0:00Okay, everybody. Welcome back to your favorite podcast video cast, The Agents. No one on the interwebs talks more about their 21 agents constantly, what we're learning from, what they do, the headaches, the learnings than we do when we're back on the agents. We'll talk about everything we've learned over the last week or so with them. But I think one of the meta themes this year is when agents take over the system of record.
0:25Our agents have written about 40 gigabytes into Salesforce. Amelia talked more about it. 99% through the API.
0:31Neither of us have logged into Salesforce for a week. So, who is the system of record actually for at this point?
0:36Yeah, it's a good question. And also new this week, Service Titan just cut off podium over exactly this question. So, while Salesforce is spending billions buying the agents, the storage math says your record is the most expensive database you own. So, today, what moves out? What stays in? And what does it all cost?
0:54So, I'm Jason here with Amelia, three humans, 20 plus agents.
0:59Let's dig in. So, first, usually we don't talk a lot about the news, although maybe we should more, but but there's a meta issue and I wanted to use Service Titan and Podium, some of which you guys have probably never heard of either of these leaders, and then talk about what we've learned for B2B founders and executives, which is this system of record concept and what we've learned. And a lot of folks think that one of the islands of stability is being the system of record
1:27in SAP and Oracle, a Salesforce or a vertical system of record. Service Titan is the system of record for much of the services trade for HVAC and much more. I think 1.5 billion AR. We've had the CRO, the co-founder speak at Saster Events and it kind of dominated a lot of the trades. And the interesting question is how to what is the mode for systems of record? What is a system of record? In fact, until [clears throat] recently at we basically had two and a half three
1:56systems of record. We had Salesforce, we had Marqetto, and we had notion. We left two. So, how safe are systems of record?
2:04So, I don't want to do too much of the news. I want to frame what I think happened with Service Titan, and then Amelia can kick it off and share what we've learned. But basically, again, Service Titan was one of the few B2B companies that have IPOed in the last couple years.
2:20wildly successful to help you on your phone and otherwise manage your your your trade business. And for years, a startup called Podium, which is doing a couple hundred million in revenue, got them leads. Podium is a mark is a was a marketing lead generation solution. Eric Ray, the CEO, spoke at Saster Paris years ago. He may come back on the show and talk about it. And for years, they were partners. I have one piece of SAS software that helps get you leads and then it would drive it to one and a half
2:49billion AR service titan that would then close them service them for years and I I don't know whether there's revenue sharing or whether podium just made its own money but that worked great that worked great for years until service titan shut them off the other day shut them off after all these years with a thousand joint customers and what happened you know the the co podium went on went on the offensive he was clear listen Our agent when podium went became a gentic about a year and a half ago and crossed a hundred million of agent
3:18revenue. The agents for the same customers for the same HVAC guys and other trades. The agent all of a sudden could do a lot more than get a lead. It could interact with the customers. It could schedule the meeting. It could track when the HVAC comes to fix your house and and it could even share that record and become the system of record.
3:36Agents are much more powerful. So instead of discreet, the agent took over more and more and more of the space of service titan and and service titan said hold on hold on and actually the the co podium tore into service titan but I think actually service titans at least public stance was fairly mature they they issued an update to their API and partner and they said you actually can compete with us. You can access our records but you can't steal our customers. You're listening to the
4:04official Sastra AI podcast brought to you by Hey 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 northwestregisteredagent.com/sasterfree
4:34s a s t r [music] f re e. Hey everyone, if you're listening to the agents, then you need to be at sastasterai annual.
4:41We'll be back next May [music] in 2027, the world's largest B2B and AI event May 11th and 12th in the San Francisco Bay area. Look, most conferences and content these days are about what's possible. As you know from the agents, we're all about what's happening now, the latest and greatest. And that's what we do even more so at SAS annual. See the actual work where we bring together 10,000 founders, revenue leaders, and VCs, plus 200 of the very best speakers showing you the playbooks of what's already
5:10running in production, behind the scenes, deep dive demos, and so much more. plus over 5,000 scheduled one-on-one meetings so you can actually meet the people doing all this, not just hear from them. If you're a founder, a revenue leader, or you're the one who has to make this all work with agents, this is where you want to be. You already know this from listening to [music] the agents. That's Saster AI annual 2027. Go to sasteranual.com and use our code the agents for a
5:39special discount on your tickets. See you there.
5:41You can't steal our customers.
5:44that that's too far. And so Podium has some smaller competitors that are still on the platform, but Podium got kicked off and with 30 days notice. 30 days is not a lot, right, for a broken integration. So we could be critical there. But it was interesting that Service Titan said, "We welcome the competition. We'll win on the field, but you can't you can't slurp all our data out of our service of record. Build your own service of record so that you don't need Service Titan anymore."
6:08So, I thought this was super interesting because I think it's going to happen more and more in other spaces in in in CX in support. If if I'm if I'm talking to an agent on someone's website as a potential customer and that agent keeps me forever, I might not need there may be no need for the CRM or CX system or SFA that undermined it, used to underly that interaction because the agent will own it.
6:33And so, I think it's interesting. I don't know if you have any general thoughts in the but we've we're learning this because we've been running headless Salesforce more than anybody and it's great but it also kind of weakens the strength of the system of record. [snorts] Yeah, it really does. I think to the point you made in the intro on writing, you know, 40 days into data. I hadn't really thought of it until somebody at SalesVoice pointed out how much data we had and that we were actually kind of like going oh we had some overages or
7:02something and I was like how can that be like we're not we're not logging in like I'm logging into 10K we're not really doing that much with it on a day-to-day basis.
