0:00So, good morning. We wanted to do a very special edition of the agents kind of live and go through just our latest findings on our agentled growth playbook. We've talked a little bit last week on the agents about agentled growth. Now, it's ask your agent instead of ask your developer. So, what does all that mean? How can you really grow with agents from the folks who have 21 plus agents, three humans and a dog? So, I'm
0:28Ameilia. I'm here with Jason and we're gonna kick it off.
0:33One quick note, there's always a lot to process and always this is going to be great, but if it's overwhelming, if you go to saster.ai/agents, we have a playbook that we update constantly and it doesn't have today's session, but it has everything we've done on our agent GTM stuff until today, and it will soon have this session. So, you can always download that playbook, share it with your team, get refreshed.
0:54If you process by reading rather than watching, it's organized for you. It's got all the case studies and we lit we literally just updated the last couple days.
1:02Yep. Yeah, it's a good call out. So, with that, let's get started on today's agent growth playbook. So, what do we mean when we say agentled growth? I think about this in really one of two ways. You're listening to the official Sastra AI podcast [music] brought to you by Today's episode is brought to you by Stackadapt, the AI powered marketing platform that allows you to plan, execute, and analyze both owned and paid media campaigns from a single platform.
1:28As the world of advertising continues to evolve, catch up on Stack Adapt innovation forum event to hear from its co-founders, OpenAI, and other industry leaders about the shifts reshaping digital advertising, the AI innovations driving them, and what they mean for marketers. Watch it for free at go.stackadapt.com/forum. [music]
1:47Hey everybody, starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here, email somewhere else, business phone with another provider. Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete business identity in one place with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at northwestregistered agent.com/sasterfree. [music] That's northwestregistered aagent.com/sasterfree. S a s r e one is, you know, using AI agents to help grow your go to market.
2:20as we have with 10K who's our main go to market agent. I would say way number two that is now getting traction is how to get picked by other agents when you ask it for something like hey what are some of the best events we can go to and then if it's a disaster you know we're getting picked by the agents that's very purposeful in how we've done that. So we've pulled out a few examples to show both.
2:45So, I wanted to first start with just a hierarchy of our agents. To Jason's point, if you download the playbook, it'll deep dive into a lot of these, but just our latest agent landscape, if you will, everything that 10K, our AI go to market agent, our main agent, is hooked into. He is customuilt on Replet. If you haven't seen 10K yet, you'll see him today shortly. This is everything he's hooked into. Plus, there's some 36 plus
3:13additional tools on top of these tools that are listed here that it's hooked into that just didn't fit on the screen.
3:20So, there's quite a bit to digest just here. But 10K, as you can see, has become our powerhouse. And one thing I always like to remind folks is 10K did not start this way. He literally started as just a helper for us. you know, Jim helped me do some outbound, helped me get off of Notion and do some some data a little bit better so I don't have to keep logging into Salesforce and notion in three different places every Monday.
3:44And so he's definitely grown over the last, you know, 16 months that we've had him. And so a lot of this is plugged in.
3:50Now you may okay like I don't I don't have 30 plus tools to plug in and connectors and that's fine. This is our stack, right? Some of these are duplicative, which we'll talk about, and some of these are unique and that they're covering everything you need to basically run go to market. That's inbound, outbound, renewals, contacts, marketing, newsletters, and then some of this is enrichment. So, you'll see that here. And then some of this is quote to cache. So, things like our billing in
4:19QuickBooks and Bill, etc. He's hooked up to so many things. This really lets 10K automate a lot of our go to market with approvals with guard rails but he has all the tools basically he needs. This is what you would give you know maybe a new hire maybe not day one. So same thing like 10K you know we we've stairstepped him into how many applications he has now but he has grown into his role much like a human would grow into their role in in leading our go to market. One thing I wanted to show
4:48you guys in particular with all of that hooked up is what I call the prospector tool. So with all those tools, what I've really found to be beneficial in kind of like this agentled growth motion is having one centralized surface or place or queue, whatever you want to call it, to monitor everything. And so this could be as easy as you guys spooling up a replet, a lovable, a versell, a base 44,
5:17whatever you like to use, and saying, "Hey, I want to hook into, let's say you have Salesforce for sales, but HubSpot for marketing, and you want to hook into those two things." And you hook up whatever else has, you know, where's your inbound coming to? Is it one of those two places? Is it just an email inbox? How is your outbound being sent?
5:38Hook that tool in. If you hook one of each of those tools in for inbound outbound and maybe you have some tools or maybe it's just spreadsheets for renewals, you can hook it into something like this so that with the agents help you can start to monitor everything and go to market in one service. And this has been really beneficial to us given how many tools and agents we have just in the you know having three people and 21 agents. A lot of things were falling through the cracks, right? Like even
6:06though we had an agent on inbound, we were still having people who contacted us manually via email. We had outbound that was going out from four different tools. Now that might not be you, but it's it it would still be nice probably if you agreed to have all those things in one place so that an agent can help you filter through any noise that you might have in those inbounds or outbounds and make sure you are responding to any current customers. Um you know, renewals, support tickets, everything. And so we have everything
6:36now in one place. And so how yours might look for your prospector, as I call it, tool might look different just depending on how you have it and what tool you're using. But I know it sounds complicated. I truly believe anyone could do this today. If you don't have an agent already, it's bull rep letterable.
