The Wire

Real-time updates from ANZ tech sales

12 days ago
News

Adobe Marketo down 1.5 days, broken unsubscribe, wants 20% price increase

## The Numbers **Cost:** $60,000 per year for Adobe Marketo **Impact:** One missed newsletter send to 450,000+ subscribers, 1.5 days of downtime, broken unsubscribe link for two weeks **Response:** Adobe proposed a 20% price increase at renewal Jason Lemkin runs SaaStr with 3 humans and 20+ AI agents. When Marketo broke, his team could not fix it because the platform is not built for agent-driven operations. ## What Broke Marketo went down for a day and a half. Not degraded, down. SaaStr missed a Tuesday newsletter send to 450,000 subscribers. The unsubscribe link was broken for two weeks, which is a CAN-SPAM compliance issue on the most basic function an email platform exists to provide. Adobe's engineering team blamed Salesforce, then blamed SaaStr, then committed to nothing. The renewal conversation started with a 20% price increase. ## Why It Matters for Sales Teams Lemkin's broader point: legacy B2B vendors are not being displaced by AI products. They are losing customers because the product and support quality no longer justify the price. SaaStr spends $10,000 per year on Salesforce and a similar amount on Marketo for community operations. The complaint is not about enterprise-scale spend. It is about the disconnect between legacy SaaS pricing and the quality of service customers now expect. For sales teams selling against legacy vendors, this is the opening. Customers are frustrated with vendors that ship broken features, ignore support tickets, and raise prices while quality declines. ## The Agent Problem SaaStr runs on AI agents. When Marketo broke, the question was not whether a human could fix it. The question was whether an agent could. The answer was no. Marketo has no real webhooks, single-digit bulk exports per day, 90-day log retention, auth that breaks on whitespace, and no agent toolkit. A full sync of SaaStr's own data takes days because of rate caps. Legacy SaaS platforms built for humans clicking through dashboards are not built for agent-driven operations. That is the gap where new vendors are winning deals. ## What This Means If you are selling into accounts running legacy martech, CRM, or workflow platforms, ask about uptime, support response times, and API quality. Customers are ready to move. The objection is not price, it is switching cost. If you are selling for a legacy vendor, expect renewals to get harder. Customers are comparing your support quality and uptime to newer platforms that are agent-ready and priced 60% lower. The SaaS market is not collapsing because of AI competition. It is collapsing because vendors stopped shipping quality and started harvesting customers.

SaaStr
12 days ago
News

Chief AI Officer hiring surges 340% in ANZ, OTE hits $500k

## Chief AI Officer hiring surges 340% in ANZ, OTE hits $500k More than two in five Australian companies have appointed a Chief AI Officer, and that figure is expected to hit nearly two-thirds by 2027, according to Datacom research covering 500-plus medium to large enterprises. Chief AI Officer listings jumped 340% between Q4 2025 and Q1 2026, with another 200-plus positions expected to fill in 2026. Enterprise CAIO packages in Australia run $350,000 to $500,000-plus, with head-of-AI roles typically priced at $230,000 to $350,000. Financial services is the clearest early adopter. All big four banks now have a Chief AI Officer or equivalent: Westpac appointed a Chief Data, Digital and AI Officer, Commonwealth Bank appointed a Chief AI Officer, ANZ named a Chief Data and AI Officer, and NAB appointed its own Chief AI Officer in March 2026. The federal public service has required agencies to appoint a senior Chief AI Officer by 30 June 2026, which has helped normalise the role across Australia. ### What this means for sales teams Companies are not just hiring a single AI lead. They are building adjacent teams around data, governance, architecture and AI product roles. Recent moves at ANZ and the big four indicate the role is increasingly a C-suite or near-C-suite mandate with direct reporting lines and enterprise scope. That means vendors selling AI platforms, governance tools, data infrastructure and implementation services are likely to find buying power concentrated in these offices. The split between strategy and execution matters. While three in five companies say AI is a top strategic priority, only two in five actually have an AI strategy. Lou Compagnone, Datacom AI director, told AAP: "Rather than having that whole 'we're just going to sprinkle AI on top of what we already do', there needs to be analysis of what it means for your company." Improving productivity is the largest driver of AI adoption, with 38% of respondents identifying it as their biggest motivation. As August earnings season looms, investors will be looking for signs that the technology is delivering returns, not just headcount.

