← The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
SaaStr 848: How AI Is Rewiring Sales: Quota, Retention & What's Actually Working with SaaStr, Salesforce and Mangomint
00:42:56
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the official Saster podcast where you can hear some of the best Saster speakers. This is where the cloud meets up today on the Saster podcast.
- [00:11]
B
Look, the rollout is bumpy, right? It's not like at 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. There's an absolute roi. It is about revenue growth, right? And 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? For the most part, you're relying on your sellers. You're relying on your people to go out there and sell.
- [01:06]
A
Hey everybody. Saster 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. It's the very best of S tier attendees and decision makers that come to Saster 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.sas.com or just use code Jason100 when you check out. See you there. Saster annual and AI summit 2026. It will rock.
- [01:44]
C
Hello.
- [01:45]
D
Hello. Hello friends. Come on in. Thanks for coming. I know Jason is still speaking. I think we're flattered you came to sit with us and learn a bit more about how AI is rewiring B2B sales. 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. 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?
- [02:30]
B
Got 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 is 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.
- [03:04]
D
So those are good ones. And then we'll go to Ashley.
- [03:09]
E
Hi everyone, I'm Ashley. I'm one of the co founders at Momentum and 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 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.
- [03:46]
C
I'm Marcel, VP of Sales at Mangamet. We are vertical SaaS in the like very SMB space for salons and spas. I 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 my list was like pretty deep. Yeah, yeah. But I would say that the surfaces 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 I think they're like editing. All of that is based on Claude, which I also love and use quite heavily.
- [04:33]
D
I feel like the whole day too and I know this is about sales, 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 have seen like I 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 do you get with your sequences? Like, a lot of that used to be okay, we're going to hire for the. I know, like companies I used to work with pre aster where I work with be like, okay, 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, Marshall.
- [05:25]
C
Yeah, I mean, the one that pops to mind. Sticking on the idea of like, but photos, images. So again I mentioned we worked 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 early 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 cloud 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, rather 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 and 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.
- [07:31]
D
And it's instant value, though, for your customers.
- [07:34]
C
It's actually still a little. They're a little freaked out by it. Magic.
- [07:38]
D
It's too good.
- [07:39]
C
Yeah. It's kind of like the Disneyland effect and I like that.
- [07:42]
D
I like that. Greg. So you're at Salesforce. There's obviously, you guys have a massive, massive workforce.
- [07:48]
B
Yes.
- [07:49]
D
How are you tackling this with your scale?
- [07:51]
B
Yeah, I mean, so look, I think getting your sales force get it to be agentic is easier said than done. Right. It's interesting. The word tools keeps getting brought up and people automatically assumed because it's AI. It's an easy tool. It's not right. 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 COVID to the chainsaw because no, I obviously didn't read the directions. I mean, what, 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, 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, our own dog food. As far as what it, what it looks like for us. What I've seen from a slack perspective of how the sellers use is, is transformational for them. But again, I think, I think the point that I would leave with is sellers want to sell. If 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.
- [09:08]
D
Yeah, we've been saying that all day. And then actually I want to get your take on that because you are an AI native, you are newer.
- [09:14]
E
I.
- [09:15]
D
Your sales team is still doing a lot manually. Actually.
- [09:18]
E
I was going to say it's. 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 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. And 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 a US 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. You got to personalize. You got to be human. Our SDRs send a lot of video messages on LinkedIn, and that seems to kind of break through the noise of just all of the 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.
- [11:08]
D
Yep. Those are, I think, something you've all brought up and something. It was also at the. I was at an Oakland event 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, um, 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. Like, just walk us through it.
- [11:51]
B
Yeah. So I know this is 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. It's not like at 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, 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's 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. And so I think as we looked at our, our evolution, which we're not evolved so we're not there, but it is to think about rethinking roles, rethinking the tools you're making available for us is some of the low hanging fruit. And what we publicly expressed was guess what, Salesforce 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. No. 1 again, that's a great thing for an agent. Let's, let's turn that over to an agent. Let's go ahead and get those curated, get those to be enriched, get those two. We can actually get a human to pay attention to them yet 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 most that's led to direct revenue that we would have not had because nobody was working those instincts.
- [13:45]
D
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 for us, I'll put it on that agent. We have all these leads literally even at. I mean we don't have the level of inbound you guys have.
- [14:00]
B
But like me trash because it is like it's not to say it's a whole bunch. This makes the problem worse.
