Jason Lemkin: commitment

Transcript context

…I think what might be useful to close out this conversation is to go through what are the things that are changing, like maybe a handful of things that are changed that are now going to be different in the world of sales go-to-market, and what are a few things that are just going to stay the same? Yeah, let's go through it. Obviously, support is the first one to have changed. It's our obviously permanently changed with AI. Whatever vendor you look at, 50 to 80% of support is done by AI. And we don't always think about support as GTM, but it is. It's the start of a customer journey. It's very important to the customer journey. So if you're skeptical, go look at... Support has changed permanently. So that train's left the station. Really, as we record this, not much has changed in sales. I mean, I do think the stuff we've talked about is the bleeding edge. I do think the classic cadence-based SDR running campaigns through a tool, him or herself, will be mostly extinct with 12 months. There is no reason AI can't do a better job than that role. The classic qualifier, qualifying inbound leads, which is a crappy experience for customers, should be similarly extinct within mostly extinct in 12 months. The rest, we're going to wait and see. I think what we do know for reps, for sales reps, everyone wants to be even more efficient in the next 12 months. There's a lot of reasons people want to be... Again, at the bottom end, it's cost, it's profitability pressures. At the high end, it's cultural. We just don't want 200 reps running around Vercel or Replit that don't know what the product does. Just the company owner, three to five million per rep is a lot different than three to 500,000. So you have to adjust as a rep. Every AI leader can't hire enough reps like we talked about, but you're going to have to adjust to being geometrically, if not exponentially more productive with help from AI. So you have to embrace these tools for real. And a lot of folks, a lot of old school GTM leaders are like, "AI isn't going to hurt sales reps. It's just going to give them superpowers." The best ones, yes. The mediocre are just going to be more mediocre. So I think the AE is what we will always have salespeople, but being a people person is not enough anymore. You know how you can tell a mediocre salesperson, Lenny? Yeah.…

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