Will growth return? How will AI influence GTM?
There's so many questions as we near the end of 2024. In today's episode, we cover the key trends and predictions for 2025.
This episode is brought to you by by Fullcast, the only AI-powered platform that streamlines your entire sales lifecycle — from plan to pay. With modules like territory and quota management, routing, and capacity planning, Fullcast adapts to your unique needs — whether you need one solution or an all-in-one platform.
Ready to see the difference? Visit Fullcast.com and mention the Revenue Formula Podcast to unlock an exclusive premium gift, just for listeners!
Never miss a new episode, join our newsletter on revenueformula.substack.com
There's so many questions as we near the end of 2024. In today's episode, we cover the key trends and predictions for 2025.
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (01:21) - Go-to-Market Trends for 2025
- (02:21) - But first: Will we see more growth next year?
- (04:17) - AI's Impact on Sales and Hiring
- (08:24) - More sales roles
- (12:34) - The rise of AI agencies
- (16:31) - GTM Engineers
- (21:53) - Teams of 20 will beat teams of 200
- (29:03) - Branding in the Age of AI
- (33:44) - Conclusion and New Year Wishes
This episode is brought to you by by Fullcast, the only AI-powered platform that streamlines your entire sales lifecycle — from plan to pay. With modules like territory and quota management, routing, and capacity planning, Fullcast adapts to your unique needs — whether you need one solution or an all-in-one platform.
Ready to see the difference? Visit Fullcast.com and mention the Revenue Formula Podcast to unlock an exclusive premium gift, just for listeners!
Never miss a new episode, join our newsletter on revenueformula.substack.com
Creators & Guests
What is The Revenue Formula?
This podcast is about scaling tech startups.
Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.
With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.
If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.
[00:00:00] Toni: Hey everyone, this is Toni Hohlbein. You are listening to the Revenue Formula with Mikkel and Toni. In today's episode, we are talking about the top go to market trends for 2025 and spoiler alert, it's not just AI.
[00:00:15] Enjoy.
[00:00:15] Before we jump into the show, today's episode is brought to you by Fullcast. The only AI powered platform that streamlines your entire sales cycle from plan to pay.
[00:00:27] Customers report up 80 percent cost savings, 20 percent growth in pipeline, and 30 percent boost in RevOps efficiency.
[00:00:35] With modules like Territory and Quota Management, Routing and Capacity Planning, Fullcast adapts to your unique needs whether you need one solution or an all in one platform
[00:00:47] Visit fullcast. com, book a demo, and mention the revenue formula podcast. To unlock an exclusive premium gift just for listeners
[00:00:57] And now enjoy the show.
[00:01:00] Mikkel: So what the listener doesn't know is, we're recording not together in the same room. We used to be able to hear the intro music. Now we for technical reasons and just a meanwhile a weather report. It is incredibly dark and gray this morning. It's raining. It's just, it could not get more boring this morning, but we have a not so boring topic.
[00:01:21] We're going to at least hop
[00:01:22] into today which is the go to market trends.
[00:01:25] Toni: Yeah. So for the, for the probably very sad and weird and shitty weather moments that you're going to have between Christmas and New Year's when you're overstuffed from eating all the food with maybe your family and you're just annoyed about that at some point. And then you don't have anything to do until New Year's.
[00:01:41] This podcast might cheer you up and talk, you know, what are we going to talk about today again? I forgot.
[00:01:46] Mikkel: No, exactly. I literally said it two seconds ago, by the way, but
[00:01:50] we're going to hop into the trends that we at least see coming in 2025. It's not necessarily that we're expert in every single subject, but the thing is, we've talked with so many folks as
[00:01:59] of late, as we've been planning out. Let's say the next wave of guests.
[00:02:03] So, just aired is Kyle Poya on how AI is transforming pricing. We had Jakob van der Kooij on how AI is taking away your job and there's a lot of change happening. And we kind of wanted to curate some of the things you know, that we've heard from others, but also our own opinions to
[00:02:19] kind of prepare you for the coming year.
[00:02:21] And I think the top of mind thing everyone has and just wants to ask straight off the cuff is, will we see more growth next
[00:02:30] year?
[00:02:31] Toni: Yeah. Will we see more growth? So the,
[00:02:33] Mikkel: please make it return.
