Stuff I am currently focused on:

#1 Bring new financial advisory products to market at Arta Finance. 

#2 Help anyone host engaging and successful events via Eventship.

#3 Help others with AI via GPT Hacks. 

#4 Help my youngest develop his soccer skills, my second work on her basketball game and my oldest shine like his sax.

#5 Spend more time with my awesome wife doing fun things in San Diego and around the world.

Hussein Yahfoufi

From BDR to GTM Leader—now Co-Founder @ Peel

I share insights on AI, GTM, and our journey building Peel. Follow along as we accelerate buyer-led growth! 🚀

Brannon Santos

I can buy a $58,990 Model 3 Tesla in 7 minutes. By the time they ship it (4-6 weeks), a B2B SaaS company will force me to go through this to buy their $25,000 software:

1. Fill out the form (first name, last name, company, work email, phone number, country)

2. 'Someone from [company] will be in touch with you shortly' pops up

3. Now we wait for a confirmation email

4. Hour 3 of waiting for the confirmation email

5. An email finally hits my inbox! Oops, it's a marketing email sequence I got automatically added to

6. The SDR finally replies (4 days later, I sent a request on Friday). I tell him I'm ready to buy, I just have 3 questions and they can have my business

7. He says he wants to get on the phone first

8. I concede and agree, but there aren't any open slots on his calendar until next week

9. I concede once again and book a time for next week

10. We're finally in the meeting. The SDR dodges all my questions and the whole call is discovery

11. He's squeezing me for intel I shared in the demo form (also available on LinkedIn or in Clay/ZI/Apollo)

12. The call ends, I still have zero answers

13. The SDR hands me off to the AE

14. Time to book a time with them, 'no times in January' on their Calendly

15. Finally find a free slot 1.5 weeks from now

16. On the call, he's walking me through the slides + more dumb questions... I mean discovery

17. When I ask my 3 questions, he says he's happy to put me in touch with their SE

18. More back and forth to book another meet with AE + SE

19. On that call, I see the product for the first time and get answers to 2/3 of my questions

20. AE is on mute most of the call, SE is good but will have to get CS involved for my 3rd question

21. CS finally answers my 3rd question over an email (thank heavens!)

22. They're finally ready to share pricing on the last call!

23. More back and forth to book that final call

24. On the call, the big pricing reveal finally happens... And it's 3x higher than what I saw on Vendr and ChatGPT


Now… The real party starts.

----------

In the meanwhile…

It's 2026 and AI can handle 60% of this painful process in 2-3 minutes, 100% on buyer's terms & async, and generate super high intent inbound leads (AALs, agent activated leads) for your human AEs.

Good for the seller (no mundane work so one AE can handle 5-10x more demand), even better for the buyer (none of the shit above).

Buying 2.0 is here and the time to transition is now.

In December, I closed a $24,000 deal (w/ a $100M+ ARR SaaS), and Peel's AI Agent handled 60% of the sales process. Here's the full buyer journey:

1) Director of Demand Gen saw my LinkedIn post
2) Visited getpeel dot ai
3) Spoke with our AI Demo
4) Shared their situation & goals with the agent
5) Booked a demo with me (also by talking to AI)
6) Smooth demo because I knew all I needed to
7) Got a verbal “yes” on the call
8) I sent a proposal
9) Closed-won (days from the 1st interaction)

Buying 2.0 already here and it’s...

Good for the seller…

(only talk to 100% qualified prospects who are already activated + no mundane work so one AE can handle 5-10x more demand)

Even better for the buyer.

(100% on buyer terms, see the product right away, get a tailored experience and decide in 2-3min if you're moving forward)

In 2026, we'll see the rise of inbound AALs (agent activated leads). The win rates will be 5-10x higher than MQLs and AI will handle 60% of the process. Here's how it'll work:

- Prospects visits your website
- AI Agent greets them
- Interviews them like your best SDR
- Demos your product like your best SE
- Builds a business case with the above voice inputs, like you best AE

It all happens in 5-8 minutes, async and 100% on buyer's terms, and then it's time for the AI Agent > human AE handoff.

A human AE starts working an AAL, a lead that's been qualified, discovered, demoed (actually seen the product) and has raised a hand to book a human demo.

60% of the (most tedious) work has already been handled by AI, and once the humans jump in, they'll have more buyer intel then ever, making AAL win rates 3x higher than other lead types.



This isn't a 'I replaced my entire team with AI Agents' delusion. This is already a reality.

Peel's AI Agents are currently booking me 10 calls/mo w/ VPs (20% win-rate) and they handle qualification, discovery & demo for a $24-60k ACV product. With AALs, one to two call closes are a common occurrence.