SmartCompany
12 days ago
News

Eight ANZ startups raised $102 million in two weeks, Partly leads at $71.5m

## The Numbers Eight ANZ startups raised a combined $102 million over the past fortnight. The largest: Partly, a Christchurch automotive software startup, closed $71.5 million (US$50 million) from DST Global and Blackbird at a $715 million (US$500 million) valuation. The rest of the capital went to seven other companies across space logistics, agtech, and B2B software. Collectively, the raises signal investors are backing expansion-stage companies with clear paths to offshore revenue, not just domestic plays. ## What Partly Does Partly builds software for automotive parts suppliers and repair shops. The company has offices in the US and UK and is building an Australian team. According to The Australian, Partly is avoiding major Australian expansion over tax concerns, despite the proximity to its NZ headquarters. The Series B values the company at 10x its previous round, suggesting strong revenue growth or expansion metrics that justified the markup. ## The Other Seven The fortnight's other raises included: - **Outlier Space**: Space logistics and satellite servicing - **Navi**: Navigation and route optimization software - **Agscent**: Agricultural technology - **Superstat**: Sports analytics platform - **Wellumio**: Health and wellness tech - **Early Bird**: Consumer product (details limited) - **Octopusbot**: Automation software Most are B2B plays. Most are raising to scale internationally. That pattern mirrors other recent ANZ rounds: Neara raised $45 million for a Series C to expand offshore, Alimetry raised US$18 million for US commercialization. ## What This Means for Sales Teams Series B and growth-stage rounds typically mean headcount expansion. Partly's $71.5 million will likely fund US market entry, which translates to AE and AM hires in North America. The company already has a UK presence, suggesting they have proven the offshore playbook. For sales professionals tracking ANZ opportunities, the pattern is clear: capital is flowing to companies with validated international demand, not just local traction. If you are evaluating a startup, ask where the growth capital is going. If the answer is "US expansion," expect quota tied to new market penetration, longer sales cycles, and ramp periods that account for market education. ## Context This fortnight follows other strong ANZ funding activity in Q3 2026. The market is rewarding startups with defensible IP, clear commercialization paths, and proven ability to sell outside ANZ. Biotech, infrastructure software, and regulated sectors continue to attract capital. For comparison, earlier July saw retail media startup Zitcha close a $15 million Series A for US growth, and wastewater treatment and local government software also landed funding. The common thread: investors want to see offshore revenue potential before writing large checks. ## The Takeaway ANZ startups are raising to scale globally, not just survive locally. If you are evaluating a role at a recently funded company, ask where the capital is allocated. US expansion means new territories, new comp structures, and often new leadership. Make sure the OTE assumes realistic attainment in a new market, not the close rates they had selling to existing ANZ customers.

SmartCompany
12 days ago
News

CSIRO seeks private funding as R&D investment lags 5% GDP target

CSIRO is asking wealthy donors and businesses for money. That is the headline from CEO Doug Hilton's National Press Club address this week, where he flagged philanthropy as a path forward after job cuts and a infrastructure backlog that left 80% of the agency's 800 buildings unfit for purpose. The context: Australia invests about 1.6% of GDP in research. Comparable nations invest 5%. CSIRO's own books show 75% of 2023/24 revenue came from federal and state governments. Private Australian industry contributed 4.4%. Overseas companies and governments added 5.6%. The gap is real. Hilton pointed to medical research as the model, saying that sector is "expert" at tapping philanthropy. CSIRO is now having those conversations across other science areas. The agency has narrowed focus after cuts, choosing to abandon some research rather than spread resources too thin. Almost a quarter of remaining job losses came from environmental research, including climate adaptation science. For the ANZ deep-tech ecosystem, the signal is that even the national science agency is hunting for private capital. CSIRO's commercial vehicle, Main Sequence, has $1 billion in funds under management and has invested in 51 companies since 2017. But the core agency still runs on public funding, and that model is under pressure. CSIRO has run matched-funding programs for SMEs and startups: Kick-Start offered $10,000 to $50,000, and SME Connect backed 750 SMEs with $20 million. The original CSIRO Innovation Fund split $200 million between $70 million government, $30 million CSIRO, and $100 million private capital. Those programs are the bridge between research and commercialisation. Hilton framed the private funding push as a way to "laser focus" extra capital on impact. The sales angle here is indirect: if CSIRO scales back foundational research, fewer deep-tech companies get incubated. That means fewer enterprise sales opportunities in climate tech, biotech, and industrial innovation. The pipeline starts at the research stage, and right now, that pipeline is underfunded.

Startup Daily
13 days ago
News

SaaStr ditches Marketo after AI agents hit API limits, migrates in one week

## The churn signal came from an agent, not a human SaaStr moved 10+ years of marketing data off Marketo after their AI agents kept hitting API rate limits. Not a strategic review. Not a procurement committee. An agent errored out, they asked it what to do, and it told them to leave. Jason Lemkin runs SaaStr (the SaaS media and events business) with 3 humans and 20+ AI agents. The agents were querying Marketo's API constantly for analytics and workflow automation. Marketo's limits allowed roughly an hour of usable API time per day, then stalled. When you are running agent-driven ops, that is not a minor inconvenience. That is a blocker. Lemkin asked the agent what they should do about it. The agent gave three alternative platforms with better API limits. All more agent-friendly. Hard to argue with. ## What Marketo could have done Marketo was their most expensive vendor. Five straight years of price increases. Another 12% on the renewal. Support was the worst of any vendor they work with, according to Lemkin. He says they would have stayed at $20k with higher API limits. Marketo had multiple chances to name $25k and keep the account. Nobody did. Instead, they pushed for another increase on a product the agent had already flagged as the constraint. The migration took one week. Cost $14 in agent time. Lemkin says he would not have voted for it without the agent recommendation. ## Why this matters for sales tools API quality used to be a solutions engineer problem during evaluation, then forgotten. Now it is a churn surface. When agents are your primary interface to a product, query volume goes up by an order of magnitude. A budget built for nightly syncs does not work when an agent is asking 30 questions a day instead of 3 per quarter. The agent has no relationship with your CSM. No memory of the deal you cut three years ago. No political reason to protect the incumbent. It surfaces the failure, gets asked for alternatives, and gives a clean answer. Switching costs are collapsing when agents do the migration work. Relationship equity does not apply to something with no relationships. Support quality and API reliability are now retention levers, not nice-to-haves. Lemkin's take: if your product delivers half its value once the agent is doing the work, you may need to let customers renew at half the price. Charging pre-agentic prices for post-agentic value is how you lose accounts to an agent's recommendation instead of a human's. ## The comp angle SaaStr previously had a traditional sales team. Lemkin has publicly said he replaced most of them with AI agents and stopped hiring humans for sales roles. That is 20+ agents doing work that used to require headcount with OTEs. For sales professionals: this is not a vendor case study. This is what happens when your buyer's ops team runs on agents instead of people, and those agents start making vendor decisions based on API performance, not relationship history.