[00:02:35] Toni: the thing is a lot of people on the planet, like in the economy, had a fantastic year, like an absolutely
[00:02:44] Mikkel: Yeah, true, yeah, yeah.
[00:02:45] Toni: We saw, I posted this recently, we saw S& P 500 is up 27%.
[00:02:53] 27%. That's absolutely outrageous. And you know, these, these parts of the economy doing, doing fantastically well.
[00:03:02] And then we kind of see other parts of the economy economy, especially SaaS, Just not doing great, right? And then, then you have this whole flip over It's like, wait, wait a minute. There's, you know, Clavio went IPO There's Doximity, there's Toast There's, you know, ServiceTitan Kind of recently All of those companies, they just went public and they're growing really well and kind of, they're SaaS companies.
[00:03:24] So what's, what's different from them? The difference is they're not selling to SaaS. That's the difference. They're, you know, Clavio's e commerce, Doximity is like a, for doctors and and hospitals and something like this, Service Titans for plumbers and carpenters and, you know, those kinds of folks Toast is restaurants I'm forgetting someone.
[00:03:45] And those, those are the you know. Everyone but SaaS
[00:03:50] is doing absolutely phenomenally well. The problem is with most SaaS companies is we're selling to other SaaS companies and that basically doesn't work right now. Hasn't been working last year, hasn't been working the year before. And you know, if this is any prediction, probably still won't work next year.
[00:04:07] I think, you know, that thing's still not going to pick up next year.
[00:04:10] Mikkel: no. So if your ICP is a B2B SaaS companies,
[00:04:14] you might want to revisit that. I think it's also interesting.
[00:04:17] You and I had a conversation recently about what does it take to build great software as in a succeeding company? And it's
[00:04:23] like, well, if it is mission critical software, such as. you know, your accounting system or your email system or your CRM.
[00:04:33] Like then, yeah, then you have justification to exist, but there's probably also a bunch of companies that aren't at that level, which makes it incredibly difficult, incredibly difficult. So yeah, I think I think it's also a weird time. Like we're seeing a bunch of public companies beat beat their quarterly earnings
[00:04:50] targets Asana.
[00:04:51] Yeah. Jumped like 40 percent on beating basically the target. And I think
[00:04:55] probably next year Outlooks will, yeah, it's crazy. And basically Outlooks will probably get, start being lifted a little bit more. So yeah I, I think it's also one of the things you and I discussed was the whole, when people talk about will growth return, I think there's this hope. Of maybe it's going to be as it was in 2021, you know, the hey, hey days of SaaS when it was just crazy growth. Are we going to come back to that ever? You feel?
[00:05:21] Toni: No, I think, I think this was an outlier. I think that was simply what it was. We're back to kind of exactly where we were before that outlier occurred. We've now been pretty stable at exactly that level. And and I think that's fine. I think there's a little bit of a depression still around public markets being able to, You know, accommodate folks that want to go public or accommodate folks that want to, you know, exit into a public company.
[00:05:46] That will probably soften and we will see some of that kind of go better. But I don't think we will, we will go back to a time where every SaaS companies, companies overly flush with cash, which they then spend on their friendly other SaaS companies, et cetera, et cetera, which then kind of build up this hype, right?
[00:06:04] Because the, The 2021 times that we saw, those were, those were not only fake revenue numbers. I mean, people really sold a lot more and kind of a lot faster and there was not really a reason why this should slow down. But what we didn't know back then is that big part of that growth was other SaaS companies kind of was the eco chamber, right?
[00:06:23] And once that crumbled, once that you know, amount of cash kind of dried up. That's then basically what created this thing and which made it such a weird situation until we kind of, you know, realized that that's actually what it is because all the companies that didn't sell to us kept doing fantastically well, kind of that kept growing and so forth.
[00:06:40] Right. So I think if there's any prediction for next year, I think SaaS companies will stay as they are, they will keep buying as they are right now, which is not much, it's decent, it's okay, it's kind of actually probably adequate for their size you know, that's how you just see it. We will see AR companies Blasting ever, ever further forward and kind of through the roof and kind of doing all kinds of crazy stuff, right?
