SaaStr 822: SaaStr's Top 10+ AI Agents: AI SDR, AI BDR, AI RevOps + More: The How, The Who, The Why with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin

26:09Like you can try it at sasterai.com, use the co-pilot. People use it for advice. Sometimes people use it for one-off questions, but when we looked at the data, most people come back to it. So they'll actually ask Jason's AI a question. Jason's AI will respond. Let's say, hey, I'm thinking about hiring this candidate for a VP of sales. Here's my high-level overview of them. What do you think? Jason's AI will say, hey, I think we should think about these XYZ things. And then if the founder says to them in the next instance of Delphi, I'm thinking about hiring that person that we talked about. What should their comp plan be?

26:42It'll come up with a comp plan with them. So again, it's becoming more of a co-pilot, which is kind of cool. and in that use case we really liked how folks use it for faster advice right faster style advice jason doesn't have time to talk to a thousand people a day but his delphi does but where i thought it kind of struggled a little bit honestly was in the sales and support side and the inbound side people would ask it going up to sas for annual questions about the annual questions about sponsoring and it did okay with the answers like it was still better to get an answer in real time the no answer, right?

27:16So it was still pretty good. But now it's just gotten a lot better that we use this mix of having a dedicated, right? Even though we have free on Artisan, like it just works better to have a dedicated agent working on outbound. And now we have a dedicated agent that works on inbound. So again, it's just that the level of output we've gotten to be used is just a lot better than what we originally had on Delphi being Jason's mind and used for like a little bit of everything. It also kind of led us to these use cases, right? I just saw that people were starting to struggle with things like that. And so that's where we wanted to add those next tools and agents to the mix.

27:55We use Qualified now. They've been in the Saster ecosystem, I would say, a long time. I know they've been attending a really long time. So we already knew of them, right? When I was starting to look for things that could do inbound for Saster as an AI, this is top of mind because I also knew a lot of folks who are already using it. So this was also one of those things where I could just back channel like what are people already seeing with Qualify and they were all positive on it. So that led me to chat with their team. But what it does for us specifically, which actually is a little bit different.

28:29So you can see it on our website. If you're on saster.com, you're going to mostly interact with Delphi. If you're however, on one of our Saster events pages. So if you're on Saster London, in, SaaS for annual, or you're on one of the sponsorship pages, media pages, basically anything that has to do with actual SaaS for revenue, this is where our qualified agent lives. This is where you'll see the Amelia AI. We strategically said that Jason Delphi is Jason's AI. We named it after Jason so folks know that they can ask it for advice. We named for this one the Amelia AI so that folks knew that there was a difference.

29:00It wasn't just like another Jason AI. This is the one that you specifically go to when you have a question about attending saster sponsoring saster and then what you should do about those two things or media right so that's how it's specifically trained um and honestly it's something where even like we don't have many sales folks here but they were a little steptic on in when i first deployed it because they're like okay our prior process to qualified was you would come to sasr annual or sasr one in any of our event sites and if you say were interested in a sponsorship you would fill out a form after sasr annual in may the sierra i was like that feels very antiquated that feels not very 0.25 where our conference is now all ai we're going all in on ai it feels very outdated to have a page where you fill out a form and that's the way to get a hold of Samster.

29:54So that was like a kick in the butt for me specifically too, to get away from that kind of old model of how we were doing things. So now our qualified does actually a lot of different things, but part of what it does is it, the form is on the website, but you won't actually ever complete it now. Like it's literally there as like a wrapper. And if you start to say, the moment you start typing in your first name, this qualified agent, the Amelia AI will pop up and say, hey, I saw you're interested in sponsoring faster. Just shoot me your email and then I'll automatically, on the back end, I'll round robin it to a sales rep here and it'll show the meeting booker instantly.

30:34Again, I know there's a lot of other things that do that. The magic though of Qualified that we've seen is that it does have all of our data. It does already have full integration with Marketo, full integration with Salesforce. It is so nice that it knows this. So like when they're coming to the site and people will come multiple times, usually to our website, it knows how many times they've been on the website. It knows if they've been to Sastre Annual and knows if they sponsored Sastre Annual. Literally, if they opened the Sastre newsletter from Tuesday, it knows all of this because our Salesforce and Mercado knows all of this.

31:08So that is actually, they call it Piper Dequalified. That's the magic of using a Piper agent. Ours is called Amelia. Is that it knows everything. So in that context for inbound, I actually like that it knows everything because these are folks that are obviously warmer leads, right? They're coming to the website. They're coming multiple times. They're on specific pages to either buy something or get involved in staffer. For all intents and purposes, they're high intent visitors. So in this scenario, I do want it to know as much data as humanly possible. And so in that reason, it's very nice that Qualify does that on the back end.

31:44So that's what it does. So it's, and it's, I mean, it's, it's ingesting our Salesforce and Marketo data like daily? I said it's a weekly because I'm like, you know, daily is a lot. I'm like, weekly is enough. Okay. So every, every week it's doing some sort of diff analysis and importing everything that's new from Salesforce or Marketo? Correct. Yeah. Okay. And that's automated. That's automated. Yeah. And that's automated. It also will crawl all of our websites once a week too. So like sastra.com, it will re-ingest once a week. So if you write something up about like you wrote, like you did the Vibe coding last week on Workshop Wednesday, it already saw that it adjusted it and knows how to reference it.

32:23This one will show up like next week, right? It's after annual, it'll recrawl once a week. So like, you know, when we add speakers or when we add them to London or make updates to the London pages, I don't have to worry about pushing it to that. It'll just do that automatically. Yep.

32:41So yes, that is where we've used it. part of it was like okay i want to you know bring our inbound into the whatever century this is into 2025 and so that was part of like okay let's replace the form with something that is a lot more intelligent than just a static form the other thing we've started doing is because it can do the meetings bookings it's obviously going to have a better response rate on meetings than we used to have manually right so if you filled out the form Previously, we would then, I would wrap Rob in it manually. Then I would send it to rep, the rep would reach out. And then, you know, they'd have to go back and forth on picking a time for the meeting.

33:20Now it just books the meeting. So literally, Dave and our team will wake up and he'll be like, yeah, I got like three new meetings from qualified. I'm like, that's great. That's what we want. I didn't have to touch it, but I do have all that data, right? I can see the conversations they had that led them to sponsoring. I could see who they were. I can also like, I'll go through with David kind of daily and say, okay, like, hey, who did you get from a qualified meeting like let's see what they said on the website website and then you can also see like what their company is doing so you can see if their company is on the website a lot right maybe they're taking it more seriously um you can see what pages they were on so again it just gives you like extra like buyer intelligence context for how they came inbound versus again static form you're just kind of getting their name and email you're not getting the context around it that piece has been really nice for us the other thing we've started it on there's like and then there's one like somewhat future use case which is literally in the next couple weeks is i started to train after we nailed the sponsorship piece which was the first piece we wanted to solve i started to train it on direct ticket sales so much like our origin this is a little bit different because it's a thin bound versus outbound it can again it can see when people are on like the sass or london site you can see if they've been a couple times now we'll preempt them and say hey are you thinking about attending you are okay great here's the discount code to attend and if they don't use it the next time they're on the site it'll remind them of the discount code so this is a new thing we've we literally adjusted that at the end of august worked really well so we're going to keep doing that and then we as you can see here we started a prompt for like do you want to inquire about group tickets my concern on that honestly with that if I turned that on, we were going to get too many spammers that were like, hey, your chat already gave me a promo code.

35:05And actually, I just didn't like it. So I'm inquiring about group tickets. But really, I've actually gotten the opposite. I've actually gotten highly qualified. I've gotten highly qualified leads, companies that actually need group tickets. So because how you buy tickets on sastra.com is usually good for a group of one to four. it's kind of tedious actually pass for people because you have to put in all their info you have to like do different things it's just easier to do it with an actual person so this has actually led to actual sales of of group tickets which has been nice because i actually thought it was going to be abused but it's been used properly that that was like the next we literally just rolled that out in the last two weeks so that was like the next use case we found it so now we're actually already up to like two slash three use cases of it the other thing it does is it does really get the port so if you ask it like people have asked the london one a lot for like the hotel block again it's like kind of buried on the website so that's a common thing it'll answer now like hey i forgot where the venue is also is there a hotel block it'll just answer that for them you gotta remember too like london time difference to california where SaaS is pretty staggering.

36:22So like I can't answer these questions in the middle of the night. And if they come to the website and they can't find it, it's much easier to just interact with the Amelia AI, ask it all the questions. The future use case, which we're going to do before London, and this is the goal with being qualified, is to turn this into even more of a co-pilot so that folks can ask it like, hey, if you come to the website again, it's going to know if you're already registered or not. So let's say you're attending, you come to the website in November, you haven't booked any networking meetings yet, or Amelia AI will be able to tell you like, hey, you haven't booked any meetings yet.