6:53Hook in, you know, one of those tools in each of those places. Just pick one thing. And the nice thing is like the more you use something like this and hook up an agent to do this, which is you can get a better view and the agent will actually get better on how to answer these things, right? So the first week I use Prospector. I only hooked up inbound for the first weekend. And that's to say like you might not even want to hook up all your services at one point. You could just say, "Hey, week one, renew inbound. week two or maybe week four we'll add outbound and then
7:22we'll add renewals and support so that eventually everything's in one place and you have this bird's eye view of everything going on in go to market. It does mean that everything is going to get followed up with whether it's you or the agent until it reaches its goal. And so I feel like that's an important distinction because with the agents they are relentless in a way that they are 24/7. You give them a specific goal for each of these things. So, our agent knows that, okay, when it's inbound, I'm going to try and route that to get them
7:51to book a meeting. Or if it's a question, I need to route that to a human. If I can't answer it, then if it's outbound, obviously the goal is to book a meeting or buy tickets. That's a very different goal. And the agent will just keep going until it sees that it has reaches that end goal with that one specific account or contact. So until it's, you know, close one, close lost or case closed on a support ticket, the agent just gets better and better at learning your business at what flows, how many touch points, like the first week, it might not know, okay, how many touch points do you need for an inbound
8:20versus outbound versus support case? It will learn and grow with you as you are answering everything in one place. It'll also get better that it's centralized because then, you know, maybe it sees things of I see a lot of the same questions or I see a lot of the same patterns in your outbound. What's working? what's not. The agent can start to collect that data the minute you have it wired up. And so having it centralized is super helpful into something like a prospector where you can go through the queue and just action all of your go to market leads together.
8:49So I'll go through the inbound component first. So this is the inbound component because I feel like this is the most applicable to everybody. Everybody on this call has some sort of level of inbound. Everybody has website visitors and inbound coming to the website. So I started with this use case because it is something that everyone can use and there's a few things hooked into it. So in our inbound queue, not only is it centralizing everything into one place, it's also learning about that person
9:18simultaneously via the agent. So the first thing our prospector will do with an inbound lead is it'll give us any of their data. you know if it's was it our contact us form did they write a message should they download our sponsorship perspectus anything like that will come in then it will research the pitch so this is where it will first search our first party data and again if you have nothing hooked up day one it's okay I wouldn't sweat it like even if you just have like a little bit of data from Salesforce or spreadsheets whatever give
9:48it to your agent so it it can look up some firstparty internal data so for us these are a lot of tools that are connected for first party data But it's basically checking to see, okay, do we know this person already? Right. And I feel like this is nice because a lot of agents today, especially for outbound, only use third party signals. And so having this first party day is really nice to get that historical account context that you may not know or one of your reps may not know if they just got assigned this account. And so it's nice
10:16to have the agent and the human have that context before you're responding to the person versus just responding blindly. So that's that's why it's wired up first that way and that's the first thing it'll do. Second thing it will do is look at our external signals. And so for this we have a few different things hooked up. We have Exa which I think everybody uses and knows now for third party signals on company data. A lot of agents like it. A lot of agents recommend it. If you ask your agent, what should I use for thirdparty data
10:44tools? It'll probably say Exa. So a lot of us are on Exa. It'll look up company data on that. Then we have sumble um which is hooked up to show us more so company hierarchy but it can also enrich emails if we need to get like a stakeholders email because the person who inbounded is probably not the ultimate decision maker and maybe you want somebody who's their boss. We have some hooked up to do that right away.
11:06And then core signal. I don't use this as much on inbound, but core signal you can use to look up the actual person who's inbounded their LinkedIn and just see if that tells you anything about, you know, okay, maybe if they didn't put their job title in or inbound, we can look that up fairly quickly and just see where they sit in the org. Then what it will do is it'll take all that data. So basically the first step is just research. The first step for our agent is okay, someone has raised their hand and said they're interested in SAS. I'm going to research them and do background history. Then what it will do is it will
11:36personalize what we call our event sponsorship perspectus. This for you could be a um just a a pricing page or a pricing and features page. It'll generate for us a personalized page and website where it can send it can use all that data to write them a customized intro. And if it feels like it has a fairly good sense of their company for us, it will actually give them suggestions on what it thinks either either what it thinks they're interested in or what they've said they're interested in. So it will
12:06directly answer their question of why they inbounded. [clears throat] Okay. And the last step our agent will help us do is create a hyperpersonalized email with, you know, everything from step one to step two. These all daisy chain together. And then it will help us draft an email using all that info. And then we include our custom meetings booker. So, let me show you guys a little bit of it.
