SaaStr 831: How We Use 20+ AI Agents for Marketing & Go-to-Market with SaaStr's Chief AI Officer and CEO & Founder

0:01Welcome to the official Sastr podcast where you can hear some of the best Sastr speakers. This is where the cloud meets. Up today on the Saster Podcast. All these agents are getting better. We have 20 in production. Here's the thing. This includes Replit. This includes Opus. This includes Agent Force and Artisan and Qualified, all the tools we love to death. They automate a lot of stuff. Like they might even automate 95 % of what you used to need a team to do. They don't automate everything. Here's the problem. As great as these tools are, they do not enable lazy marketing. What they enable is better marketing and much more of it.

0:45Everyone wants an autopilot. Everyone wants to buy a tool and disappear. It does not work that way. You can have crappy output. You can have crappy LinkedIn posts. 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. That's salesforce.com slash SMB.

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1:52So thanks all for joining us here. We thought we would do a part two to what we started last week. If you didn't see it last week, that's okay. We'll cover some of it here and do a refresher. We primarily focused on sales and specifically outbound all of our AI SDR agents. So what I thought we would do today is start with marketing and then we'll kind of circle back to a few things we didn't get to in broader go-to-market. just in what's working now for us, at least, as our AI is running our go-to-market teams and we have more agents than people here at Sastr. So I thought we would go through that sort of there.

2:32One thing I'll preface for everyone, if you haven't seen this yet or you missed this last time, if you do go on sastr.ai slash agents, this will reference a lot of the things we talked about last week and this week in the two parts for go-to-market. it. So this is our agent arsenal, as it sounds. A lot of these tools are third-party tools. Some of them have a little bit of proprietary stuff in them. There's the proprietary apps we've vibe-coded. But this has the whole guide there. So if you're looking for certain tools we message or drop in or show screenshots of and you want to refer back to them, they're all there just to make it easy for you.

3:12So with that, let's dive into marketing a bit, just because we didn't get to it. And I feel like it's an important topic. And before we get more tactical with it, since we have a little bit of time, Jason, I want to get your thoughts on what you're seeing here as well. I think this is a study I referenced last week as well. This is from Rory and Skill venture partners is a state of AI go-to-market study that just came out. It's a pretty good one. I wanted to call out a few things in marketing. I think they're interesting to me slash us because I feel like for marketing in particular, folks seem to be more behind than they are in sales or support.

3:55I actually anecdotally don't know why that is. I don't think it's because there's a lack of tools, which a lot of folks will point to. I don't think of that as you'll see in our next few slides, there's plenty of tools we're using in marketing and that are working well. So I think it's just a little bit interesting here to see in the data that, you know, most folks are just using AI in marketing for things like messaging. Okay, fine, but that's everyone's done that now, right? Yeah, TBT. Doing research, I feel like, yep, that's a little bit more in the weeds, maybe a little bit more specialized, but most people have not done these phase, what they're calling phase two use cases, which is actually analyzing, you know, marketing campaign data and spend, whether it's in-house or with third party agencies, actually using it to be creative.

4:42I think, I don't know where this stigma has come from, but that the AI is not that creative or that all the AI content comes out the same. I feel like those are also two schools of thoughts that we've kind of myth busted on. And then for things like enriching and scoring. So as we talked about, a lot last week and just how we're running some of our go-to-market through these agents with sales in particular, a lot of that is still relevant to marketing. So I think that's maybe a conversation we can have at the end of, you know, what does this all mean for the two separately and then together? But I think it's something where so many of these platforms and AI, maybe they were built for sales, but you can actually use for marketing, which I'll show.

5:24All right. So let me show you guys a few things of what we mean. And then, yeah, So we can dive into it a bit more on what this might mean for you all. I would say right now in marketing, we have the most specialized stack. And what I mean by that is we have the most amount of tools in marketing, maybe that we have for sales. A lot of our agents that we've deployed in sales, I'm able to deploy multiple agents on single platforms. And so that's helped a lot in terms of how we train and tune all the agents has been different in each of those platforms and in each of those single instances. But I'd say for marketing, we probably have the most specialized stack right now.

6:02We have hyper-focused tools that do one thing really well. And so in this, it's been a little bit of trial and error of us trying to find, you know, what are the very best ones out there? And then not only which ones are the very best ones out there, but which ones will we actually stick with using and also use for our actual go-to-market, right? which ones are just okay we kind of had fun played around for the weekend on and then never used again which ones do we actually need now in our day-to-day so there's two i think that have become core for us it's both from a this one's both a sales and marketing perspective but i've used it for both these cases this is a really great one at making collateral so just go to market collateral whether that's sales collateral marketing collateral the two apps we use the most right now are going to be Gamma and Reeve.