SaaStr
14 days ago
News

SaaStr AI 2026: Anthropic closes 54% of enterprise self-serve, Gamma hits $100M with no sales team

## The playbook is changing faster than the comp plans The sales and GTM sessions at SaaStr AI 2026 were not about whether to deploy agents in the revenue org. That debate is over. The speakers had already shipped, and they brought the numbers: what broke, what worked, and what they would do differently next time. Eleanor Dorfman, Head of Industries at Anthropic, walked through what happened when a new Claude release sent enterprise demand vertical. The obvious move was to hire reps three to five times faster. Anthropic went the other direction and rebuilt the enterprise motion around AI instead. Four months later, 54% of new enterprise logos were closing through self-serve. Real enterprise accounts, real ACV, real contract terms, with no rep gating the front door. The reps who used to run those deals got pointed at accounts where a human actually changes the outcome. ## The $100M no-sales case study Gamma is the single best argument in B2B for skipping a sales team. Grant Lee, co-founder and CEO, stood on stage and told founders not to skip it. Gamma hit $100M ARR with roughly 50 people, profitably, driven by word of mouth rather than a sales org. 50 million users, 600,000 paying subscribers. His biggest regret was waiting too long to add sales. Even a world-class inbound motion leaves enterprise deals, expansion revenue, and larger accounts sitting on the table. If the company with the strongest excuse to wait wishes it had moved sooner, most founders riding inbound are later than they think. ## Rep economics are resetting Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner.com, put up the most concrete rep economics of the event. Owner is approaching $100M ARR selling roughly $10K ACV software to independent restaurants. The numbers on his AI-native team: $2M+ in ARR per rep per year, as the average, not the top performer. That is 20x close-won to OTE, meaning a $150K rep is bringing in multiples of their comp. Outbound BDRs are closing $100K+ per month in revenue, not pipeline. That is 4x the ARR per rep of their direct SMB competitors. The takeaway for every revenue leader is a reset on what good looks like. If your reps are running at 3x or 4x their comp and you think that is healthy, the ceiling just moved. AI-augmented reps at a well-run org are producing at a level that makes the old benchmarks look outdated. ## Agents on the leads no human was going to call The PayPal and Salesforce session delivered the cleanest ROI story of the week. PayPal put Agentforce on roughly 8,000 leads a month that no human was going to touch. These were not the good leads. These were the accounts sitting at the bottom of the funnel with no rep assigned. The agent converted them at a rate that justified the spend, and it did it without adding headcount. Vercel took a 10-person lead qualification function down to one person with a lead agent. Replit showed data that rep-level AI usage predicts quota attainment. Stripe's Maia Josebachvili walked through the four patterns behind the fastest-growing AI companies on the platform. Sam Blond, co-founder and CEO of Monaco, put the comp question on the table: when agents deliver the outcome, how do you pay the team? The session did not land on a single answer, which tells you how early we still are. What is clear is that the old ratio of reps to revenue is breaking, and the new one is still being written. ## What this means for ANZ sales teams None of the companies on stage have confirmed ANZ headcount or local offices in the provided research, but the GTM models they are proving out will hit here. Enterprise self-serve motions, leaner revenue orgs, and agent-augmented SDR and AE roles are not US-only trends. If Anthropic, Gamma, or Owner.com do open ANZ offices, the roles they hire for will look different from the traditional scale-up playbook. Worth watching LinkedIn for enterprise sales, partnerships, or solutions engineering roles in-region, because that would signal a push into Australia and New Zealand rather than purely US-centric expansion. For ANZ sales professionals, the question is not whether AI will change the motion. It already has. The question is whether your current role is structured to benefit from it, or whether you are sitting in a function that is about to get re-architected.