- [14:05]
D
It Makes the. But yeah, to your point, it makes the problem worse, right? So it's like, okay, we have everybody, Everybody. When we've told the story today or like, when I see other, like, founders around me, leaders bring it up. I'm like, everybody that, like, I don't know 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. Or if you haven't checked, like, you know, your. Your horror 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 sales. For Salesforce. 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.
- [15:00]
B
I don't know, Maybe.
- [15:02]
D
Maybe. And it's like, for me, I'm like, 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. 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 event just happened in May. These people wanted to know about annual. You didn't call them yet? 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 so like, I was like, we have to fix this. I'm 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 came up with some like, phony balloon cause loss reason. And then you go back and you're like, there's no notes. Like, there's literally no notes in the record. So I have no idea why this, like, got lost.
- [16:02]
C
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, enrich it in Snowflake, that gets pushed out to our bdr. So it's already good data there. But. But when it comes to inbound, we're like, okay, 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, Emelia could open a salon or spa tomorrow. And she's using her Saster 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, Barry loves getting injections. I'm hoping 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.
- [17:24]
B
Yep.
- [17:25]
D
The agents do take a lot of training. And I feel like I want to hear guys this quick perspective, though, on like, resistance to the rollout. Right. Because we were all at different stages right now. 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 Anyway, why'd they join? Yes. Yeah.
- [17:46]
E
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. You 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, like, note taking. We're like, okay, we can have bots on the call. We can take a note. So I. 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, IT, it is so dependent on the personality and the mindset. And I, I do believe that we will eventually push through all those barriers over time because obvious who's leveraging AI and who's not and 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.
- [19:48]
C
Well, it's like it's, 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. They're 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, what 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. And so you've mentioned a couple 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.
- [21:23]
D
Yep.
- [21:24]
C
Because it's like the, the greater than they, like I'm, I'm here, I'm in this. I, 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.
- [21:39]
D
And then anything you want to add from the salesforce side?
- [21:42]
B
Yeah, I mean, look, throwing CIOs under the bus. I'm a former Reform 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, it's dangerous by the way, that 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 buyer. Right. Like that's a big difference. And also you got to think about the psyche of those folks. So I'm just a little defensive, have thrown on the bus. But, 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 even if they're not a seller of agent force.
- [22:36]
E
Yeah.
- [22:37]
B
And what are we? 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 is AI 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. Like you need whatever your agents are, you need to make sure you have defined analytics.
- [23:02]
D
Yep.
- [23:03]
B
Now, KPI's ROI, I could probably go a little off on that. I'm not, 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 is not waiting around like, what. What is. What is causing this to happen? 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 own agent layer.
- [23:41]
D
Yeah, it's interesting because I was like, okay, pre May right before we went on this agent journey and a lot of other folks did too. Like, 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 was no close. This just close. I'm like, well, where are the nodes? Okay, no notes, no calls, no nothing. They just, you know, never did it. 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. 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 as 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 Salesforce as it should have been? Like, we've had this wreck. We've had this system of records since I've been here, like nine years now, like alongside our marketing automation platform. But why does my marketing automation platform have like 10,000 more data points than Salesforce? I was like, salesforce should have more actually, because our. 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 ways. 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 annualized Al, I was like, I need your help. Because I wanted to Salesforce. Yeah. I was like, close the lid.
- [25:33]
C
But I think you don't always know
- [25:35]
E
what you don't know. I think we're starting to.
- [25:37]
D
Like, in the back of my mind, I was like, well, you think it's being.
- [25:40]
C
And then. And then the.
- [25:41]
E
The old way of working is you would go to the reps and ask what's going on.
- [25:45]
D
Yeah.
- [25:45]
E
Then you realize, oh, wait, you could go to the itself and make your own decisions. And I think that's just the change now that AI is unlocking for.
- [25:53]
D
Yes. That's a. That's a big call out because I feel like too. It's not that I don't trust humans anymore, obviously. Like, we've worked with a lot of humans to make this happen. And I've gotten to know a lot of humans in this process. Right. Like, all these people here. I'm like, I've met so many really great humans in this process. I don't take this the wrong way, but, like, a lot of our humans also just didn't do their jobs. Like, the basics of put your. Like, I think it's, you know, AESTR 101. Put your contact and notes in Salesforce
- [26:20]
C
or your cross also, like the personality.
- [26:23]
E
Yeah.
- [26:24]
C
Like the. The top seller has a Persona. And that Persona at my organization at least is a whatever, forever. You know, anything you've got to throw at her is going to roll right off and she's closing that deal. But there's no notes. She could screenshot her text messages all day and send them over, but it's like that. It just. It is another one of our reps. I love him, but he shared with me after working for the company for a couple months that he basically had to ex. He'd been in sales for a while. He's like, I had to explain to my wife why I had all of these women in my text messages. Because he had never sold to salon and spa owners.
