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The AI Revolution in Sales: How Agents Are Transforming Go-to-Market

Jason Lemkin has transformed his SaaStr sales team from 10 humans to 1.2 humans plus 20 AI agents, achieving the same performance with dramatically different resourcing. His experience offers a blueprint for how AI is reshaping sales and go-to-market functions.

The Current State of AI in Sales

• Traditional sales roles are being displaced at different rates:

  • Support is already 50-80% AI-powered across vendors
  • SDRs who qualify leads and send emails will be "90% displaced by AI next year"
  • AEs (account executives) are safer for now, with 70% of their jobs secure through next year, declining to 40-50% after that
  • Field sales remains largely unaffected by AI currently

• The most vulnerable roles are:

  • Email-based SDRs doing cadence outreach
  • BDRs qualifying inbound leads
  • "Mid-pack" salespeople who don't deeply understand their products
  • People who self-describe as just being "people persons" without technical depth

How to Build Effective Sales Agents

• Start with your best performers' work:

  • "Take your best person on your sales team, the best marketer you have, take their email copy and use that as the template for your AI"
  • Train the agent on what already works rather than starting from scratch
  • Let the agent iterate and A/B test variants of your best-performing content

• Data ingestion and training process:

  • Upload your website, wiki, training docs, and sales materials
  • The system processes this data (through "ingestion")
  • Answer the agent's questions to train it on your specific use cases
  • Spend hours daily for the first 30 days correcting mistakes
  • "By the thirtieth day it's gonna be pretty good"

• Continuous improvement cycle:

  • Review agent outputs daily
  • Correct mistakes and refine responses
  • Provide additional training as needed
  • "Each day you spend an hour or two correcting those mistakes"

The New Go-to-Market Organization

• Orchestration is critical:

  • Dedicate someone (like a "Chief AI Officer") to manage your agents
  • This person spends 1-2 hours daily reviewing agent outputs
  • They segment your database to prevent agent conflicts
  • "Agents work all night and they work weekends and they work on Christmas"

• Selecting the right vendor partners:

  • Choose vendors who will actively help with implementation
  • "The world's best software with no help training you is not going to work"
  • Look for vendors offering "forward deployed engineers" (FDEs)
  • Get on calls with the actual people who will help you implement

• Segmentation strategy:

  • Different agents for different parts of the funnel
  • Separate agents for outbound, inbound, and reactivation
  • "You've got to segment your base otherwise it just becomes a mess"

How to Thrive in the AI Sales Era

• For individual contributors:

  • Embrace AI tools rather than fighting them
  • "Be the guy, the gal, the person that loves these tools"
  • Become the expert on working with agents in your organization
  • Accept that AI will make you more productive but also create more work

• For sales leaders:

  • Pick one agent to solve your most painful problem
  • Do the implementation work yourself - don't delegate
  • "Train the agent, ingest the data, do the iterations, understand how this damn thing works"
  • Expect to become more valuable as you master orchestrating agents

• For founders and startups:

  • Provide hands-on implementation support to customers
  • "Make sure it's awesome versus in the old days... take them two years to go live"
  • Focus on delivering ROI before contracts are signed
  • Understand that business process change remains the biggest barrier

The Future of Sales Careers

• Specialization and value shift:

  • "We should have $250,000 a year SDRs but they'd be like at Vercel they'd be managing 10 agents not 10 people"
  • The best salespeople will become more valuable, not less
  • Technical knowledge and product expertise become more important than being a "people person"
  • High-touch, high-value enterprise sales will remain human-led longest

• Net hiring impact:

  • Despite efficiency gains, fast-growing AI companies need more sales talent
  • "Net net we're gonna need more sales and go-to-market professionals than ever"
  • The skills required are shifting dramatically
  • "If you become a master of the universe in AI you will be hyper employable"

The Paradox of AI in Sales

• AI doesn't eliminate the need for humans, but changes how they work:
  • "It is more work, it should be tiring... but this is the most exciting time of our lifetimes"
  • The best salespeople get superpowers, while mediocre ones get replaced
  • Organizations need fewer people but pay them more for higher-value work
  • "The days of working twenty hours a week and kind of phoning it in... those are forever behind"