[00:07:04] And again, right? Who's, who's the predominant buyer for, for AI companies? Well, it's, it's kind of big enterprises also, right? It's, it's not just the you know, small SaaS company wants to tweak a little bit here and there. I mean, we see some of that as well, but when you, for example, look at 11 axis growth, right?
[00:07:21] I know. They sold a lot of stuff into just the Mittelstand in Germany, right? Kind of, they sold into the mid market in Germany, not, not only to kind of every SaaS company that has an SDR team, but to kind of normal companies. And that, that is, that is the target that you need to try and hit.
[00:07:37] You know, normal companies, mid sized up until enterprise they will, they both have still budgets.
[00:07:44] They both want to spend money. And they're interested in this AI thing and trying to figure out how that can maybe convert how they're, how they're operating right now. So, so that part of the of the, the economy and of the, of the industry will probably keep growing like a lot.
[00:07:59] Mikkel: Yeah. I, I, I agree with that. I think the other question that probably lingers as well is what's the hiring situation going to look like for a lot of
[00:08:09] folks? Right. And I think you and I discussed this before hitting record, like everyone knows certain departments like marketing, they're, they're being cut.
[00:08:16] They have been cut and they are probably also going to get cut more. Just because of the amount of technology and how this whole go to market and growth is, is panning out.
[00:08:24] That's, that's just how it is, but there's a kind of, I would say counterintuitive thing happening right now
[00:08:31] that you and I have read from Sequoia.
[00:08:38] Toni: a couple of eyebrows when but when we saw this, and actually this was an article from Sequoia on the heels of Salesforce announcing that they're going to hire, I think, a thousand sales reps something like that. And this was already like, wait a minute, they're hiring a thousand sales reps to sell the AI sales solution.
[00:08:56] That's replacing sales reps kind of what is it now? Is it do we need more? Do we need fewer? What I mean, I'm confused now,
[00:09:02] Mikkel: are we selling snake oil?
[00:09:04] It's like literally going to be the question
[00:09:06] Toni: Yeah, but it's snakes selling snake oil.
[00:09:08] Mikkel: Yeah, that's true.
[00:09:08] Toni: it's super weird.
[00:09:09] Mikkel: Hey, as long as they get a mouse commission, then who cares?
[00:09:13] Toni: Okay. We solved it. No. So the, the thing is and this also comes through in the paper they, as I just mentioned, AI companies will keep growing and lots of that sales process will still be managed by salespeople. There's, there are other parts of the sales funnel, like, you know, SDRs and maybe some disco calls or whatever.
[00:09:33] Increasingly so will be taken over. But selling a million dollar ticket, which isn't something out of the ordinary for Salesforce, let's just be honest, and that's not going to be replaced by an AI agent anytime soon, like for a long time, probably. Right. Because like, why, why would we, it was like, it doesn't make any sense.
[00:09:49] Right. So for those tickets, obviously you need salespeople to sell them. And Salesforce is seeing tremendous demand there actually. I think that that's something crazy, like 2 trillion. AI actions completed or something like that. They, they announced a crazy milestone, I think a quarter after the released agent force.
[00:10:07] So they're seeing this thing working out, right. And, and basically in order to satisfy that demand, Salesforce in particular, but the general as a whole, you know, they will probably get in a bunch of salespeople on how to kind of meet that demand, right. So there will be a spike for the sales folks.
[00:10:22] You know, as some of those companies grow, obviously they will hire as well in order to create that scaffolding in order to support the organization. But I think that there won't be any particular spike in another part of the organization. There will be many areas where maybe those organizations don't need so many folks, right?
[00:10:40] For example, Benioff itself in a recent podcast actually talked about how 2025 will be the first year ever. Where they're going to be staying flat on developers. And it's not like a cost cutting exercise and you know, all kinds of, no, it's you know, all the AI stuff that we brought in, we actually don't need to.
[00:11:00] Get more developers actually Yeah,
[00:11:06] we
[00:11:06] Mikkel: So, you know, we yeah.
[00:11:08] Toni: Yeah, we can we can hit our targets just for the same and someone did the math You know funky math And they were coming up with something like 700 million. This, I mean, it's a big company, Salesforce, that alone, but they're not hiring more folks next year in the development department, it's going to save them 700 million, right.