- [27:05]
E
No wonder you have no notes and
- [27:07]
C
like, everything's in your phone and you're
- [27:09]
E
having to explain yourself to your family.
- [27:10]
C
So you're not going to explain it to me.
- [27:12]
D
This.
- [27:13]
C
The what shifts when you do get something like momentum and you get everything into Salesforce and these feeds fields feel filled out is like the signal to noise ratio shifts so quickly that then you have to. Because again, like, I notice even for myself, that you become addicted to the noise or sifting through it, and then you have to like, stop, regroup and go, it's all here. We're okay.
- [27:37]
D
Yeah.
- [27:37]
C
Now what? What now? Now, like, how do we then level up and do more with the team you have?
- [27:42]
D
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, that's just such a big unlock for most people, right? It's like, okay, once you finally deploy your first agent, one agent, whatever it is, sales support, retention, like, wherever you're going to deploy, it's like, okay. Getting it to work is one. I know it sounds like a big hurdle. It's a hurdle. But then once you get there, I feel like everyone has this, like, aha. Moment where, like, even for me, with Agent Force, I was like, I filled out so many agents of Gizzy, I was like, I have to now do another one. But then, like, we, like, they. We started, like, going through the process together, and then you guys brought on, like, an fda, and I was like, well, that one, that helped a lot. And then two, once I, like, got over this, like, mental hump, I was like, I don't know, like, it looks kind of complicated, to be honest. And then I got in there, I was like, no way to understand this. I was like, I just couldn't. Like, I was like, I just need to sit for like 10 minutes and read it and read the prompts and like, how I can train it. And I was like, okay, never mind. Like, I get this. It's like, not that different from a lot of things that you prompt and build into. And like, some of the. Once you learn how to do one agent, like, a lot of the core principles you learn are actually transferred. Like vendor agnostic are transferable, which I feel like is a big thing for folks. And then before we run out of time, I want to talk about two more things, which is one, because it's in the title, let's talk about quota for a second. Because a few people have asked me about this today of like, what's the quota of your aisdr? I was like, well, it's more than what the human quota was. Also, it doesn't ask for, you know, a percentage of the AE's commission when the deal closes. So that's nice, but let's open it up to you guys, whoever wants to start on quota.
- [29:24]
C
I'll tell you about quota all day long. I actually, I. I just announced to our team last week that we are not raising our quota in 2026. And I could have.
- [29:36]
E
Yeah, that's interesting.
- [29:37]
D
Yeah.
- [29:39]
C
You know, what I learned is what I've seen happen this year, this year was like the proving grounds. Right. I've been in 2024. I implemented AI using a tool called Demodesk for my team. So I was able to analyze. They're based in great company. Unfortunately, we're no longer using them because we moved to momentum for some other things. But I can't help but shout them out. I think they're fantastic. I almost cried canceling that. That was weird.
- [30:07]
E
Like, it's.
- [30:08]
C
It's rare to feel emotional about a company, but I think what they've done was so good and they. They rolled out AI early. But the red queens race gets everybody right. Anybody know, like, you're running at the speed you've always been running, but suddenly the trees are running with you. You've got to run faster. And so when I think about that, this year we roll out momentum. You know, my team, like I said, We're. We're very SMB SaaS. My team poses 20 logos a month. When we roll in our payment processing. This is very SMB doing up. Up to the. The like 7x, you know, ARR to ot ratio. That's crazy in very SMB. But it's. It's good. It feels good to us. What I learned is we've got these top performers that are almost those, like, over performers. There's usually, you know, a couple boxes you could check that make you realize, oh, that's possible for you and that's great. So you're closing 35 logos in a month. Absolutely wild. But good for you. Like to make that ote and very S and B sales creates an absolute, like, raving champion of our team. They want to run direct view and put a review on there and say great things about the company. But I am pleased as pie as our CEO always says. And I love with that person who's running at quota because you're still incredibly efficient. What I'm going to do is spend this next year really making AI allow you to push up into those top performers. Very curious to see what happens with those top performers once we're like, once things feel truly native but we're not there. And so when we talk back to, like, how do we make these people feel safe in this new environment? That's. It is like, reap that benefit and that reward to where it's so, like an intrinsic motivation that it feels like part of you and we move up and we will get there. And it just felt right.
