Early-stage sales teams should not segment or rush upmarket too early
AJ Tennant · AJ Tennant: How to Build a Sales Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | E2118 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Oct 23, 2024 · at 17:20
AJ Tennant, VP of Sales & Success at Glean, discusses the dangers of moving a sales team upmarket to large enterprise accounts too rapidly.
0:00 / 0:30exact quote · 30.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I think the worst thing you can do early stage as a sales organization and a go to company is segment too early and move way up market and just like, let's say we rewind the clock. If I all of a sudden moved all my sellers to just focus on the Fortune 50 or Fortune 100, that would have been a nightmare because we would never get revenue for nine, 12 months, right? Because you still got to feed your reps. While you're slowly moving up market.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from AJ Tennant
Many enterprise customers say Microsoft Copilot is falling flat
“Look at like Microsoft Copilot, I mean, Many customers are saying it's falling flat. Like, it's just not delivering the value that was advertised.”
Enterprise AI tools without clear ROI will churn within two years
“AI budgets that are based on just, hey, we need to quickly enable our employees to be AI-centric that aren't tying it back to business outcomes, impact, Top line, bottom line. A year from now, two years from now, we're going to churn.”
Enterprise AI implementation takes 6-12 months or $5M in services
“Everyone is being sold A bag of goods and a dream of this sort of AI enabled workforce or Automation, top line, bottom line, and then when it comes to implementation, it's taking six, nine, 12 months, or it comes attached with a five million dollar services bu…”
Glean withholds AE commissions unless deployment success plans are completed
“I took a page out of Dave Schneider's book from ServiceNow and We're implementing a system where we're not paying AEs on their deals unless they have an approved deployment success plan filled out.”
Glean ties CSM compensation to user activity rather than direct upsells
“We're actually tying the compensation of our CSMs not to an upsell. I guess it's sort of embedded into the NDR piece, but it's frankly more about, are you getting users active?”
Vertical software AI add-ons will suffer high churn
“I also, I think that you're gonna see it, for example, like, there's some of these vertical solutions that have layered on to AI and sold a big story on, hey, you're already you know, paying X with us. We can accelerate you to go faster. I don't think some of …”