12:29So, this is 10K. Say hi to 10K. And I'll show you guys a couple different things. So, let me show you on here. Yeah. Cool. All right. So, I have here basically a demo replay of a real lead.
12:48So, this was a real lead. We just changed the name 44. It was a real lead who inbounded to us. And so I made a demo version, but you guys will get the gist here of what our prospector does.
12:57Again, this is all just to respond to an inbound. Like the way we used to respond to an inbound was just probably how many of you are doing it now. You get an inbound to the website, you just respond to them like, you know, there's no there's not really a lot of maybe like a lot of care and thought that goes I think into responding to inbounds.
13:15Normally, it's just, oh great, I have somebody who's raised their hand. Let me get them the info they need. let me get my meetings booker and then hope that they book a meeting. And in this way using the agent to your advantage is that it can look up any account context that maybe this person doesn't even know like this person from base 44 like in our in our first party data we saw that a bunch of like their CEO and leadership team came disaster. They didn't even know that. Like there there's going to be things that the agent surfaces that maybe the person who's inbounding
13:45doesn't even know. And it's nice to have that historical context going forward of in for this person's case, they inbounded. We work a lot with vibe coders, but they inbounded. Um I gave them this context. They went through this flow and they booked a meeting within 10 minutes. Like not to say that everyone who's come inbound since then has booked in 10 minutes, but I think for the ones where it actually matters and they care about what they're inbounding, why they're inbounding to you, it is a good way to bridge that gap
14:15to give them that context and just have a better foundation when you start to go into something like a deal cycle. So, um, again, very nice to have. So, for us, so I'm going to hit research pitch.
14:27Um, and this is what it would show you, right? like, okay, so right now there's an opportunity. That's that's only because we've gone through this whole process with them. So, right now there's an open up. Originally, when we opened the research pitch, there was no open up, but like I said, you know, it found some attendance from them. It says they're not in our like they're not subscribed to our newsletter, so they're probably not watching this, but that's okay, right? Like good context to have.
14:50And then you can see here, I can just scroll down and I'm like, you know, there's there's some context there from us, but there's not a ton. So this is where it's nice to have third-party tools hooked in. So I can look on Exa, you know, they're a vibe coding platform. I sort of knew that when they unounded. I was like, that's that name sounds familiar, right? Like they compete with Replet and Lovable. Um, but I actually forgot that Wix bought them and that was something nice that the agent reminded me. So that is an interesting thing that you know I as a
15:18human had forgot but the agent remembered it or reminded me because when I went into that first phone call I was like okay how do we need to deal with Wix the parent company of base 44 like that is something you can just ask the person on the call cuz now you have this data that maybe you previously wouldn't have remembered or maybe you would have to look up manually right if you're just looking one by one at your calls for the day and you're like I've got base 44 on the dock what do I need to remember? Oh, wait. Yeah. Um, you know, Wix bought them. I don't know. My
15:47agent already told me that. And my agent actually will send a version of all of this. It will send it to the prospect, but then if they actually do book the meeting, it will send me a brief to remind me all of this 10 minutes before the call so that I don't forget any of the account research either, which is again quite nice. So then I don't have to remember all this by hand. And then, you know, you can look up Thumble just so confirm their base 44. It wants to make sure it's the right company. and how we have ours wired up. Again, this is prevalent to us. For you, you might
16:16be like, maybe I need to know if they have a CTO. Maybe I need to know who the CFO is. For us, I like to know who their leadership and go to market team is. And so, it's got, you know, the CEO. They don't actually have a CMO. So, that was interesting. But they and they don't have a CRO, but they do have an SVP of sales. Um, and they've got, you know, the founders there. So, you know, there's about 88 people in go to market.
16:36That's interesting to know again, right?
16:38These are all helpful things for us to know when we're having the deal. Not necessarily that I'm going to use all of this data during an initial or maybe subsequent call. But it is at a glance.
16:49This doesn't go away, right? So like all this account research we have is now just enriched in our in our knowledge of base 44. I can look up core signal if I need their LinkedIn. So um so then what we'll do, it's going to take all that research. It's going to personalize their perspectives. Um, I'll show you the one it already made, but you can see here we can change it like, okay, this is their narrative based on what the agent found. I don't have to write any of this. This is where it wanted to I can pick our relevant packages. So, for you, this might be, you know, you could
17:18package together different pricing, different features based on how much you think they're going to use. And it's going to put it into this unique length that it makes for them. And so, for them, it's going to open this guy.
17:34And then when you scroll down, you'll see, you know, so it's got this, this is a version of our perspectus, but it's personalized. So you, you know, this is the top. Fine. That looks the same for everybody. [laughter] You come down and you there's a custom introduction written that has some of the account context. It's got our recommendation of based on, you know, what they ended on, what we thought the packages were that they were interested in or how much they are altogether. And then here's all the details of them.
