SaaStr 832: How to Use AI to Hyper-Customize Go-To-Market at Scale with SaaStr's CEO and Chief AI Officer

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 Sastra podcast. So I know a lot of folks, again, going to the service company, want to turn on an AI SDR and have it magically create revenue. Another way is understand calmly which parts of your funnel, which parts of your go-to-market process is not even happening. Is it even remotely optimized? Where are the leads? Where it's just not like your team says they want to do them, but they don't want to do the small leads. They want to do the low-scored leads, you know?

0:33and that's what that 15 % is. And everyone is like, you're going to say they don't do it. Every salesperson is managing their time. They're going to force rank their leads in their head. They're going to put all their effort into that one big deal that's going to close this quarter, a little bit of effort into the small ones and nothing to the bottom. So if you can put AI into that scenario or the ones that wasn't worth their time, 70 % open rate, even if you grow 15 or 20 % faster in 2026 because of AI, it's a gift from heaven, right?

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2:29All right. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for coming back disaster AI London 2025 where we really appreciate it. So we have a full day. So we're just going to keep going and know some folks are going to stream in. So folks are going to have coffee. This first session, we will go deep on our agents, our 20 agent, in particular, the core ones we use for outbound, inbound, leftbound, rightbound, and sales. Amelia's going to drive this. We will do this for about 45 minutes with it. One thing I want to give folks context on we have, if you guys have followed us, maybe they've even seen a version of this content.

3:06We're updating it all with all the latest data, all the emails we've sent, all the performance, everything that our AI SDRs and agents do. So you'll get all the latest data that Amelia has aggregated. The one thing I want to bring up, because we've heard it online and then I've heard it at this event already, is a lot of folks are like, well, that's great. This stuff works for SAS or it doesn't, but it won't work for me. I'm not as big. I don't have your scale. I don't have your data. I don't of your history. Amelia will dig in here. It's not true. All of this will work for you to some degree.

3:34Why? All of you have data. All of you have leads. All of you have a database. Very few people here at this event have zero in revenue. Very few people here have zero customers and zero prospects. Those guys go to Web Summit. Okay, this is Saster AI. You guys have customers and revenue. Agents will work for you, whether you have to train them or tune them differently, Amelia Diggan, maybe so. And maybe you don't have 10 years of data, but you don't need as much data as you think. And you don't need as much trailing data as you think for agents to work. Here's the simple aha moment. And I know a lot of you know this, so it sounds Captain Obvious.

4:11Then I will let Amelia drive this. To simplify a lot of complexity. The mistake that everyone made in AI SDRs and AI sales agents in 2024 and into this year, and even through today, and even conversations we have today, but especially is they would buy a product, do nothing, and expect it to get you millions of revenue. It don't work that way. Amelia will dive into it. It didn't work that way before Cod 4 when none of these products work. It didn't work that way after Q1 this year when they started to get good, and it don't work that way today. The way an AI agent works for sales, for GTM, is you figure out something that works with your team with humans.

4:49You figure out an email, an outreach, a script, a set of objections that you overcome, a set of questions. You nail it yourself, just like it has always been at Sastra since the beginning. Humans figure it out and then you take what worked and you give it to the agent and you train it for a month and then every day after and you take what worked and you do it at scale. That's all these products do. Like, listen, there's a lot of AI. There's a lot of LMs, a lot of sophistication. You're going to learn about it all day. But at the end of the day, if you want to simplify, because all these products are good, take what humans have nailed, document it, and then train an agent with what works.

5:23If you're expecting an agent to sell when you can't sell, that's never worked. You got to go back to the old days of founder-led sales. But instead of giving it to that first human you hired, you give it to the first agent you hired. But basically the same thing. So with that, Amelia, we'll dive into our data. Okay, well, let's do it. Well, I wanted to focus today, just for some of you that have been to like our podcast or watch Shortshop Wednesday, I aggregated a lot of our data. I put in some new data and I'm going to focus a lot on hyper-customizing at scale. If you haven't seen this yet, these are our 20 plus agents we've deployed.

