We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened

Jason Lemkin is the founder of SaaStr, the largest community for SaaS and B2B founders, and a former co-founder and CEO of EchoSign, which sold to Adobe. In this conversation with Lenny Rachitsky, he gives tactical advice on building a B2B sales team, covering when to hire, whom to hire, comp design, VP of Sales hiring, and how product and sales should work together.

01Key learnings

• Don't abandon a sales motion to chase pure product-led growth if customers need help to buy; many self-serve startups later need sales, and firing the team can collapse revenue.
• Founders can close the first 10 customers themselves because they excel at the middle of conversations; focus on asking for next steps and money at the end of calls.
• Start hiring sales reps once founders spend about 20% of their time in sales and 20% recruiting; hire at least two reps so you can compare performance.
• Hire early reps who would buy your product themselves, have a few years of relevant experience, and can sell well, rather than people with impressive logos but no fit.
• Hire a VP of Sales only after two reps are consistently hitting quota; the VP should still carry a bag and spend substantial time in live deals.
• Use a simple compensation plan: early reps keep 100% of closed revenue for about a quarter, pay market salary, and aim for sales of 3-5x their total take-home pay over time.
• Test candidates with a 'sell me this pen' assignment, like selling your product in a demo, and always check references before hiring.
• Make product leaders deeply involved in large sales deals, and give sales a fixed quarterly budget of product capacity so feature requests get prioritized rather than whipsawing engineering.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.