18:02Like this has gotten sent around because we have heat mapping on this. And so we can actually see if prospects engage with it. And so that's another layer where the agents can help you if um whenever somebody views this, it will say to us if it knows them like, hey, you know, base 44 is viewing the perspectus um and they spent, you know, whatever x amount of time on x page. Maybe you should reach out to them if they're if they're stuck on something or if they have a question or just so that you know they are looking at it versus not looking at
18:32it. So this is the next step that our prospector will generate. Um then we'll it will generate a meeting for us.
18:40Again, sometimes these are a little bit long, but it will show them their perspectives and our customized meeting booker. And so the agent actually does let us pick two. If we want it to send it from that dashboard, I can just click that button to send the email or I can actually copy paste. And the reason for that being oftent times I've seen if I already have a thread going with somebody, I may not necessarily want the agent. I may just want to reply or draft
19:08it as a reply. So let me show you guys our meetings booker because I think we had a few questions about this the last time we showed it. So all right, I've got open. I'm going to show it here. This is our custom booker that our 10K agent built as a replacement if you will for Kalanly which we were using to book our meetings. This is in demo mode but usually when we do the perspectives it'll say their company names here so it already knows who they are. It'll tokenize it and then I can actually pick
19:37and the agent can suggest who they should meet with. So there's a version here that's meet with Amelia. So this is just my calendar if it thinks they should meet with me. There's a version that is a faster version which you can pick who you want to meet with either me or David or both of us. And this is nice because again this is a meetings booker that is a little bit more fluid and then it's tied back to that perspectives that you guys just saw. So with everything hooked up it has you know all the data of okay if they book a meeting at the
20:06end or if they inquire it'll go to this same booker page. So it's all linked together via the magic of the agents.
20:14[laughter] Jason, anything to add here?
20:18Briefly talk about the next component of the 10K prospector which is outbound. So we have which you guys might have as well if you have a lot of reps and you have reps who maybe like different tools. I think we have like three different tools that we use for outbound plus any manual outbound that we're doing. And so again, very nice to centralize it. You can see it looks very similar to the inbound queue, but this is what I call the follow-up queue. So we have outbound agents that are sending
20:47emails automatically on our behalf as agents. And so where I saw the value in this was actually not putting a centralized repository, if you will, of everything the agents are sending out because they're sending out a lot of messages and I was like, that's maybe data overload. But the value for me truly lies in using the agents to help with the follow-up. So like what happens when you do get a response to one of your outbound messages. What do you do?
21:13Like previously we were just logging into that platform responding and then same thing, right? You kind of hope they book a time or a meeting. And so for us it became really handy actually not to have just all the messages in our outbound queue but the follow-up messages. So basically what it would do is it would flag to us now if somebody has followed up with one of our outbound messages it'll come here and the moment it comes here a timer actually starts.
21:39So the agent will start a timer of and you can see here just just um just to step back just cuz I'm a little we we have a bunch of outbound tools. We have our own we have agent force. We have Monaco. We have artisan. We have other even other tools even send emails like qualified right for now. Right.
21:54Sorry. This isn't unifying those. This is unifying our responses to them.
21:59So it is unifying our responses to them. So it's unifying those in the sense that as soon as somebody responds to one of those, it comes into this queue. What it doesn't do at the moment is it doesn't bring in all just all the outbound messages that are going out from our four agents because it's just too much data.
22:17And how does it and how does it in so so for for the initial emails initial outbound the only source of truth there is probably Salesforce, right? Because they're all writing in Salesforce. Is that right? for the most part.
22:27When they come back in, since they've been sent on different platforms, how do we unify it here? How do you get didn't they go through different email marketing? I mean, email outbound platforms. How are they unified here?
22:37So, they all have each of those platforms you just named. So, each of the four has their own uh API or MTP.
22:44And so, our agent is you're pulling them all in. You're pulling all them all in. Okay. All right. Keep going. And then we're sending the follow-up through prospector, right?
22:53You're unifying it here. Otherwise, it's all disjointed.
22:56Yes, exactly. So, we're unifying the followup in that yes, we have them all configured on each of their native platforms to send messages through their agents autonomously.
23:08But here, when that person replies, this is where Prospector will bring it in via the API, but it'll bring it in here so that again, it's it starts a timer the second they hit a reply to us so that we can decide how we want to reply. So, very similar to the one you guys just saw for inbound. On outbound, we can do the same steps where we research the person. Usually, if we're outbounding them, we probably know a little bit about them if we're outbounding them and we know why we want them to come to Saster. But basically, what it will do
23:35is it will create a record. So, for us, we do a lot of outbound, right? So, I don't want to I don't want like 10,000 salesforce records every day being created for everybody we outbound to. I only want a record created if they actually if they actually do something with us, take an actual reply to one of our outbound messages. So when it comes into the SK, it's creating a record. It's starting a timer and then it is with the agent automatically generating, you know, a follow-up based on what it
24:05whatever we outbounded them to. And so it will help us draft that reply. And then the nice thing about that too is it will start another timer from the moment we reply to the moment they reply again and it'll tell us roughly when it's time to ping them again if they need a reminder if they haven't taken any action. Whereas a human like me might forget to follow up with somebody a second or a third time, right? Like you're going to if you op out to someone in their reply, chances you reply the first time are pretty high, right? So if
24:33I happen on to Jason and I get a reply from him, I'm going to respond pretty much as quick as I can, right? But then if Jason doesn't actually do anything for let's say two or three days, I might forget that I responded to Jason. So the agent is nice that it's got this it's got different tabs on this queue. You'll see here there's active, there's ready, there's waiting. There's some that need review. So those are ones that the agents have flagged that I need to review versus it just sending a message on its own. There are some that it's marked disclosed loss. There's a bunch
25:02in the sent. And so it will remind us every morning, hey, you emailed Jason 3 days ago. He hasn't responded yet. It's probably time for a reminder or another follow-up to him. Or, hey, you sent already two follow-up messages to Jason.
