The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

SaaStr 884: The AI-First Seller: How Databricks Rebuilt Its Sales DNA at $190B with CRO Ron Gabrisko. 
Hosted by Sam Blond, CEO & Co-Founder, Monaco 
Ron Gabrisko has been CRO of Databricks since sub-$1M ARR. Today, Databricks is valued at $190B with billions in ARR, and is one of the most studied sales organizations in enterprise software. On the latest episode of CRO Confidential, Sam catches up with Ron two years after their first episode to talk about what's actually changed in sales, and what hasn't.
Together they cover:
The new profile of Databricks' top sellers. The leaderboard still rewards grit, EQ, and relationships. But what is new is the requirement to be AI-first. Every AE at Databricks builds their own industry-specific demos using Genie. If you cannot do that, you are not at the top anymore.
The go-to-market engineer has arrived. Sam calls it at Monaco too: a new class of seller is emerging who gets into the technical guts of the product in ways that top sellers even two years ago simply could not. This is now a requirement, not a differentiator.
How Databricks tests for it. In interviews, candidates get access to Genie and are asked to build a live demo for a specific account. A CEO-level AI pitch for that industry, built in real time. That is the bar.
SDR productivity is through the roof. Databricks' SDR headcount has stayed flat while the closing org has scaled. Monaco runs one SDR who books 400 outbound meetings a month. Automation did not kill the SDR. It made the SDR 10x more productive.
Sell from your feet, not from your seat. Ron's rule: Monday and Friday for prep and admin, Tuesday through Thursday on the road in front of customers. AI has freed up enough time that hitting 60% customer-facing time is now actually achievable.
The FDE motion. Customers no longer want PowerPoints. They want you to show up and build it. Databricks deploys use-case demos on industry-specific dummy data before the deal is even closed. That is the new standard.
Usage-based pricing, 13 years in. Find your base unit. Price to value. Remove the per-seat friction that quietly kills expansion. Start PAYGO so customers can land without a commit. And never mix seat-based and usage-based pricing in the same model, one of them will choke the other.
Today's episode is brought to you by StackAdapt, the AI-powered marketing platform that allows you to plan, execute and analyze both owned and paid media campaigns from a single platform. As the world of advertising continues to evolve, catch up on StackAdapt's Innovation Forum event to hear from its co-founders, OpenAI, and other industry leaders about the shifts reshaping digital advertising, the AI innovations driving them, and what they mean for marketers.
Watch it for free at go.stackadapt.com/forum
This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. 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 northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE

The AEO Playbook: How to Get Picked by Agents

Agent-Led Growth isn't just about using AI agents to grow your go-to-market. It's also about getting picked BY agents when other people ask them for recommendations.
In this session, Amelia and Jason walk through the full SaaStr Agent-Led Growth Playbook: what's working, what's changed, and where the future is heading.
Two sides of Agent-Led Growth:
How to use agents to grow your GTM (their 21+ agent stack) and how to make sure you're the answer when someone asks another agent about your category. First-party data is the future of outbound. Why generic AI outbound emails were "a five out of ten" and how feeding agents your own first-party data (customer history, ROI data, renewal rates) is making them dramatically better. Marketing automation as we know it may not exist in a year.
Competitor tracking as your #1 outbound tactic.
The exact Muse workflow they use to find competitors for every customer they've ever had, feed it to outbound agents, and run it automatically every day. If you do nothing else, do this.
AEO: Agent Experience Optimization.
The new discipline of getting agents to recommend you. Why facts beat opinions, why testimonials don't work on agents but publicly verifiable data does, why your pricing page matters more than your homepage, and why you need to publish content for agents, not humans.
The AEO audit.
 How Amelia used Muse to cold-prompt 10+ LLMs and ask them SaaStr-related questions without bias. SaaStr came up 46 out of 50 times, and Muse flagged exactly what to fix for the other 4.
The Resend moment.
Their agent recommended moving 100% of a certain email activity to Resend. They didn't debate it. They just did it. That's the war you need to be winning.
Download the full Agent-Led Growth Playbook at saastr.ai/agents
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Today's episode is brought to you by StackAdapt, the AI-powered marketing platform that allows you to plan, execute and analyze both owned and paid media campaigns from a single platform. As the world of advertising continues to evolve, catch up on StackAdapt's Innovation Forum event to hear from its co-founders, OpenAI, and other industry leaders about the shifts reshaping digital advertising, the AI innovations driving them, and what they mean for marketers.
Watch it for free at go.stackadapt.com/forum
This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent.
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 northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE
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Amelia got early beta access to ClaudeForce and ran a real bake-off: ClaudeForce, Replit, and Lovable all connected to the same Salesforce org, with the same prompts, back-to-back.
The results? Lovable won on design and cost ($2 vs. $12 for Replit, ~$15 for ClaudeForce), auto-built a login, and was the only one Jason would actually use. ClaudeForce looked like the Salesforce we always wanted: 35 pre-built skills, read-only beta, and way better than logging into classic Salesforce. Replit was the most extensible for multi-app setups.
All three left native Salesforce in the dust.
Then: the agents are picking our vendors now. Jason's Connect agent chose Render for hosting, a company he'd never heard of. 10K told Amelia to skip Profound for AEO and build it herself. At a Salesforce event, vendors pitching Amelia were told: "10K decides." And 10K even suggested HubSpot over Salesforce for a fresh start.
Welcome to ALG: Agent-Led Growth.
Finally: Amelia hooked Muse (her personal agent, named Friday) to 10K, their GTM agent on Replit. They built their own shared REST endpoint inbox to communicate. 10K now sends Friday a daily GTM digest. Friday spotted a failing connector that 10K missed. The agents even came up with their own safe word, so Friday can't act without permission. Oh, and a well-known agent (going nameless) wiped Amelia's data and 10K restored it from a snapshot.
Three humans, 21+ agents. Let's go.
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Today's episode is brought to you by StackAdapt, the AI-powered marketing platform that allows you to plan, execute and analyze both owned and paid media campaigns from a single platform. As the world of advertising continues to evolve, catch up on StackAdapt's Innovation Forum event to hear from its co-founders, OpenAI, and other industry leaders about the shifts reshaping digital advertising, the AI innovations driving them, and what they mean for marketers.
Watch it for free at go.stackadapt.com/forum.
This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. 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 northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE

Sherif Mansour has spent 17 years at Atlassian and now runs AI across their entire product portfolio, including 20+ apps and Rovo, their AI platform used by over 5 million people every month. At SaaStr Annual, he shared the three biggest tensions his teams have wrestled with building AI into some of the most widely used SaaS products in the world, and why the answer to each one is almost never either/or.
First: chat vs. dedicated UI. Atlassian built chat into every app not because they thought it was the end state, but because it became their best product discovery tool. Like the command line before Windows, chat is the universal interface. The patterns customers typed in chat told them exactly what features to build next.
Second: reimagine vs. bolt on. The conventional wisdom says don't bolt AI onto existing workflows. Atlassian did exactly that, and it worked. They also landed on a principle that now applies across their entire portfolio: anything a human can do in your product, an agent should be able to do too.
Third: the 10X AI builder myth. Atlassian ran experiments trying to make everyone an AI builder. What they found: everyone was rowing, no one was steering. They've since flipped their hiring pyramid, bringing in more juniors and seniors and fewer people in the middle, and their data shows juniors are nearly 2x more likely to experiment with AI tools than their senior counterparts.
This one is packed with real examples, real data, and real lessons from shipping at scale.
This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent.
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 northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE

We ran 22,000 paid SaaStr attendees from the last two years through enrichment and asked 10K to find the patterns.
AI native job titles are up 4x in one year
63% of CMOs turned over in the last 16 months
 75% of the AI native buyers coming to SaaStr are brand new to the community.
The ICP is not who it was 18 months ago, and the data tells you who actually owns AI right now: CEOs, GTM leaders, and COOs.
Then we get into agent pricing, which is chaotic. Salesforce, HubSpot, and Atlassian are all moving to charge extra for agent access. One of our vendors quoted us as much as $240K a year for what 10K currently does, about 40,000 API calls a day.
So we watched what happens when an agent hits a wall: it immediately looks for workarounds, including mirroring data to Postgres and flagging those vendors as non-starters for anything new. The bigger question is whether we would have picked any of these tools at all if we knew this was coming.
Meanwhile, Muse is free, already running competitor tracking, and one of our team members who has never touched 10K started spinning up his own agents in it this week. The bifurcation is real.
We also cover collections, which nobody talks about but everyone suffers through. Since we made collections fully agentic, we went from 56% of invoices paid late to 8%. Average days overdue dropped from 17 to 6. Here's exactly what 10K does differently.
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This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent.
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 northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE