Jason Lemkin: prediction

Transcript context

…What are some other things that you think are going to change that people may not be thinking about that's going to change the way we do sales in the next couple years? Net net, we're going to need more sales and go-to-market professionals than ever because the winners are growing so quickly that even if they're more efficient, they will need more human beings than ever. We'd have to put together a spreadsheet to see the crossover point. Obviously, many folks are shrinking headcount. Microsoft's already said they're past peak employee. They're never going to be bigger. We're seeing this all across the companies we work with. They want to be as lean as they can, but AI is such a huge part of our economy already. And it's such a force of nature. And everyone eventually goes enterprise. Everyone eventually has a sales team. Everyone eventually does it. It's happening faster. ElevenLabs, 50% of their sales is through enterprise now. I mean, I don't know everybody. The fact that Vercel just added Janine means they're going more enterprise by definition. I think Replit just added a sales team a couple months ago for real, and now they've added another CRO. So they got to a hundred and something million with no traditional sales team, but at a billion, it's going to be flooded with salespeople. So if you get great at this stuff, if you go buy an agent today, when you listen to this and deploy it yourself and do the hard work and train it and ingest it and iterate it every day and get ahead of it and then get two agents and then three and then four, you may become more valuable, have a better experience in ETM. And I believe, I hope, actually be better paid. I've talked about that we should have $250,000 a year SDRs, but they'd be like at Vercel, they'd be managing 10 agents, not 10 people. Then they're worth 250 grand. For sell, they'd be managing 10 agents, not 10 people. Then they're worth 250 grand, instead of 80 grand or 90 grand. It's not that much, is it? So, there is a great world coming. These are the best of times, aren't they, Lenny, for product and business? It's not evenly distributed. So, if you have those skills, even though we're not going to need these SDRs and even though not going to be BDRs, even though we can get rid of half of AEs, the amount of revenue and growth in AI leaders is so phenomenal, right? And not just at the startups, at the Google Clouds, at everywhere. Azure, they're hiring so many humans that net-net, it's a positive for the profession, but not for the way we've done it in the past. You're at risk. That is really interesting that we're still hiring. And this is what I've seen too, just like everyone's hiring salespeople, go-to-market people. Do you think there's going to be this peak in the next couple years of just, okay, now that AI is doing more and more of this, or is it just hard to predict because who knows how big AI gets, how big these companies get?…

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