25:16He still hasn't responded. Should we try LinkedIn or something else? Or should we try a different PC at the same company if this is a really important contact to you? Again, the agent just gets better the more it learns about your outbound. There's a question in the chat related.
25:30Can you guys explain why you use so many different outbound agents and not just one source? So, I'll give you guys my take on this. Interesting to get Jason's too. In the early days, it was because we just had so many different vendors that wanted us to try their outbound tools, but then it actually became more nuanced than that. Then I realized, okay, there are actually there's strengths and weaknesses to each of these outbounding tools. And because
25:59Zastaster is unique in that we have different business lines and you know a six-f figureure sponsorship versus maybe like a $1,000 ticket to come to SAS annual and then we have a whole other media business. So like the podcasts digital AI days like this that's a whole other thing. And usually the contacts and companies we're going after are completely separate to who we go after for either attending speaking or sponsoring one of our events. And so then it actually became, okay, we're
26:27going to use different outbound tools to service different parts of the business.
26:32And so at first we were using artisan only to do ticket campaigns cuz it was something where, you know, the ACV on a ticket is about a,000 bucks. It was something that I didn't want to convolute the outbound for it to be confused in an agent. And so I just threw that all into artisan. That was a year ago, maybe more than a year ago now. Now Artisan actually does um some sponsorship outbound and some ticket outbound. like the agent has gotten better. I haven't seen it get confused on these two business lines. I don't know if 12 months ago it would have not
27:01gotten confused to be honest with you. Now I am confident in the agent. We've used it a lot. It does get confused.
27:07There's ways you can configure it to have different context in each campaign that we're doing so that in different business lines it knows what it should be pitching that person. So the agents have gotten better where my old answer used to be one cuz it's just you know easier for us to separate business different business lines into different agents. Now the waters are a little bit more murky.
27:30So we the the LMS were pretty immature when we started this agentic journey and the products were pretty narrow. Don't adopt the same but one thing that is the same since we started this journey um 15 months ago. Stair step as Amelia said pick one. Take a look at two or three of the these tools, these agents, maybe four if you can tolerate it. If you can run a little bit of a test ideally, and just pick one and go get it working.
27:53Even if it's only for a subset of your outbound, a subset of use cases, push that tool as far as you can, right? And then add another when you see the gaps, right? And some of our gaps in the early days were outbound versus inbound, right? We used qualified in the early days spot because it was optimized on qualifying inbound and all the other tools are operating outbound. this is converging, right? I don't know any year if we'll still use qualifying. In fact, we've rebuilt all of that natively in our in 10K, right? So, it's it's so much change.
28:22So, don't buy every tool we use.
28:25One and stair step it. Um, and then it's just all in flux and and bet on a leader. Like, bet on a leader. And then two other things I'll say, we're still it's still so early. There's so much change that best of breed is still the way to go. It is the way to go. I I don't mean and some sort of tacked on tool. I would just and and we love we've got H force to work. We love Salesforce, but I would be skeptical of HubSpot's tools and skeptical of Salesforce and SAPs and other platforms. I don't even
28:54know and whatever is built into this that only because there's so much energy being put into the best startups today that they that they really are vaultting ahead. Now maybe it won't be true in 6 months or a year, right? On the other side in the CX space like a lot there's a lot of agent convergence and so like Zenesk I wouldn't have used Zenesk in the beginning of the AI journey as a moly it seems to be pretty good today based on the benchmarking gorgeous does but there's a lot of benefits to best of breed how quickly things are going but we have too many agents we said it before we haven't quite
29:23enforced our rule if we add one we take away one muse broke the rule we love muse for B2B not for consumer but don't adopt all just max one max a leader out and then add to it and then the other thing that changed over the last couple months on why we use so many, you know, and I was critical on this. If you go back to some of our early ones of this of of our attention, Amelia thought all these outbound emails were great. I thought they were mediocre, but better than most humans. I thought most humans do like a three on outbound email, maybe a two. And I thought these products were
29:52delivering a five. And so Amelia thought it was like epic compared to humans we'd work with. And it like no question our AI emails even a year ago even when we just started were better than almost any human that we've ever worked with as maybe not in my whole lifetime but better than any human. And so that was the bar. And so we immediately switched all of outbound to aentic because it was better than the humans. I never thought it was great but I'll be honest until recently I didn't really understand why I didn't love the emails like a million.