7:14How can there be just so much chilling in there that it's flagged that it's a lot of data? Because I asked Claude, too, like, okay, do you think that's a lot of data or is that, you know, for for somebody who's just moved 10 years of stuff over from Marquetto and always had Salesforce, is that a reasonable amount? And Claude said it was it was a lot.
7:30We we when we went from Marquetto to Salesforce, that alone was 40 gigs of data. All of all of our customer records over a decade.
7:38Yeah. Yeah. So like maybe half of it was. So the interesting thing and then keep going the learnings that was on the Salesforce side where where data is expensive that was a flag that was a flag hey that's a lot of data for a for postgress like a superbase or neon that we run our replet apps on or data bricks it's a drop in the bucket 100% yeah drop in the bucket right so it's interesting that our agent as of yet has not said hey you should move
8:07some of that data over to something cheaper Postgress or a data bricks if you will. I think because for now it's running so many things through it that it feels like it's worth it to have it all stored in Salesforce but you know it tried to get rid of Zapier last week. So who knows how long it will decide that it wants to keep Salesforce as our system of record. I don't know.
8:30Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know if this is accurate but but Claude analyzed that. It says 21 million records and said if we moved it to Postgress it would be a thousandx cheaper.
8:40Oh, I'm sure a thousand. And this doesn't mean that like Salesforce is a bad guy. They have costs. I think they're running they have their own database cost that has been architected for a pre-agentic era. And they they do have a new data.com. They do have a new uh cloud that's doing it which we can chat about and it does work much better than Marquetto. Y but it sounds like a meta issue is if nothing else the data cost is so much higher on a system of record that how
9:10much of our data can we afford to store there? What if because our agents are generating so much data they could generate they're generating a hundred times more data a year than pre- aent.
9:19So if what would happen if our salesforce bill went up 100x you guys are going to have to figure they're going to have to figure it out, right? Well, it's it's interesting. It's it's going to be too expensive, right?
9:31It's interesting because, you know, we we we've architected our whole agent stack around Salesforce and we're we're proud of it and we love it. We did it in in fact because the second agent we launched was Artisan, right? An outbound agent and it ran natively on Salesforce or close to then qualified with Salesforce bot. So our third party agents all ran on it and so we used to get folks when we started on this journey about a year ago folks would haze me in particular on Twitter and they'd be like why don't why aren't you doing this in Postgress? Why aren't you just doing it in database? why are you
9:59doing it on such an expensive system of record? I'm like, well, we don't care up to a point, right? We have 10 years of data in Salesforce. It just works. These are hard points. They're not going to drift. There's not hallucinations in Salesforce data and these agents artisan qualified and others natively integrated with it. If it's a few nickels more, what do we care, right? As long as I don't even care if it's slower as long as it it's not debilitatingly slow like Marquetto.
10:24Marquetto like literally it would break within minutes every day because of API limits. Salesforce API has always been well architected, right?
10:33So I didn't usually I didn't personally think too much of this intellectual argument because I'm like sure you know our replet agents are built on on neon which is a version of postgress because that's what's built into replet. It's not like we thought about it, right? But it is interesting that the 40 gigs were flagged as a lot of data.
10:54It is interesting that it is a lot of data and it's like I said, it's mostly created and used by our agents. On one side, I'll show you in a little bit this renewal agent we built with that data.
11:04So, it is pretty cool and we are getting lift out of it, right?
11:07So, there are some cool things you can do by having this much data, but it does come at a cost.
11:13Yeah. So I think we'll watch it and then then we can move on to the next point. But it feels to me and and listen these agents like we love qualified with Salesforce bot and these other agents and they're going to keep creating more and more data natively in Salesforce, right? And up to a point that's good, Yep.
11:29But here's the meta attention and then tell me what you want to do next to show this. But you know one of the things in toxic SAS toxic pa SAS is a lot of folks are talking about how to charge even more to access their APIs.
11:42Yep. So many of the leading vendors are talking about it. Hey, we're you guys are buying less seats from us. We're going to ratchet up what it costs to get to get data out of our API. Well, I I get why the sales dude in the room wants to do that. But there's no way we're going to put more data in if you ratchet up the price for because the vendors are missing the point. We're generating so much more data. If the data was flat preai and you wanted to ratchet up the API price, we'd be pissed off, but we'd probably pay it, right? if it just went
12:12up a little bit, 20%, right? As much as a ripoff it is, but it could be 200%. 2,000%. If not only is our data going up orders than I do, but you're char you want to charge 10 times more to access my own data through your DPI.
12:26It's a reckoning that I think I I think it is a self-inflicted wound for a lot of systems of record and SAS vendors as they jack up the prices because seats are going down and agents are going up and they jack up the price for access.
12:38It's incent us finally to put more and more of our data outside of that system of record and then forget about the fact your data gets out of sync which is a huge issue right you know the biggest challenge for folks that are that were founded before 2024 or so is the whole org is built around these motions these per seat product not agent focused motions they're focused on gotcha overages right
13:07which is these these motions that what customers really want is they want a cost that's just tied to resolutions, that's just tied to outcomes. You don't want to be penny pinched on things that are not tied to outcomes. You're what? You want to charge me five times more for my data? That's like not what people want in the AI area.
13:25Yeah. I mean, and and then you know, and then and then you can demo whatever you want. Related to this, we do run Salesforce headless, right?