SaaStr
14 days ago
News

Blue-collar roles see 20% pay rises while sales comp stays flat

## Blue-collar roles see 20% pay rises while sales comp stays flat The biggest pay rises in Australia are not going to sales leaders or enterprise AEs. They are going to stevedores, underground mining supervisors and field service technicians. New ATO taxation statistics for 2023-24 show annual salary growth of 15-20% in blue-collar and technical roles, while corporate positions including sales stayed relatively flat. SEEK labour market data backs this up: the strongest wage growth is concentrated in mining, construction, energy, infrastructure and manufacturing. Specific winners include stevedores, field service technicians, draftspersons, mining drafters, jumbo operators and underground supervisors. Healthcare and social assistance roles saw 5.5% growth according to ABS data. Retail, admin and most office-based roles saw minimal movement. ### What this means for sales teams If you are selling into resources, logistics, trades, healthcare or technical services, your buyers are competing aggressively for talent and have budget to spend. These sectors are expanding headcount and paying premiums to retain operational staff. If you are in corporate sales and wondering why your OTE has not moved much while living costs jumped 7.8% in late 2022, the data confirms what you already knew: the money is going elsewhere. For context, this follows a period where inflation hit 7.8% in December 2022 before the RBA wrestled it back down. Workers in shortage sectors got real raises. Most corporate roles got cost-of-living adjustments at best. ### The comp reality Robert Half, Robert Walters and Michael Page salary guides have all documented similar patterns: technical and operational roles in high-demand sectors are seeing the strongest movement. Sales roles, particularly in tech and professional services, have seen modest increases that often lag inflation. For SDRs and AEs evaluating offers: if the company sells into mining, construction or logistics, ask about their growth targets and pipeline. If they are in a hot sector, the budget is there. If they are selling to office workers in saturated markets, expect tighter comp and longer sales cycles. Bottom line: the cost-of-living crisis is not hitting everyone equally. Some jobs are doing fine. Most sales roles are not among them.

SmartCompany
14 days ago
News

Sendle brand bought from liquidation, relaunching September under McKenna

# Sendle brand bought from liquidation, relaunching September under McKenna Andrew McKenna, who runs McKenna Worldwide Services and Quantium Solutions Australia, has bought the Sendle brand out of liquidation. The acquisition covers trademarks, IP, and the domain, but excludes Sendle Pty Ltd and its debts. The relaunch was announced at Sydney's Online Retailer Conference with a target go-live of September 2026. Deal value was not disclosed. Sendle collapsed in January after a three-way merger with US logistics firms FirstMile and ACI Logistix fell apart. The Sydney-founded startup had raised over $100 million positioning itself as a tech-enabled, carbon-neutral alternative to Australia Post for SMB parcel delivery. When major investor Federation Asset Management questioned ACI Logistix's finances, Sendle abruptly ceased operations, leaving small-business customers scrambling. The brand is now part of McKenna Worldwide Pty Ltd. McKenna said customer and supplier response "has been extraordinary," signaling demand for affordable small-business shipping. ## What this means for sales professionals No confirmed sales hiring yet. The original Sendle team is gone, the FAST Group merger entity dissolved, and McKenna's acquisition is a brand-led restart, not a continuation of the old business. Historically, Sendle competed as a middleman between SMBs and delivery networks like Aramex and Couriers Please. The relaunch appears to preserve that model under McKenna-linked logistics infrastructure, but current headcount, revenue, and go-to-market structure are unclear. Worth noting: this is a post-liquidation acquisition, not a turnaround. If McKenna is rebuilding a sales team, expect green-field hiring with no legacy comp structure or book of business. Role details, OTE, and territory structure have not been announced. For now, this is a brand comeback story. Sales job announcements, if they happen, will tell us whether this is a serious relaunch or a domain parking exercise.

Startup Daily
14 days ago
News

Thriday customers hit with phishing scam from official email address

# Thriday customers hit with phishing scam from official email address Australian fintech Thriday warned customers Tuesday that a phishing email was sent from its official contact@thriday.com.au address, requesting banking details via a fraudulent link. The timing matters: the scam hit during tax season, when Thriday's SME customers are finalising 2025-26 financial year affairs. The company told customers to delete the email immediately and avoid clicking any links. Customers who clicked the link were told to contact their bank and call Tyro (Thriday's ASX-listed parent company) on 1300 008 976. ## Why this matters for sales teams Thriday sits in the crowded small business finance platform segment alongside Xero, MYOB, Airwallex, and traditional banking tools. The company combines business banking, accounting, tax, and cashflow management in one platform. When your product handles sensitive banking and business data, security incidents directly affect: - Customer acquisition: prospects evaluate trust and security during evaluation - Onboarding conversion: new customers hesitate when security questions surface - Account retention: existing customers reassess platform risk - Sales cycle length: enterprise deals require extra security review For sales teams in fintech or any platform handling financial data, a phishing attack from an official company email raises questions prospects will ask: - How did attackers access the official sending address? - What customer data might be exposed? - What security improvements are being implemented? Thriday was founded in 2020 by CEO Michael Nuciforo and targets Australian SMEs and sole traders. The company has not disclosed customer numbers or revenue figures. ## What sales teams should know If you are selling in the SMB fintech space: - Expect security questions to increase in discovery calls - Prepare specific answers about email authentication protocols - Know your company's incident response timeline - Have documentation ready on data handling and breach notification Competitors will use this. Be ready to differentiate on security without being opportunistic. Thriday said it will provide further updates via email. The company has not disclosed how many customers received the phishing email or whether any customer data was compromised.

