In our latest SaaStr AI Workshop Wednesday, Jason Lemkin joined us for “Go-To-Market Isn’t Dead. It’s You: A Wake-Up Call for B2B Leaders in the AI Era”
Top 5 Take-Aways:
- The Same Execs in Many Cases Are Running the Same Playbooks — But Leaner and Better – Go-to-market leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, and other hot AI companies are the exact people who spoke at SaaStr in recent years, running upgraded versions of what already worked. If something’s “not working” for you, the fundamentals haven’t changed.
- Mediocre and “Rinse and Repeat” Execution Is Dying Faster Than Ever – Low-energy campaigns, mediocre outbound, recycled content, and boring events are failing harder than before. AI has made it easier to produce mediocre work at scale, which means only truly excellent execution cuts through. Make everything awesome or don’t bother.
- AI Budget Exists—But Only for Instant, Massive ROI – CIOs are drowning in AI tool requests while cutting efficiency software budgets. Companies like Notion, Dialpad, and Filevine are reaccelerating by tapping into AI spend. If you’re not seeing growth, you’re not delivering transformative value fast enough.
- Traditional Channels Still Work (When Done Right) – Webinars, case studies, SEO, outbound, pilots, events, and brand building all still work. SaaStr’s SEO is up 3-5x in 12 months. OpenAI does pilots. Anthropic runs webinars. The difference is execution quality and adding genuine value.
- PLG Is on Steroids in Age of AI, Sales Teams Are Real But Much Smaller – The hottest AI companies have intense product-led growth but lean sales teams. Perplexity has five salespeople. Vercel has one human SDR and ten agents. The demand is unprecedented, but the go-to-market motion has been AI-amplified, not replaced.
Why Your Go-To-Market Isn’t Working
Walk through any B2B startup today and you’ll hear the same refrains echoing in Slack channels and hallway conversations: “Outbound is dead.” “SEO doesn’t work anymore.” “Our pilots aren’t converting.” “Go-to-market is broken.”
But here’s what nobody wants to hear: it’s not broken. You’re just not good enough.
I know that sounds harsh. But look at the data. Companies tapping into AI budgets are reaccelerating everywhere. Notion just announced they’re accelerating at $500 million ARR with their agents. Dialpad and Talkdesk added nine figures of incremental ARR from AI agents this year. DataDog has accelerated because they’re powering OpenAI’s DevOps infrastructure. The AI spending explosion is trickling down—you’re just not catching any of it.
The Plays Haven’t Changed Much. The Playbooks Have, Though.
Want proof that go-to-market fundamentals still work? Look at who’s running sales and marketing at the hottest AI companies. OpenAI. Anthropic. The next wave of AI-native unicorns. You’ll see the exact same people who presented at SaaStr over the past few years. They’re running nearly identical playbooks to what worked before—just upgraded versions.
OpenAI does pilots. That’s right—the hottest company on Earth uses pilots to close big deals. They’re not dead; customers want to see your product working before they commit, especially in the AI era.
Anthropic and Cursor run webinars and produce case studies together. These supposedly “old school” tactics work because people need social proof more than ever. With hundreds of new AI vendors launching monthly, buyers desperately want to know who else is using your product.
Brand still matters—maybe more than ever. Why are Greg Brockman and Sam Altman everywhere? Why is Amjad Masad from Replit on Joe Rogan? Because in a brutally competitive space where new alternatives launch daily, constant brand reinforcement helps customers decide which products are winning. When you have 100 choices for any given tool, you default to the brands you recognize and trust.
Events and in-person connections work better than ever. Figma brings thousands of customers together. Lovable, Bolt, and RevenueCat run constant hackathons. In an era of noise and vendor proliferation, face-to-face connection cuts through like nothing else. Many faster-growing tech companies are quietly doubling down on events because marketers know it works—even if their teams sometimes resist doing the work.
What’s Actually Working (And What Isn’t)
Let me be specific about what we’re seeing across dozens of startups and our own data at SaaStr.