6:58I think the next slide is Higgs field. We use those a lot heavily. I put this slide here. This is an actual file I sent Ripley. But this is a custom... You'll see that I picked this slide because I have a few custom photos on it. The photos were made by Reeve. So where you see these guys like vibe coding outside. I told Reeve, you know, hey, I'm thinking about doing like a vibe coding camp for Summit or something, Vibe Coding Lab. It also came up with that name for me. Vibe Coding Lab at Sasser Annual next year. This is basically a pitch I wanted to do with our marketing team. I gave it actual photos of Sasser Annual.

7:37I was like, here's what our setup looks like. Here's what the tents look like outside. Here's what people, you know, kind of look like in Sasser. So just so you have a grounding, I would say, for the agents who know what to output on. That also will help it not be as generic. I feel like where Reeve kind of kicks butt over Nano Banana or some of the other, or, you know, ChatGBT or Sora is, you can upload an image to those. And I feel like most people are just Ghibli themselves or maybe like a Pixar version of themselves. Reeve is really good at doing mock-ups. Like, I don't think it was intended to be a superpower.

8:15It's really good at doing stuff like this where, like, I used to have to ask her, desire okay can you do a quick mock-up of you know the replet logo in its head kind of make it look real like people are sitting in it one that takes really long when a manual designer does it two because i gave it reference images reeve was like this was a first shot image i was like that one's pretty good i was like i like that one it looks like our tent that we have outside there's people they're vibe coding on the screens i told it make sure they're vibe coding on the screen and so that's pretty cool and so i had to do a couple more i was like okay what are other things i want to conceptualize for this potential space that replet's going to do it's faster um i said okay i wanted to be an exclusive footprint so it came up with this you know here's the rest of the outdoor tent with the replet logo i did orange umbrellas because it pitched that from their brand colors that's prevalent in the logo and i said okay now the last thing i want is i want to include some sort of like outdoor stage and space i gave it photos of past outdoor stages we had with speakers on it and it came up with this and i was like cool i actually think it kind of crushed it on these mocks i wouldn't have been able to do otherwise and it's just such a way in which like when i started presenting this to the replete team they were like that's cool like they can visualize it they can see it yeah yeah just to add the inside tip for guys that might not you know for reeve.art it is a team that built their own image LLMs.

9:41It's not the same stuff. Everyone else uses, you know, there's a variety that they might use. But when, you know, when you build, when you build a lot of images and they all look like cartoons or they look silly or they look goofy, it's not your only asset for B2B. Try Reeve. Upload something that's similar to what you want. And in plain English, tell it what you want. I think for B2B use cases, for real business stuff, the 95 % chance it's going to be much better than what you get out of ChatGPT. I started using this. I told Amelia to use it. She didn't. And then it's just, this is the kind of real stuff that you want, not goofy cartoon looking stuff.

10:13Or, I mean, that has its place if you want to be fun, but for B2B use this and it's going to crush. Like this looks real. It looks great. There's no excuse for those, for that goofy cartoon stuff, unless that's what you want. And I don't think the, you know, the world has moved past that for B2B. You don't have to settle for crappy text, which we'll talk to you. And you don't have to settle for cartoony images. you in fact should create great pitches for your prospects yeah yeah so how this one came about in this use case was i yeah we've honestly had this journey with replet but then i started to get to know their marketing team they wanted more marketing and so they're a sponsor of our learning event already but we wanted they were like we want to do something bigger probably something custom at staffster annual and so we started thinking through this vibe coding lab think i would say reeve also is best at you can this logo i gave it that logo right like sometimes when you put it in the other generators or llms it will come up with a logo or it will change their logo reeve i think kind of quietly crushes it at the text being good and if you upload logos it keeps the logos so that's one where i to jason's point i really like the professionalism Some of it, it looks polished, right?

11:29So this is something that I think is tendable to folks. I like it for that use case. Another one is just related to marketing. You know, we're doing all these assets for Sastor London in 10 days or whatever this is. And I put in to read like my original concepts of, okay, here's what I'm kind of thinking for all the stages. You know, we need like some backdrops. We need a bunch of signage. and I had Reef giving you know all these different outputs I'm like now that one looks too dry that one is too overdone that one's too boring it's really good for storyboarding which I feel like it's a good superpower of it too because it's going to generate all these really realistic images I give it images of past London events like I gave it the venue I give photos of the venue like it can actually help you picture and visualize and storyboard what you want and so when I started going through that process it made this really cool like portal looking thing I was like oh I like that or like that plus the staff straight AI would look pretty sick and so then we actually we ended up I upscaled it in Adobe Photoshop as a little bit of AI so you can take it out of if it's you know it's fine enough digital quality but if you're doing anything print you do need to have usually higher quality higher DPI and so I put it into Photoshop upscale that gave it to our designer as a 4k asset all generated in read and I was like this is the portal you know clean it up, add SaaS or AI, and we got a pretty sick looking brand.