SmartCompany
15 days ago
News

SaaS Firm Automates Invoice to Collection with AI Agent, 4 Deals to Train

## What Happened SaaStr automated their entire post-sale finance workflow using an AI agent called 10K. Contract signature to invoice generation to payment collection to commission calculation: no human touches it unless something breaks. The workflow: Deal closes in PandaDoc. Agent reads the contract, flips the deal to Closed Won in Salesforce, generates the invoice in bill.com with correct payment terms and splits, sends it to the AP contact named in the contract (not whoever closed the deal), answers customer questions about the invoice, runs payment reminders, escalates overdue accounts at 7 days, calculates AE commission when cash lands. They built it into their existing AI marketing agent rather than spinning up a new finance-specific tool. That decision mattered: one agent with full context across the revenue cycle versus fragmented point solutions. ## The Training Curve Four deals to get it right. The agent ran supervised for deals one through three. **Deal one:** Missed split payment terms, generated single invoice for full amount. **Deal two:** Same mistake. The fix was not correcting the invoice but teaching the agent to apply the rule to every contract going forward. **Deal three:** Customer did not exist in bill.com yet. They walked through the branch logic: what do you do if the customer exists versus if they are new. **Deal four:** Fully autonomous. One bad invoice since launch (wrong due date, no reproducible cause). Human stays copied on everything the agent sends. That is not a launch precaution you graduate out of, it is the operating model. ## Why This Matters for Sales Teams The gap between deal signature and invoice is a cash drain nobody measures. AEs do not flip stage fields the night they close deals. They go have sushi. Then someone chases them, then finance generates the invoice, then collections starts weeks late. Automation closes that gap. Also: the agent proposed calculating commission based on collected revenue versus forecast revenue without being asked. Agents will do that if you let them see the whole process. The company behind the article (SaaStr, an events and media business) is not a traditional software vendor, but the finance automation space is real. Companies like Vic.ai are building AI-powered finance ops stacks for B2B teams. Vic.ai is hiring a VP Finance for a business in the $50M–$150M revenue range, which signals mid-market traction in this category. For sales ops and RevOps teams: this is what finance automation ROI looks like when you wire it into your actual systems (Salesforce, PandaDoc, bill.com) versus buying standalone AR automation software. The agent runs on tools you already pay for. No new system of record. Worth noting: budget for failure during testing. They produced duplicate invoices and sent things to the wrong people. If your contracts vary more than theirs, budget for more than four training deals.

SaaStr
15 days ago
News

Former ACCC chair calls probe on Kogan dual-site pricing

Former ACCC chair Rod Sims has called for an investigation into Kogan.com after ABC reporting found the retailer operates a second website, Exclusive Brands, that appears designed to make its main site discounts look better than they are. The setup: Kogan.com shows "standard retail price" comparisons when advertising discounts. ABC found those reference prices often match prices on Exclusive Brands, which sells the same Kogan-owned products but attracts minimal traffic. Former employees described Exclusive Brands as a "clone" of the main site. "If Exclusive Brands was operated solely to make Kogan.com's prices look more appealing to shoppers comparing prices online, then it could very well be misleading because you're not getting a bargain," Sims told ABC. Kogan denied wrongdoing, saying Exclusive Brands prices are not the only factor behind reference pricing on the main site. The company did not specify what other factors determine those comparisons. **Why sales teams should care:** This matters for anyone selling against Kogan or navigating competitive price claims in ANZ retail. If the ACCC investigates and finds artificial reference pricing, it sets a precedent for how retailers can structure multi-brand pricing architecture. It also shows how consumer trust issues can create regulatory risk, even for scaled e-commerce players. **The track record:** Kogan has history here. In 2020, the Federal Court found it misled consumers by raising prices before advertising "tax-time discounts." That case was brought by the ACCC, which makes the current call for investigation more credible. **Market context:** Kogan competes with Amazon Australia, eBay Australia, and Big W in crowded categories. Similarweb ranks those three as its top traffic competitors. The business is scaled but competes heavily on price and promotions rather than exclusive assortment, which explains why reference pricing matters to its positioning. No formal investigation has been announced. Sims told ABC shoppers should not judge the company before a probe takes place. Kogan did not provide full comment to ABC before publication.

SmartCompany
16 days ago
News

Multi-year SaaS contracts dropped 5%, buyers now prefer annual deals

## The Market Shifted: Stop Pushing Multi-Year Deals Three-year SaaS contracts dropped from 28% of new logos in 2023 to 23% in 2026, according to ICONIQ benchmark data. Sub-one-year contracts jumped from 4% to 13% in the same period. This is not negotiating tactics. This is rational buyer behaviour. AI replacement cycles compress every 18 months. A three-year contract signed today might lock a customer into a category that is obsolete by year two. ## What This Means for AEs Stop discounting multi-year deals to force them. You slow down deals when buyers are already uncertain about where AI B2B will be in 10 to 12 months. Push too hard and you create resentful customers who churn at renewal. The only companies consistently winning longer initial commitments are the ones whose customers see undeniable ROI before the renewal conversation starts. Datadog, Figma, Databricks, Snowflake. They close three-year deals because customers already chose to expand, not because of pitch decks. Top-quartile companies sit at 110% to 123% NRR. If you have 120% NRR, which is where you should be aiming at Series B, short initial contracts are not a threat. You earn the extension through results. ## What to Do Instead Optimise for NRR and renewal quality, not initial contract length. Invest heavily in field deployment engineers, deployment, and post-sales. Get customers to ROI in 60 to 90 days. Make the renewal obvious. That is how you win longer commitments in 2026. The market moved. Fighting it costs you more than it gains. **Source:** Jason Lemkin, SaaStr (bootstrapped B2B media and education company focused on SaaS GTM strategy)

SaaStr
16 days ago
News

Anthropic builds enterprise sales team while Atlassian ships AI workflow playbook