[00:11:26] And that will, you know, they're hiring a bunch of sales folks, but no one in development like that, that will give you a clue how the rest of the market is probably also going to shape up.
[00:11:35] Mikkel: But so it's so funny, like the way they phrased it was like, because of AI, we'll have more salespeople, which is counterintuitive
[00:11:42] because you have AI SDRs and all these things promising you that you need fewer sales reps. I think on the other hand, what, what you will see as well, driving the growth of hiring sales folks is certain companies where, where the unit economics didn't make sense for them to have salespeople. will actually start working out so they can have salespeople,
[00:12:03] which is going to be a really interesting development to see that someone can sell a software license that's maybe 500 bucks a month or something to that
[00:12:13] end. But because the seller is so hyper efficient You know what? It can totally work out.
[00:12:18] It can totally work out. And I think that is also going to be interesting to kind of see what kind of shifts happen there to, to the motions that now make sense to, to operate. So I think, yeah, that's definitely one of, of the other predictions, trends we'll, we'll see going into the new year.
[00:12:34] Since we're on the topic of AI, One of the things for previous episode, we, we found that was super curious, was AI, implementing AI is the number one priority folks have out there, right? This is from a, I believe a HubSpot state of sales 2024. So this year it was the number one priority, which makes sense, but guess what the number one challenge was implementing AI.
[00:13:00] And what you and I have discussed is, is 2025 going to be the year when we see AI agencies rising?
[00:13:07] Toni: So I think this is exactly what's gonna happen. So we, we've seen for the last two years, the, the companies really making money with the AI boom. Like an NVIDIA OpenAI aside where actually Capgemini, Accenture, BCG, Bain Co, McKinsey.
[00:13:25] Mikkel: Yeah, all the AI experts.
[00:13:29] Toni: All the AI first kind of really cutting edge
[00:13:34] has have been around since like, I don't know, one and a half years kind of companies. They're basically been making most of the money in the market in terms of AI. And jokes aside, that's, I think that trend is going to continue, right? When I, you know, rattle off those, you know, four or five big names, it's obviously, you know, some of them do the strategy stuff only they just come in and do a slide day and it's like, no, you should totally do AI.
[00:13:57] Or some of them are also doing some of the implementation work, right? And what I think is going to happen we will see, we will see a lot more of. Agencies, consultancies around implementing AI
[00:14:12] popping up, right? I think we will see a lot more of that and I don't mean this in a way of They're a bunch of technical agencies out there that help you You know, build your, I don't know, AI strategy and encode it and stuff into the product.
[00:14:26] And I'm not talking about this, I'm talking about, think about those, all those RevOps agencies or go to market consultants. Kind of all those kind of folks, maybe even the same ones. I think they will rebrand into, I can help you implement AI into your go to market, into your whatever you choose, right? I think there will be a massive wave.
[00:14:46] I think we've seen some of this already with all of those clay agencies. It's kind of, you know, HubSpot clay agencies, kind of the same idea. And I think their next big horse that they're going to all be jumping on is like, hey, you know, don't you also want to have AI in your go to market? And everyone says yes, because, you know, Jacko said so, Chris Walker said so.
[00:15:06] Maybe, you know, the revenue formula said so too. And, but we're struggling with it and I think there will be a big swath of people jumping on that problem because it's a real problem that needs to get solved.
[00:15:15] Mikkel: I think it's also Especially gonna happen because there's gonna be a lot of folks who have been Probably dragging their feet at implementing some kind of AI assisted seller or something down those lines,
[00:15:27] even, you know, could be for marketing purposes. And the reason they've been dragging their feet is they've seen all the bad examples, right?
[00:15:33] They've seen those folks who initially implemented in a terrible way, spammed the market and basically killed any demand for their software ever. Because it was just terrible outreach, right?
[00:15:44] And I think a lot of folks, they're excited about what the technology promises, but they worry about the downside.
[00:15:51] So they need kind of experts to come in and help build out those safeguards so they don't screw up themselves, right? So I think that's one side. And the other is, a bunch of these solutions will be priced out on basically the tasks they perform. Right. So it's very much almost a consumption based pricing. And what that triggers is, Oh, are we going to get, you know, a massive bill from this company next quarter? So there will also be a need to kind of, how can we control the costs of all the proms or the AI credits we're using? Right. So I
[00:16:23] think those two combined, they're going to create an additional need for having those experts to support organizations.
