDR agent that we use. We've got a few. Can you share more about what you trained it on? Was it only past successful emails? Did it go through an exercise to identify what good looked like? I'll give my take on it real quick. Just having trained the agents a bit and then choose can share his learnings on it too. I think the interesting nuance here, even though we've covered this, is that you actually don't, you counter dutly don't upload your good emails to any of these AISDR platforms. Like literally none of them that I've looked at. None of the ones that we use. Even some of our AI agents that do like meetings, bookings with our inbound didn't ask us what like good outbound or what good inbound look like. So I think that's kind of maybe the counterintuitive learning. None of these really do that when you train them. Like, that's almost a, like prior to 2025 way of thinking about, you know, how if I'm going to train a person, right, if it's a, if it's an outbound sdr, I'm going to train them on all the best sales calls. I'm going to get all the best gong calls, whatever it is, I'm going to find all the best email from our team, train this person on that so that they can duplicate that and where the AI is fundamentally different, it doesn't necessarily need to know those things or want to know those things to bias the AI, because it's going to make it a lot more personalized to whatever's going on with that person today to add value. So the way we train our AI SDRs specifically for outbound is I never loaded into the platform. Okay, here's some of our past very good outbound emails. Honestly, they're fine. Once you look at your past outbound emails that eventually led to close one deals from a human sdr, I'M like, they were always just okay. They were okay. And then the aisdr what we trained it on instead was not what a good look like we just trained it on. Okay, here are different Personas, here are core Personas we train it on our core Personas we trained it on. Okay, based on past knowledge, what do we think would be the best way to add value to them? Train the AI on that. The AI will scrape in. Any of these tools will scrape what they're doing now. Right. It's going to look at their LinkedIn profile, it's going to look at their website, it's going to look at any funding news, it's going to look at any announcements they've done, it's going to look at their Company X account, it's going to look at their personal LinkedIn, it's going to look at their professional company LinkedIn. And so when you train it on based on adding value, that's where the bulk of the training is. It's not what good looks like necessarily. Now, you could argue that because we're training it so much on adding value, that is what good looks like. Sure. But it's different than traditional. Like, hey, let me upload to the AI platform a little screenshot, you know, that Mikey did off the deep to book a deal. It's training it on adding value to the customer and then letting it do its magic, which is it can scrape all these data signals in a way that no human can. Right. Like that. I can't. That Jason can't. That. No, no human SDR that you ever hire will ever be able to do because they don't have access to all these datas and insights and Chad and Claude and whatever to go see what this person is doing. Right. And so that's where it will then formulate a sequence for you to reach out to this person on a way more personalized level. And I think again, the nuance there is that good. Looks different to every single person. Right. And versus trading it on like what good may look like for five Personas, you're basically teaching the AI how to get it good for the thousands of people versus just like 10 emails are pretty good and the rest were great.
That's good. That is a good insight. The one thing I, I, I think not layered on top of that one, those great emails are the past. Right. They're helpful, but there's relatively smaller data point than you might think. Right. Two, you're ingesting lots of signals. Right. Almost in real time. But three, here's the thing that I didn't get until the other day until a new platform was demoed. To me it's captain obvious. But they're all running multivariate tests. So the thing is one, it's great that you have one email, but they're running three, four, five, six different a test and then they're iterated and then they're attempting to personalize it. Right. You can put multiple, you can run multiple tests. In a way it's no human's ever going to do. Right. I've never met a human SDR that can run five multivariate versions of an email and iterate it and make an improvement and see how it interacts with signals. They're just cutting and pasting, often in three different colors and two different fonts. Right. So the, the training is as much about the iteration of the data that comes out of it as it is all the history of what's worked in the past. That's a pretty, that's a non intuitive and pretty small part of it. Would you agree with that?
Yeah, I would say so. It's a combination of thinking about it as it's going to take probably the same amount of time as it would to train a human being. But the training is not the same, right. Like in the way that you would train a human SCR on good emails, good calls, you know what brand, right. It's much different on how you're telling an AI to go about and do this because it has just so much data. Oftentimes I find myself telling our AIs to keep it simple, right. Like add value and like here's my laundry list of things you could say. And you do want to put in all these variables because again, good will look different and custom to each every single person versus like bucket. But at the end of the day like you want to arm it with those things but like it will decide for you. Right. A lot of these AI platforms, especially for outbound, you can put in like I think we have like 20 different things in ourisin right now that it could pull up on if I want to try and book a meeting for sale. There's like 20 different data points from SaaS responsors literally in the last like two months. But I'm not going to tell it, hey, use that one when you're outbounding Dial pad, use this one when you're outbounding Zoom. I let it decide it and it will decide it based on what they're talking about. Right? So that's just another nuance. And like we, we're overtly explicit to all of our AIs that we always wanted to add value. And so we've set it up to be very conservative on how much it talks about Saster and we keep it simple and we typically talk about them a bit more and then it surfaces some of the stats of how we can help them. Okay, cool. There's the next question which is related. A few folks have asked, what are we driving towards with the aisdr? Is it a meeting with an ae?