13:36We've talked about 10K adnauseium on this podcast, but it took me a hot minute to realize 10K really is headless Salesforce, right? I think when you built 10K, our AIVP of revenue, I'm not even sure it integrated with Salesforce at first and the No, it didn't. And then you added it and we just added it as an to grab some data, right? But then we quickly, you know, your agents are very powerful and they come up with good ideas and it quickly became headless Salesforce and made Salesforce 10 times more powerful, 20 times, you know, for me personally, I
14:05hadn't never logged into Salesforce in ever in a decade and now I was logging in every day running into May. So it made it powerful. But the thing about headless is it also makes it much easier to bifrocate our data and put some into outside of the system of record and some in because the agent the headless version of your CRM or SFA or system of record. Well, it has no problem up to a point pulling in from three different systems of record, right? Like we dumped Marquetto,
14:35but it's still pulling in data from two different CRM in part, Bisbo and Salesforce. Mhm.
14:41Most folks, unless you've listened to this or or or have done events, you'll never heard of Bisbo, but Bisbo remains a leader in event management software, right? The it it's not what it once was.
14:52All all the software here is not what you'd love like Cvent and Bisbo, but we've used it for years, right? And we're going to continue to use it. And before agents, we never really thought about it as a CRM per se, right?
15:03It was too difficult to access it, right?
15:05But it has. We've been doing we've been selling tickets and emailing folks disaster events through Bisbo since like 2018.
15:17So a couple things to that point right that I want to show and show people because I think the number one question we'll get is why do you guys have 40 gigs of data now in Salesforce when you used to have like five [laughter] [gasps] in the span of 30 days. So this is how we run 10K and Salesforce headless. So this is 10K that you guys are looking at. You're looking in particular at his dashboard tab, if you will, that I go into every day. And so this is my command center. It shows you what he's hooked up to headless within
15:46Salesforce, too, because there's multiple things running into this. So he's got class, I call it classic Salesforce for sales, right? So Salesforce CRM that our sales team has always used for like 10 years. He's got qualified, which Salesforce bots and now that's a native integration. Momentum, which shows our call recordings, which again Salesforce bot 2. So that's two agents that kind of ingested and then agent force which we were like an early adopter of and we still use and then marketing cloud next which is where we transitioned over from Marquetto and
16:15then this quote to cache thing which is a little bit of a custom app built on 10k replet salesforce and then using other APIs that we access headless so pandadoc bill.com quickbooks we have our own custom quote to cache initiative that pushes back into Salesforce between our full revenue cycle, if you will. Those are the six core things that we're doing headless in Salesforce. And
16:43it's everything from when does a deal close, you know, quote to cash, send the contract to the right person, all that stuff we've talked about previously, to, you know, sending an email, coming up with ideas that I'll show you guys here, planning our day of, okay, as our as our headless stack, what can it do? So, so this is kind of making the argument of okay it's worth the 40 gigs of data because we can do so much with this running headless right. So you can see everything that's been closed one our
17:11projected revenue accounts how much is in accounts receivable how many emails have we sent already even though it's only been like 6 weeks let's say on marketing cloud next what were the last 6 million that's a lot it's a lot what were the last well not all emails go to all people for us right like we have emails that are running through agent force we have emails that are running through qualified we have emails that are our newsletters that's going you know half a million people each basically every newsletter So it's a lot of it's a lot of emails
17:41like it is doing a lot in this 40 gigs.
17:44It'll show me you know what are the last three emails sent? What are our top ideas for the day? What are some accounts that need action? And so what this has kind of unlocked for us y with a lot of data but being agentic like okay first of all this looks very different than the Salesforce classic dashboard like that dashboard is I can't use it. I don't think I've ever used it in my life and [laughter] I think the only time I ever used to go in there was to see which opportunities
18:14are open, but this will do this for us now. Like if you click into these, you can see what are our open ops. When I talk to the agent 10k, I can create new ops again. I can do full cycle without having to log in and o to Salesforce.
18:26And so most of this is being done by our agent. And then when I have a call, you know, with somebody and momentum records it, it'll change the opportunity stage on its own if it needs to. Like it can do a lot of cool stuff. So it is doing some highowered stuff that used to be very manual. And then the latest thing we did kind of related is because we have all this data and the agents are now constantly kind of writing this data. We we created a a mini renewal agent. So let me scroll down. I'll show
18:55you guys this. So we've got this mini renewal agent now going where you know we had our AI day I think last month or something and previously it'd be a manual thing where we have a digital event or an inerson event you here are some of the ones from the inerson annual you know event ends you send your classic email follow-up it's manual maybe some of your AEES forget to email some of the lowerhanging fruit I tell this story because in building this
19:24renewal agent I realized a couple things that I think will be helpful for folks to hear and get your take on which is because the agent using Salesforce headless and then also this is plugged into gamma. that we use it to make some of these cool decks which I'll show you one for I'll show you one for Replet cuz we've already posted about some of this so I don't think it's too proprietary but you can see they were the number one sponsor it's a so just slow down for a second our you built this agent and let's come back to it
19:52and then it it pushed in it used gamma plus the data it has to build this highly customized sales deck you're going to see for renewal exactly and it's specialized and I want to I don't mean to interrupt you it's specialized for renewals It is specialized.
20:07All of our other agents, our agent force, our artisan, our Monaco, you decided not to use them for renewals.
