The latest Marketing & Sales Tech posts we have indexed from venture capital blogs and newsletters, plus the highest-scoring pieces of the past year and the people who write about it most.
Mailchimp's acquisition by Intuit for $12B in 2021 has ended in decline—the platform is now shrinking, with parent company earnings stripped of its figures and management cutting 17% of staff. The fall stems from a seven-year drift away from focus (adding CRM, social, SMS, postcards) combined with a structural shift: AI agents now provision email via API, not UIs, leaving Mailchimp absent from the platforms where new apps are built.
SaaStr details its operational playbook for agent-led growth: automating GTM with AI agents (its custom 10K agent connected to 30+ tools), centralizing inbound/outbound/renewals in a unified Prospector queue, and optimizing for discovery by other agents via AEO tactics like first-party data integration and standardized facts.
AI has not replaced SDRs; leading AI-forward companies are hiring more of them. Sam Nelson, founder of SDRLeader.com, reveals why automation works on inbound but outbound still requires human credibility, the one metric that predicts SDR success, and domain risks that silently kill email programs.
A hands-on comparison of three AI-powered Salesforce connectors (Claudeforce, Replit, Lovable) reveals divergent architectures and recommendations; agents are now choosing vendors and building their own communication channels, shifting B2B GTM strategy.
AI in sales works best as operational leverage for human reps, not replacement: Skimmer's CRO shows how data enrichment, first-party call intelligence, and vertical-specific insights empower sellers while horizontal AI SDRs often backfire in fragmented blue-collar markets.
Vercel's COO reveals how they built an inbound sales agent that now handles qualification and outreach with minimal human oversight—starting with a 125-line prompt, evolving to 1,000 lines, then distilling to 14 deterministic rules plus model-driven judgment, running the entire function for ~$1k/year in inference.
The cost of building custom GTM AI agents has collapsed from $10K-$40K to near-zero; the article presents a framework for when to buy off-the-shelf tools (systems of record) versus build custom agents (edge workflows), with four real examples from Together AI and Resolve AI.
Analysis of 17,000+ mobile subscription apps reveals optimal free trial lengths by plan type and category: 30-day trials convert 86% better for annual plans, 10–16 days peak for monthly, and AI apps hit a wall at 16 days due to inference costs.
Saastr (21) · The Sociology of Business (8) · Lenny's Newsletter (4) · Stage 2 (4) · SignalFire (2) · Madrona Ventures (2) · Making Connections by Jax (1) · Tomasz Tunguz (1) · Deconstructor of Fun (1) · Stratechery (1)
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