Latest updates for ANZ sales professionals
SaaS investor Jason Lemkin raised his hand for a six-figure fund admin deal. The vendor sent generic emails, gated a boilerplate deck behind a signup wall, and did zero research. Deal died in two touches. This is what weak discovery and template fatigue look like when they cost you real pipeline.
Sydney-based Oz Hair & Beauty bought Melbourne retailer Beauty Works in July, adding a Melbourne Central store and e-commerce operation to its portfolio. The deal, undisclosed sum, signals a shift from product retail to service-integrated strategy as the $100m revenue business expands beyond its NSW base.
Production costs collapsed. Match rates now matter more than creative. The constraint moved from making ads to reaching the right people, and most B2B teams are still optimizing for the wrong thing.
Rory O'Driscoll, 30-year software investor at Scale Venture Partners, ran the numbers on whether AI kills SaaS. His answer: software got harder to win, not obsolete. The math matters for anyone selling B2B software in 2025.
Employment Hero surveyed 2,600 workers and employers: 33% use AI at work without telling their boss, 75% report higher productivity, and 40% feel like they are cheating. Meanwhile, 44% of employers report staff using personal AI accounts with company data. The disconnect: workers are self-training on AI while businesses struggle to set policy.
Blended churn metrics hide what is actually happening in your customer base. Break it by segment and you will see small customers churn at 3% monthly while enterprise retention hits 120%. Same number, completely different problems to solve.
Six companies showed the actual GTM playbook at SaaStr AI 2026. The pattern: build and sell in parallel, price outcomes not seats, treat agents as buyers. Stripe's top AI customers grew 175% in 2026. Cloudflare reports non-human traffic crossed 50%. The old seat-based model is done.
Six vertical SaaS companies at SaaStr AI 2026 landed on the same thesis: the moat is not the model. Commerce platform Shoplazza, rev ops tools Nue and Reevo, payroll compliance vendor Papaya Global, and fintech players Fisent and Launchpad all said the same thing: data, workflows, and guardrails are the competitive advantage. The AI layer itself is commodity.
The CSM role flatlined after four years of growth while forward deployed engineering roles climbed 1,000%. AI-native companies are replacing traditional customer success metrics with workflow-specific correctness checks and embedded product delivery. Here is what that means for sales teams handing off enterprise deals.
Three hypergrowth AI companies are rewriting customer success: Harvey runs old-school on-site for law firms at $190M ARR, AssemblyAI renamed CSMs to forward deployed engineers after technical buyers shut down, and Lovable stopped saying 'AI-powered' entirely. The shift: adoption metrics mean nothing if customers are not changing how they work.
Maleka Momand, CEO of policy management startup Esper, broke down the reality of selling to government: expect three-year sales cycles, win trust before business, and treat professional services as competitive advantage, not cost center. The company has raised $10.7M and is expanding into Kansas and NYC.
Giant Leap's Will Richardson says AI-generated pitch emails are killing credibility. When every founder uses ChatGPT to write cold outreach, none of them stand out. The irony: AI-focused VCs are now drowning in generic, homogenous pitches that fail to convert.