One small point out. There's. There's so much we could chat about here. It is interesting. I don't, you know, the. On the qualified side. Right. On essentially the, the inbound. Right. What. I really like that. And again, there are a lot of things you, you could do this pre IR with other tools. It's just much better now is that now the. It's not perfect, but the AI will qualify the prospect on its own. Right. So there's nothing I hate more than a qualification step which is now with the seller. Right. It's just awful. So we don't do that anymore. And then as it does it without, without seeing obnoxious, it then does create the appointment and sets up the meeting and puts it in the calendar of the rep. Right. That's a huge positive rather than, you know, even today in 2025. I can't tell you how many times I inbound to a vendor and it's like a week before I can get a meeting set or someone tries to qualify me out. It's just unacceptable today, right? I mean, literally, there's a vendor, there's a, there's a pretty tool, a niche tool that I literally love. I hadn't seen anyone automate this before, so I, I reached out to them on Twitter. I said, listen, if you can get this to work for me, I'll be, I'll be in your homepage. Like, I will tell everyone to buy your product. It's so great. And then a week later, I get a DM from the CEO. What happened? I mean, what do you mean, what happened? You did nothing. He's like, oh, we emailed you. I'm like, I don't know who on your team said they emailed you. But like, I got no emails. This is a week later. And he's like. And then finally the CEO sends me the email himself. I'm like, I, I love you. But that last week, I'm, I'm too busy. I like, you lost your window, right? So if you, if that, that, that tragedy you can eliminate instantly with AI like that should not happen. The, the stealth qualification, you can pull all the data, you can pull all the signals you can, it'll hook up all the data on the API. I already know who you are. Right. For the, for the company, for us. Right. That meeting should be set in real time. Like they just lost me. I might do this in a month or two but like I'm pretty busy until after Halloween now. So they lost their like super fan customer. Like I would have been there, you know. And if we really back somebody assassin, we're not perfect but we do have reach and we do it because we believe in it, not, not for any other reason. When we back someone hard, it, you know, it works. So a missed opportunity that AI can instantly solve. So a niche point, but that's one of the things I love about it, right Is no cut, no prospects left behind, no prospect is left behind. And I can't tell you how many sales motions I see participate in watch where anything other than the easiest low hanging leads even in 2025 are left behind. And there's just no excuse. Yep.
There's a few related questions. Where all of your AI agents trained on the data you aggregated from over the years or was it new data? So like for outbound and we're starting to get questions in the chat on like how we train our outbound versus like amount agents. Different, differently. Again if you remember, inbound is much higher intent. They're coming to your website. They probably already have a sense of what you do. They're there for different use cases. So we've trained them much differently on one versus the other. So I'm seeing that question come up now. But just to the point on the data of what we trained our AI SDRs on, our inbound agent is trained on a lot more than our outbound. Which again maybe sounds counterintuitive for folks because you would, you'd think okay, don't I need, don't I need it to know more to do outbound because it's cold, they don't know me as well and maybe but like honestly what we found is keeping it simple and adding value. The historical data has nothing to do with that. Like adding value to a person. Sure. Is it nice to know that they sponsored before or that they came to Saster? Yes. And some of our outbound does do that. But honestly I found people switch companies so often, especially in B2B and SaaS that a lot of the context we give our AI is almost useless because we have 13 years of data. But this person may have just started at cursor or anthropic, and they don't know that they spoke. It's Astra annual this year. They may not know all these things. And so for us, we try. And again, we've tuned ours like all the way to the max on the slider of adding value to the person versus it. Talking about Saster from like, historic context or what we've done with them on outbound, Inbound's a lot different. Like, if they're coming to us, we've determined that as a signal of, okay, they're coming to us, they're having a conversation with us. In that case, because they're coming to us, maybe it is actually more beneficial to have our AI fill them in on other things their company's doing. And typically it'll be like, okay, your company's attended in the past, you sponsored in the past. But also, hey, did you know your company's like, been on our website a lot lately? Those kinds of signals are a lot better on an inbound where they already kind of know you and you're filling in the blanks versus, like, trying to educate them more. So on the outbound side.