20:14Even though we're using them for reactivation, net new follow-ups, but for the actual renewals, you're not using them because we want to create this custom collateral and have custom data so that it's hyperabmd and specific. Why did why did you why did you build it rather than use what we already have? It's not even buy because we already have these great vendors. So I decided to build this renewal sub agent because there's so much realizing now we had so much data in Salesforce but we
20:42also have proprietary data that wasn't in Salesforce. So part of what this renewal agent is doing is it's searching sasser.com. It's searching our social media which 10K is already hooked up into. It's searching our podcast. It's searching literally every mention of this sponsor who is a renewal sponsor to see what is the full picture.
21:03Oh, I see. You couldn't get that from a third party agent.
21:05You can't get that from a third party agent.
21:07You wanted to show how many times we mentioned on the podcast how many folks came to the booth. It just you can't as wonderful as our AI sales agents are, they're not built for that.
21:16Yeah, they're not built for that. Like this just needed maybe it took me a day to just build on top of what we the pieces were already there in 10K. So he's using headless Salesforce. He has, you know, all the for one, he's calling up the contracts. So he's going into Salesforce, seeing who the AE is, seeing what they signed for, what have they signed historically, right? Is he's getting like the LTV out of Salesfor like there's a lot in there. So like there is a lot in Salesforce, are they opening our emails, are they interacting with us via qualified? Like all that headless, have they had calls with us
21:46that momentum saw? Like all that great data that he has from Salesforce, that's like its number one source of truth.
21:52Okay. So he can so like two through five is then he's already hooked up to all of our social media accounts via their APIs. You know X has one LinkedIn we upload the impressions already for our podcast. He has already all of our podcasts. He has the sasser.com WordPress API. He basically has all of our surfaces put together. All of our emails that we're sending and marketing cloud qualified calls and momentum. He can bring in any third party data that we have. He can also, and this was nice
22:22for this renewal thing, he went through my Gmail to see what I've been saying to these accounts recently, which I don't I don't track every email in Salesforce. It's too much data. So, he can do that.
22:3310K went through your email.
22:35Yeah, 10K has a Replet has a Gmail connector. Ah, there's a lot there's Grockbot and Instinct and there's been a lot of questions about whether these bots can safely access email, but it's interesting that for our renewal rep, for renewal agent, you allowed it directly to access email to make sure we're getting all the all the best information for the renewal pitch.
22:56I did. And you know what? I waited. I was like, what's the worst that could happen if he gets into my emails? I'm like, well, there are some pretty good contacts in there, but I think it's worth it. So, yeah. Yeah. [laughter] So, so I let him go into my email. So, so that's that's all the sources he And then we already had gamma hooked up because we've been using it for a while to create docs and decks, but now he does it through the API.
23:21The agent makes the gamas. We don't The agent makes the gamas. Yeah.
23:24And one question I want you to walk through this because it's I think it's this is you can folks can pick at this, but I think this is better than any human could ever make. There's no time to make this. A lot of folks can make slides now. It's built into Replet for free. It's built in. I think Verscell and Lovable C. Can they do this? These cheap these low-end slide makers. Can they can they create this kind of dynamic deck? This, you know, I've tried them. They weren't as good.
23:48Yeah, that was good. Yeah.
23:49And I actually fought not well slightly fought. I lightly fought with 10K a little bit on Gamma because there are times where Gamma wants to create images, which is what the other ones, this is why the other ones got rolled out immediately. Replet, Gamma, Canva, Claude, they they can make slide decks, but a lot of Claude can make mediocre slide decks.
24:13Yeah, mediocre. But a lot of the times you'll see it and it's AI generated images. Duh. Like [laughter] that's that's what you're going to get from a slide deck. So R10K actually figured out a way with the gamma API. I forget the term for it, but there's a certain API generated deck he can do where it will keep our images. So you'll see like this is a leaderboard we made. like this is not an AI generated image.
24:36This kind of like backdrop with the Saster logo, that's actually our logo. That's not like an AI weird variation of the exhausting to use something where it's not all they do. They It's just exhausting when they change these images. You can't use them.
24:49Yeah. Like even this morning I was trying to do some stuff with Higsfield and it kept changing the logo. [laughter] Like I love this is all gamma does at 150 million revenue. So they're they're enforcing the right guard rails.
25:01your templates, your imaging will work, right?
25:03Yeah. And so that's why for this scale where we're making one back to the the point I was I started on earlier, like part of why we started this renewal agent is that, you know, classically you would say, okay, if I'm if I'm an AE or CSM or whoever involved in my renewal cycle, I'm gonna go top down. I'm just gonna focus on the folks that are like, you know, my biggest LTV accounts, my biggest renewal accounts, and I'm gonna go top down. The thing about my agent
25:32now with this renewal agent, this is one for everybody. This is every single sponsor at Zaster, whether they were a diamond or a silver sponsor. And like we actually got maybe unsurprisingly more responses in the last week from some of our silver sponsors than we did some of the diamonds. And previously I would have been like I we just don't have the physical time to make every silver sponsor cuz there's like 25 of them a deck. Like that's going to take me a whole I got to carve out a whole week.
26:01Walk us through this. But what's interesting is we would and this is unacceptable but true of any organization. We would cut the corners on the smaller customer. It's true of everybody.
26:09A 30k silver 25k silver. We just we you know we we might make a nice deck for a for a three or $300,000 a year sponsor.
26:17Yeah. But the small guys, we just, you know, no human would do it, right? And now, interestingly, the silvers, the smallest, we still love you. Also, traditionally, the lowest renewal rate, it's even worse, right? Not only the smallest, they have the lowest renewal rate. Now, they get as high quality a custom piece of renewal collateral as the biggest.