## Anthropic Builds Out Enterprise Sales Eleanor Dorfman leads commercial and industries sales at Anthropic, the AI safety company behind Claude. The role signals continued enterprise GTM buildout at the OpenAI rival, which also appointed its first CCO and expanded international leadership including ANZ in April 2026. Anthropicis positioning Claude on safety and enterprise trust against OpenAI and Google. The company added its first product leader and CFO in 2024, typical signals of a research-led startup maturing into a broader operating company. ## What Atlassian Learned Shipping AI to 5 Million Users Sharif Mansour, Head of AI and Product Management at Atlassian, shared how the company shipped AI features across 20+ apps to more than 5 million users. The strategy: bolt AI onto existing workflows, then evolve. Two and a half years ago, Atlassian added an agent step into Jira automation workflows. Customers immediately chained agents together: marketing agents talk to Canva, social agents post assets, all triggered by a ticket. That pushed Atlassian to a principle: every problem you solve for humans, solve for agents. Humans need tools, context, goals, and accountability. So do agents. Three patterns emerged from watching users: 1. **Automate the prompt.** Repeated prompts become buttons. 2. **Prompt to workflow.** Prompts that cross systems become multi-step capabilities. 3. **Conversation to UI and back.** Some flows start in chat, move into dedicated UI, return to chat. On chat usage: millions use Rover chat daily, even though they also run Gemini and Claude. The lesson is workflow proximity. People reach for the AI closest to where they already work. ## What This Means for Sales Teams The playbook: build on the stack you have. For new products, reimagine. For existing workflows with users, bolt on and evolve. That applies to sales tools too. If your team already lives in Salesforce or Gong, start there. Automate repeated prospecting prompts into buttons. Turn lead-scoring chat into dedicated UI. Make workflows agent-ready. Anthropicis scaling enterprise sales. Atlassian proved the playbook works at scale. The question for sales leaders: which repeated workflows can you automate first?

SaaStr
17 days ago
News

SaaStr cut AI agents from 30 to 20, output up 4x

## The consolidation tax SaaStr runs an eight-figure B2B business with 3 humans and 21 AI agents. A month ago, they hit 30 agents and could not manage one more. Every agent that surfaces to a human costs attention, context, and maintenance. They were out of all three. So they stopped adding and started consolidating. Output went up roughly 4x. ## Why they had 30 in the first place A year ago, four separate sales agents made sense. Agentforce ran ghosted leads. Artisan ran warm outbound. Monaco ran cold ICP. Qualified ran inbound conversion. Different audiences, different motions, different context. Splitting them was right at the time. Today, any one of those outbound agents can do what the other two do. The models got better at generalizing. The cost of maintaining four specialists went up while the benefit went down. Their rule now: if an agent is producing results, keep investing in that agent until you run out of time. Do not spin up a new one. ## One agent replaced an entire function 10K started as a dashboard. Then it became their AI VP of Marketing. Then Finance. Then RevOps. When the finance team went on vacation and collections fell behind, the instinct was to spin up a new agent. Instead, they built finance into 10K. What it does now, unattended: contract signed in PandaDoc, 60 seconds later 10K has it. Reads the contract. Flips the deal to Closed Won in Salesforce. Finds missing contacts and appends them. Creates the invoice in bill.com with the right terms. Sends it to AP. Queues collections reminders. Escalates to a human at 7 days past due. Customers email back and forth with AP without knowing they are emailing an agent. Then it told them it could calculate commissions. It already knew the AEs on each deal, payment terms, and when cash landed. They gave it the commission rules. Month end got easier. ## What this means for sales teams The AI agent stack is starting to look like the martech stack in 2015: too many tools, not enough integration, and diminishing returns on each new addition. The difference: agents can expand scope in ways SaaS tools never could. A dashboard does not wake up one day and offer to run collections. An agent can. If you are running more than 10 surfaced agents and feeling the overhead, the answer is not better agent management tools. It is fewer, deeper agents. Go deep on what is already working. Stop spinning up new ones until you run out of capacity on the existing stack. The ROI curve on an agentic product is steeper than anything pre-agentic, but only if you stay on it long enough to hit the steep part. The consolidation phase is here. Worth noting: it happened faster than the SaaS consolidation cycle.