5:59You can go to saster.ai slash agents. A lot of these agents I'm going to talk about today, because this whole guide is up, I'm not going to mention too many of the vendors because I aggregated a lot of the data. I'll talk about some of them, but they're all in depth here. So saster.ai slash agents. A lot of them are third party. Some are ones that we vibe coded. Some of these agents have sub agents, which I'll talk about in a little bit. But these are our 20 plus agents that we have currently right now at Saster. We do also have more agents than humans. So I literally just saw someone we know yesterday.

6:35and was like, oh, Sastra London looks so great. This is my first time here. How many Sastra employees did this? I was like, well, there's two on this stage there. One more full-time employee. We've got a few contractors trusted that we brought here to London and then we have all of our agents. So we have more agents than humans. But on today's topic of hyper-customizing GTM at scale. So this is just in the last six-ish months. So after SaaS in May, so basically post-annual for us, we really started going deep on this AI journey, deploying our agents, and we wanted to see what would work in different use cases.

7:15As we did that, we deployed more agents in more use cases, more sub-agents, and that's how we ended up with this hyper-customized AI emails and messages at scale in the last six months. So just to give you context, our personalized outbound six months ago when we still had people before all the agents, the average SDR we had here as a human would send, you know, on the low end, maybe 75 emails a month per rep. And at the high end, maybe somewhere like 280, 300, right, per rep per month. So if you look at this total over the last six months, almost, you know, 60 ,000, so let's say 10K a month, that's 32x the max output that those human SDRs were doing in a very short amount of time.

8:08I'll talk about the ramp time of these agents, which was a little bit different than humans. but if you think about this that means we were also only doing about three percent hyper personalized emails at scale before this because the other thing i'll show you right now is the consistency between our customization of our agents versus on humans very hit or miss right you have one sdr that's maybe really good they send really good high quality emails you get another sdr they're just not getting it and the email's terrible like you wouldn't buy from them You're embarrassed that they sent this email and you wish you could unsend it.

8:41So this is how you can get hyper-customized at scale. And a majority of these target accounts are receiving, you know, highly customized messages and reply on the first send. So that's something I think that is also a big learning is if you do this right and train the agents the right way, not only is it different from a human AI, like a human SDR, but I think on most human sequences, it takes a few messages. whereas on ours, because it's so custom, usually on the first email or first message, we get a reply. So a lot of change to encapsulate here. This is really good. First of all, the timing here is really interesting.

9:18Maybe we're going to get to it. But if I see this, so these are three... These are our three main outcomes. Artisan, qualified, agent force. Correct. And if I'm looking at it, and that's the sequent, that's the artisan first, then qualified, then agent force, right? Correct. So in the sequence of time, we did artisan first and qualified and agent force, but actually qualified's done more because it's on the website. So it's cheating a little. And then artisans in the middle and then agent forces are newest at the bottom. Got it. Okay. I thought it's a good chart. I thought some of the things you're saying is by the time you get to your third agent, you can also roll it out more quickly.

9:55Maybe I wasn't reading the end of the chart, but. You can. Yeah. the other thing and then amelia keep on the other thing amelia will show you examples of the emails and communications our agents are selling another sort of criticism that i hear from folks i put criticism and air quotes is oh those emails are only pretty good like you talk about hyper customization but this isn't going back to the 1980s when you bought this and you did this like they're good but they're not the bar this is important when folks say oh i can't do this the bar is as good or better than like your average human sdr yep so you will see these emails are customized depending on that we do and we have more data to pull from if you were saster three years ago we know about you they get better but but your jaw's not going to fall on the floor when you see these emails you're going to see they're pretty good they get as good or a higher or equivalent response rate to humans correct but they're not the most that the customization on a scale of 110 i'd say varies from a three to a six yeah and i'll actually show you on it's not in a Well, this isn't an email that someone spent equivalent to spending a month of deep clawed research crafting.

11:02They're just like, here's a, they're just pretty good. But the average human, and then, and a lot of folks on the internet are like, well, I could do better than this if I hired 30 top tier SDRs. Maybe we're going to find 30 top tier Oxford graduated SDRs that want to carefully craft an email each day. And if they're that good, they want to be promoted at AE in like three months. So they're going to cycle out and lead. So the real bar is better than the average human with 24-7 consistency. And that's what you're going to see in these emails. Like pretty good with not a lot of errors. That's good enough to crush it.