Yeah, that's a good. That's a great. That's. That's the great answer right there. Very minor, but it was interesting. We, you know, we do. We do use this app called Delphi as our general AI agent. Right. It's the first one we did. It is trained on 20 million words of Saster content. It's updated almost in real time every day. So this will be in. This will be automatically ingested into that general AI later today. Everything I wrote today will be ingested. So it is updated. But it was interesting. I wrote up this week. The CEO came and gave a presentation on a million chats between my AI, Brian Halligan from HubSpot, Keith Raboy and Lenny's. And one of the many Captain Obvious learnings was the value radically declines after X months. Like the old stuff that Brian did, the old stuff that I did, there is value there, right? But you almost want to repromote it and edit it, which we do on Saster. I edit old content and update it because the value and that agent of old content is very low. So just like Amelia said, you don't need a trillion great emails that worked in the past. Just one or two is enough to get this multivariate engine going. Right. You may need a smaller body of higher quality recent content to make this work than as large a body as you think. And a lot of folks have come to our events in the past and said, oh well, we could never catch up with Sasser. You have 20 million words of content. Well, the Delphi example is a perfect. You don't really need 20 million. Right. You might need 20,000 great words of content that are recent on your product. It might be enough to make the AI great. You don't really need what. And we got this wrong in the beginning because we, we were very early here and we had our general agent everywhere. It was, it was qualifying accidentally, it was doing customer support, it was answering founder questions and it was so good and it was calling back some old stuff. But I think we missed the fact that it, it wasn't, it was a little bit great because it had 20 million words of content, but it was especially good just because we were keeping it constantly updated every day with three to four new pieces of relevant content. I think that was more powerful than the long tail. And I got that wrong. Yeah.
Last question earlier on the topic question from Kelly was how much time do we spend monitoring the AI SDRs interactions with customers and prospects? Is it more or less than human?
It's more. Right. There's so much resistance to sharing data, inputting data. Emilia may see it differently that because it's all measurable and we can see it, we spend much more time just because it's visible. One other Captain Obvious comment. I was watching a demo the other day of a next generation AI SDR product that is designed for new founders that haven't done sales to take none of their time up. Right. This is a next generation idea. It's interesting but the, the, the, and what the reason I bring that up is if I think about, if I think about one of the reminders from AISTRs is founders especially vastly underestimate the amount of management time it takes for human sales reps. They, they don't re understand how much time a good VP of sales and my God, a VP of outbound or SDR development spends with their team. It's a mammoth amount of time. And so in that founder run state, founder led stage, very few folks can survive in that environment without enough oversight in coaching and therapy from. They just don't. You just don't have enough time. And you can do a lot of this with AI. In fact, you could probably do almost 100% of SDR, but you've got to put in more time because you weren't Putting in enough. Wait until you have a human great sdr. I mean sales leader. You will see they're spending so much time coaching, fixing, backfilling, reading, reviewing, listening to their team and no founders have the time to put into it. So you're going to have to make more time to Amelia's point to get this right, not less. This is, you will get more benefits, but you do not get time back. You lose time, you lose time with these agents.
Yep, there's a, there's more of a comment. Let's go question in the chat and then maybe we can break on any final thoughts. But Felicia has said some of the problem too with training humans versus AIs is that you'll train them, you'll invest in them and then a few months they'll leave you for a quote unquote better company. Which my comment back was unless you cancel your contract for your AI agents, it's not going to leave you willingly.
So, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, this is one of the things I talk about, but I think people miss. We talk about it. We want AI to like, we want to press a button, have it do things we, we can't find people for. Right. We want to do that and we want it to produce massive uplifts in revenue. You know, the reason we got started on the Saster journey and I think people are missing, is Amelia and I didn't want to use AI to, to make Saster better. We wanted to use AI because people kept quitting that didn't want to do the work. The reason we replaced our human SDRs with AIs is not because we didn't. We asked them all to stay, but after a couple years they didn't want to do it. They all went off and wanted to be VPs of sales and typically failed almost immediately or other things. But they just didn't want to do the job and it was exhausting to replace them. And so we just started replacing different humans. And then our content team like got tired of reviewing 2000 speaker sessions each year, so they quit on us and so we replaced that with an AI. And so we didn't do this to increase revenue or to save money. We did it because we were burnt out with people just with change and especially post 2022 change. And so that's a start. But what's really the next wave next year is there just aren't enough people that want to do the type of work we need them to do. It's hard. People don't want to do it anymore. Young, medium, old, retired. It's just the honest truth. And so we're going to be using more. We are, we're early on this, on Saster. We're all going to be using these AI tools, not so much because they're better, but because they are there, because they work, because they don't quit, because you, you can't find the humans, you can't find anyone that's good enough to be worth giving those precious leads to. Leads are precious for many, many, many years. And it's better to give a precious lead to an, to a B plus AI than to give it to someone in sales that's going to quit, not show up or screw up the deal. That's what's happening. We're going to use AI to replace the roles that people don't want to do. Even if they pretend they want to do on LinkedIn, they don't want to do it. And that's why it's going to radically accelerate the next 24 months. So thanks, everybody for all the time. We'll do another one of these very soon.