[00:16:31] Toni: And, I think the, the flip side of that coin kind of when people go, Oh, should we outsource? Should we insource? The insourcing solution will actually be something More and more folks are also now calling go to market engineers,
[00:16:44] GTM engineers. And it's actually pretty interesting, right? Kind of in our journey at Roblox, we actually arrived at the same point.
[00:16:50] The, the GTM engineer wasn't born yet. It was still like. Revenue operations kind of folks.
[00:16:56] But when, when we, you know, we were looking for first SDR, basically it was clear to us that, Hey, it needs not only be someone that can pick up the phone, but also needs to be someone that can build the machine around it.
[00:17:08] And I'm not saying kind of. You know, the hiring plan and the compensation plan, no, kind of how are all the different pieces wired together? How are we actually implementing the newest AI technology in order to make this super smooth and kind of reach people in different ways? And we ended up hiring a fantastic guy, David Kubler.
[00:17:24] I think he found a job already. So he's off the market, but He basically became our go to market engineer without us knowing it and he had a Ravos background and a sales background. You
[00:17:34] And I think I think that's the kind of setup you will want to have for, you know, adding, you know, creating, creating this internal AI go to market thing that you're thinking about.
[00:17:47] Because really that person needs to have two different skill sets. One is obviously, you know, understands the technical side, be excited by the whole AI thing.
[00:17:55] But number two needs to kind of have walked in those shoes. You know, I think
[00:18:00] someone was saying the other day, the, the, the lines between operations and execution starting to blur in that role, right?
[00:18:08] Because both you're buying and implementing tools, which is squarely like, Oh, you're revenue operations now. But then at the same time, they're kind of sending their drafting, the messages, maybe even recording a video, kind of doing the sequences, running their stuff, booking meetings. And then it's like, oh, wait a minute, that's not RevOps, that's something else.
[00:18:26] And in order for someone to really nail that, I think they need to have front line experience. And I think another example where we've seen this in the past is basically in marketing. You've seen a lot of folks in, you know, performance marketings particularly that basically needed to understand not only the numbers part and how this whole PPC works and the networks and so forth, but also, well, what is triggering what reaction with my, with my prospects, with my audience, you know, what do you want to put in front of them?
[00:18:54] How much do you want to pay for that to get what, you know, return of investment and really running this as a lab and experimenting and testing. And improving that could not, you know, never be only someone that only looks at the numbers. They also had to understand a little bit how the audience works.
[00:19:10] And I think the same thing you will see for sales and CS and
[00:19:14] some parts of marketing soon to actually. So that will be kind of a new breed of folks. I think you need to either nurture or hire or find or steal from agencies that probably going to label themselves as go to market engineers.
[00:19:26] Mikkel: I think this also was a super interesting conversation you and I had off air at one point, which is, Hey, who's going to spearhead the implementation of the AI strategy? And we're like, Hey, I just don't see anyone in RevOps coming to marketing and telling me how We should implement AI because they don't understand the different tasks being performed, like conceptually.
[00:19:48] Sure. They might have an idea of, of what is actually going on, but think about that demand gen person. There's so much, you know, tacit knowledge he or she will have that I think the true winners will be those who. who. actually understand the field and then understand some of the techno non technological components, which for us, at least you and I, in this conversation is the go to market
[00:20:09] engineer.
[00:20:09] That's the person who can say, Hey, actually, you know what? We're going to stitch these four technologies together. Then we're going to have AI. And what it'll do is it'll spit out because we were running 500 ads on Google. It's going to spit out 500 new versions once a week. So we can kind of test and optimize from
[00:20:25] there.
[00:20:26] Toni: Yeah, and it's like also all, you know, where there's a problem in this part of the funnel, the conversion rate isn't working out, kind of need to work on. So basically really merging this merging this art and science piece of, of, you know, each of these roles a little bit more together, right? And some wonderful things happen then, because, you know, for them to use their own data to make better decisions, they need to make sure they have clean data, so guess what, they're kind of actually caring about the CRM setup, and how this all things work, and, you know, is the data there clean, and can we use it, and can we repurpose it, and so forth.
