SaaStr 848: How AI Is Rewiring Sales: Quota, Retention & What's Actually Working with SaaStr, Salesforce and Mangomint

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 Sastr podcast. Look, the rollout is bumpy, right? It's not like a day one, everything worked. It's not like your data was in a perfect place. It's not like the processes we were trying to enhance were all there. And also ways of working. That is constantly being rewritten. So to your point, it is not about, again, if you run a call center, yeah, you probably do want to cut heads and there's an absolute ROI. It is about revenue growth, right? And if you look at most of the AI that's out there, people tend to focus on service-related, tend to focus on operational-related.

0:44Why? It's easier than sales, in my opinion. But why is it easier? Just because it's operational? No, usually your data is in a better place. Usually your process is more advanced because you're already doing that service activity with humans today. On sales, what are you relying on? For the most part, you're relying on your sellers. You're relying on your people to go out there and sell. Hey, everybody. SaaS for Annual will be back. May, 2026. The world's largest SaaS and AI gathering for executives with 68 VP level and above attendees, 36 % CEOs and founders, and 25 % were AI first professionals.

1:21It's the very best of S-tier attendees and decision makers that come to SASTR Annual and AI Summit each and every year. Lock in your spot today. Use my code Jason100 for exclusive savings. Get your tickets at podcast.sastranual.com or just use code Jason100 when you check out. See you there. SASTR Annual and AI Summit 2026. It will rock.

1:43Amelia LeRutte:Hello. Hello, friends.

1:49Amelia LeRutte:Come on in. um thanks for coming i know jason is still speaking i think uh we're flattered who came to sit with us and learn a bit more about how ai is rewiring b2b sales um for we're going to cover things like quota we'll cover retention we'll cover a bunch of different topics we'll try and keep it fluid so that we can also answer questions for you guys because i know it's already been a long day of a lot of agents and content and things. But let's start with intros. So I'll start with you, Greg. If you want to give a quick intro and then maybe also, in addition to Agent Force, what are your favorite AI tools?

2:30Got it. So it's interesting. I came from financial services. And so when they say CCO, I think of chief compliance officer. That is not me. That's It's not me. Chief customer officer for Agent Force for Salesforce. So all things AI. What are my favorite tools? Look, I'm anthropic on day one. I always have been. Mainly for ethical reasons as far as I like their stack. And then from a CIO standpoint, which was my job before this, I think that they're best when it comes to coding. So those are good ones. And then we'll go to Ashman. Hi, everyone. I'm Ashley. I'm one of the co-founders at Momentum.

3:12And I would say one of my favorite tools, of course, is Momentum. I also use a lot of, of course, Claude and ChatGPT. And we've recently rolled out Gemini to the company and kind of are moving the company to that. And I have been really impressed with some of the just like built-in agent behaviors, even asking a question, writing up a memo and having my Gmail right within there. And I think that's such a great way to kind of make AI more accessible in the organization. And I'm excited to keep using that tool at our company. I'm Marcelle, VP of sales at Mangomit. We are vertical SaaS in the like very SMB space for salons and spas.

3:54I run our revenue organization. So everything from outbound sales, full cycle AEs, onboarding implementation, and, you know, favorite AI tools, the stack. When you asked this question, what list was like? Well, I'm out pretty deep. Yeah. But I would say that the services I work on the most, really quite committed and dedicated to Notion. Notion is AI. If you asked me four years ago, I hated Notion. Today, you could not pry it on my cold dead hands. I also really like using the way that I think they're like editing. All of that is based on Claude, which I also love and use quite heavily. I feel like the whole day, too.

4:34And I know this is about sales.

4:35Amelia LeRutte:We'll go back to sales. But like the whole day we've been talking about like sales and quota, which we're going to talk about more of. But maybe just really quickly from each of you, like that's like one of the most creative things I think we've done where I've seen like AI get creative. And I know somebody like a lot of the speakers today have been like a little bit anti-AI when it comes to creativity. Like, just what is your guys' hot take on that? Because I do feel like it ties into sales and the motion of like, you know, how creative you get with your sequences. Like a lot of that used to be, OK, we're going to hire for the I know like.