12 years ago, I was an SDR, cold calling Fortune 700 CIOs, pitching them our $50,000 solution, and it worked. In my 1st year, I generated $1M in pipe, was named SDR #2 and became an AE the next year (fastest SDR to AE transition in the history of the org).

I was good, but back then, this wasn't extraordinary.

9 times out of 10, CIOs would answer the phone and would actually listen to a sales pitch of a 21y old. In fact, these cold calls were often one of the few ways to learn about products like ours.

For us, the seller, economics also made sense (our call-to-opp conversion rate was ~10%), making cold calling one of our best performing channels (also, there weren't that many channels back then).

Today?

Good luck cold calling CIOs. CMOs. CROs. CFOs. Good luck achieving even a 1% conversion rate from ANY outbound effort (And cold calling is wayyyy higher converting than email right now.)

Because since then, that same CIO I used to cold call has…

Started receiving 10x more calls.
Started receiving 100x more emails.
Started seeing 1,000s of ads everywhere he goes.
So he shut it all (and himself) off.

Even worse, when he himself initiates the buying…

We make him fill out a 5-step form (for info we could get from Clay).
We make him wait days for a reply.
We tell him he first needs to sit through a discovery call with a 20yo with zero subject matter expertise.
We tell him he needs to wait 2 weeks to sit in that call.
We make him repeat the same story to at least 3 different people.

Then we wonder why our win rates are lower than ever and CAC is higher than ever.

We need to do better.

Both buyers and vendors deserve a better way to engage and learn on our own terms.

The solution is Buying 2.0: selling that's on buyer's terms, where AI agents handle 60% of the process (qualify, discover and product demo, most of the business case), then handing off AALs (agent activated leads = qualified, discovered, demoed…enticed!) instead of MQLs/SQLs to senior, subject matter expert sellers (AEs/SEs) who provide a red carpet experience.

I sold Peel's 1st product (AI Presentations) to CMOs. Our 2nd, bigger product is AI Demos, and now CROs get involved. A lot of them immediately shut it down:

'what is this?'
'I don't want AI demoing our clients'
'we need those meetings'

Nothing strange here.

With AI Presentations, CMO is the owner of the surface area (content assets).

(we turn those content assets like reports, ebooks & whitepapers into interactive presentations that book meetings automatically, in any language, at any time)

With AI Demos, CRO is the owner of the surface area (demos).

Having been in a VP Sales seat, I fully understand CROs immediate rejection:

1. AI will compromise your meetings target
2. You don't trust AI to do a good demo
3. You don't want the CMO in your yard

I hear you, but in the rest of this post, I'd love to show you how AI Demos will actually help you accomplish the major mandate every CRO I know has been given in 2026 (do more with less, with AI).

I'll use my own example (founder-led sales), since it's a very similar use case ($24k-$60k/y product, as you can see - a very complex purchase with 3-5 stakeholders, usually CMO + CRO + CEO, ICP = $50M+ ARR SaaS).

Here's how selling changed for us at Peel once we implemented AI Demos:

1) I only talk to AALs (agent activated leads; qualified, discovered, demoed & enticed by AI), no time wasted on non-qualified leads

2) Buyers are better educated, 100% qualified and happier (AI demos them in 2-3 min, on buyer's terms)

3) The buyer intel I get from AI on these AALs is epic. The only time I've seen more intel back in the day is when one AE inherited a deal from an exiting AE

4) I generally do fewer meetings (than 'usual'), but our win rates are higher, so overall, we can take on more demand and Closed-won is up

5) Sales cycles are shorter (the first meeting isn't discovery w/ an SDR, it's more like a stage 4 meeting directly with an AE, plus the champion usually sends the AI Demo to other stakeholders so they're warmer too)

6) 2-3 call closes have become the new normal.

7) I feel like I can finally do the actual job, sell. No qualification, no discovery, no warming up. AI already did it.

---------

Just imagine each of your AEs living this life. How much would their productivity and win rates go up?

And all you gotta do is take the demo recording (CI recordings are fine especially just to test with), let Peel turn it into an AI Demo (in minutes), and run a test (our customers usually test it first on a product page or have SDRs send it to stage 1/2 prospects).

If you're an enterprise AE selling a $50,000+ product, would you rather talk to inbound MQLs, SQLs... or AALs (agent activated leads)?

Let's first define each:

1) MQL: ICP fit + engagement

Qualified means there's a human that fits the profile and therefore they've passed the internal gate required for a human AE or SDR to speak with them.