26:36Right. The the agents can democratize the quality of of data and presentations that you get. There's no, you just click on a button and any human can send this out and it's everyone gets the same quality. So, it's cool. I didn't I hadn't realized it's it's a good obvious point. All right. Show us what you built. Show us what it builds.
26:56Yeah. I think it's a I think it's a big unlock that you should be able like now we're going to do this for everybody. Like regardless of our customers size, ACV, whatever. Like we're going to do this for everybody. We already had started actually doing a version of this with our media sponsors, but now we do this with every event digital or otherwise sponsor like customer of ours, right? Like we just do this for everybody now.
27:16Y but I think it's a point to where not enough people do that now. Like this is one of those things where in the age of AI uh this took me an extra let's say half a day with 10K to build. Like you gota sure you might have to set up these sources the first time, but then you can output something like this for literally every single customer you have to try and keep them. So yeah, [laughter and gasps] so so yeah, this is what it's built.
27:43It's pretty cool. I'll walk you through it. So this is one where specifically Replet sponsored our disaster annual this year in May, but we did a lot of social you've personally done a lot of social media posts about it.
27:56And so I actually think 5.9 even though it's really high. I still think it's low. I think there's more out there that I didn't think of that we posted that has more. But so it's pulling in, you know, their final lead counts and stuff from the actual disaster annual event. This is in our this was in Bisbo, so it could just get it out of there.
28:14How [snorts] many companies are across those leads? How many attendee and then how you know how much percent of that is in their ISP? So VPC level or founder above 76% for an event in person is really high like Yep. comparatively. And then, you know, 5.9 million social media impressions. I think that's a pretty good killer slide, by the way, as an opener. Like, just [laughter] here's every like here's all your results. You ended number one at the show, but also by the way, we had
28:44almost 6 million social media impressions on top of that. Like, I think it's pretty cool. So, this is like a summary, a deep dive of going into like where that all came from. social safer.com how much we've talked about them how much you know their team did in person the vibe coding classes are a call out of something they did together with us with their sponsorship this year the case for doing more in 2027 so this is an interesting slide because I had to push the agent to be more salesy like
29:12the first iteration of this was here I think it had like this slide and I was like all right that's pretty cool but it didn't have this portion with the 6 million I was like you why are you burying the lead. And then it had one where uh this is a long deck now, but what they contracted for was basically like the next slide. And so yeah, it's this one like what you contracted for. And so I was like, dude, this is a renewal.
29:40Like you [laughter] got to you got to make the pitch punchy and it's got to be in the first three slides cuz you know, as as cool as it is to build this deck and I spent time on it and Tenke spent time on it, they're not going to read the whole thing. let's be honest. And so I was like, you need to be more salesy.
29:55Like in the first three slides, you got to give me all the heavy hitters on what we did for them. What were their, you know, the best numbers you could surface, the best companies they met, and then make a case for doing more because obviously if they've gotten this much out of, you know, their event sponsorship, but now it's technically over, then they're kind of leaving a lot of leads on the table that they could otherwise get if they did more with us year round. And so that was kind of
30:22where I gave 10K more of a I guess I was teaching him how to sell a little bit more. So [laughter] I had to he was very, you know, he's an agent. He doesn't have emotions. He's just very methodical like here's what you bought. You were number one. Here's all the things we did for you. And he didn't he couldn't build this kind of case for doing more until I trained him a little bit more on sales as an AI agent. And it's interesting because now like we used replet as like the first
30:50deck that we built together. And so when we finalized this deck and you know it also shows them like okay who did you meet at Saster Annual which I think is cool because you know you can as a sales team you could easily look and see okay did we close those folks and I know I already closed a deal from Saster.
31:06Where else did we post you on Saster?
31:08There's a lot. So this is just some of the 214 articles we've wrote about them on sasser.com.
31:15I think a couple cool things here and it's this is 100% duplicatable. Like you could do this like you could duplicate this what I just did in this flow. You could duplicate this. I could do a full workshop on it if people want us to do that or a full episode or whatever showing you the steps because you can duplicate this. And the magic of this was this is written for like top down like cool this is great for the events team. It's good for the media team. It's good for the CEO. I was like, I'm
31:45literally sending the storm job. Like, this has so much of the coverage and stuff that we've done with them that this is a deck formulated in a way where people are going to pick and choose what they inevitably read in this deck. But you can send it to the whole account.
31:56And to my point on like no renewal account left behind earlier, you could do this for all your accounts, every CEO, every buyer because actually 10K has all of our contacts stored in Salesforce and Panda through our CPQ thing. He already was like, "Okay, here's now the email to you should send to Replet and who's who here's who you should send it to." You know, you could send it to the CEO, then you could send a different one to the the person who signed the contract in the first place.
32:24You could send ones to different people who are the decision makers on the overall team for renewal. So, it's pretty cool that it can do this. I will say the maybe interesting part I didn't have to do previously with 10K is we added this step now for for other decks. It made I told 10K to build in a narrative step. I kind of stole this term from Westworld if you guys remember that show where was like you know what's the narrative of the what's the whatever narrative of the town right or something
32:54they used to say it a lot and I stole it with Tenki and I said okay going forward after Replet because Replet was the first deck we did together. When you generate a deck tell me what your narrative is going to be. So, now that you have a little bit more sales coaching from me and now that you have this really good process for building a deck, like you're being too bland about it, like give me a story that you're going to tell, tell me the narrative that you're going to tell this sponsor that's up for renewal and we'll agree on it before you generate the deck. So, we added that step and now actually all the
33:24decks are So, hold on. So, so, so there's a there's a there's a there's a field you agree on the the narrative which is in essence the pitch.