- Our AI SDR is working. We replaced our human SDR team with AI. It took a month to train and requires daily tuning, but it works. We sent 5,216 messages, generated 206 leads, got 136 responses, and 52 positive outcomes. That’s a strong conversion rate—52 interested buyers from 1,200 leads.
- Our SEO is up 3-5x in the last 12 months. Not down. Up. Now, are chat GPT and LLMs taking some traffic? Yes. But if you’re producing high-quality, canonical content that teaches people how to do something important, it still works. In fact, we may be benefiting because while our average Google position is only 28, LLMs don’t care about ranking—they just want the best content to answer questions. Our 10,000+ posts on every B2B topic imaginable are being surfaced by AI tools.
- Outbound still works when you add value. The problem isn’t outbound—it’s that AI has made mediocre outbound easier to produce at scale, so inboxes are more flooded with mediocre messages. But send an email that genuinely adds value to the recipient? They’ll open it. The difference is you now have to be truly excellent to cut through.
Why Your Competitors Are Winning (And You’re Not)
If you’re not seeing reacceleration in late 2024, you’re missing three critical shifts:
1. The Demand for High-ROI AI Products Is Insane
The products winning right now aren’t incremental improvements. They’re tools that do something you literally could not do before, with almost instant ROI.
We spend a couple hundred dollars a month on Replit. In return, we’ve built a new SaaStr AI homepage, a startup valuation calculator that 300,000 people have used in five weeks, and an AI pitch deck reviewer that crossed 1,000 users in days. That’s not a better version of something we had—those are entirely new capabilities.
Gamma isn’t just a better PowerPoint. It lets us create dynamic, personalized sales decks for every sponsor automatically. That was impossible before.
This is why Office co-pilots are failing. Nobody wants to pay $20/month for something that does a little bit extra. They want something that changes the game on day one with massive ROI.
2. There’s AI Budget, But No Budget for “Efficiency Tools”
Every CIO will tell you the same story: they’re drowning in requests for AI tools across their organization, but they’re still cutting classic SaaS efficiency tools. They want to end the year with 200 software tools or less, not 200 or more.
Even worse, all their existing budget is being consumed by price increases. Salesforce just raised prices again. Zoom raised prices. Everyone’s raising prices.
If your product is just an ROI calculator or a way to make the sales team 10% more efficient, there’s no budget for you. That was the game in 2021. Today, unless you’re doing something genuinely transformative, you’re fighting for scraps.
3. It Has to Work—Immediately
The old B2B playbook was: “This will create efficiency. Try it, and over a year you’ll see it roll out across your org.” That’s dead.
Customers are expecting magic upfront. They’re expecting forward-deployed engineers who do most of the work to train your app and deliver huge ROI before they even sign a contract. Even Marc Benioff said in our recent 20VC episode that he wants his team working in production with a customer before the contract is signed, with great AI agents already delivering value.
We replaced two human SDRs with our AI SDR, but it wasn’t simple. It took significant work to train and tune daily. But it has to work, or there’s no point. You can’t promise efficiency benefits with sales fluff anymore. You have to deliver transformative ROI almost instantly.
The Real Reason Things Feel Harder
Let’s be honest about what’s actually dying:
Crappy execution is working less than ever. Crappy outbound that we’re blocking. Crappy PR where AI tools have made it easy for anyone to send mediocre embargo emails. Low-energy campaigns with recycled speakers and boring content. The 11,000th generic ROI calculator. Random names loaded into Salesloft with the same generic cadences.
AI hasn’t killed these tactics—it’s just exposed how bad they always were by making mediocre easy to produce at scale. Now mediocre doesn’t cut through.
The painful truth: if you’re running the same playbook from 2-3 years ago with less energy, nothing will work. Because that low-energy execution was always barely good enough, and now it’s not.
How AI Companies Actually Do Go-To-Market Differently
The hottest AI companies aren’t running fundamentally different playbooks, but there are real differences:
Sales teams are smaller, but they exist. Perplexity’s Chief Business Officer has five people on the sales team. Vercel has one human SDR and ten AI agents. OpenAI and Anthropic have sales teams—just leaner ones.