They may have opened up an email or downloaded a book or taken an action on the website… and there's an inbound reason to speak with them.

A lot of this is just surface-level data you could get from LinkedIn or Clay, but in most orgs, there's still a lot of human, manual effort that goes into qualification.

2) SQL: ICP fit + conversation

Some of the further qualification may happen automatically (using intent data, scoring etc), but most of the time, an SDR will have to speak with them and qualify them further, getting deeper into pains and goals.

Then, during the SDR > AE handoff, we see more fallout. A smart AE won't only look at objective qualification criteria, but will e.g. also try to validate deal likelihood ('you're qualified, but could I get a deal done within the next quarter given your interest level?').

3) AAL: *activated, not just qualified

I initially framed these as AQLs (agent qualified leads), but after thinking about it for a while, I realized they're so much more than just ***qualified***.

Calling them 'qualified' would be a misnomer since they check all of these boxes:

- Qualified (fully)
- Discovered (deeply)
- Demoed (actually seen the product)
- Enticed (raised a hand to do a human demo next)

That's why I'm calling them Agent Activated Leads.

And the best thing about this is that all of this happens in 2-3 minutes, on buyer's terms, async, 24/7, in a casual conversation with an AI agent.

-------

In 2026, this will be a real conversation inside forward-looking sales teams.

As an early founder doing sales, I'm already working almost exclusively with AAL (using Peel's AI demo agent) and I'm closing $24,000+ deals with enterprise companies, and overall I'm 10x more productive because of it.

Buying 2.0 is here, and I wish my AEs had this when I was a VP Sales back in the day.

'Nobody wants to talk to a bot' is a common objection for AI Demos. Then I show them talk time stats of AALs (agent activated leads) Peel AI demos generated:

- 2:34 min (CRO at a $50M ARR SaaS)
- 3:15 min (VP Demand Gen at $50B+ pharma)
- 2:46 min (VP Sales at Enterprise Org — Researching "The State of B2B Buyers")

And even longer ones...

- 17:24 min (GTM Engineer at Tech Scale-up — Deep diving the "Peel Playbook" workflows)
- 15:33 min (Partner at Tier 1 VC — Due diligence on Peel AI Demo financials)
- 15:17 min (Director at Non-Profit — Evaluating Peel AI Demo for community efficiency)
- 13:57 min (CMO at HealthTech — Analyzing value metrics in Peel AI Demo)
- 13:06 min (Head of Finance at Series B SaaS — Validating ROI via Peel AI Demo)
- 13:00 min (CISO at Cybersecurity Firm — Stress testing "Threat Detection" scenarios)


5-10% of buyers in most product categories will always want to talk to a human, yes (but that number is going down every year).

That still leaves us with +90% of the market that would rather talk to AI than a 20yo SDR who will ask you dumb question you've already answered in the form (and are available in ZI/Apollo/Clay)

People DO want to talk to a bot. Especially when the alternative is so much worse (2-4 weeks just to see the product, 4-6 weeks to learn pricing).

The other day I heard the term "Born Again SaaS."

My knee-jerk reaction was arrogant. I thought, "Hah, those legacy SaaS 1.0 tools better figure it out fast or they are dead."

But then the reality hit. We, the startups born post-OpenAI, are under the same pressure to innovate. Actually, the pressure on us is likely higher.

Here is why being "AI Native" isn't a safety net:

1) Incumbents can just buy us. Legacy SaaS companies are sitting on war chests. They can afford to wait, watch the chaos, and acquire the "AI native" apps once the winning patterns are clear. From a timing perspective, this consolidation is overdue.

2) Categories are being defined too early The pace of shipping is so fast that we are rushing definitions. Take "AI SDRs." The market decided what they were, what they were "allowed" to do, and their value before the tech even matured. Meanwhile, products are quietly evolving out of those boxes.

3) The problem space is shrinking under your feet Indirect competitors, and the models themselves, are solving more of your customer’s problem every day. Your wedge looks smaller, not because you are worse, but because the remaining problem is smaller. It is lazy to just say "focus on a narrow problem and you are safe." You might not be.

For us at Peel, 2025 was the year of constantly reinventing ourselves. PMF has always been a moving target, but last year it felt like a treadmill.

For the first time ever, I've seen the product pace outpace the marketing pace.

In a single year, we went from 1 product to 3. We debated going vertical vs. horizontal, updated our messaging a dozen times, and signed customers from wildly different industries.

We're at a stage where things will get more clear, mostly because we now know exactly what doesn't work.

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Hussein Yahfoufi

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