- [32:01]
E
I think that's interesting too. It's making me think about when we were writing our, the. Well, we interviewed a bunch of leaders. Kyle Norton from owner.com he, he talked a lot about the, the systems that he's put in place to support the team and how they have a lot more revops folks and ops folks than a traditional team would have. And that theme actually came up four or five times from Demandbase, some other companies that we interviewed. And our takeaway was that we're going to have a lot more operational folks running the agents, running the data, which will allow the teams to be more efficient. And I think that instead of thinking, okay, we just gotta like double quota now because everyone's gonna be a lot more efficient, that will only happen if the business is supporting those folks with all the underlying, hey, do my SDRs have enough accounts? How do we get accounts? Where does that come from? It's like you need to orchestrate and architect all those systems from top of funnel on down to post sales. And so, and I don't think we're in a like industry wide place where we've all like proven that out. I think we're all much more like you guys, us as well, where we're saying, let's start to just build, bring in more people on the system side, add the headcount as needed. But I, that's why I don't really buy yet into, okay, we're gonna have two reps and we're gonna get to 100 million. Like, sure, that works if you're lovable like that can work with the right business, but a lot of us do not have that business. So to hold ourselves to that standard just feels impossible and unrealistic and better to think about, okay, what are the underlying systems we can put in place?
- [33:42]
C
And I, I just said I'm not raising quota this year. But I was just talking to CEO of a native AI company and he's telling me about his company and how his head of sales is like, oh yeah, well, we've got, you know, this particular quota and everybody's hitting it. There's a new founder, he's probably 26, 27. You know, he's whip smart. But this whole world of building a revenue organization is new to him. So he's listening to this head of sales that's like, yep, that's, that's industry standard. This is the standard playbook. This is where we leave quota. And I said, you got the Wrong person. Like, that's, that's not it. What you don't want to do is take the old playbook and try and plug it in. Like you actually have to strip things down to, you know, first principles, like, what is your business doing? And that's where it's like, he could probably double his quota and people would be motivated by it. Like they feel like they're reaching for something. So
- [34:37]
B
from a Salesforce perspective, it's. Salesforce is always going to raise quota. That's just what they, they do to the sales salespeople. But I think it's interesting when, when all of the panelists. And I'm going to, I'm going to echo it. Didn't focus on, on raising quota and increasing sales. It talked about what happens when you do that.
- [34:57]
D
Yeah.
- [34:57]
B
And I, and I think I can point back directly to your, to your story in that. Fine. We're, we're. We're selling the shit out of Agent Force. And that's great and it's wonderful. But again, in some of these situations, it's not just click, click, click and you're done. Right. Like, some of these flows are actually very complicated. They involve a lot of pre work. From your data perspective, maybe your workflow perspective, can you actually service your accounts afterwards? Is your operations also scaling? So it's not just a sales issue itself. For us, being the Ford deployed engineers is what's helping us as, as a band aid, because it really is a band aid until product makes it where it is, just quick, quick, quick. Right. But to get quick, quick, quick, it still has to have a lot of maturity. So yes, you can, you can definitely increase your quota if you'd like. You can set different ones. I've seen everything at Salesforce, but you also need to make a holistic view. And I think that's what all three panelists wanted people to think of. It's not just about sales. And you look at your business holistically, Right.
- [35:55]
C
You're not doing that.
- [35:57]
B
There's gonna be repercussions.
- [36:00]
D
All right, well. And on the topic of retention, just because we have a CCO here, so I don't. A lot of people aren't using it for retention. I've. We've kind of mildly used it for submission in the sense that, like, because we're so seasonal. Right. If you think of Saster as. I mean, we have sponsors like these guys out here for like Saster Annual, then some of them do London, some of them do your own stuff because they have like bigger partnerships. Cool. Most of them do one at a time. And so we have this like seasonality that's just natural to us, right. With our event cycle. And then we have media which is like a little bit different because that's year round. But for that like the event cycle is very seasonal, right? So we have this seasonality. And so one of the first things we've done for retention is load them up into the agents. Because I was like, I'm, you know, because one, we had new people who raised their hand for those last semester and said I wanted to sponsor literally one of these booths out here. We never like replied to them. But I also had, you know, 200 existing vendors who had just done this like last semester in May. And I'm like, you know what? I know the team says they're going to follow with all their current customers and current accounts. The agent do it anyway. Like, like, no harm, no foul, like it's not going to take credit, it's not going to sell, you know, whatever, you know, out here today, like ACV on this, but let's just say 50k, right? It's not going to sell a 50k booth, but at the very least it can keep emailing them if they want to be emailed, get their feedback from the event, check in on them maybe, you know, half the time I'm like, hey, did you talk to all your sponsors and your accounts? And they're like, oh, I saw some of them and then I got busy. I'm like, yeah, I get it. But like, but like, what are you doing tomorrow now that the events, now the event's over? I'm like, are you, are you, are you reaching out to your accounts? Are you doing things? And they're like, you know, some of them were, some of them weren't. And so I was like, okay, enough of the like 50, 50 some yes, some no. Like you'll find this with your sales team. No matter what happens, like you're always going to get a mixed bag of results. Right? You have top performers, you have low performers. That's just how the bell curve works. Like uh. And so for us we were like, okay, we're gonna load these existing accounts into one of our agents. Some of them are in agent for us. And I'm gonna like, I literally. That's why it has such a high open rate too. It's a mix of, you know, people we ghosted and then people who are customers. Yeah. Are, are getting into this sequence where we're following up and I'm like, in Some cases they're like, oh, hey, I actually didn't get to connect with my AE post annual. And I'm like, man, they told me the gig is up, the gig is up. But Greg, just any quick thoughts on retention with AI?
- [38:40]
B
Yeah, so it's interesting. There's the staff from McKinsey deck I saw, which was 40% and this was in financial services. 40% of financial services customers want increased outreach from their firm. But I think when you looked and you got the 30, it's like, okay, fine, yes, they want to be talked to, but they want to be talked to on their level about products or services that interest them. So it's, it's not just about creating a traditional like marketing campaign where you're dripping like that's not what an agent is for. It's not, you can, you can use plenty of off the shelf. So for to do that. It's exactly what she said as far as mentioning about getting some kind of action. And you're trying to build that relationship digitally so that your human can close it. Yeah, that's all they're doing. They're trying to build a little bit at a time. Maybe it's a survey, maybe it's a question, maybe it's thought leadership doesn't really matter. Right. Think about an agent in that standpoint of being able to continue to keep the relationship fresh. Because as a human you can only talk to so many people day.
- [39:44]
C
I mean until this is specific again to my customer, until there's an agent that texts with the blue bubble, I, it's just, it's not going to happen. The bias on email for us is so extreme because salon and spa owners don't open emails. Like, unless it's like I'm booking a haircut tomorrow at 3pm or you know, he might. So I think that's the biggest piece we've run into there. We have like incredibly high net revenue retention to begin with. Like our customer, our product is so sticky. So to me, the, the way I think about it is more like it's the, it goes back to like how quickly we need to move it deep into our vertical to make the hard decisions for them. That's what drives retention. And so yes, we do that through AI, but it's not through an agent reaching out.
- [40:34]
D
Ashley, any last posing?
- [40:35]
E
Yeah, I think what's been interesting, I mean, because we have some customers that use us much more heavily post sales and I think CS has tended to be underserved in terms of tooling and process and I think the expectation has still been high on them getting data back into Salesforce or get the data in gainsight and which is still down. Yeah. So it's, there's like a lot more opportunity actually on post sales, I think in disrupting and not just the customer support chatbot experience, which is like great starting point, but actually again to help CSMs and CS leaders have a better pulse on the business. The moment that somebody is expressing dissatisfaction, it's. We all know that it's a slow. I mean, unless you're like egregiously messing up your product, it's kind of a slow drip to churn. Hey, I didn't get this answered. Hey, this is not working. And it's. I think it's really hard for CSMs and I oversee customer success. So it's like a close thing to my heart where I'm like, it is hard to know in the moment what needs to be escalated unless somebody is being like, I'm going to leave. Yeah, that kind of soft, slow dissatisfaction now that I have momentum. Listening for those moments of dissatisfaction which almost sometimes swing the other way where the. You get on, you see a clip of the customer saying something and you're like, what is going on? And they're like, it's actually kind of fine. Like it's not a big deal.
- [42:01]
C
I had to mute mine since I've been here.
- [42:03]
E
Yeah. So it's like. But I think that on the CS side, I'm very excited for what AI can do for retention and keep doing. Not to mention something like, you know, we have a customer that does three hour support calls in another language and then they had to go write that into Salesforce. Imagine the time savings and the ability now to bring that all into a common language, English in the CRM. I think that we should all be orienting ourselves to thinking about AI for customer retention and CS just as much as on the sales side. And I think it's all going to have such a huge impact on our businesses.
- [42:39]
D
Okay. We're out of time, unfortunately, but we'll stick around and answer questions. But thanks for joining.
- [42:45]
B
Thank you.