11:37Yeah, the 24-7 thing I'll get to. And it's part of why it works. So at scale, you'll see in that chart I just showed. So I'll break it out a little bit. Artisan overall. And we're live streaming, by the way, guys. So if you want the slides and all the data, you can also go on our live stream. but you can also keep taking photos and for artisan that one has it actually went up it's about a six percent overall response right now you know average for normal str is two to four qualified has inbound so that's about the same six percent and the asian force we've said this has a higher open rate i'll tell you why it's our newest asia it's also people we ghosted so it kind of makes sense that they were like you finally followed up with me i'm like sorry My human wouldn't, but my AI agent would.

12:27Also, more importantly, I feel like I see people getting this wrong is not empowering their agents to sell, especially if you have something that is a low ASP. Something like a ticket to SaaS for London is a great example. Between our two agents that I empowered to sell, they sold 15 % of the ticket revenue for this event, which is kind of crazy. because in the past when we've had human SDRs try and sell tickets, I think they sold like literally I could count on one hand. So at that volume and at that scale, I see people getting this wrong a lot, which I'll get into. But why does this work, right?

13:05It's because all of these different platforms have different things that they're using to contextualize to add value back to the prospect. So instead of making it too much about Zaster, we really try and tune up our agents and train them so that all the value is about their company, what they're doing, and why they should be at something like a SaaS. I think that's also important as you're training your agents or thinking about rolling this out, is that it should be about adding value, right? I don't know. I feel like somehow that got lost in all the outbound madness, but that should have always been the case.

13:36And it's definitely the case with AI. AI will also know your product a lot better than most entry-level SVRs. And so whatever you tell it about the product, it will contextualize for them and add value. So AI does this in a way, obviously 60 ,000 messages we couldn't do ourselves beforehand. So it's really crazy to see which we'll dive into. And maybe one thing to add on that data, I wrote a Sastra post on this recently, but the agent for 70 % open rate, which on its surface is jaw-droppingly high, right? Let me dig into that for just one second. and the 15 % of revenue from London. This is a theme I call having agents do the work humans don't want to do or unwilling to do, okay?

14:18So the 15 % of ticket revenue folks coming here, we, for six years on and off, we tried to get our human SDRs to help us reach out to return attendees to get them to come to Sastradion London. They just wouldn't do it. It wasn't worth their time. They wanted to hunt a six-figure sponsorships. We'd ask them, we'd give them incentives, we'd give them Starbucks cards, We'd beg them. They wouldn't do it. And they said they do it. And then finally, we would use tools like Momentum and Intentive. And we see they didn't actually do it. And they lied. Okay. So that 15%, here's the point. It's a lift, a lift without the agent we wouldn't have gotten.

14:55Yes. So I know a lot of folks, again, going to the service government, want to turn on an AI SDR and have it magically create revenue. Another way is understand calmly which parts of your funnel, which parts of your go-to-market process is not even happening. Is it even remotely optimized? Where are the leads? Where it's just not like your team says they want to do them, but they don't want to do the small leads. They want to do the low scored leads, you know, and that's what that 15 % is. The agent force one, if you didn't read this or catch it, this is amazing and a tragedy at the same time.

15:29These are folks who reached out to us and said they wanted to sponsor Saster for five or six figure tickets. And we did not respond to them. As our human team. Not because we didn't like ground robbing it. Not because we're not going to find. It's just because our SDR is just... It wasn't worth their time. They mentally lead. And everyone is like, you're going to say they don't do it. Every salesperson is managing their time. They're going to force rank their leads in their head. They're going to put all their effort into that one big deal that's going to close this quarter. A little bit of effort into the small ones and nothing to the bottom.

16:04them. I mean, literally while we're here in London, about five days ago, I wrote this on Twitter yesterday. I reached out to a vendor for a$10 ,000 product. They said, I want to buy it while we're here. I don't have a lot of time. We're here at Sastra London. I have two questions. I didn't hear back till yesterday afternoon. I was handed to another rep because it wasn't worth the first rep's time for$10 ,000. And that rep said, let's get on the phone and talk about your questions. Five day response, get on. I mean, you lost the deal, right? So if you can put AI into that scenario or the ones that wasn't worth their time, 70 % open rate, even if you grow 15 or 20 % faster in 2026, because of AI, it's a gift from heaven, right?