33:32Right. And then not only it doesn't just generate a deck with all the impressions, the the leads, but you but it's each deck is tailored to the pitch that you guys agree upon and then it's built.
33:44Yeah. So like for one one of the silvers, the original narrative was, "Oh, you're a silver, you should upgrade to a gold."
33:52And I was like, "That's a that's an okay narrative. That's a natural narrative, but you should probably give them other options." I was like, "This is a company that's doing pretty good now." Like, they just came out of stealth when they were at SAS, you know, so they didn't have maybe as big of a budget back when they signed for this in April and then did it in May, but they've kind of blown up a little bit. I was like, the narrative should really be, yeah, you could stay at that level, but you could go up to gold if you wanted to get just like, you know, a bigger booth and more leads.
34:22Sure. Or you could go up to something like a super gold and add media where there's content involved. Like they seem to be speaking a lot more. Like that's what you should build into the narrative. And so now the agent the agent will come up with the narrative pass first. Now basically the pitch and then I'll put in my inputs and say okay I agent comes up with the pitch.
34:40The agent comes up with the pitch.
34:41We review the pitch together and then it generates the deck.
34:45Yes, that's pretty cool.
34:46It is pretty cool. I was like this narrative thing is pretty cool.
34:51That's something to copy because as much as I love all of our agentic tools, every pitch is kind of the same. There's not enough context in any of these agents, right? even the best ones. There's a lot of reasons, but there's just listen, we love our AISDRs and and you should buy them, you should use them, and we stand behind the ones we promote. But yeah, not so many of the emails aren't great.
35:14The pitches aren't great. It just doesn't have the context.
35:17It doesn't have every single every single pitch every single pitch should be great.
35:23It's at least possible if you build it yourself with enough context, right, for every pitch to be great, right?
35:27Yep. I think not only can every pitch be good, I think how I've balanced it because this is a new thing we've just started with this renewal agent.
35:35How I balance it now is like I literally started up I think it's an artisan sequence.
35:41Last week when I built this and what it does it's like it's doing the heavy lifting on getting them to open the email and then I send that custom pitch check as a reply. So like they're getting an automated email so that I can at least get like them responded to us or get feed like a lot of those a lot of folks gave me feedback in that first email from the agent. I was like great I can use that in the pitch. Then I would generate the pitch with 10K and then use that as the customer reply in the next
36:10sequence because I never I famously I never let our agents just send a follow-up email. I talked about that [laughter] because the artisan monaco agent force emails they're all better than a human which is all that really matters today as we record this right they're better than 99% of humans but they're not great like that replet deck none of them are great none of them have the whole history relationship how many times jod and Jason talked about this how many times this was mentioned right that none of them you know lead to scan have they
36:40just they're just not hooking up into those APIs or doing that level of reasoning on top of it right So you're so you're you're using what they're good at which is a modest level of customization, right? But then you're taking over step two with sort of you're you're almost doing the ABM in step two.
36:58Then you're making sure the followup it's h it's human managing 10K to build the world's best to agree on a narrative. The agent comes up with a narrative though. You agree on it and then build the deck.
37:12An interesting hybrid on this, right? I know it's a it's a well, you know, it it's I started as just an experiment, right? I was running all these agent experiments. Let's try one with renewals because certainly like for the past 3 months, it's like Dave and I have been manually emailing people.
37:29And sometimes I don't I don't sometimes I don't think my emails are better than what Artisan or Agent Force of Qualified could do. They're not always better. And so I was like, you know what? I'm just going to start a new sequence. I used Artisan for this. Just whatever. We have four. Okay, sometimes I just pick one.
37:44So, I picked that one, [laughter] loaded it in, and then I saw I was like, "Okay, I'm I actually split it. I was like, okay, some people I'm going to try and give the agent enough context to say that we have like this custom generator results thing." It didn't work. And then I was like, the other folks, I'm just going to say, you know, I'm going to give it the renewal pitch and then I'm going to do it now as I've done it as a second step. And that one worked a lot better. And so we did AB test, if you
38:13will, between me and the agent just to see what would work. And we found that, you know, let the agent kind of get them to open, get them to re-engage with you, give you feedback and then you give them the deck because the deck is kind of overkill if like you don't want to hear from Zaster.
38:26Yeah, it's of course it's it's a sec it's a second or third step, right? But yeah, it's interesting the we'll see where these you know, we we're building we're hopefully we we'll be able to launch it in the coming weeks.
38:37We've been building this app called Sastra Connect ourselves which is to help folks it does two things. It's to help folks in the Sastra community meet each other outside of our events but it's also an agentic recruiter.
38:49And we'll let everyone the first batch of folks come in or all the folks that have gone to our event. Hopefully it will come out in the coming weeks. And one thing that that I've learned from it so far is, you know, in the beginning it was like an AISDR, you know, and let's let's say I was trying to recruit Amelia to come join me and and Millia is a VP of market CMO somewhere would say, hey Amelia, come join Saster. It's the world's largest community for AI and B2B. I think you'd be a great choice there. That was great.