36:57Here's all the info on the SaaS for who do you want to meet program for London. You should start networking. Or hey, I saw you haven't booked any sessions yet. Here are some ones we recommend you should book and go to on Tuesday, December 2nd. So that is its next date. I'm also adding, like Jason's Delphi already has voice. So you can literally talk to it, which a lot of people do. They call it. So we're adding like poison video to this agent as well. Again, this is adopted a lot later than Delphi. So it's doing a little bit of catch up in that area. But I would say in the use cases we've printed on has been successful out the gate.

37:34And then, yeah, I would say too, like you can see here, like some of our much like artisan, like our performance. I think they're fine with me sharing this. our performance metrics is like higher than average. So like the black lines on each of these for like engagements and meetings for Sastra has been higher than average, but still really, again, their averages are still fairly high. Ours just happens to be above average. Again, I think that's part to do with like the brand that Sastra has and how people are coming to our website versus like a more common product website.

38:11i think it sounds like listen a lot of these behind the scenes these apps are a lot of mashups of other apis right they're api other services that can figure out who's on your website and figure out all these things but what's i think one of the things i don't know others can do this but that works for us for qualified is we have so much data about so many people over a decade right that we have so many returners yeah so many of the folks that come back to us And so that's why we do so well. But you might think if you're a newer startup, oh, I don't have folks that are returning. Of course you do.

38:41Everyone's, the newer you are, the more folks are in discovery. How many times do I have to come back to your website to do diligence, to think about it, to when a sales rep tells me something, when I hear a referral, they're all coming back multiple times. As Amelia said, we're shocked how many times, now that we track it more carefully, we could have done it before, how many times people come back, right? So you should leverage this, all the data, all the interactions, everything you have to get them, right? to personalize the experience and get them. There's one thing before we move. So I'll show you guys the backend of Qualified for a second.

39:15All right. So somebody asked, if you have a more enterprise ASP, can you still use a tool like Qualified versus having the customer directly connect with a rep? You can do both. I've literally done both on Qualified. Like one, are ASP for tickets? Yes, it's a couple hundred bucks for London, in slightly more for Sastra Annual, but our ASP for sponsorships is probably 85k. So I don't know if you consider that enterprise, but I would say that's more of an enterprise ASP. The nice thing about it is you can at any time, they call it pounds, you can start talking. I don't know who this is, so I'm not going to talk to them.

39:54At any point, if you see that they're typing, which it'll show you what they're typing in real time, it'll literally show me what page that they're on right now on sasher.com you can say hey it's like you can hit this and start talking to this person so for us it's on either or like i actually find it very addicting to have this just this is literally i have called what always on as one of my tabs and i'm continuously seeing what it's doing where people are going and it'll alert you it's got like a slack integration so it'll alert you like you can set it for certain signals but it'll alert you how you want so if If you want to jump in and have an actual rep, start a conversation with them, you can.

40:34It's meant to be fully automated. Most of the time people get our fully automated experience, but there have been instances where I see folks or maybe have a more nuanced question related to sponsorships, which is a higher ASP, and I jump in and I start talking to them. And then I get it to show the meeting book or et cetera. You can do both. Before we run out of time, Anything else you want to hit on Delphi, Jason? We've hit it a bunch, but. No, the only thing I would, listen, if you want to try our general chat, just go to saster.com and just click on the chat on the bottom right if you have, and a lot of you have, 139 ,000 conversations.

41:14It's really good. Just the one reminder from it, this is the first one we started, and there are other tools that do this that create digital clones, but what it does is it mostly automates ingestion. So it automates, you can automate, It'll crawl our website. It'll automate the RSS feed from our blogs. It ingests all my tweets. It ingests every YouTube video we've ever done. Then we got SaaS for that. It's a lot of content. So out of the box, it was really good. The quick thing we learned is then to quickly upload some very specific documents. So when this was the only tool we had, I'm like, well, let's upload the sponsor prospectuses for our sponsors.

41:47It became magical because all of a sudden it could answer those questions. And we get some stuff wrong, so you have to read it each day, but it would get pretty good. So we'd have to review it daily. The meta learning is, listen, to get the results that we've seen from the SDR and the BDR, you have to put in a lot of effort, but even just some general tools, man, this is so much better than get back to you in a day. It's so much better. So if you want to start, we started first with, or you could use qualified as a general tool. Like it's not a perfect support tool, but it could like these tools all can do more than you think.

