Account Executive

“The next one could be a player coach who can roll up his or her sleeves, do the selling while simultaneously taking the lead on hiring the next four account executives.”

“If you don't have those two AEs and you hire a VP of sales, 80% of the time it doesn't work because there's nothing for them to work with.”

“I don't think you create that playbook until you have at least 20 ramped AEs.”

“We've got two folks down at a customer onsite right now, running a hackathon with the team. They're retool sponsoring a hackathon and they're building applications together. And so they're meeting all these new teams. They're embedding themselves in the busine…”

“It doesn't matter how smart or good of a presenter, Or how technical an SE is. If they can't work with their AE counterparts, they're never going to be successful.”

“Even if both people can do exactly the same thing, there's a lot of value in having just two people on a call because A prospect or customer is going to answer questions differently coming from an SE than they would from an account executive, because they have…”

“But I would say on average across a wide variety of products, when you get to about like five to seven reps, Because, you know, you're starting your first sales team. You probably, you know, need to hire more capable multifaceted AEs for the first five, but th…”

“A good rule of thumb is like an AE in my book should be generating at least a new op a week. By themselves, without SDRs, without marketing, helping them in an enterprise software sale, outbound sale.”

“I think the account executive needs to join those QBRs. They need to listen. They need to participate. They need to not be maybe the one driving the QBR that the customer success manager is leading, but they need to show up. And what that shows is like, I care…”

“The way I start is hire two individual contributor account executives. Those are sales reps. Always start with two.”

“Salespeople should absolutely be responsible for controlling their own destiny in a way, generating their own demand that often manifests through outbound. I think this is true on day one. This should be true on day 1000.”

“Where people over index is domain. If you are hiring your first AE, first big AEs number one and two, they need to have seen an early stage startup environment.”

“AE range, 100 to two 50 is, is like the AC is the total comp for a sales rep.”

“I wouldn't send you a loan as a new AE. I would send you with either your boss or someone else”

“But I would be really, I would really push back on A leader or an AE that barring force majeure or some macroeconomic pandemic or a financial crisis, if you're selling to the banks, I would really push back any time today of someone saying, you know what? Peop…”

“To truly verticalize and to truly deliver value for customers, it can't just be the AE. It has to be, this was journey we went on. It has to be every single person that touches the account.”

“Actually, so there's one where AE's pushed back a lot saying that they, the SDR needs to go do more qualification and needs to go you know, warm the deal up more for them. And I think To me, that's BS because if I'm a good AD, I want to take any conversation t…”

“When you're interviewing salespeople, you can actually ask like, what was your quota attainment? What's the biggest deal that you've ever sold? Right? Like there's like, you ask for experience and it's like the complete opposite for sales development because y…”

“I think that you can solve that by educating Some of the other generalists AEs because the problem with it is sometimes, you know, those telecoms are all over the world, right? And you're not going to have one AE who's based in the, you know, the Bay Area be a…”

“Our strategy is that in the enterprise, you as an AE are involved in the deployment. The reason you're involved is because you have an incentive to make them successful because your, the future upsell is dependent on your ability to drive deployment.”

“You can very quickly know when you've got an AE that's all they're doing is coming to you with problems and not coming with solutions and ideas.”

“If you, if you're a really sharp, insightful person, you're not going to be an AE. I'm going to get killed by a whole AE audience. But like, if you're really sharp, I can make money in so many better industries. It's tough. Sales is fucking hard.”

“Absolutely. We at Glean, you know, we have a, you know, and every company I've been a part of, like, I want AEs to be joining, expecting that they have to do outbound, and they're not going to have a BDR. Now, the reality is, is you're going to have a lot of h…”

“Pipeline generation. Hiring AEs that have not built their own pipeline, that one is non-negotiable, because if they say they will, if they say they want to they just don't know how hard it is, or they don't remember, maybe they did it as SDRs a long, long time…”

“If sales reps are doing the work to generate their own meetings and their own pipeline, man, when they get pipeline from their SDRs or from marketing or from partners, they'll treat it like gold because they know how much work and how hard it is to get that. A…”

“I still expect the majority of pipeline to be generated from the BDR team, but AEs who don't self-gen just doesn't work. And I think it does them a personal disservice over time.”

“There's too many moving parts. There's too much emotion that's involved in selling. There, there's too much that can be driven on a feeling. Hey, I just had a great conversation with Harry. I think he's gonna buy. Having someone to keep you honest throughout t…”

“AEs, in my humble opinion, should be responsible for their own pipeline. And I'm going to quote one of my sales leaders, Matt Joshi. He says, pipeline is lifeline. I think marketing can help you. BDRs can help you. But at the end of the day, the sales professi…”

“Every sales team I've led or account executives are responsible for their pipeline, and they're responsible for their pipeline because they're also responsible for their number.”

“There'll be, this is the year where we will see the end of so many entry-level sales jobs. We still need AEs. We still need people knocking on doors. We do not need two-year-old kids sending emails. Those jobs will disappear.”

“A's have to be responsible for their own PG, like full stop. That I think is, is consistently true anywhere I've been, and I firmly believe in it. I think that's critical. That is the job in a lot of ways, like the most important part of the job.”