5:09Amelia LeRutte:Companies that used to work with Chris Astor where I worked would be like for the SDR team, we're going to like find the most creative people out of college. And those are the people we hire. Yeah. So now that the AI can do a lot of that, like, how do you balance that? Maybe we'll start with you, Marcia. Yeah. I mean, the one that pops to mind, sticking on the idea of like photos, images. So again, I mentioned we work with a very SMB customer. So salons and spas, many of you look like you've got a haircut at least once in your life. That business you went to is who we sell to. So everything from booking to payments.

5:43early on 2021, we really pushed into like a PLG motion. So customers could go to our website. We were the first SMB salon and spa software that you could start a trial, literally be set up and using the product in days. And over the years, we've allowed for the product within it, customers to upload their logos, customers to add their colors. Well, we realize our customer is not sophisticated enough to use a dropper tool and to figure out what their brand color is anyway, and they have no idea what a hex code is. So one of the things we rolled out this year during a hackathon was our engineering team, again, using quad code, among other things, was able to take that process, which currently when a customer would upload a logo and it was like the wrong format, it was like horizontal where vertical looks better on our online booking.

6:36Rather than a designer on our team having to take that and completely transform it, It is now all completely done automatically using AI. And then the designers just check a box, you know, manual, make that happen. What's really beautiful about that is we don't use PLG in the traditional motion where it's like you get in, you sign up, you're all on your own. It's really a tool to tell the sales team how quickly and how engaged this customer is. So we can score that quickly and get that in front of a rep to reach out to them. So within minutes of a trial starting, somebody uploading a shitty logo, it is now fixed.

7:13And that rep can text them the link to their online booking that shows their logo done properly with the right colors within minutes. So that's like one of the ways that we really like pushed on the creative side to make things like minutes, not hours, not days. And it's instant value, though, for your customers. It's actually still a little, they're a little freaked out by it. Hot magic. It's too good. Yeah, it's kind of like the Disneyland effect, and I like that.

7:41Amelia LeRutte:I like that. Craig, I know. So you're at Salesforce. There's obviously, you guys have a massive, massive workforce. Yes. How are you tackling this at your scale? Yeah, I mean, so look, I think getting your Salesforce, get it, to be agentic is easier said than done, right? It's interesting, the word tools keeps getting brought up, and people automatically assume just because it's AI, is an easy tool. It's not, right? Like the first time I used a chainsaw and I tried to cut a log and it didn't cut, I was like, well, this is a piece of shit. I didn't take off the cover to the chainsaw because nobody there, I obviously didn't read the directions.

8:21I mean, what man does? But it gets to the point. You have to get the same culture when you're trying to make your workforce or your folks to be agentic. It is not just about turning on a license for Claude or OpenAI or whatever it is. It's actually about making sure they understand the tool and its possibilities and how they can use it in their daily life. At Salesforce, obviously, we have to eat our own dog food as far as what it looks like. For us, what I've seen from a Slack perspective of how the sellers use is transformational for them. But again, I think the point that I would leave with is sellers want to sell.

8:58If you give them the tool that's going to help them, they will figure it out. But don't leave it to them to figure it out. Have a strategy around it. Make sure you're getting the right training, making the right education.

9:08Amelia LeRutte:Yeah, we've been saying that all day. And then, Ashley, I want to get your take on that because you are an AI native company. You are newer. Your sales team is still doing a lot manually, Ash. I was going to say, there's no like holy grail that you just get to. And I still think that a lot of the workflows are human assisted. And I think that's probably where it should be right now. Because I think in your talk this morning about all the training that goes into it and the time, And also we're in a unique position where some of our team is non-English English speaking. So our SDRs are in Argentina and some of our AEs are in Argentina.

9:45And so it's been this is one of my, I guess, favorite creative uses of AI to kind of democratize language and to make these folks be supercharged. Folks who are right out of college, but not they don't live in San Francisco. They didn't go to U.S. college, but they're smart. A lot of them are actually coming from technical organizations, technical universities. They want to break into SaaS. And so the fact that we are able to empower them to do that, we as a company, but really because we have AI to make them able to write sequences. And they still have to do a lot of the manual work, though, because I think that's where to break through.

