We’re doing something a bit different. No stage, no 5,000 people, no badge line. Just a room at Granola’s HQ in San Francisco on December 8, a real conversation about agents for GTM, and time to hang out after.
I’ll be there in person with Bardia Shahali, VP of Sales at Granola, for GTM Series #05. It’s part of Granola’s ongoing series where GTM leaders sit down with Bardia and get into the details of how they’re actually selling today.
Request to join here: luma.com/gtm-series-jason-lemkin
What We’ll Cover: 10 SDRs and AEs Down to 1 AE and 20 Agents
Not long ago, SaaStr had a pretty normal B2B sales team. About 10 SDRs and AEs, the usual tools, the usual ramp times, the usual turnover.
Today it’s 1 AE and 20+ AI agents running in production. That’s how we sell sponsorships, work inbound, run outbound, and follow up on the long tail of leads that no human team ever gets to.
Bardia and I are going to get into all of it:
- Which agents are actually doing the work. Outbound, inbound, follow-up, qualification. Which ones we’d rebuild the same way, and which we’d do differently.
- What broke. Plenty did. Agents need a ton of training and daily management. “Set it and forget it” doesn’t exist yet, and anyone telling you otherwise hasn’t deployed one at scale.
- What the one human AE does now. The job changed a lot. Less prospecting, a lot more closing and orchestrating.
- Who manages the agents. Running 20 agents is real, daily work for the humans on the team. That’s the part nobody talks about, and it’s where most deployments fall apart.
- What this means for your sales team in 2027. Headcount plans, quota, comp, and which roles get rebuilt first.
Why Granola’s VP of Sales Is the Right Person to Push on This
Granola is one of the fastest-growing AI apps in B2B right now, and Bardia is building a sales org in the middle of all this change. He’s hiring humans, deploying AI, and figuring out the mix in real time, same as most of you.
That makes this a working session between two people with very different answers to the same question. Granola is scaling a sales team up. We scaled ours down and rebuilt it around agents. Both can be right depending on stage, ACV, and motion, and that’s what we’ll dig into.
Who Should Come
- CROs, VPs of Sales, and sales leaders deciding how much of their 2027 plan runs on agents
- Founders and CEOs who are still doing a lot of the selling themselves
- RevOps and GTM ops leaders who’ll end up owning the agents either way
- Anyone who has deployed an AI SDR, wasn’t happy with it, and wants to talk about why
The Details
- What: GTM Series #05: Jason Lemkin, SaaStr AI, in conversation with Bardia Shahali, VP of Sales at Granola
- Where: Granola HQ, San Francisco (exact address shared after you’re approved)
- When: December 8, 2026, 6:00 to 8:30 PM. Please arrive by 6:30 PM
- How: Registration requires host approval, and space is limited. Request to join at luma.com/gtm-series-jason-lemkin
Bring your hardest questions about agents in sales. The best part of these smaller sessions is always the Q&A and the conversations after, and we’ll both be sticking around for them.
See you there.