SaaStr
18 days ago
News

Stripe hit $6.8B revenue, 47% FCF margins, eyeing $53B PayPal bid

## The Numbers Stripe closed 2025 at **$6.8 billion in revenue**, up 33% year over year. Free cash flow hit **$3.2 billion**, a 47% margin. Q1 2026 alone did **$2 billion** in revenue, putting the company on an $8 billion annual run rate. That is a Rule of 80 company at nearly $7 billion in revenue. Most public B2B companies are running Rule of 30 to 40 and getting punished for it. Stripe is roughly double the best public comps while growing faster. The company processed **$1.9 trillion** in total payment volume in 2025, up 34%. The tender market valued Stripe at **$159 billion** in February, up 74% from $91.5 billion a year earlier. On current revenue that is about 23x, roughly double what similar public companies get. ## Growth Re-Accelerated 2025 was Stripe's fastest growth year since 2021, at a revenue base more than 4x larger. The mechanic: Stripe processes payments for OpenAI, Anthropic, and the long tail of AI-native companies. It is not selling to the AI boom, it is taxing it. When your revenue is a percentage of your customers' revenue and your customers are compounding faster than anything in software history, you inherit their growth rate without paying their CAC. Usage-based pricing looks very different in an AI cycle. Companies with consumption-linked models are re-accelerating. The ones on flat per-seat contracts are watching NRR drift toward 100%. ## The Non-Payments Business Stripe's Revenue suite (Billing, Invoicing, Tax, Metronome) is tracking toward a **$1 billion annual run rate** in 2026. That is roughly 15% of total revenue coming from software attach rather than payment processing. The company paid a reported **$1 billion** for Metronome, the usage-based billing infrastructure behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and NVIDIA. Billing for AI is hard because what a customer owes changes constantly and pricing tiers stack. When your core take rate compresses, the answer is a second revenue line with different pricing logic. ## The PayPal Bid Stripe is reportedly bidding **$53 billion** for PayPal. That bid is possible because the company generates $3.2 billion a year in cash and does not need to ask permission. Cash flow buys optionality that a headline ARR number never will. For sales context: Stripe powers half the Fortune 100, 80% of the Forbes Cloud 100, and 78% of the Forbes AI 50. More than half of new businesses that joined in 2025 were outside the US, pointing to widening international footprint including ANZ expansion.

SaaStr
18 days ago
News

Up Bank founder Dom Pym: 25 years, three exits, one overnight success

## The 25-Year Ramp Period Dom Pym co-founded Up Bank in October 2018. Six years later, it sold to Bendigo Bank for $116 million with 400,000+ customers and nearly $1 billion in deposits. That is the headline. Here is what actually happened: Pym spent 25 years in fintech before Up. Three exits. Started as a software engineer at a Fortune 500 company. Built Pin Payments, Clear Interactive, Triple Bubble. Made roughly 100 investments through Euphemia and other syndicates. Co-founded Ferocia. Director at Fintech Australia. Up was not his first rodeo. It was the accumulation of decades of relationships, market experiments, and founder judgment about what works in Australian fintech. ## The Sales Angle That Wasn't Here is what matters for sales professionals: Up did not win by building a traditional sales organisation. Pym's insight was that they were not building a bank, they were changing people's relationship with money. That positioning meant consumer-led growth, not enterprise sales. No SDR team cold-calling businesses. No AE patch assignments. No quota relief discussions when the territory got optimised. Up scaled through product and brand, not through carrying a bag. That approach works in consumer fintech. It does not work in B2B SaaS, enterprise software, or most of the market where OnTargetIsh readers make their living. But the lesson holds: founder clarity on go-to-market strategy matters more than hiring faster. ## What This Means for Career Progression Pym's trajectory is worth studying if you are thinking about moving from sales into founding. He did not jump from AE to founder. He spent 25 years building technical capabilities, market knowledge, investor relationships, and founder judgment. That is the actual timeline for "overnight success" in ANZ tech. Not two years carrying a bag and then raising a seed round. Two decades of compounding decisions, most of which do not make headlines until the exit does. Up's exit validates the long game. It also shows why sales professionals considering founder transitions should expect a 10+ year horizon before the comp catches up to what they left behind.

Startup Daily
18 days ago
News

Trump hits Australia with 12.5% tariff, cites forced labour claims

Australian goods exported to the US will cop a 12.5% tariff starting today, after the Trump administration alleged Australia failed to adequately block goods made with forced labour from entering supply chains. The tariff covers most imports, with exemptions for beef, coffee, rare earths, pharmaceuticals, energy, and some metals. It hits 60 economies total, but the impact on ANZ tech and services companies appears limited: the levy targets physical goods, not software or professional services. For Australian exporters with US sales, the tariff adds cost to an already complicated market. The Australian government rejected the forced labour claim outright, saying there is no credible evidence supporting the finding. Business groups are pushing for sector-specific carve-outs. The dispute stems from a USTR investigation that claimed Australia had not imposed and effectively enforced a legal prohibition on imports produced with forced labour. Australian officials say the criticism ignores existing modern slavery legislation and trade settings. The tariff takes effect at 2pm today, replacing a 10% temporary baseline levy. The White House published the presidential memorandum overnight, with USTR Ambassador Jamieson Greer calling it a correction for "both a human rights abuse and distortive trade practice." For most ANZ sales teams, this is background noise unless you are selling physical goods into the US. If you are, the 12.5% just became part of your pricing conversation. Worth noting: the tariff went through a public consultation process, but implementation happened anyway. That tells you where the negotiation leverage sits. Australian officials are disputing the claim, but the tariff is live. If your comp is tied to US revenue and you ship physical product, run the numbers. If you are selling SaaS or services, carry on.