10:22You got to personalize. You got to be human. Our SVRs send a lot of video messages on LinkedIn, and that seems to kind of break through the noise of just all of inbounds that we tend to get from people in those roles. And so I really look at it as human assisted, start to just like knock off the manual, tedious tasks that we could do. And I do think eventually we'll get to agents, agent force, like the world will be run in the next, I don't know, maybe five years, 10 years. who knows what will happen like so much more things will be powered by ai and run but i just don't think we're there today so it's more about like bring it in and start with kind of some basic use cases so your organization can also feel like it's a win yeah those are i think something you

11:10Amelia LeRutte:all brought up and something it was also at the um i was at an oakland event um with salesforce before literally getting on the plane to london and it's you guys have like this tagline it's like humans and agents working together. And part of the talk too is like, you know, we're, again, I don't think Mark or Salesforce is saying to fire anyone, but you definitely are retooling people, retraining people, pivoting them to new roles, right? Putting them into FDE roles, putting them to SE roles if you can. So I feel like so much of this is table stakes right now on the rollout. So let's start with Salesforce because you guys have had one of maybe the most public rollouts of AI.

11:48Amelia LeRutte:Like just walk us through it. Yeah. So I know it's not recorded. I see the camera right in front of me and no one's actually on social media. Look, the rollout is bumpy, right? Well, it's not like a day one, everything worked. It's not like your data was in a perfect place. It's not like the processes we were trying to enhance were all there and also ways of working. Yeah, that that is constantly being rewritten. So to your point, it is not about, again, if you're on a call center. Yeah, you probably do want to cut heads and there's an there's an absolute ROI. It is about revenue growth. Right.

12:23And if you look at most of the AI that's that's out there, people tend to focus on service related, tend to focus on operational related. Why? It's easier than sales, in my opinion. But why is it easier? Just because it's operational? No, usually your data is in a better place. usually your process is more advanced because you're already doing that service activity with humans today on sales what are you relying on but the most part you're relying on your sellers you're relying on your people to go out there and and sell and so i think as we looked at our our evolution which we're not evolved so we're not there um but it is to think about rethinking roles rethinking the tools you're making available for for us is some of the low-hanging fruit and And what we publicly expressed was, guess what?

13:08Salesforce gets a ton of web-bound leads. Most of those leads are pretty low quality and they're very pick and choose on which ones are being followed up on. It was very low percentage of those are followed up on. Again, so that's a great thing for an agent. Let's turn that over to an agent. Let's go ahead and get those curated. Get those to be enriched. Get those to, we can actually get a human to pay attention to them. Or just get them out of the funnel. just let's just get them get them out get them done say that we did it and that percentage is probably the the most that's led to direct revenue that we would have not had because nobody was

13:43Amelia LeRutte:working those things i it's funny throughout the day we've been talking about this of like you guys did that we did a similar thing where we had a bunch of leads and then i was like because we're going to deploy agent force i'll put it on that agent yeah we have all these leads literally even at i mean we don't have the level of inbound you guys have but like me trash because it's it is like it's not to say it's a whole bunch it just makes the problem worse it makes the problem but yeah to your point it makes the problem worse right and so it's like okay we have everybody everybody when we've told this story today or like when i see other like founders or enemy leaders bring it up i'm like everybody think like i don't know if who can honestly raise their hand in this room and say i think every lead has been perfectly followed up with like maybe if you have a then like then be up here next year but like i feel like everybody today was like no i feel like i probably should double check with my team because there probably are some leads that we haven't thought about um or if you haven't checked like you know your your horde or your rev ops in a while there's probably a bunch of leads in there like everybody has this use case of everybody has leads they never followed up with and it's honestly it's embarrassing for all of us i'm like it's embarrassing for Salesforce, Salesforce.

14:53Amelia LeRutte:It's like, okay, we have all these like big brands, right? And it's like, okay, we should, we should be getting back to people instantaneously. Maybe? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe. And it's like, for me, I find it so embarrassing. Like when I found all these leads post-annual that I'm like, okay, our sales team is not that big. And I get it. They're like, they don't have, you know, maybe infinite time. I'm like, but they do have time post-annual. Like this is the best time to call people, right? Like our ventures happened in May. These people wanted to know about annual. You didn't call them yet.

