In Store for 2025: Human > AI

Market Updates, AI pricing models, and finding a job in 2025

Hope that everyone is crushing their Q4’s and having a great end to the year. We know that most are signing off as of yesterday but us sales people know that there are still 5 business days left to lock down contracts.

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As we close out 2024, wanted to share a few observations in the market and what 2025 might hold for us sales savages:

• New Pricing Models with AI?

• The Real Path to Hitting Quota: Human > AI

• Retention or Die

• Finding a job in 2025

New Pricing Models with AI?

It’s all over the news if you’ve haven’t heard:

SaaS is dead.

Well, not quite yet.

“Software as a Service” ie SaaS is now “Service as a Software” because of AI agents. With it, the next logical question is:

“How is AI going to impact pricing model and what’s it going to look like?”

Credit: Jared Robin

The debate rages on X. I’m personally bearish on this, I think that enterprises would not want subjectivity around contract with vendors since it might open up lawsuits.

Plus, generally speaking, enterprises will gladly pay more for premium, so long as they see value.

And of course, why would you want your sales team selling contracts that have a risk of not paying out?

Check out the thread.

Comment your thoughts below, interested to see what you all think.

End of day, that’s my perspective but I could be wrong. One perspective that’s making me think:

Credit: The Revenue Formula

This sticks out:

At $0.99, Intercom’s price might seem expensive, but if the cost of support agents (in this case human) is $25 to close a ticket – it’s quite the discount

The Real Path to Hitting Quota: Human > AI

Last week I shared some hilarious examples on email outreach.

Most of this is due to sales teams using AI WAY too much to drive volume.

If that’s your strategy: NGMI.

Credit: Josh Roth

Wow, meeting people IN PERSON helps you close more deals?

Credit: Giphy

AI is going to help yes.

But it’s the human stuff that you can’t scale, replicate, or code. Awesome to see that stat and congrats on crushing their number.

Retention or Die

It’s crazy to see how fast AI companies are growing. I’m not even talking about venture funded or enterprise either. Scrappy AI startups are hitting $10mm in ARR within MONTHS.

Unheard of.

What’s really going to add value?

“In my view, certain increases in spend are particularly bullish since they signal tangible, real-world use cases + ROI:

Vertical AI: 12x
Departmental AI: 9x
Horizontal AI: 5.3x

Said differently, further “upstream” categories (like Foundation Models, Training + Development, Data + Infrastructure) are correlated but less definitively linked to a tangible line of business ROI (i.e., you can spend money training a model… that fails in the real world).”

-Matt Harney

Credit: SaaS Letter

***Also, if you’re a founder or sales leader that needs ROI based reports for your sales cycles, send Matt a note: matt.harney@cloudratings.com

With the pace of how everything is moving, customer retention, much like 2024, is going to be a make or break for many companies in 2025. Easy to be disrupted with far cheaper solutions or workaround using AI.

OnlyCFO on the importance of NRR/GRR metrics:

“Many companies have seen retention deteriorate over the past few years, so proving retention isn’t getting worse (and hopefully improving) will be critical to their survival.

Investors are paying close attention to revenue retention metrics as a leading indicator of revenue growth endurance and ability to grow efficiently.”

Credit: Only CFO

Finding a job in 2025

Sam Marilech recently posted about why job ads don’t work.

Credit: Offer Accepted via Sam Marilech

Wondering what the 802 number is?

That’s the number of applicants. Oh, and by the way, that ad was up for 4 days.

If you’re blasting resumes and applications in hopes of a landing an interview than much like using AI for outbound: NGMI.

We’ve written about how to navigate the hiring SaaS market before in The Hidden Trap of OTE.

Long story short, be a human.

Find the orgs you want to work for and find out how to get intros through your network. Or reach out cold.

Otherwise you’re going to be swimming in an ocean of status quo applicants not being noticed and doomed to keeping your “Open to Network” status on LI.

That’s it for me today folks. Hope you enjoyed.

As always, thanks for reading and see you all next week. If you have any questions or thoughts, shoot me a DM or email andrew@hackingsales.xyz.

See you all next week.
-Andrew K

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