12:56That is also another great use case more specifically for marketing, kind of related to events, but even if you have a small event, this is a good way to kind of quietly up-level it as well and make it look more polished and better. I've used it in emails, right? Obviously, image generation for emails that we're sending out. But just in go-to-market, if you want it to be more tactical, we're using it here for both sales and marketing collateral that we're using to drive revenue so it is something that works really well i then plugged these three images into gamma gamma if you don't know it is a it's a i want to say newer ish tool that does content creation specifically presentations so like you might say oh i could do a presentation cam but yeah you can and like i've done both and I run tests on both side by side.

13:45Usually the gammas are just a bit better, especially for B2B rather than B2C like Canva is. The decks come out a little bit better. You can give it things like, again, I gave it Replets Orange. I gave it... I was like, check their website for fonts that you should use. Also look up how they talk about themselves. Because you can give it the content you want, but you can also prompt it. Usually the output is pretty good. And so I like Gamma a lot because we use it now to send all of our sales collateral, sales deck, support decks. We've Gamma'd. It's easy. They're also easily shareable. So between the two tools together, you'll have to still customize the two.

14:30I don't use all the image creations out of Gamma. Gamma has built in image creation. And I obviously still prefer the Reave images or ones that we have. that are actually real images. We still pick and choose which ones work better. So that's what I mean. Our marketing stack is probably the most specialized. But it does help eliminate a lot of bottleneck and deal cycles. You're getting them something polished. You're not waiting a week for your designer to come in and do this. Personalized decks, I feel like, just elicit a much better conversation or response from folks. This also, not only can this kind of up-level your decks, So you can also send them to more people is what I found.

15:13We started sending these to pretty much everyone. We used to not do that. We used to be like, here's one set deck we have for Saster. If you're interested in sponsoring, here's the one deck. Sometimes that's not the best thing for teams to pass around when they're like, okay, we're considering opting into this. Or if you're trying to go to market with something, more so on the marketing side, again, it's not clean. It's not unspolished. Just you're like one set that's more generalized, obviously versus something that's hyper personalized to them. You've obviously thought you've listened to their names, but using the AI, you can kind of scale that up a bit more so that you can have this sound to cross.

15:50It looks a lot better. You don't need an agency to do this. And then they can share it internally. If you use it directly in Gamma versus exporting it to a PDF or Google Class, it'll tell you whatever people view it. So I'll get pings all the time. I'm a random XYZ person at XYZ company. Do this deck. I'm like, yeah, I didn't send it to them, but they're at the company and they're always like sharing this around. So I think that's what you want is you want to use this to not only improve your current processes of how you're doing these things, but also just to unlock new ones so that you can do it a more hyper-personalized scale.

16:24And for folks that, I mean, Gamma got a lot of, we've been using it for a long time. It got a lot of press recently. They just said they crossed a hundred million AR this year and raised around it two billion. So a lot of press, but I've actually found we've been promoting Gamma for a long time because we use it. A lot of folks, they may not even talk about it. They've never used it. Literally, I was at the other day at an event with the CEO of a public SaaS company saying, ah, Gamma, it's just PowerPoint. And no one will ever use that. I'm like, you know, they're going to, they already got to a hundred million, my friend.

16:53There's something there. But here's the tip. Okay. Most of you haven't used reeve.art for images. It's all on SaaS for diet agents. Go upload something that you use and just ask it to make it better. I bet you're going to find this is your best tool. For Gamma, if you haven't used it, don't overcomplicate this. Literally go into a Google Doc, write five bullets of what you want a deck to be, okay? Take those five bullets, put it in the free version of Gamma, and watch it build a deck for you. I bet it's the best thing you've seen, okay? You can use it. You can make a template you use again and again, which Amelia does, and then upload it dynamically with data.

17:28Become an AI agent expert. But that could be intimidating for folks. If you haven't used it, don't overcomplicate it. take five bullets on anything that you're doing give it to gamma and watch the agent build a deck for you it's pretty awesome and then if you get excited about that go deeper like we have and then you can make dynamic decks for everybody for real not the same crappy static decks everyone else but you can start really simple with these tools they don't have to be intimidating and i think your jaw will drop for both if you invest like five minutes in each keep it simple invest five minutes.

