Agentic Sales: Seth @ Sandler

Seth Marrs spent six years at Forrester as their lead sales AI and technology analyst, which means he evaluated every major wave of GTM tech and has the receipts to back his calls. Now at Sandler as Chief Strategy Officer, he's seeing the practitioner side up close. His read on the agentic SDR market is blunt and sits well outside the vendor narrative, and he supports it with something most guests can't: actual data on what happens to sellers when you train them, test them, then watch them on live calls the next day.

He also gets specific on the parts most people gloss over. Why removing the seller from data capture is the first move that makes everything downstream possible. Why "next best action" is a flawed idea that quietly argues against needing sellers at all. And why the agentic opportunity in sales may sit with the SE and the human selling skill, not the SDR everyone is trying to automate away.

Topics discussed:

• Why "fire your BDRs and automate with AI" is the vendor red flag to watch for

• The recording-permission gap that breaks the data flywheel on outbound

• Keeping BDR research depth while moving from 10 calls to 50

• Sales motion as the deciding factor: high-velocity vs. long-cycle BDR economics

• Removing the seller from data capture entirely to build a reliable dataset

• Compete score: revenue per rep normalized across net-new, farmer, and CSM roles

• The 40 to 80 to 40 adoption collapse measured on live calls, not surveys

• Certifying sellers on what they actually say to customers, not test completion

• Why top-three suggested actions beat a single prescribed next best action

• The agentic SE: training a bot on the technical layer while humans own the conversation

• Extracting intelligence from the bottom of the funnel where capture doesn't exist

• Buy the infrastructure, build the AI layer on top: the maintenance trap with vibe-coded tools