[00:20:57] And you're starting to have basically someone that you know, cares about it, but also basically sets up the foundations. We talked about this a lot on the show that people with shitty data, shitty processes, that, you know, just slapping AR on top is not going to help you. So you kind of, you need to kind of build this up from the base you know, in the right way.
[00:21:15] And those kind of hybrid folks that I think will probably, you know, they will see a surge in 2025. Those hybrid folks kind of combine those things and actually solve those problems from the bottom up, right? So I don't want to say I'm excited about it, but I think that's totally what's going to happen.
[00:21:33] How is that going to interplay with revenue operations?
[00:21:36] I don't quite know yet. We'll do an episode on this, you know, later, but there's some really interesting stuff happening here.
[00:21:43] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:21:44] probably going to, they're going to take some work away from, from revenue operations that they really wanted to do. And then it's time for some introspection. Sorry. Sorry. I just put out my initial opinion for that episode.
[00:21:53] I think the other thing you know, we've, we've discussed is there's going to be a new breed of companies. There's going to be a new breed of companies. We'll start seeing more and more and more and it's going to be a company around 20 people. And what's going to be special about them is they're going to outgrow the companies with maybe 200 people. And they're going to do so by a lot.
[00:22:16] Toni: So, you know, picture this. You really have two companies, same size in terms of ARR. But one company is 20 people and the other company is 200 people.
[00:22:26] And I think we will start to see the first examples of that. Whether or not that's exactly the same split, right? But we will, we will see companies that are similar in revenue size, But are fundamentally different in their cost basis and how they're running the show, right?
[00:22:41] And and what we will also see is that those smaller teams will clearly Clearly outperform the other teams.
[00:22:52] And this is not like a financial thing of like, Ooh, they can raise. And then, you know, they can spend more CAC to acquire whatever. No, no, it's nothing to do with that. They will just simply be out operating out, executing out, competing the other team.
[00:23:07] Right. So why, why is, how can that be? You know, so number one the team of 20, in order to get to the 20 million, you They will have to, you know, been able to set up their company in a way where they actually can already start using some of those AI agents in some shape or form, right? It will have to be the case.
[00:23:27] Otherwise, you will not get to that disparity between those two organizations, right? And what then happens is a pretty crazy growth loop, right? Because people are currently only thinking about, oh, AI will help me save money. But I think what's also starting to become more and more clear, AI will also help you to make money.
[00:23:47] It will, you know, will move in both directions at the same time, right? The saving side is pretty clear. It's like, okay, don't need Mikkel anymore. I can do this, you know, without that salary. But these, you know, increasing your revenue side is actually coming from a perspective of, well, let's just say you have AI reps having conversations.
[00:24:07] With your prospects and, you know, they will have a playbook that they're executing, but then they will also keep learning across 20, 30, 40 conversations happening per day, you know, across all the different agents, across all the different prospects you're talking to. They will start experimenting and seeing, Where they're actually consistently getting better results, and then they will, the next day, roll this out to everyone else, or, whatever, to all the other agents in the network, and then they will kind of learn again, and then they will find something that works, and then they will roll it out again.
[00:24:39] And the best thing is, those AI agents, they will not, you know, leave the company they won't ask for a pay raise they won't forget. Like, Oh yeah, you told me yesterday, but you know, I forgot. I had a really good night out. Those things will just not happen. Right. So you basically at this level, we'll have a much more robust and I would argue, scalable
[00:25:01] infrastructure in place compared to organization with 200 people with like, 40 sales reps and, you know, 10 managers, and then, you know, maybe they have a performance review once a year, and maybe there's a You know, a sales performance coach that screams into the void and nothing changes and, you know, battle cards that never get read.
[00:25:21] And so, it's like you have all of those, right now, seemingly archaic problems that will be sitting with this one company, but not with the other, right? And this is just one example of all the different ways and forms, you know, shape and forms. That this small organization will be able to leverage AI in order to kind of accelerate more.
[00:25:42] And we haven't even talked about you know, the benefits of having 20 people versus 200 people. Just the sheer size.
