S2E4: AI is Making Sales Teams MORE Important, Not Less | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado)

In this eye-opening episode of Get Paid, I spoke with Sahil Mansuri, founder and CEO of Bravado, about how AI is dramatically reshaping the landscape of sales and recruiting but not in the way most people think.

While many SaaS companies are seeing their business models threatened by AI's ability to automate human work, Bravado is experiencing the opposite effect. As Sahil explains, "Because we were in recruiting and what we did was more services heavy than software heavy, venture capitalists used to be less excited about our business." However, the rise of AI has transformed Bravado's economics completely. "Now we're operating at an 85 to 90% software margin because AI has basically taken over and is doing 95% of the work that the human being was doing," he reveals.

Bravado helps companies hire top-performing salespeople through their AI-powered recruiting tool called Hunter. What makes this particularly interesting is that while AI is automating many roles across industries, sales is one function that remains stubbornly human-dependent. As Sahil points out, "You can build AI engineers and AI marketers and AI doctors. But if you want that AI product to get adopted by Siemens, you're going to need a real life fleshy human being to fly to Germany, sit there and meet with 40 different executives."

This creates a fascinating dynamic: as companies like Cursor, Anthropic, and others develop powerful AI tools that eliminate jobs in other departments, they're simultaneously building massive sales teams to sell those very products. The value of great salespeople isn't decreasing, it's increasing.

Sahil shared several counterintuitive insights about hiring in today's market. Companies often make the mistake of hiring from big tech logos when scaling up, but "that person who joined Stripe when they were at a billion dollars and now took them to 1.4 or 5 billion is not the same person that's gonna take you from five to 100." Instead, Sahil recommends hiring people who are "overperforming at a shittier company than yours" because giving them better tools and resources will allow them to excel even more.

Regarding the skills that matter most for sales professionals today, Sahil emphasized the growing importance of technical knowledge and genuine subject matter expertise. The days of "quarterbacking" a deal by bringing in specialists to handle the technical questions are over. Today's top AEs need to be able to answer complex questions themselves, especially when selling technical products.

One of Sahil's most provocative claims is that prospecting is making a comeback. After years of relying on automated outreach tools, companies are rediscovering the value of personalized outbound like calling, relationship building, and social selling. "Once you get them into the door and you get them on the pitch, most people have a really tight funnel. Most good sales teams are able to close. The problem's always top of funnel," Sahil explains.

Perhaps most controversial is Sahil's take on AI sales development representatives (AISDRs). While there's been significant hype around AI completely replacing SDRs, Sahil believes "that job is never going to exist" for high-value enterprise sales. "My very strong opinion is that as more and more companies build more and more automation and AI products, the demand for hiring more salespeople will go up. The compensation of sales professionals will go up."

He points to companies like Slack, which initially prided themselves on having no salespeople, only to eventually get "crushed by Microsoft for not having enterprise salespeople." Even Jack Dorsey at Square recently acknowledged during an earnings call that they need more salespeople after realizing that their product-led approach wasn't enough.

What's emerging is a new model where AI handles the mundane, repetitive tasks like data entry, scheduling, follow-ups - all while human salespeople focus on high-value activities like building relationships and solving complex problems. This shift is also happening in recruiting, where Hunter automates the tedious parts of the hiring process so that human recruiters can focus on closing top candidates and ensuring cultural fit.

As businesses navigate this transition, Sahil believes companies will need to move away from per-seat pricing models toward outcome-based approaches that reflect the value created by AI. This aligns perfectly with our mission at Paid, as we help companies capture the true value of their AI-powered products and services.

Whether you're building a sales team, developing AI products, or just trying to understand how technology is reshaping business, this conversation provides invaluable insights into the future of work in the age of AI.

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