16:45And that's what a lot of this is. Figure out, you know, it's not, it's not all magic, but it is magical. If you can get a lift out of the folks that just aren't being touched in your funnel and keep going, I want to take all your time, but don't assume if you're not deep on your funnel, don't assume every lead is being touched optimally. Don't assume every lead. I have an old saster post that every lead should be treated like a queen or king. Every lead is precious. I reached out that$10 ,000, a lot of money to me. Okay. Maybe it's not a lot of money to people. That would be Amelia and I basically spending it out of her own pocket.

17:18That's not nothing. Okay. Even in London, like 10 ,000, you can get buy something nice for 10. That's like a lot of what's the steak place? Flat iron. Got a lot of flat irons for$10 ,000. Okay. It wasn't even worth their time to get back to us. it's always worth the AI's time to get back to them. It's always worth it. And then your leads deserve it. So keep going. But that's why there's some of this magical rage is because humans wouldn't do the work. Yeah, but your AI isn't picky. So just on that, on that point, why is this so great, right? Like why were human SCRs when we had them only 3 % doing of what we did now?

17:53Part of that is what you're talking about, right? There's downtime, there's holidays. Okay, you know, you have planned time offshore, But then somehow when it comes to SDRs, there's always a lot of unplanned downtime for all the humans. And so I think that's something where since the AI works 24-7, I was actually just talking to Philippe who's presenting later. We were saying once you get a few agents, actually your problem becomes not having agents. Your problem is keeping up with your agents. So we'll talk about that a little bit later when you guys come back for his new session. But because it works 24-7, this is now our biggest issue is actually keeping up with our agents.

18:32Like, I get constant slacks, notifications. Your AI is doing this. Your AI is doing that. And we try and watch it all, right? Like, we want to make sure AI is saying the right things, treating people properly. So many people yesterday were coming in disaster saying, like, oh, hey, Amelia, thanks for your help. I was like, did I help you? Oh, Amelia AI helped me or Jason AI helped me. I'm like, fantastic. this is real Amelia and I'm glad my AI agent could be there when I was either sleeping or walking my dog so that's it's it is it's you'll enter a new world quickly where you have to learn to actually keep up with your agents once you get the hang of them but it is also part of why it works so well I put an example here I think which one's this from it doesn't even matter but you'll see here this is an example of like a highly customized email again it's tying back value to the person versus it being too much about saster i think in this case it's using some website authorization of what they were looking at and tied it back to them and what they were posting about and then this one had a meetings link as well so there's a few things i want to get into i want to get into this one because a few folks have asked us on our previous webinars to create like a mind map which i didn't have previously so i made one for this a lot of people ask me like how did you think about like the rollout right of ai sdrs i'm like well we had sasr annual we had a few human sdrs and after sasr annual they quit and so instead of replacing them with another human i replaced them with ai so this is how i started to do that I split up basically the lowest hanging fruit right so I took into our because it had just been saster annual so you can take something equivalent for your company maybe you've just done a new product release the new year is coming up you can do something that adds value and say okay I've got all these contacts so let's say I want to follow up with them in my agent I'm going to train my agent on these specific contacts so it should be a subset you should never just unleash AI agent on your entire database.

20:42Like, do not do that. It will not be customized. It's not going to work like this. Like, you do need to train either sub-agents, depending on what platform you use, or do like sub-campaigns, however they call it. But basically, you want to make sure that each like thing you're deploying in your AISDR is specifically trained in tune for that persona that you're going to go after. So you're going to make little sub-personas, right, of your target buyers is it a cro has the cro done something with us is it a cmo is it have they been on our website have they churned or do i feel like their usage is down and they're about to churn like you can also use this for cs use cases and marketing like all of this starts to converge but basically all of these things are things you can put into different sub-agents training it make it personalized to those leads i usually keep it in batches of like 800 to a thousand i don't try and do more than that.

21:34I try and get that hyper-customized on who I'm targeting with each of our sub-agents. And then I'll pick which, in our case, we have more than one outbound AISDR. And so I'll pick which agent I think is the best one for that. I'll pop it into that agent, train it, fire it up, and then give it the sequence that I want of, okay, I want you to, maybe I want this one to book a meeting. I want this one to sell a ticket. I want this one to follow up with a lead we never followed up with. I want this one to book a meeting. And so I'll Also give it different goals for each of those personas. So that's how I kind of start to map it out.