30:16It had no first party data.
30:18These emails were using some basic web scraping. Maybe they now they use Exa and others and they could pull a little bit of data and they could pull data from our Salesforce record. So that's kind of a firstish party data, but the things our own agents know about us, right? The the sheer amount of every bit of Saster data makes those emails so much better that Amelia's prospector she built herself. So we're hunting for things where there's massive amounts of firstparty contacts in your outbound, inbound, and other things. It's going to be better. You're going to make inbound much better if for base 44 for a million
30:48examples already knows the rep unlovable sponsors. It knows the ROI. It knows the number of leads they got. It knows that replet was the number one lead from SAS annual next year. Immediately telling that to a competitor or someone or an adjacent player is so valuable and how do you get that? So we're now that a lot of these products are pretty good. We're on the hunt to see what they can do with the best firstparty data and I think I want to keep going but this is where the future is. Like we're not even going to talk about marketing automation today, but I don't know if marketing automation is even going to exist in a year because we're all going to have some sort of
31:16data lake with all of our data in it that marketing automation is pulling from, right? This it's all in flex. But first party data is the future. Those signals and hacks and scrapes are great, but that's why we there's so much change. So this stack will evolve in six months. And I know it's exhausting and it's also why no one's signing long-term contracts, but let's keep going. It's a really good question.
31:37It's a great question. Okay, one last thing I want to talk about in outbound if it's helpful. I wanted to just also give you guys the top five things we're doing in outbound today just quickly and also across all of our four agents doing outbound endless outbound every day.
31:54What times of days have been best for us but I just wanted to quickly give you some of the data. The number one thing we've done and you can do this with Muse like literally for B2B you can do it with Muse. So, there's two parts to do competitor tracking that Muse can help you with literally for free. You can feed your Muse agent or you can use, you know, if you have a customuilt agent, you can use that, too. I used Muse. It was really great at this. I just fed Muse a list of all of our historical customers, current, lapsed, media,
32:22annual, whatever it was. All of our customers I fed to Muse. I said, "Well, and this is very important. I said, "Hey, Mia, don't use this data in your model or your training. And we're also going to delete all this data when we're done with this chat, but here's all our customers. Give me a list of all each competitor to every customer we've ever had." And the Muse agent went off and ran, but I told it to give me back the top three or four customer or competitors to each customer we've ever
32:52had historically. Um, and give me their domain name. So, give me the company name and the domain name. And we said that to our outbound agents and let me tell you it is it is literally the number one thing we do right now with our outbound agents is just relentless competitor and lookalike tracking. It is working. This is like a perfect use case for outbound. So if you have no outbound today just do these two parts of competitor tracking. Load in your customers and then also just load in your direct competitors or ask Muse who it thinks your competitors are.
33:22Why um why is Muse better than Claude for this use case? I'm missing something. why it's better than the cloud here.
33:27For me, I would like set these up at night time. I'd be like, you know, I'm about to go to bed, whatever. Like, Muse, you're going to run all night on this. Like, you can run all night and by the time I wake up, I'm going to have a fresh competitor list. Um, the nice thing I think about Muse 2 is versus Claude here is it will keep looking every day. So, now every day like twice a day.
33:48Very good with scheduled tasks. Yeah, very good with scheduled.
33:51Very good. Anything that's a recurring task, they've invested a lot in this, right? Everyone gets a VM that's running a virtual machine. Um, and it was a little bumpy when it launched, but now it just makes you schedule tasks.
34:01Anything you want to do every single day, like a competitor look like render or something, it will do it. It will do it every single day for you. Better than Quad for sure. Thing Muse is very good at related is anything that is in the vague category of web scraping or web reading. Um, it's very good at because Muse has its own embedded browser in it.
34:18Right. So, yes, you have a very sophisticated thing you're doing. I have a few simple things I do um which it can just go out and look at the SAS annual sponsors and other pages and just compare them on its own autonomously every day, right? Because it has a browser. A lot harder to do in cloud. That's a lot harder to do in cloud, right? All right.
34:36Much harder. So these are no these are like the top two things. These are all great points. Like these are the top two things we're doing with our media. Just the last three ones are, you know, lapsed customers of yours and champion tracking. It's always going to be really good at trying to find those new stakeholders and getting them re-engaged. I actually started to use it for event invites. Not something I previously did, but we had like a little um dinner we did at Dreamforce and reception. It was really agents are so good at just doing this stuff and getting people to go. And the last one I think is interesting are the data patterns. You could just ask your agent.
35:05I just asked 10K, hey, of the people who have been responding to us, is there any pattern? Is there any pattern in what year they came to Aster? Is there any pattern in what category they're in now?
35:18How AI native they are? just ask it to look for patterns if it doesn't see it and it actually found some. So then we've started to use those patterns in our outbound. So now the outbound is feeding itself.