[00:25:48] Mikkel: Yeah. So, and, and actually it's funny you said that because let's just take an example. Let's say next year, that's the year where the vendors finally figure out how to make these AI SDRs work. They book meetings, those meetings turns into deals. Let's say that it just, it just works, right? You have these two companies, one has 200 people, they're going to have a bunch of SDRs there. Versus the other one. They now need to make a painful decision of replacing those SDRs with AI. How are they going to do it? Maybe they're going to run a POC first that takes time to prove that it works. Then they negotiate, find the right vendor. They need to do stakeholder management internally. It needs to go through legal infosec.
[00:26:28] Like there's just so many steps to take to make a very simple and obvious decision to implement a technology that works, right? So they will be slower. And I think to your point. We discussed this in a previous episode, if you're 20 people, you don't have like a CRO, CFO where they need to discuss budget and move things around or like do some internal politicking and, and stuff like that.
[00:26:53] It's just. A whole lot easier
[00:26:55] if you're 20 people, the CEO will know what's happening in the organization. They will have lunch together and probably be able to decide over a casual lunch to like, yeah, go for it. Buy that thing. That's totally fine.
[00:27:05] Right. So, so it's, it's definitely different. It's definitely
[00:27:08] different.
[00:27:08] Toni: and here again, right, it's really, people need to ask themselves the question, do I want to be the 20 people organization or do I want to be the 200 people organization? Or what am I right now? Am I go, am I going to be the one that's getting, you know, disrupted by a shitty team we made fun of because on LinkedIn we only see their like LinkedIn insights or 20 people, you know, what a piece of shit is that?
[00:27:28] And then suddenly, boom, kind of, they kind of explode on the
[00:27:31] side.
[00:27:31] Mikkel: But it used to be the flex, the trust sign.
[00:27:34] Hey, we raised a lot of money. We hired a lot of people. It's like, when you ask someone what startup they worked at, it's like, Oh, we're from this company, we're 500 people. It's like, no, that's
[00:27:43] now it's going to,
[00:27:44] Toni: I talked to a kind of a bootstrap founder the other day and she's like, I don't know, four or five million in AR or ten million, I forgot. Something, like something totally fucking serious. And he was like, one of the, one of the most encouraging kind of things is actually when you go to those founder meetups or, you know, kind of parties around this.
[00:28:02] And then they ask you like, how many how many employees do you have? Because that's, That's the number everyone, you know, that your mom asks you, kind of, how big is the company? Four people,
[00:28:10] you know, or 500 people, you know, it's a different, and and, and, you know, this is how everyone counts, right?
[00:28:16] And then the founder was like well, we have, we have 10, 12 people or something, you know, they, they were close to a million dollar benchmark per FTE. I said, okay, you're just, you're just starting out. That's really cool. And, and, and the other founder had, you know, maybe raised, I don't know, 20 million and was maybe at 5 million, but had like a hundred people team.
[00:28:34] And it's like, you know, it's very clear who's the loser in this conversation, but it's not clear to everyone else. Right. And I think that will also change a little bit. I think, I think people will start respecting small teams more and not immediately equate.
[00:28:49] 10 people with a loser team. And we'll actually kind of start to think like, okay, well, 10
[00:28:53] people, but you know, how much, how much money do you make per, per FTOs?
[00:28:57] You know, what other benchmark they might ask? And I think that that will change.
[00:29:01] Mikkel: yeah, for sure.
[00:29:03] And I think, by the way, so this is dealing with perception and that's kind of the last prediction trend that we have kind of also inspired from our chat with Kyle Poya when we talked about how AI is transforming
[00:29:12] pricing. What, what has happened with all this new technology is now everyone is a designer.
[00:29:20] Like forget about Canva. Canva was fine. Now you have Midjourney. You can actually create. Awesome things there fairly easily. You can create something, a stock photo, that's way better than a stock photo. So the average brand in terms of quality will be able to get lifted in you know, quite a bit. So how do you stand out in this noise?
[00:29:39] How do you stand out if everyone can use AI to create visuals or craft copy? It's really with the personality.
[00:29:46] Toni: Yeah. instead of everything needs to be beautiful, everything needs to be ugly, probably kind of, you kind of need to jump to the, to the other side of the spectrum. No, but I think you're right. I think I think personality, whatever that means, whatever that means. I think that will need to start to play a much bigger and bigger role in building the brand, building awareness and so forth.