17:58Yep. Okay. Let me go to the next one. In terms of content and automation, so we have a lot of specialized tools in this bucket. You saw on one of the previous slides, this is where most folks are using AI in their marketing stack. I would say, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that these are all specialized. Again, like the way that I use gamut and read together it's like it only takes i would say 60 extra seconds to generate an image and read versus doing a native brain gamma that a lot better in my opinion comes out a bit more customized and i port it over so i don't i don't think you should be scared by the amount of tools on this one side we do pick and choose like the very best things and outputs and also a lot of these are off the shelf so i would say for particularly in marketing and how we're using this so far i think the next one is one of our more like enterprise tools and solutions is you know these are all off the shelf so like claude replet reeve higgs field recall which we use for locker content opus we're adding mosaic for video like these are all ones where they're like you know user subscriptions like anybody on your team slash yourself could just go sign up you know whatever, 20 to 30 bucks a month or 10 to 30 bucks a month and try these tools and see which ones work for you.

19:26So I think what's working well for us now is, yes, obviously we do use it for some of our content. We have a lot of content at Souser. And prior to this, that was a lot of Jason and my day was writing content. It's still a lot of Jason's day. It's still a lot of our time. But now the agents, I don't want me to speak for you, Jason, But I do feel like with this agent mix you have, specifically in content creation, you get there a lot faster. So you're able to post more advice to folks. Yeah, I would say what we've been able to do is triple our content output with AI. I think that, and I think the mistake a lot of folks make is they use a lot of crappy social media tools that regurgitate content again.

20:10So they want thought leadership. So they spool up a tool. It examines someone else's feed. It often examines my feed. I see folks rewriting my content and it sort of works because LLMs are good at copying and regurgitating. So if you just want views, I guess, if you think that's going to move the needle for your business, then generic AI tools are fine. Okay. But what we do, which is the real powerful thing is, is you architect the content, you create the content, our videos, our sessions, our posts, our ideas, and use AI to turbocharge It should do more research for you to go deep dive. You know, we used to, that's what you really want to do is to, is for AI to be your steroids for content creation, not to create the core nucleus that becomes trite and boring, but that's how we've tripled it.

21:01I, I write all the, if you've read Sastra for a long time, I've written most of the content for more than a decade. Okay. But if you compare an article today, this year versus two years ago, you'll see that it's pretty similar, but there's a lot more data. I can do a lot more research. And it's not just asking Claude to do the research. I can take multiple articles, three or four articles off the internet. For example, today, just before this, I wrote an article on how venture capital has changed for funds. I took two different data sources, one from Crunch Race and one from an LP, an investor in top funds called Venrock that analyzed 1900 funds.

21:38And I added that data to my post. Okay. I added that data with AI and it makes it so much better. You've got to check the work. It does take a few minutes, but AI can let you take great ideas and make them 10 times better. That's where you get, get the leverage. Yep. I would say too, just on this here, we do use a few different tools here. They all work fairly well, but yeah, to, to that point, right, We are using it to amplify existing content that we have or even build up on that content. Like one thing I did for this webinar, actually, for last week's and this week is I gave it the last three or four sessions that we had done on this topic of AI, our agents.

22:22I put it into Clive because I thought better. I was like, hey, given what we've already covered, I don't want to keep regurgitating things. Like I want to show data. and Claude did not have my data. And I would like, these are screenshots I took. I put these slides together, but it gave me a pretty good outline. It was like, okay, based on the last few talks you guys have done, based on what you have coming up, based on where you're at the six month mark, here's what I think you should cover. That is like SaaS or style actionable content. So it gave me a really good outline. It like gave me this outline, like this format of like, okay, you should go into each of the different segments of go to market.

22:59We should talk about what's working and what's not on each slide. You should call out the tools. And it gave me ideas. I'm like, okay, here are maybe some answers. Like it would ask me like, hey, is this what's working? Is this not what's working? Okay, like then maybe show this as like the next slide. And so it gave me a really good, it was like a really good co-pilot for me. I'm like, just putting my thoughts together because obviously now that we're doing a part two, I was like, I have a lot we could cover and go off on about AI and go to market. But I want to try and make it super tactical for folks so that it's helpful and useful.

23:31And it was really good for holding that. And it was like, okay, I was like, what about this topic? It was like, no, like that could be its own topic. Don't go too much off the engines. And so, yeah, it's gotten, I would say really good at that. So I'll do this outline. And then I obviously did, I still wrote all the slides and did all the, I could use Gamble a bit. And then I pulled all of our screenshots and of our data. And, but now I'm also using it for some of the stuff we're going to do in London. And again, I'm going to give it this one after today. I gave it last week. I'm like, okay, now build on it again, knowing that some people in my audience would have seen these two faster AI lives and some people wouldn't have.