SmartCompany
19 days ago
News

Jason Lemkin walks through how lazy outreach killed a $100k deal

## The Setup Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr, was actively shopping for fund administration. Budget over $100k annually. He engaged with a vendor on LinkedIn and said give me your best shot. Warm lead, clear intent, six-figure ACV. The vendor sent two template emails. No research. No point of view. No reason to believe they understood his setup or could beat his current provider. The single link went to a generic deck behind a signup wall. Lemkin told the rep the truth: the email was lazy. Did you research my fund size? My goals? How your product beats what I run today? Did you spend ten minutes on this? The deal died. Not because the prospect went cold. Because the outreach killed it. ## What Actually Happened This is textbook failure on a qualified opportunity: **Poor qualification and discovery.** The rep knew Lemkin was in-market but did not know why, what he was solving for, or what switching costs he was weighing. You cannot earn a switch without understanding what the buyer runs today and why it is not working. **Template outreach to a hand-raiser.** Cold prospects expect templates. Warm prospects who just engaged expect you to show up like the account matters. A boilerplate email to someone who raised their hand does more damage than no email at all. It signals how much effort you will put in after the contract closes. **Gating generic content.** The deck was not customized. It was not even visible without a form fill. Gating real, specific content works. Gating a boilerplate overview stacks friction on friction and delivers nothing worth the cost. ## Why This Matters for Sales Teams Top of funnel is expensive. Ads, content, SDR headcount, events, all of it built to get qualified prospects in the door. The email is the cheap part, the last mile, and the one most inside your control. A rep who takes a hand-raised lead and answers it with a template is burning the expensive part of the funnel at the cheapest possible point. Lemkin's broader point: sales is often the most a vendor will ever care about you. Effort peaks during the sale and drops after close. Lazy outreach does not just fail to earn a reply. It disqualifies the vendor before the first call. ## The Pattern in Lost Deals This maps to common deal loss drivers across the research: - Reps qualify poorly or present too early without understanding the buyer's real problem. - Discovery is skipped or superficial, so differentiation never lands. - Follow-up is generic or inconsistent, and warm leads go cold not because the buyer lost interest but because the rep never gave them a reason to stay engaged. - Switching costs are real. Migration is a project. Risk is real. A new vendor has to clear a high bar: show me you are better, show me you will be more attentive, show me you will fix what I deal with today. Fall short and switching is not worth it, no matter how good the deck looks. Lemkin's fund admin vendor had a shot. They wasted it with lazy execution. That is the story.

SaaStr
19 days ago
News

Sendle brand acquired 7 months after collapse, no sales team details

The Sendle brand is back under new ownership, seven months after the Australian shipping platform shut down and left small business customers scrambling. Andrew McKenna, who runs logistics businesses McKenna Worldwide Services and Quantium Solutions Australia, acquired the Sendle brand, trademarks, and domain. Deal value was not disclosed. The acquisition was announced at the Online Retailer Conference & Expo in Sydney this week. Sendle was founded in 2014 by James Chin Moody, Sean Geoghegan, and Craig Davis. The company positioned itself as a carbon-neutral alternative to Australia Post, targeting small businesses and eCommerce sellers. It raised more than $100 million across its life, including a $45 million round in 2021. The platform operated in Australia, the US, and Canada, acting as a middleman between small businesses and carriers like Aramex and Couriers Please. In 2025, Sendle merged with US logistics businesses FirstMile and ACI Logistix to form Fast Group. That structure collapsed in January 2026 when directors voted to cease operations after the merger failed. McKenna said former Sendle customers and suppliers have shown strong interest in the brand's return. No details yet on sales team size, hiring plans, or comp structure. The company's previous sales operations spanned Sydney and Seattle, but current headcount and go-to-market strategy remain unclear. Worth noting: Sendle's collapse left thousands of small business customers without a carrier mid-contract. Whether this relaunch addresses those obligations or starts fresh is not public information. For sales professionals tracking logistics and eCommerce tools, this is early stage. Brand recognition exists, but execution under new ownership is untested. If McKenna rebuilds the sales team, comp and territory structure will matter more than nostalgia for the old brand.

SmartCompany
20 days ago
News

Salesforce ships AI search engine, cuts merchandising work by 85%

## What shipped Salesforce launched Agentic Commerce Search, an AI-native product discovery engine built from its February acquisition of Cimulate. The tool replaces keyword-based search with intent-aware natural language processing. B2C Commerce customers can toggle it on using existing catalog data. Non-Salesforce customers (Shopify, SAP, Adobe, Commercetools) access it via headless APIs. ## What it does for sales teams If you sell B2C Commerce or adjacent ecommerce platforms, this matters: **Merchandising overhead drops 85%.** Teams stop maintaining thousands of manual search rules and synonyms. That is real headcount ROI for enterprise accounts. **Natural language search.** Customers type "outfit for country concert on hot day" instead of stripping queries to two keywords. Salesforce research shows 39% of consumers already use AI for product search. Last holiday season, AI-referred traffic drove $263B in sales globally (21% of orders). **Small Language Model approach.** Instead of relying on massive clickstream data, the engine simulates millions of shopping journeys per customer. Salesforce claims this delivers 10x more behavioral signal than traditional search. ## The sales angle Salesforce tripled product investment on this since the Cimulate acquisition closed. It is now a top priority for the Agentforce Commerce roadmap, which means: - AEs selling B2C Commerce have a legitimate differentiator against Adobe and SAP - Cross-sell opportunity into existing Commerce accounts - Headless API availability means you can sell to non-Salesforce shops ## What to watch Integration with Shopper Agent (Salesforce's conversational commerce tool) is live. That creates a bundling play: search plus agent equals digital concierge. For enterprise AEs: merchandising teams burning cycles on search rules is a known pain point. Quantify that headcount cost in discovery. An 85% reduction in manual work is a real budget conversation.

Salesforce Blog
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