42:21So pick a platform and just keep investing in it. It's so much better to get back to someone with a 90 % perfect answer in real time than any brutal other process. There's just no excuse. So my point is, listen, we started with one and now we have 20, right? And 11 core ones. So this general platform was not enough. But man, just having a versatile platform versus nothing is so much better. It's just so much better. There's no excuse to not have a super well-trained AI talk to your prospects or customers in real time if that's the way they want to talk without a human. So if nothing else, pick a general tool and run with it is the meta learning.

42:58All right. Two more, if we have time, and then Jason can chat about quickly as well as we live coded ourselves. Sales collateral, I'll touch on this one real quick. I actually don't remember how you found Gamma, Jason, but... I just knew. I just tried it. And it was great. But then I said to me, can we customize this so that every single sponsor prospect gets customized collateral? because it was driving me nuts and how crappy like our decks were pretty good but they were so uncustomized i wanted to cry yeah yeah and yeah so we use it that is our primary use case so like to jason's point we have right now this prospectus on our website which you can download you can talk to our ai and get it and see it and it's like a hundred pages i don't know it's crazy long because it has everything.

43:47So it's fairly long and hard to digest. So where we started to use a Gamma was, okay, if I wanted to talk to somebody who is a prospective customer, and I didn't want to send them this 100-page deck, I wanted to send them something more custom, I now just load it into Gamma. I tell it which slides I want to keep from our long prospective stack. And I tell it what the company is i tell at other points and it'll automatically spit out a more customized deck for them i send it to them it's a lot easier for them to not only use and reference but it'll get passed around right especially if you host it on gamut it'll give you like an alert of anytime somebody reads it or sees it these will get passed around because we've literally made it for them specifically so if it's the bp of marketing we're talking to and they need to run it up to the cml or the CEO.

44:39Send them an either pre or post sale, highly customized deck, they can share it around. A lot of the times we do these decks now and send to folks, the number one response I surprisingly get is like, oh, I was going to have to actually do that myself so I could show the rest of my team or I could show it to our decision maker or a buyer or actually legal need something for procurement. So a lot of times it will actually, not only does it look a lot better, it feels a lot better. it's more customized to them it will save your buyer a step and so obviously if you think about those implications you want to make your buying process as easy as possible and so now we like live and breathe by doing these decks again probably takes like 10 or so minutes to make one just depending on how customized you want to get with it and then it'll spit it out instantly the other thing i've done is i've used it for like our internal docs or docs i share with like certain VIP groups at faster.

45:33So like at sponsors, past attendees, if I want to make something, you know, we don't have a full-time in-house designer. I just do it on Gamma. I uploaded our brand guidelines. I said, here's our guidelines. Here's our colors. Here's our logo. Give me something that I can just, you know, use in 60 seconds to pass around because I already have all the content I need for this. So that's where it's been, again, highly well received when We send these because it saves folks to staff and also just super easy to use. Like it is as easy as Gamma to use in Gamma.

46:07Last ones we've added, I bring them away to my attention because they're good partners of chapters, but they help us do automation and we use Salesforce. So specifically, it's Salesforce. It will analyze all of our sales calls automatically. So now I just get a Slack. There's some stuff up there, right? It's not just going to be like, okay, David had a call with XYZ company. Here's the summary of the call. It does do that, but we've also tuned it on. There are certain things I want it to say. So I always wanted to do next steps, which you'll see in the screenshot. I always wanted to do it. Were there any objections?

46:41What help does either the person or does David need to get the deal to the next step? It will automatically attach the contacts to an opportunity. So we're really bad at doing this. Your sales team is probably bad at doing this too. We put a lot of accounts in Salesforce. Sometimes we forget to put the actual individual contact. It will just create the context for you when you have the call. Then you go back to Salesforce already there. You don't have to do anything. For us, we've also set it so that it will change our stage. So if this is a first step call, which for us is like a 0.5 step in Salesforce, it will move them to step one, like meeting held, anytime the meeting has been held, and then it's over.

47:20So for us, it's just nice because I have spent the last I don't know how many years pulling my teeth trying to get our sales reps to put things into Salesforce. So now instead of pestering them all day to do it, and they just don't. So they do have to, again, they do poke it up to Salesforce. It does give me reports of like how much activity they've had a week, how many calls, action items, red steps. It also has some like both of them have really good AI where you can automate like the next steps if you wanted to. with the ai but again there's a lot it does here even though maybe it seems simple to you guys there's a lot it does behind the scenes similar to like a qualified where it knows these accounts right it's hooked up to your salesforce data it knows who how the call went and automatically push all the notes right like we didn't have any call notes in our salesforce prior to this like we just had like loose information like if there was a close one deal it was in salesforce otherwise it was pretty much not in there, which means it did not exist.

