Latest updates for ANZ sales professionals
SaaStr deployed 20+ AI agents, cut headcount from 20+ humans to 3, grew revenue 47% YoY. The catch: AI multiplies your existing playbook. If your messaging doesn't work at human scale, 10x zero is still zero.
SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin says Adobe Marketo went down for a day and a half, broke unsubscribe links for two weeks, and missed a 450,000-subscriber send. Then Adobe asked for a 20% renewal increase. Lemkin runs SaaStr with 20+ AI agents and says the company has stopped hiring human SDRs and AEs: legacy SaaS cannot be operated by agents, so it gets replaced.
Jason Lemkin's team moved 10 years of data off Marketo after their AI agent kept hitting API rate limits. The agent recommended the switch. The migration cost $14 in agent time. This is what procurement looks like now.
Jason Lemkin's team trained an AI agent to flip deals to Closed Won, generate invoices, chase payment, and calculate commission. Took 4 real deals to get it right. Now runs end to end with human on the loop, not in it.
Jason Lemkin's SaaStr AI scaled to 20+ production AI agents handling SDR, BDR, and support work while cutting human headcount to just 3. Revenue up 47% YoY. The agents generated $1M+ in direct sales, but they still need traditional CRM infrastructure. Here is why ripping out your sales stack for a Postgres database does not work.
Three B2B acquisitions in 30 days, all around $3B, all buying the same thing: proprietary data to train AI models. Salesforce bought Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B, but the real story is a $100M AI agent line growing 350% YoY. The legacy helpdesk business? Flat. For ANZ sales teams: this validates outcome-based pricing and shows legacy seat-based models are being commoditised.
Jason Lemkin's AI VP of Marketing executed 125 actions in an hour for $13.42, less than California minimum wage. Monthly cost: $94.51. For context, a human VP of Marketing costs around $145 per hour fully loaded. The gap between building AI agents (expensive) and running them (cheap) is reshaping cost models for B2B teams.
A founding customer churned after nearly two decades because Adobe Marketo raised pricing instead of offering a retention discount. The case highlights a common trap: legacy vendors protect NRR metrics by letting at-risk customers walk, rather than discounting to buy time for product improvement. For account managers, the lesson is clear: renewal discounts work when migration friction is high, and losing a logo costs more than the NRR hit.
A major Telstra network outage disrupted businesses across Australia on Wednesday morning, affecting mobile calls, data, and payment processing. Sales teams relying on Telstra's network for CRM access and customer communication were cut off, with some businesses reporting they could not process card payments. The outage started before 5am AEST and affected Telstra customers plus resellers including Boost, Belong, and Aldi Mobile.
Australian DTC brand Who Gives A Crap pulled its AI-powered customer email system after it told a subscriber their toilet paper would jump from $1.38 to $2.90 per roll. The error highlights implementation risks as more sales and CX teams deploy automated communication tools without proper guardrails.
Jason Lemkin's SaaStr runs real revenue on custom AI agents. They didn't replace Salesforce, they went headless on top of it. That distinction explains why rolling your own CRM works for a three-person team but breaks at 40 reps, and why most sales orgs will keep paying for the platform even as agents handle the workflow layer.
Vercel automated lead qualification with an AI agent that costs $5,000 a year to run. The company reduced its SDR team from 10 people to 1.25, redeploying the rest into higher-value roles. COO Jeanne DeWitt Grosser says it is a 32x ROI, and SDR quotas went up 30% that quarter.