PLG is on steroids. Companies like Replit went from $1M to $150M ARR, and Hixenbaugh went from $0 to $50M ARR in five months because they’re riding unprecedented PLG demand. They’re doing all the traditional things—creating virality, building brand awareness, producing case studies—but the underlying product-led growth engine is more powerful than we’ve ever seen.
The same people are running it. Look up who’s leading sales and marketing at the top AI companies. You’ll see executives from Brex, Rippling, Ramp, DataDog. They’re not AI natives who’ve been doing this since grammar school—they’re experienced B2B operators running upgraded versions of what worked before.
What You Need to Do Right Now
Here’s my tough love challenge:
Stop complaining and audit everything. Just like we’ve said for a decade: read your sales team’s emails. They’re probably terrible. Even with AI, they’re probably terrible. Slow down and audit everything you’re doing.
Make it awesome, not just acceptable. Ask yourself: would you take that meeting? Would you go to that webinar? Would that outbound email make you respond? Get your best customer on your webinar. Make your collateral dynamic and personalized for every prospect. Add genuine value in every interaction.
Tap into AI budget or accept you’re dying. Every investor and YC will tell you the same thing: half of pre-AI B2B companies are accelerating now, and half aren’t. The difference is whether they’re fundamentally adding insane value that taps into AI budgets.
Look at Filevine—a 10-year-old case management company for law firms that always had product-market fit but was just an ordinary vertical SaaS company. They went deep on how to transform case management with AI, and now they’re worth $3 billion and accelerating. If you do it, the budget’s there.
Accept that AI requires more work, not less. Founders vastly underestimate the management time great VPs of Sales spend coaching their teams. You don’t have that time, but AI doesn’t give you time back—it requires different but intensive oversight. We spend more time monitoring our AI SDRs because everything is visible and measurable.
Understand what AI agents need. Don’t upload your “good” emails to train AI SDRs. Train them on adding value to specific personas and let them scrape real-time signals about prospects. They’ll run multivariate tests and iterate in ways humans never could. But you have to invest the time to train them properly.
The Bottom Line
If you talk to any investor today, they’ll tell you companies tapping into AI budgets are reaccelerating. Notion. Intercom (Finn crossed $50M standalone). Dialpad (added $300M accelerating). Filevine.
The budget exists. The channels work. The playbooks work.
If you’re not seeing it, it’s not the market. It’s you.
4 Things Founders Should Do Now:
1. Audit Your Entire Go-To-Market Stack This Week Read your team’s outbound emails. Look at your sales collateral. Review your webinar attendance. Check your event strategy. Be brutally honest: is any of it actually awesome, or is it low-energy execution you’re hoping will somehow work? Make a list of everything that’s mediocre and either kill it or commit to making it genuinely great.
2. Figure Out How You Tap Into AI Budget—Or Prepare to Die If you’re not accelerating in late 2024, you’re not delivering transformative AI value. Hit pause and ask: what can we do with AI that customers literally could not do before? What delivers instant, massive ROI? What taps into the insane AI demand everyone else is capturing? You may need to fundamentally reimagine your product, like Filevine did. You probably have less time than you think.
3. Start Replacing Roles People Don’t Want to Do Anymore Stop trying to hire humans for work nobody wants to do long-term. Use AI agents for SDR work, content review, qualification, scheduling—anything with high turnover or low enthusiasm. You’ll spend time training agents instead of constantly replacing people who quit after six months. This isn’t about cost savings; it’s about reliability and execution quality.
4. Double Down on What’s Working, But Make It 3x Better Don’t abandon SEO, outbound, webinars, or events because you heard they’re “dead.” They’re not dead—your execution is mediocre. If you’re doing webinars, get your hottest customer to co-present. If you’re doing outbound, personalize with AI at scale and add genuine value. If you’re doing events, make them experiences people actually want to attend. The channels work—you just have to be excellent.