48:24Part of this too is like the, I guess there's other learning on it of doing like the AI Red Vops tool is forever starting from when we implemented this. Now we have great Salesforce data, right? We have healthy data on all these accounts. So when it talks to, when qualified so you're up there on the website or artisans that were outbounding them, it can reference this, right? Because it's all pushing the Salesforce.

48:53okay we only have a few minutes left but if you want to go through do you want to go through like the bide code yeah i'll go we go a little a little bit over even if we lose people it's a new world but um anyhow there's a lot more that we do but we just wanted to give you the core gtm flow that we spend the most time in which is what you just saw the sdr bdr generic ai and rev ops but there's a lot more and it's a bigger topic. Certainly we've written about it and tweeted about it, but we have built a bunch of stuff ourselves in Replit. You could build it in other tools as well. I mainly picked Replit in the beginning because it was an end-to-end solution, but ultimately all the leaders in VibeCoding basically use Cloud Code and are more similar than they're different.

49:37But where there was nothing to buy, we built. And there's a bunch that are cool. This one is niche, but some niche apps are, can be pretty powerful. So for example, this is specific to us, but it is interesting. We get thousands of speakers submissions a year. Okay. And if we get a handwritten email from Larry Ellison saying they blew up the quarter on AI, I'd like to speak at Sastr. We'll just, we'll get that one. We'll see that one most likely, but we get thousands and there's gems and it's too many to process. It's way too many to process. And so what we did until, uh, through last year was we hired agency.

50:14They worked with three years. We paid them about$15 ,000 a month or more. And part of their job was to review all these inbounds. And it was okay for a while, but they got tired of doing it. And the volume was really high. And they might have heard of HubSpot or Salesforce, but they might not have heard of cool tools like Gamma or Replit or others. And so they'd miss things and it was a lot of volume. And then they would hold things and people wouldn't know if they were accepted and they get grouchy because it would take months to hear back from the agency. And so when the agency didn't want to do this anymore, after a while, I just vibe coded a speaker application.

50:48And it's pretty damn cool. You could don't do too many, but you can try it on sass or london.com. Do a speaker application yourself, put in it. And it's pretty good. It uses all the criteria that we want. And then it instantly grades you on the website. Here's one from 857 this morning, 54 out of 100. It tells you what your score is. It tells you why you might or might not be a good fit. It tries not to be triggering. and it sends us an email and a Slack notification of who they are and why. And it gives us actually much more brutal feedback on their pitch than it does to the candidate. But man, now everybody knows this is so much better and saves us so much time.

51:25And this did take iterations. This was not a 15 minute project. It probably only took me three or four hours to build this, but it was over multiple days. So it has to be at least a P2 priority to build it yourself. and then maintain it. But pretty damn cool to have an agent reviewing thousands of speaker submissions and content submissions rather than spending hundreds of thousand dollars a year and getting much lower output from humans that don't want to do this. They just don't want to do this work anymore. So I built an agent. So that one's pretty cool. You can try it and you can, that's kind of epic.

51:59That's an internal, mostly internal UGIS, but you can try it and do a submission. The next one, what's the next one we got, Amelia? and just a few others you can try that we built ourselves and again at the bottom buy where you can don't build we can do a follow-up session on this i know some of you have followed it we built this whole speaker review we do content review with ai agent we built a startup valuation calculator you can try it on saster.ai we've had 230 000 valuation calculations where you can value a startup we then once we did the speaker review of the 2000 submissions i'm like let's use a version of that to help founders review their pitch decks to VCs.

52:39I launched that this week. We've already had, I think, 450 bona fide DC decks go through the system. It gives you deep feedback and scores based on 4 ,000 recent VC rounds and 800 DCs that have come to Saster. It's pretty cool. We had our Saster AI London website built in Squarespace for years, but it was driving me nuts. I couldn't do what I want to do with this year, so I rebuilt it from scratch and replet. That's pretty cool. And then we built a whole new version of our Saster website, which you can try in sasara which has so much stuff and all this stuff is cool it's interesting when i look at the order i made this and they went i went from necessary to nice to have so probably anything below this line i would not vibe i would buy it there's no way you're going to build an artisan a salesforce a gamma you could build the little bits of it i mean there's just no way there's too many man hours but if you have nothing the beauty is you can vibe your own agent now.

53:32Just be patient. We've done a lot on it. So a quick look on other things. We've done a bunch on this. Maybe we'll do another in a couple of weeks on what we've really learned vibing. You can try them all here, but you really can do it. Just stay small, keep it simple, and buy if you can.

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