22:06Important to know, though, I did not start with all of these, right? I actually have more than this. But it's important to stair-step it, right? So start with one. Like a really good one is people you might have ghosted or didn't know that you had ghosted. Another one is if you're getting really good inbound, but you're not able to completely follow up. Or if you can't follow up after the first meeting, that's a good use case. Like don't start with something mission critical. Like you're going to be disappointed if you can't get it to work really quickly. A lot of these have ramp time, which I think is on the next slide.

22:38So don't start with something that's too mission critical because then you might set yourself up for failure. I mean, who would, who do you think can implement something like this? That's a good question. I have that later. All right. Keep going. Yeah. All right. These are a few more examples. the other thing i'll say too and the reason why i put these examples hopefully you guys can see so the first one this one's an example from artisan i think this person came here but literally the top is to jason's point is like it's an okay like is it the greatest email on planet it's pretty good would i have written this maybe i'll give myself a 50 50 this one's inviting them to come to sass reannual and literally this says on the bottom hey i'm a fan I'm going to see if I can come attend.

23:25Did your AISDR write this? Because it got my attention versus trash, which just real Amelia answered. So I was like, it's a mystery for you. On the next sample, let me try and go ahead. Okay. Then there's another example where like, just because it's an AISDR and you're going to have all these hyper-personalized emails, don't expect that every response will be positive. Like most of the time I get like a response, like the last one, sometimes I get a response that's like this. That's like very nice, but I'm not going to be there. And I'm like, cool, I'm going to follow up with this guy later. Like not everything is going to be an instant yes.

24:03Like I think that's another fallacy of like the AISDRs is like if you're trying to get into book meetings, sell something, it may not do that on the first action. Almost like that was true before the AISDR with regular SDRs. So all those things you know to be true are still true even with the AI. Okay, I want to talk about this one. No, just on those examples. One, you know, a lot of folks ask us, do they know it's an AI? Do they mind that it's an AI? I think even just in these two examples, you'll see a spectrum here. You'll see, is it an AI was the question. So I guess we're not always clear whether it is or isn't.

24:44I think the biggest, but a big takeaway is as long as the communication is reasonably good, adds some value, right? And even just a discount is value, okay? And a little bit of connection. What you can see from the three emails you've already seen is people don't mind. They don't mind. They don't mind. And what they want is help. And I really think, especially in 2026, we're all going to work in these heterogeneous worlds where we mix AIs and humans. And imagining that I somehow mind talking to a great AI is backwards. A great AI is often going to add more value than a mediocre human. So like, don't, I think my meta learning, it's a learning.

25:22Don't worry about that. Don't worry about people talking to an AI. Worry about if it's good and adds value and people are happy. They don't mind. In fact, they don't mind talking back to the AI. Forget about chat, even by email. They're happy to do it, right? You might be happy to do it too. It might be a relief to talk to an AI rather than the human that took five days to get back to me this week. Like it's not a negative. I don't think it's a negative. To that point, we did hyperchange our inbound flow because of AI as well. So that was mostly Apple. For inbound, we used a tool called Qualified on our website.

25:55Our old flow six months ago used to be you have to fill out a form on our website. I know a lot of people still have that flow today. Then we would get alerted via email. And then I would manually route it to whoever I thought was the best AE based on like the company size. We don't really do territory. company size category of company like okay do they wrap any competitors things like that so we would route it and then the AE depending on who it was would take about two or 24 hours to get back to them and it'd always be like you know oh hey it's so and so from Saster so you're interested let's book a meeting like the simplest maybe worst email response to no offense to our team to those inbound leads and now this is a screenshot of Amelia AI.

26:39If you want to try it, it's on sastralennon.com. You can talk to she slash me and you can instantly talk to Amelia. You can book a meeting with her. So she instantly books meetings for our team. Honestly, a lot of the time she books meetings while I'm asleep. So I'll wake up and I'll be like, okay, and the meetings booked are, I'll just go through all the meetings that have been booked overnight. Instantly, I didn't have to worry about waking up in the morning, routing any leads I might've missed or whoever's in charge of your routing might've missed. and then follow up with them and then hope that the AE then also follows up with them to book the meeting.