24:10But also make it shorter because now we're together. This will be like the two-hour mark. And I think the opener at London is only 45 minutes. So what are the most valuable points I should hit on? And it's gone pretty good at that. So I think it's great for that too because that saved me a lot of time. Like it still took me a while to obviously make the stack and put all the points together for you guys and put all the screenshots and the data like that, that still takes work. But it did help me organize my thoughts a lot more. Yep. On the content repurposing, not to spend, I know you hit it. A lot of folks, especially founders and marketers that are watching or will watch later.

24:52I find we're all generating so much more content these days, especially video. There's so much more pods. There's so much more everything going on. And people are not using AI to extend the life of that content. There's a lot of disgust on it, but I see a lot of lazy approaches. And let me tell you what we do. It's pretty simple. Amelia has it on this bullet point, Opus Pro, Get, Recall, and Descript. I don't think we touched on the first two, did we, Amelia? No. But okay, so you just did a great interview. and then you stick it on your YouTube and it disappears. Okay, great. I hope it performs.

25:30Just a few, the first one's a little, you probably know, or you might not. The second one's a little more subtle, but let me tell you what we can do with this content. The first one is stick your, if you haven't used Opus Pro, it's on our list on Sastre Agents. There's a lot of tools, but it's the leading tool for turning your video into clips. And listen, it can't take boring content and make it great. But what Opus Pro is really good is take the YouTube URL, stick give it to opus clip and it will force rank the most compelling content out of that and find you some clips and then it will just actually automatically schedule it for you on your social media accounts on linkedin on x on facebook whatever you want it's pretty good it will take the if you just did a 40 minute webinar it will take the best 60 seconds 120 seconds clip it and let you put it right on linkedin where your customers are you should be doing this and you can queue up five, six, eight, 10 of those over the course of the month.

26:21You should be doing that with your best content or you're kind of wasting it. How does it grade it? It uses AI. It's pretty amazing. And there's a free version. This is another one you can literally try in five minutes. Take your YouTube URL and stick it in Opus Pro and see it. It extracts the text, which is actually very easy to do. Actually, YouTube gives you the text through the API. It's not that complicated. And then it just runs that text through some LLM. I don't even know what it is and says, find me the best parts. When Opus first launched pre, I don't know, we were using it in SAS for London a year and a half ago.

26:54It was like magical. I'm like, how does it do this? How does it find the best clips? This seemed like the most magical. And I actually invested in the company. It was so magical. It still is magical, but now that I understand how AI works better today with our agents, it's less magical than I thought. Extract text. It's not much text. Like these videos, even if it's two hours, it's not a lot of text. It's not much for the LMS to process. Give it to the LLM and say, break it up into the best two minute chunks. It works really well. And then just, then it just says, hook in your LinkedIn account, hooked in your Twitter account.

27:22And it just does it all for you. It's magical. So you're wasting your content. If you don't do this, you could also ask it to make three minute clips, which we do too. If you have a little more energy, you can put those three minute clips on X and LinkedIn, like the best ones for deeper dives. You'll see Sastra do that all the time. You'll see these three and four minute clips. I don't have time to make it. Opus makes it for us. Like it's really good. Okay. So what's the next? So that's how you turn your video into clips and short thing. Just do it. Opus is like, there's a free version or it's 20 bucks a month or five bucks a month for the paid, but you can try it free.

27:53Then we use an app. Very few people use called get recall. There's actually two apps called recall. One does like transcription. I don't know. One is an API of tons of folks use the founders at Saster and you'll got a ton of customers out of it's an API get recall actually just transcribes your whole internet world with AI. Like everyone should be using this. It's just a niche app. It'll do everything. I use it for one thing. I give it that URL for the YouTube and it instantly gives me great summarized text. And then instead of Opus doing its own thing, I take that text and I put it into Claude and I tell it the type of article I want to write out of the content.

28:30This is really powerful. Okay. So literally we're doing this hour long webinar right now. Okay. When it's done, I will grab the YouTube URL and I'll go to get recall and give it to it and I'll get the text and I'll put it in Claude. And let's say I only want to write a Sastra post on content repurposing. I will take the transcript of this session and say, Claude, write me a Sastra post just on what Amelia and I said on content repurposing. And then it can write an article just on that. Now, of course, you've got to edit it a little bit, but it's going to be pretty good. This is, and literally if we wanted to, we could take this session and turn it to five or six articles by getting the text from it, from GetRecall and YouTube, and then just asking Claude to write five or six great articles out of it.