15:24Amelia LeRutte:Maybe call them now. Like the event just happened. Maybe they came. You can sort that way. And so for me, I was like, this is just like, I was like, we have to fix this. And like, we have to just do it with AI so that it's consistent. Because part of the problem beforehand was, you know, we were giving these leads manually to humans. And they would just, like you said, they would just cherry pick. Like, they'll just cherry pick the ones that they want to work. And the rest will either say, oh, not a fit or they'll come up with some like phony baloney close loss reason. And then you go back and you're like, there's no notes.

15:56Amelia LeRutte:Like there's literally no notes in the record. So I have no idea why this like got lost. I think, well, it's important to like start that process now. So we are about 80 % inbound, 20 % outbound. I just spun up our outbound team with our director of outbound this year. So beginning of this year, no outbound. now we've got it. And what I've noticed is, yes, within like we started with how do we layer in AI from the top of funnel to make outbound at our ACV make sense. So it has to be data first. So we ingest all of that lead information and Richard and Snowflake that gets pushed out to our BDR.

16:37So it's already good data there. But when it comes to inbound, we're like, OK, we want to keep all trash out of the AEs hands. So we actually have a team that like human team that actually looks at every single lead, because if you're thinking of a salon or spa, well, Amelia could open a salon or spa tomorrow and she's using her Sastor email to sign up for a trial. And we're like, DQ, that's definitely not a salon or spa. But if a human actually calls you and you're like, Oh yeah, Bay Area loves getting injections. I'm opening a med spa tomorrow. then we would actually want to talk to you so there's these like so much nuance but what we're doing is cool we now understand the the nuance on a human level as soon as we can do that with an agent yes we will yep um the agents do take a lot of training and i feel like i want to hear

17:29Amelia LeRutte:guys's quick perspective though on like resistance to the rollout right because we're all at different stages right now um maybe actually we'll start with you like any resistance with your i mean you're an ai native company maybe they can't resist ai any but why they join yes yeah not in our organization but we are selling to companies that are dealing with their own internal resistance and i think it's been really interesting to see i mean i was on the stage earlier with contentful and we talked to them twice over two years before they became a customer and it was just a matter of internal teams getting on board.

18:07You had someone like Ashley who was championing it from the beginning, but they're European-based. They have a German works council. Their legal team was very, very reticent to bring AI into the organization. And so I think that what we see is that it's great that we've moved beyond note-taking. We're like, okay, we can have bots on the call. we can take a note. So I feel like it's easier to sell AI to organizations than it was two years ago. But I'm still kind of amazed at the internal resistance when you bring in legal teams, CIOs, like it is so dependent on the personality and the mindset. And I do believe that we will eventually push through all those barriers over time because it will be so obvious who's leveraging AI who's not.

18:59And I think the companies that are will be so far ahead. But I've come to just appreciate that some things really come down to timing. And another angle of that is that the company that's going to adopt AI internally needs to have a strong team championing it because you can't just give these tools to your team and expect them to just magically use it all day long. I think there's some crazy stats out there about how many people are actually using AI in their orgs, and they probably all have access to ChatGPT or Claude. And it's just it's very hard to get people to change their behaviors. So I think that's equally important is that there is just somebody raising the flag internally and who's really committed to the cause of saying this is going to be transformational, but it's going to take time and you have to have buy in.

19:48Well, it's the psychology. Like as humans, we will do far more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. Like it's just what we do. So like I noticed we rolled out momentum with our team, started with our onboarding team, worked backwards to AE, soon BDR. and what I noticed is I could quantify that we were going to save 15 minutes per deal. For our AEs, that's 16 hours a month. Their 20 wins is their quota. I can quantify that, but what I didn't teach them at first is how that will change their workflow. So they are literally 30-minute demo, closed the deal, immediately have to get off of that call, build notes for the onboarding team, get that into Salesforce well.

