Two lessons we’ve learned the hard way running AI agents across sales, marketing, and customer success at SaaStr in 2026. If you’re rolling out your first AI SDR, internalize these now. They will save you a lot of frustration. Lesson #1: Budget at Least 2 Weeks of Ramp Time. Always. Regardless of vendor. Regardless of…
Continue Reading

We just wrapped SaaStr AI 2026, and the sponsor engagement leaderboard is in. It measures the one thing a sponsor actually cares about: how many leads they pulled from 10,000+ B2B + AI founders, operators, and buyers on the floor. Here’s the full top 15 by engagement: Replit — 1,423 leads (Vibe Coding / AI…
Continue Reading

“Time kills deals.” Everyone says it. It is especially true in M&A. On 20VC x SaaStr a little ways back, we were discussing OpenAI’s acquisition of TBPN. The outreach happened in January. Fidji was new as head of apps, thought it would elevate OpenAI’s brand, pitched it internally, and got the green light. It took…
Continue Reading

The six sessions that closed out SaaStr AI 2026: Shoplazza and Subotiz (commerce), Adam Modsley, CRO | The data is the moat, not the AI Nue (revenue operations), James MacArthur, VP of Product Advocacy | AI speed inside deterministic guardrails Papaya Global (global payroll compliance), Sivanne Fishel, VP Client Success, and Hagit Ben-Tzur, Head of…
Continue Reading

For most of B2B history, customers never knew or cared what database ran under your product. They consumed the UX, maybe an API, and the data layer sat invisibly in the back. Benjamin Wagner, CEO of Firebolt, came to SaaStr AI to argue that this is over. As agents start hitting products directly, the data…
Continue Reading

hopify just turned 20. The company Tobi Lütke spun out of a snowboard shop called Snowdevil in 2006 is now processing more than $100 billion of merchant sales in a single quarter and running at a $13B+ revenue run rate. Most software companies that old are coasting on installed base and slowly declining. Shopify just…
Continue Reading

The Forward Deployed / Customer Success track at SaaStr AI 2026 turned into something closer to an autopsy and a rebirth at the same time. Leaders from the fastest-growing companies in B2B + AI got on stage and said versions of the same thing: the post-sales playbook most of us spent the last decade building…
Continue Reading

There’s an argument going around right now that sales isn’t as important as it used to be. Still important. Just not as much as it once was. Bear with me here. It’s not an argument I agree with. But I can’t argue with the logic. The point is this: the world has bifurcated. And what…
Continue Reading

I was recently catching up with the CEO of a B2B leader who was proud their AI cost was now just pennies per customer. And look, I get the impulse — that’s real engineering discipline. But to me, it also means you just aren’t competitive. Anything genuinely great in AI + B2B generally costs far,…
Continue Reading

The half-day that kicked off SaaStr AI Annual 2026 was the most concrete look we’ve put on a stage at what running a company on AI agents actually looks like. Not the hype version. The real version, with the costs, the bugs, the drift, and the wins. Four sessions, four very different angles: a hands-on…
Continue Reading

Dear SaaStr: I run revenue at a B2B company doing about $40M ARR. My playbook is basically the one I built in 2021 and 2022, and it’s working worse every quarter. What’s actually changed in go-to-market, and what should I be doing differently? The ICONIQ State of Go-to-Market 2026 report is some of the best…
Continue Reading

CPQ is the category every B2B operator has a horror story about. A rep needs three versions of a quote for a customer call, and it takes two hours. Pricing lives in a spreadsheet nobody trusts. The quote and the bill disagree. AI was supposed to fix this, and in most demos it makes the…
Continue Reading

On the latest episode of The Agents, we walked through the actual back ends of our top go-to-market agents: commit counts, API stacks, monthly costs, and live demos. We run SaaStr with 3 humans and 20+ AI agents. Here are the 10 takeaways, anchored in the numbers. 1. 10K replaced an entire BI workflow for…
Continue Reading

At SaaStr AI 2026, Aurasell co-founder and CEO Jason Eubanks skipped the AI futurism. He put the exact go-to-market stack he ran at his last company on screen, what it cost to run, and why he thinks the whole model is about to come apart. It is probably your stack too. Sellers Just Don’t Sell…
Continue Reading

Dear SaaStr: What Quota Should I Give to my Enterprise Sales Reps? For enterprise sales reps, quotas typically range from 3x to 5x their fully burdened on-target earnings (OTE). This means if your rep’s OTE is $200K, their annual quota should be somewhere between $600K and $1M in bookings. The exact number depends on your deal…
Continue Reading