[00:30:05] I think slapping real people's pictures on things, you know, making things feel a little bit more, more scrappy, not fully polished, right? Everything that's not 4K video. We'll be like, oh, okay, that, that probably is real, that probably took time now, you know, instead of, instead of kind of the, the, the flip side of, and can you instruct those tools to B square R P?
[00:30:30] Sure, you can probably have some kind of freaking filter and so forth, but, but I guess, you know, people out there kind of catching my drift, I think the polished, Surface and the polished brand will even more so blend in with the background and the background noise. Then stuff that's a bit edgy stands out.
[00:30:48] How can you create edgy? There are different ways around this. Personality is one. We talked about ugliness, you know, an ugly
[00:30:55] brand
[00:30:55] Mikkel: check out link, links cast, by the way,
[00:30:58] Toni: Yeah.
[00:30:59] Mikkel: is crazy.
[00:31:00] Toni: I didn't see that, but anyway, kind of that, that creates edginess, right. And kind of, Oh, you know, remember those guys that an ugly logo or whatever it might be.
[00:31:08] Right. And I think, I think we will see a trend more and more in that direction where people are trying to be on purpose, completely out there. And I think it's going to be good. I think it's going to be good for them.
[00:31:18] Mikkel: I think it's also like, there's one exercise, I forget who, who created that exercise or mentioned as an example, but it's like, okay, imagine your brand. Now opens a hotel. What does that experience look like? If, if we were to say that brand was Nike, I think we'd have a pretty good idea of what it looked like.
[00:31:36] There'd be like basketball hoops in the lobby
[00:31:39] and, you know, the running tracks on the floor, but some other brands you just go, You know what? I'm, I'm, I don't know, it'll have some catchy slogans on the wall and be like, very corporate y feely, but I'm not sure, it's just gonna be, it's just gonna be another hotel, isn't it, right? And I think that's that's like the point where you think about, a strong contrast is like, what's his name, Virgin Airlines.
[00:32:03] Richard Branson, thank you. Doing a bet with a competing
[00:32:06] airline where the loser has to wear a stew, like a female stewardess outfit and serve drinks, right? It's just, that is personality.
[00:32:15] That is very different. And there's a lot of elements you can choose to play with. I think if you really want to stand out, just make sure that not everything you do is originating from AI. By
[00:32:26] all means, you can use it.
[00:32:28] But you've got to think about what the outcome at the end of the day
[00:32:31] is. So that's like, I think all of our trends, predictions that we've had planned out, none of them planned by AI, by the way, none of them, this is all
[00:32:43] you and I going into our duo echo chamber and just, Hey, what, what is controversial?
[00:32:49] What can we talk about here?
[00:32:51] Toni: Yeah, but also I think what we do believe in, right? So
[00:32:54] I
[00:32:54] mean, I like, I like Chris Walker's line with like, he is right, he's just not always right
[00:33:00] Mikkel: yeah,
[00:33:03] Toni: five years ago, they, they came true last year but not, you know, four years ago. So, I think this stuff is gonna happen.
[00:33:10] I'm sorry, folks, if you don't like it, or, you know, don't, you know, don't shoot the messenger. But I think, I think these things are going to happen and I hope it informs maybe how you make decisions going forward and hope, hope it informs to shape your mindset and looking at your organization, whether or not that's a small team of 10 because you, you're, you're only owning that many or it's, you know, you're owning bigger parts of the organization and really kind of chilling yourself and be like, Hey, you know, there is stuff fundamentally changing out there and I think we need to make sure we adapt because otherwise, Otherwise you're going to be a roadkill.
[00:33:41] And that's, that's, that's really the realization here.
[00:33:44] But folks, I hope you liked it. I hope you're going to have a wonderful New Year's and a wonderful 2025. Thank you so much for sticking with that and kind of listening. If you haven't already. Hit subscribe, follow, you know, all of these things, the buttons appearing everywhere.
[00:34:00] Mikkel: down. They're gonna be down,
[00:34:01] Toni.
[00:34:01] Toni: and and if you think that was helpful, send it to a friend of yours and be like, Hey, you should really listen to those two folks talking about 20 and 25 trends, because that was super valuable. Thank you Mikkel. Thank you everyone else for listening and have a fantastic day. Bye bye.
[00:34:14] Mikkel: Bye.