39:15Now it adds a deep reasoning. It goes through your entire LinkedIn background from inception. everything about it. Hey Amelia, we we you know I watched the latest agents. I saw you're really interested in community and scale between your work at Everstring and wherever and saster. Here's why it might be a good fit and here's why I think you should meet with Jason. And then it gives you an opener now like a sales opener and it tells you how to kick off the conversation. And it just
39:44takes a lot of reasoning and a lot of work. It's not that this is hard, but we have to do it if we're going to do it across 30,000 people meeting with 30,000 other people, that's like a million interactions to score. And each one has to be pretty good and somehow has to be Q8 and managed. This is at the edge of what I can do without help. But this is what all these Aentrice products should be doing. But it can pull in all of our data. It has all this history. It's building backgrounds in every person. It knows which SAS events you went to. It knows who you met at those events by
40:14pulling in all this data. Right? And I know these AI outbound SDRs don't do it yet, but it's possible. It's possible to. And this would require more FTE work and more customization. I know it's hard, but as these products go mass scale, the the art is how can you also pull in tons of contacts from the third party systems where it lives to make these emails great because you know that if we you know the be the one of the difference between the best outbound and mediocre is they really know the customer.
40:42Yeah. If nothing else, hey, and you reach out to Anton at lovable. Anton, thanks for sponsoring last year, but Replet went three times bigger and they got the most lead at the events. They got 716 716 sea level execs that reached out. Right. Here's what lovable should do and why. That's a great email.
40:59But I don't think any of these AI agentic sales products can write that email yet. But but your renewal your renewal agent can, right? Because it has the context. So that's the challenge to everybody is to build that email. It's totally doable, but you need a lot of context.
41:15You need the right guard rails. You needed to not hallucinate that conversation, embarrass you with Anton, right?
41:22I've spent weeks trying to do this. And it's it's not hard, but it's complicated. [snorts] It's complicated. Yeah. Part of what I had to go through with ten building that renewal agent was to say, never ever make up any of the numbers.
41:34Like, and yet it still does. [laughter] Don't. I'll cap four times.
41:41Don't [laughter] So it is an issue. And how many of these have you sent out these replet like hyper customized pitches? How many have you sent out so far?
41:51Yeah, it's just it wouldn't have happened before AI right before the just wouldn't wouldn't we would have maybe had two.
41:56Oh, I would have done just the diamonds which is five. So that would have been it.
42:02But yeah, and it's yeah to to that point like when we got responses from a lot of the silver sponsors like I'm just generated their deck agreed on the narrative with 10K and then there it went. So it's nice we've been able to give more attention to every customer of ours regardless of you know maybe that's the wrong way to do it but I think in the age of AI you got to at least try.
42:21No, you're right. you know, old classic posters, you've got to you should you should try to treat all your customers like kings and queens, right?
42:27Whether they paid you 10k or or or 1 million, especially if you're an important product, you you're important to them, right? In fact, for us, not to spend all time, many times the the smallest sponsor spending 25k, that's a lot of money to them for sure.
42:45It's like not a lot of money to Google Cloud. Okay. Now, I'm not saying it doesn't matter because budgets are fixed, right? And so it's it's but at the end of the day the amount of stress like for for a while when things were crazy like in 2022 we like banned small sponsors because we didn't want the stress.
43:00We just didn't we just we just like you if if that's so if $20,000 is so much money to you like you're betting your entire startup come next year we would say just just don't even do it. Right.
43:10And but AI if AI can let you treat your smallest as kings and queens it's very enabling because they deserve it. They they deserve it. right? That is more important to them. Um, interestingly, I think just to tie it all together and then I don't know if you want to wrap here or go on to anything else like in making these ones for all of our like all of our room. So, we've sent 30 cuz like when somebody replies to our sequence then we
43:39send the deck like we have them. You saw my screen. We have them for everybody just [music] ready to go.
43:45Interestingly, 10K was like we should do this now. We should do the inverse. We should do this on inbound so that [music] every lead instead of the I mean you can book a meeting with Ameilia AI instantly and that is much better that is a thousand times better than a contact us form but now if you actually talk to her and book a meeting or download one of like our media kits or perspectives for 2026 we're in the process of deploying the inverse of what you just saw which is
44:14every inbound gets a customized proposal of what they should be doing with faster and why. Oh, it can it will it can look and see who they're like, who's similar to them, who's had success, and gives them a custom automatically when they inbound.
44:26Automatically when they inbound.
44:27That's the dream. The minute you inbound, not only, you know, it's great that the agent can instantly set up a meeting rather than wait for the 3 days to get your goddamn meeting set up. It just is inexcusable, right? That was why we love qualified, but now you're going to get an email back with a full proposal with you that no human has to be in. That's great.
44:43Yeah. So, I tested it yesterday. It's just like a proof of concept. And then I can show you guys next episode how we built it. So, but we wouldn't have gotten there without this renewal agent cuz this is this is all the piping, right? This is step by step. Two, we don't know as much maybe about an inbound that we do a renewal. And so, there's kind of like different sources. We'll try and pull in as much as we can. So, it's but it's the dream, right, of like every inbound, every renewal, every lead loss
45:12gets some sort of custom touch point instantly. Okay, I want to do that the next episode. I want to push most of the rest of our agenda the next episode. There's one last thing I wanted to hit just because I thought it was interesting. While we're on this general topic, I want to talk about I want to give some credit to Clay the API. Clay the application. Yeah.
45:32And we in some ways in the early days we were kind of clay skeptics because there was so much mythology around it and it you know but but our agents love clay don't they?