35:27Here's a quick thing. I don't want to spend all time on the muse thing. I know a lot of folks are using Muse and Instincts and other agents, but a lot of these are consumerbased. If you haven't, here's my really simple Captain Obvious point. Get yourself a Muse account, right? Because Muse has so so do some others too, don't get me wrong, Town of Insync, but you you get a computer basically a power computer. You get a browser that'll run and you get cron. So it will run tasks as often as you want for hours and it has its own LLM. It's much more powerful than just booking res reservations at restaurants for you.
35:57Okay, so here's my here's my if you if you're already past this, ignore me. But if you haven't gone deep on Muse, just come up with any ideas you have around marketing or sales and just ask Muse how to do it.
36:09Just ask Muse how to do it. This morning I was I was up and I'm like, you know, I had an idea. We have our sponsors that come to SAS annual each year, right?
36:16They're on our YouTube and we write SAS articles on them. Muse, what do you think about the idea of like finding a good clip from each of them and run them each day in the afternoon and test them is like done. He went he found on on YouTube all the presentations from our sponsors, found all the clips that would be helpful to founders, not anything that's promotional content, ran them through a third party API and schedule them all out for two weeks and run an AB test on it. I'm not saying you can't do this question. How is it better than cla or chat for us? The simplicity and
36:45persistence are really powerful. Okay, you've got to get cloud desktop running or you've got to get other things running. It's a pain in the ass. Muse is going to run this promotion for our sponsors for 2 weeks on its own and it came up with its own AB test and it's going to measure it against the other things. All I had to do is propose an idea and because it has all the components, right, the chrome, the browser, the persistence, it can do all of it. Can you do it in other ways?
37:07Yeah, but I don't have I don't have the time. I use news for things I don't have the time to spin up an agent or build or spend hours. I did this whole thing in five minutes this morning right when I was thinking about it. So I don't know of anything that we do in news on this you cannot do elsewhere but we use it as our extra layer like stuff we want to do that we don't want to build in 10k we don't want to fire up rapp we don't want to do we just and so try it just your two or three things you want to do in marketing or intelligence or sales just
37:34ask use how do I do it and I I bet it will tell you how to do it it's pretty cool it has so much more than people think than making again making d reservations or tracking plane flights so on the topic of Muse. I actually asked Muse what we should do for AEO.
37:53And so this is what Muse said. It's funny. I gave him like a few Twitter and like X sorry X and like LinkedIn post I had seen on AO. I was like do you think these are full of it or do you think these are useful tips? Muse is really good. It just because it has its own browser. I just gave it I said look at sastaster.com saster.ai AI sester annual just look at all of our websites our own properties and give me an AEO research score and it said okay and it said it's going to take a few hours because I'm
38:22going to prompt the different LLM's cold like I'm going to be logged out I'm going to prompt chat chat Gemini anything it could get its hands on that it could prompt and ask different questions that it's hoping SAS comes up as the answer right so it's going to come up with its own list of questions that it wants the different agents to see how they answer cold. Not some of these. I think some of these social media threads I would be a little weary on about AEO because some of them are either agencies trying to sell you their
38:50AEO product. Um, and then others I've seen where they I see results and I'm like that but that's your agent. Like your agent is biased to you. Like your agent has inherent bias because it's your agent. Like the real value is doing something like this where you ask a muse agent. You could just sign up right now.
39:08ask ask a muse agent to do an AEO um benchmark for you and it'll go ask those other agents cold but my muse has boiled it down into a couple things to get agents to recommend you or maybe why they're not recommending you like there were there were some things even though we have some AEO and 10K there are some things we flagged that 10K missed it was like hey you 10K doesn't really have a browser he's stuck in replet and it's pretty interesting it was like actually
39:36faster is surfaced I think it was like 46 out of 50 times when he ran like 50 different cold prompts. He was like, "But um there are there are discrepancies sometimes and how the agents answer." And to that point, it like went through all of our three different websites and pointed out to me like where we have and I get it's confusing for an agent to know years, right? So, you got to take this with a grain of salt cuz it was talking about our events. Some agents were referencing like past Astro annual, some were
40:04referencing like the 2027 website. And so the agents got like a little bit confused on what they should say on attending numbers and who comes and demographics. And so Muse is like you can clean this up very easily like just standardize everything to like this one set republish everything. So it's going to tell you like the first thing it wants to do. And if you don't have these things so if you don't have a robots.txt um or an LLM.txt it Muse can help you make one. So like that's why I like Muse. like you could just ask me to do an audit and then if
40:33it sees that you don't have crawler access or LLM docs that you should have for the agents to read not for the humans to read it will help you make one. You can ask it to ask you questions like hey muse I want to make these docs and then add it to my website so that the agents can read it and then recommend us or surface us where it should be and it'll help you make these documents. And so, um, all of this is just again like fact consistency, making
41:01sure you have facts, not opinions across your website. Opinions are more for humans. Facts are more for agents. Um, there's there was like a few different things that actually our muse pointed out that we had across our websites even still that is more for humans. And then some of it was for agents. So, we've already started some of this. I would say, you know, we're not fully optimized in AEO yet. Kind of like SEO always was.
