SaaStr 823: Is GTM Really Dead?! with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin

0:00Welcome to the official Sastra podcast where you can hear some of the best Sastra speakers. This is where the cloud meets. Up today on the Sastra podcast. 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 Sastra 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.

0:41So 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 busywork, 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 at salesforce.com slash SMB.

1:21That's salesforce.com slash SMB.

1:28Hey everybody, it's 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 2 ,000 plus 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, Clay, Intercom, Fin, and all your favorite B2B companies, including yours truly with Harry Stebbings and more doing our live 20DC podcast.

2:19It'll be fun all in the heart of London. Don't miss out. Get your tickets. You can still go. Go to podcast.sasterlondon.com. That's podcast.sasterlondon.com for a 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 a whole bunch of points around it. But one thing, because I just, I see a little bit less of this on LinkedIn than I did six months ago.

3:00But 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 open ai to 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.

3:42There 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 a 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 launched their agents.

4:17Dialpad 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 DevOps for open AI. There's just so much trickle down from this insane spend in AI. The problem is you're not getting into that spend. You're not getting into this spend. Others are, and we'll go through it. So is it dead? 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 and slides, but I wanted to present a few things.

4:59We've done a bunch of Workshop Wednesdays and others, and we've got another post on this on SASTR this week on how we're using our AI SDR. 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 AI SDR. 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 it, it works 1206 leads to saster from this from 500 5216 messages that's pretty good um 136 responses so that's a pretty high direct connect rate and 52 positive well 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 of 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.

6:04And 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 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, an ad die 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 Hott, 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?

6:40Top 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. a lot. OpenAI does pilots now. OpenAI, the hottest company on planet Earth. Are you going to other 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 Mark Benioff, he wants to do more pilots. Everyone wants, is talking about forward deployed engineers. We could do a whole workshop Wednesday on that.

7:12But Mark had a good point. I asked him what he thought about Mark Benioff, what he thought about forward deployed engineers. And he's like, I love it. I want to have my team before 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're rolling out to everybody even mark wants to go hard on day one but they want to do it pilots still work folks so if 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.

7:46Okay. 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 AISDR should I use again? And I'm always like, well, Google it. We did like 11 webinars on this, but I get it every day.

8:21Okay. 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 Higgsfield? Should I use Reeve 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?

8:54So 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 are greg jensen and sam on the left here doing this this week why does amjad from replet on joe rogan i mean you know craziness and austin this aside you know replet isn't brutally category you know replets one to 150 million this year i mean pick your jaw off the table. But Lovable is almost as fast. Bolt's at 60. Believe it or not, Wix bought Base 44 and they're growing almost as quickly now.

9:40This 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 Sass or 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.

10:22Okay. 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.

10:54They 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. I mean, you can't walk 60 feet 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.

11:29They still work. Okay. Here's one that a lot of folks are complaining about on the LinkedIn too. Oh, SEO is 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 is up. Now, is it perfect? Is ChatGPT 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 Sastra session with their CMO, Sydney Sloan, the other day.

12:14Their 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 chat GP are taking some of that adjust the world changes, but three, it still works. This it's still work. So if somebody is 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.

12:54Produce great content. It works. And I actually think that's what's happening with SaaS around a variety of reasons for what it's worth. If you look at this little chart on the right, I'd 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 sem rush and others actually chat gbt 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 old days we had lots of we were number one for how to hire a VP of sales, but Sastra's got 10 ,000 posts on just about everything, everything you could possibly imagine in DTM.

13:46So 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.

14:23Crappy PR, if you guys want, if you guys recognize that PR has changed like dramatically, but you want it, you want to be at SaaS 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, 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.

15:01the low energy crap that still kind of worked a few years ago the the cloned boring campaigns that that 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 like we don't we don't we've lost patience for the 11 000 thing or the 10 000 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 nothing works because that stuff don't work, at least not in my experience. So here's a couple of challenges to think about.

15:41Some of this sounds, Captain, obvious, but I got to 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 Sastra 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. Slow down and audit everything. Okay. Make it awesome. So for example, we've done a bunch of sessions on our AI agents.

16:11Amelia has 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 Sastra events. And we have to close 10 plus million of Sastra sponsors just to keep the lights on because our events are so expensive. That's our annual 10 ,000 people. We do have to close some sales. And 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. And we had a designer do it, but then it was static for a year. We couldn't really change much.

16:45And 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. The, 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.

17:14Make your collateral awesome. Make your outbound awesome, right? Ask yourself if 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. 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.

17:57I 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 OpenAI presentation from Maggie at 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 at Anthropic. There are plenty of sales folks at OpenAI, but in many of them, there's fewer. So we had the chief business officer of perplexity at SaaS or this year. You can read the post. He had five folks on the sales team. Five folks on the sales team. The sales teams, there are sales teams at Replit and Lovable and Bolt and others, but they're small.

18:34We're going to have an upcoming session with Vercel. They're 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 one to 150 million? And how did Higgs field go from, you know, zero to 50 million in five months and gamma 60 million this year from nothing. It's like, there must be these great marketers are great. I know I what they have and I know this is obvious is this is just the strongest demand in PLG we've ever had.

19:16They'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 scratch your head and you look around at these folks that are running circles around you, just realize it's like go on LinkedIn and see who's their head of sales, who's their head of marketing.

19:50You're going to see folks that worked at wherever, Brex 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 or 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 a lot of the stuff they're running versions of the same playbook, but this PLG poll is insane.

20:23Okay. So just a couple of 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 ROI products is insane. It is insane. And I can just tell you what some of the ones we use there, 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 it's pretty awesome what we should cross a thousand folks have used it by the weekend so you know like gamma at first when gamma came out for for decks i'm like I said to Amelia, oh, this is like a cool AI tool for decks, right?

21:32I 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.

22:06This 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're at the CAO 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.

22:43I'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 teams 10 % more efficient.

23:18That 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, if you break 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 and 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 work with or invested in is it just has to work.

23:54It just has to work. And this is why so many mediocre co-pilots, 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 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 up front.

24:28I mean, again, 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've got to deliver this ROI almost instantly. That's what everyone's expecting. So no lame co-pilots. If you're wondering why your product isn't growing fast from the age of AI, you have a lame co-pilot that doesn't change the game almost on day zero.

25:03Even Mark Benioff wants to do that. He doesn't know how yet today. But even he wants to do that. So by last, I know, slightly annoying, kicking the arse, and then we can take questions 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 end user 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.