20:35What we learned immediately was we don't have that readily available. It's going to take 15 minutes to get that information back to them. So the workflow changes. You're now stacking demos and then you have an hour-long break where you're going through your momentum tasks in the Slack that you're already in. So you're not having to change surfaces, processing them much more quickly than it would to do it manually, but actually like implementing that and being very explicit about the way you work is changing. It's going to look different, but the net gain is going to be so much greater. You have to like be ahead of that.

21:12And so you've mentioned a couple of times, like I'm really active in the onboarding of momentum into our team. I want to build, I want to be in the tool. If I'm not, that's where the resistance bubbles up. Because it's like the greater than they, like I'm here, I'm in this, I know how to use it. It won't be that way forever for every single tool. But I think you have to, like you said, have that champion, that leader that is in it.

21:38Amelia LeRutte:And then anything you want to add from the Salesforce side? Yeah, I mean, look, throwing CIOs under the bus. I'm a former reformed CIO. And the problem with AI, it's not just AI, right? It's not just saying, oh, I'm anti-AI or not. Again, there are data to be concerned. What is your company IP? How are you going to turn that over? I mean, there are other concerns that technology experts have of why we are perceived that way. It's just, it's dangerous. By the way, the CIO that, you know, gets a data breach, like that's going to be fine. That happens. The CIO that gives their data away to AI is fired, right?

22:16Like that's a big difference. And also you got to think about the psyche of those folks. So I'm just a little defensive. I'm thrown on the bus. But you, at Salesforce, look, several things. number one we have a product right so there's a product that they want to learn and use because they're going to be selling it and if they're not a seller of agent force yeah and it goes to it like they're going to need to know it because that's the questions asked so so you you did have that buy-in but i i also think that when you're talking about um is the guy going to replace humans you know that's the fear maybe that's part of the adoption or maybe the tool doesn't live up to the expectations maybe that's part of the thing but your analytics is is your best friend, right?

22:58Like you need whatever your agents are, you need to make sure you have defined analytics. Now KPIs, ROI, I could probably go a little off on that. I'm not as big as fan on that, but the analytics around it, you need to be able to prove that it's actually is working, what you're getting out of it, because you're going to want to improve it. I also think that's pretty lacking in the industry as far as when you look at your agents that are built, getting those level of analytics to say, why is it dropping out in process three at 21 %? Is that because it's bad data is that because there's latency and the customer's not waiting around like what what is what is causing this to happen um it's been a big part of salesforce's roadmap since since dreamforce but i also think it's something you need to have in mind as you build out your

23:39Amelia LeRutte:own agentic layer yeah it's interesting because i was like pre-may right before we went on this agent journey and a lot of other folks did too like although i don't think it is that bad and i started to you know onboard some of these tools and agents and i go oh man like our sales team never put half the stuff in there like there's no close this just those lost i'm like well where are the nodes okay no notes no calls no nothing they just you know never did it um and why that sucks for so many reasons now is because you're now your agent can't go back to those things so like if it never existed as like a record previously in your data it's not going to exist there now magically with ai not going to find it it's not going to find it um so i think there was like a little groundwork we had to do like when we first rolled out all these agents to say okay what should we implement and it's part of how we picked some of these tools was like okay well what should we implement so that going forward i obviously can't change the past so that is what it is but like going forward what can we put in so that we make sure everything is always in sales force as it should have been like we've had this rec we've had this system of record since i've been here like nine years now like alongside our marketing automation platform but why does my marketing automation platform has like 10 ,000 more data points than Salesforce.

24:57Amelia LeRutte:I was like, Salesforce should have more actually, because our marketing automation pushes to Salesforce, but then the AEs are pushing to Salesforce. So it should have more, but it didn't. They were like almost even. And so part of this process for us was making sure we could implement the right tools in the right way to say, okay, what are we going to pick so that everything goes back to at least one source of truth so right now that is salesforce like we use momentum and like that goes back into like that was why like after annual i told ashley i was like i need your help because i wanted to salesforce you're like yeah i was like close the lid but i think you don't always know what you don't know i think we're starting to wake up i was like what you think it's being and then and then the the old way of working is you would go to the reps and ask what's going on And then you realize, oh, wait, you have to go to the data itself and make your own decisions.