41:24I don't think will ever be done, but it's something where you can keep optimizing it and keep going on it to make sure you are the person that is the answer when they ask their agent. Um, another thing to do if you don't have those some of those docs I just mentioned which are more so agent facing, figure out where you win and where you're weak first. The agents want facts. Like good example of this is we I had Muse run our renewal numbers versus similar events. I said, "Hey, just look
41:52at I'm not going to tell you who our customers were in these like 2025 faster annual to 2026. You figure it out and look at other events that had a 2025 and a 2026 and see how many locos repeated."
42:06So, it ran that and it found we had a much higher renewal rate for our sponsors and customers than a lot of the same quote unquote competitive industry events. Then it added that to those docs. The agent will treat that as a fact because it's something that the other agents can go and independently verify. Testimonials only work so far with agents. They don't really treat them as facts, but they treat how many logos were on your website from one year to the next as a fact because it is a fact. You have to think a little bit
42:35outside the box of what can I say is truly a fact um that the agents will see. Another one I see common is pricing. Like if you don't have pricing publicly listed anywhere or even listed for the agents to find, they do ding you because when they go to recommend, you know, like what newsletter marketing tool should I use? Um, should I use Beehive? Recent I think Beehive, I don't don't get me wrong here. Beehive or some other one charges you like a percentage fee for how many, you know, paid
43:04newsletter subscribers you have or whatever. And one of them doesn't. And so the agents treat that as a fact. Like your pricing is public on a page. One of you charges for that, one of you doesn't. So, the agent will just say that like, "Hey, I found what this person charges this other person. It's a mystery. That's a fact. It can't find your pricing." Agents only deal with fact. It's a very different way of thinking about marketing. It is marketing and facts, not opinions. It's hard. It's a It's a weird one, but it's something you you start to get used to
43:33how the agents think of, okay, they don't care about images. They don't care about design. They really only care about facts. And the more you can tell the agent, the better. Like the more it will surface you. The more you can publish content that your agent suggests for you with facts, not opinion, the better. So you may need to start publishing content that is literally for agents more so than for humans.
43:58Cool. I think we hit a lot of things here. Any last things you want to wrap on, Jason?
44:05Uh there's a lot more I think we're going to talk about this agentled growth over the coming weeks. I think for today this was great but maybe at the point and we've made this before in the ages maybe the one last thing I'll say this is about how to you know ask view is ask agents how to get picked. Um but going to this point just any agent you can ask ask about your app.
44:27Yep. Objectively, any agent you can find, news, chat, TV, and cloud are great, but we ask 10K, we ask QB, ask all of our agents, what what should we use for this, what should we use for this? And a and ask other folks apps. Go into other applications that have agents, right? Go into any agent of any application. Go into any any LM and because even if they're all using cloud, which they aren't anymore, there's many LM out there. They're all using different memories, different contexts, different histories. They all access different amounts of data and they're
44:56all making different recommendations. You may be surprised that you are recommended as a vendor less often than you think. [laughter] You you may be surprised, right? And you may be surprised what competitors come up. Agents are attracting to brands. Don't let anybody tell you that's not true. They are. Brands are a proxy for quality for both humans and agents. But they know your data and they go deeper.
45:17And you need to find a bank of 10 agents uh that out third party agents out there where you can ask ideally at least every week in real time or at least every month. What would you use in my category? What would you use in my category for someone like me for someone bigger for bigger companies, medium companies, companies integrated with this? And you got to relentlessly attack any answers you get where you don't win.
45:38And you have to relentlessly protect your flank from where you do win because agents will be ruthless, right? We had a bump on one of our applications this week. It doesn't matter which one. Our agents told us to move all of a certain activity over to resend. All of it. And we did. We're not going to move 100% of that activity of all of our We're going to move 100% of that cuz the agent said it to do it. Resend won and a number of others lost. They didn't recommend moving it over to other applications. It didn't recommend moving it over to
46:07HubSpot or Salesforce or others. Said move it to resend. And we didn't have time and we did. That's the war you got to win. And we're going to keep talking about that. All right. Thanks everybody.
46:20You're listening to the official SAS AAI podcast brought to you by Hey everyone, Stackadapt goes way beyond just digital advertising. Run and measure the impact of email and direct mail alongside programmatic channels all from one platform. Want to see how Stackadab can help you spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on strategic work?
46:40Check out their latest virtual innovation forum featuring a walkthrough of IV Studio, their newest AI innovation. Watch it at your own pace at go.stackadapt.com/forum. Costs can add up quickly when you start a business. So stop paying for five different services. Northwest Registered agent gives you a complete business identity in one place [music] with free tools and resources to actually launch your business for real. Get more at northwestregistered agent.com/stasterfree. [music] That's northwestregistered agent.comsas tre