45:44They love it. They love they it because you might like a certain vendor and and I don't want to I we'll talk about all the vendors in the space are good but our agents love Clay especially Claude pushes freaking pushes pushes right loves Clay [laughter] so much this is so important for vendor discovery and and there's real reasons this isn't just an AEO thing right it isn't just that it ranks higher right no it's used
46:12for us to enrich our base and get the data across our base of 450,000 our community which gets stale which means enrichment people move jobs all the time right we need to constantly enrich our base or it just it just it just gets so stale so quickly right so it's interesting on the Clay side so famously a couple months ago I was using Clay and then they changed their pricing and I was pretty peeved that they changed their pricing overnight and I couldn't use their internal agent as
46:41good as the day before when they rolled out the pricing cuz their their internal agent just wasn't trained on their new pricing. So, for a while I was kind of I was kind of cold on Clay after that. And I honestly hadn't used it in a while, but then we needed to enrich some things for part of this renewal thing that we've been going through is I was trying to find contacts that were previously at a renewal account that weren't there anymore to see where they went to see if
47:09their new company was a potential fit for SAS. You should you should all do this champion tracking thing. I think not I think so many people forget to do it, right? It's like a oh yeah, duh, makes sense. and then you forget to do it cuz it's not automated or whatever work for most people to do. Yeah, it's too much.
47:27And so I was like, of course we can just automate this. So I gave it first to 10K. 10K did a terrible job at it. It was like it called up Clay and it couldn't get the results and I was fighting me on using like Finding Mail instead. So it wasn't great for some reason. The Replet Clay integration is not great. But then I gave it to Claude and I said, "Claude, just either use the cuz Clay has the Cloud integration, too." I was like, "Either use the
47:55integration or just use co-work in my browser and I'll log into Clay and see if you can enrich these past renewal sponsors to see where they're at now."
48:07It ended up using both. So, it used the connector for like some of its first enrichment passes. And then the other ones, it was like, it's going to be much faster if I just use your browser versus me trying to call it up through the connector. And I was like, was using MCP or something? It was just slow.
48:23It was just slow. Like, it took a whole day.
48:25Slow for a lot of these use cases. Everyone's all on MCP, but man, it's a lot of these connectors are so slow.
48:32It was like, if you want to be done in like an hour versus a day, just open it up in your browser. I'll do it in co-work. I was like done. So it didn't go work much faster. It finished it and then I said, "Okay, is there any value to using Zoom info too?" And it was like, "Yeah, if you use Zoom Info in Clay," I was like, "What?" I was like, "I've never heard of people using Zoom Info in Clay. Like, wouldn't you just use Clay?" He's like, "No, no, like it's good to have." And so it used Zoom Info in Clay and Co-work. It's three layers
49:02deep of agents to enrich this list. And it was like the best enrichment we've gotten so far. It was every every person at their new company and actually some of them are in a artisan sequence right now and we've we've been able to run this flow now that's customized where it knows where they were and it knows where they are now and it will send them a custom pitch for their new company. So it's pretty cool. It'll send them the email and then when they reply I'll send them the custom deck and because it has
49:31all these inputs of like you know Clay did the heavy lifting to figure out where they are now which is the good like that's the part we need and it it's the best at it now if they respond to an email that we send with one of our AISDRs I can send one of those customized decks for an outbound and it's pretty cool like we can and last week we talked about how we track all of our decks and stuff now like all those gamas are tracked all the perspectives links we do are track everything we do is tracked and our agent decided on its own heat mapping tool. And so now I'll get like
50:00emails of, hey, that person that was a renewal champion that you found through Clay, went to this new company that artisan then emailed as another agent that replied to you and you replied to them with a deck actually read that deck.
50:13Yeah. [laughter] Is looking at I forget if they're looking at media or something and I was like, "Okay, great." If nothing else, there's a lot of interesting things that that about about this. You've the AEO thing is trying to come up in the top three, right? Who who should I pick for enrichment? Right.
50:33That's not enough, man. What you've got to do is say, "Hey, here's the problem we have at our company. Solve it. Which which which vendor should we use to solve it?" And here Replet struggled because the connector wasn't great, right? the name of connector.
50:48Claude was like, "Let me do it with co-work, right? Let let me just do it and use Clay." That's different than who's the best in theory, right? This is who's the best if you're going to do it.
51:01Right. That's the agent raising its hand. The agent raised its hand and said, "Let me use effing clay."
51:06Right. In this case, it was Claude itself rather than replet. Right. But it's use clay. You got, you know, you're gonna lose if you're not clay in that, right? And it got you, it got you to invest more in clay.
51:21You had invested in clay in several months. You invested more, right? So maybe some of it's Captain Obvious, but this you're going to lose in the vendor war if you're not the one that not just is recommended in AO, but where where the agent says, I will just do it with this with this API. Oh, now I have a I have a custom skill in cloud now where he will he knows now to start in in in with the connector and then go over to co-work and he'll just ping me when he needs me to pop him open to
51:51co-work and then he knows where he needs like he'll do like a first pass now through Zoom info and then he'll run it through Clay Clay MCP and then Clay coowork like it's this complicated thing whatever that was like his like happy path that he decided on and so I said you need to say that as a skill so you don't keep forgetting this.
52:08And so now he just I call it that skill when I need to do enrichment and then off he goes.
52:12Pretty cool, man. All right, so we learned a lot about headless. We learned about a lot about costs. You built the world's best renewal deck generator script tool ever.
52:25Yeah. And then next week we'll see how it all connects to outbound. But pretty cool. And do we have anything else you want to add before we break, Ameilia?
52:33I think we've hit a lot.
52:34Okay. All right. Thanks everybody for tuning in, being on this journey, and we'll basically do part two of it next week. Thanks guys.
52:45You're listening to the official Sasker AI podcast brought to you by Costly when you start a business, so stop paying for five different services. Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete business identity [music] in one place with free tools and resources to actually launch your business for real. Get more at [music] northwestregisteredagent.com/stasterfree.
