Account Executive

“And we, the way we got scale is by hiring account executives, you know, across the country and teaching them. And it was card carrying knocking on doors and doing this at scale and building the pipeline. Going through the nine to 12 months sales cycle and doin…”

“The world's best sales team is not going to respect a founder who can't do it themselves. If you're going to bring on an AE and say your, you know, your one quota or target is a million and a half. If you yourself haven't done that in six months, you don't hav…”

“They had to have a spirit of more consultative account management and sales. They had to delight the customer. They had to love that customer's Mission and had to go in because they wouldn't get anything on top of their salary until the customer started using …”

“So first two in, there's some competition between them, right? So that's good. You don't want just one because you have no point of reference.”

“What they have sold is less important because we can teach them how to sell our product. We can teach them about the industry. So we are not like only hiring A's who actually are coming from a similar space. We have A's who come from very different industries.”

“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.”

“You have SDRs or prospecting, AEs or closing deals, run ups or maintaining systems. The issue with this is it operates a lot like an assembly. And assembly lines aren't really good for sharing learnings and scaling ideas.”

“So we're looking at starting out with an AE in the first year, we would look at spring some anywhere between half a million to three quarters of a million dollars worth of revenue.”

“The average of the two would be 20.”

“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.”

“I think 70% of their jobs will be safe by the end of next year, but I think it will decline to 40 or 50.”

“I think we're going to see AI is not going to replace the AE the way it is already beginning to replace the SDR has already replaced. Support is already replacing customer success, but it is going to replace a lot of AEs that aren't product don't know the prod…”

“If you're a seed or series A founder, and you're evaluating sales leaders and AEs that have only been at companies that have done like, fifty million or more of ARR when they joined, it's probably going to be really difficult for them.”

“The litmus test I have always given my sales team is if you are an account executive in my org and I put you in front of 10 engineers at our company, it should take them 10 minutes to figure out you aren't a product manager.”

“Another factor that can be useful signal in AEs is candidates who have quickly gone through promotion cycles from SDR to AE, AE to senior AE, and more. It's particularly helpful if they've done that while being at the same company and they've been promoted whi…”

“I think the world of an AE and a separate SE are gone. I mean, unless like you're selling at the infra level and it's super technical, like I can't imagine an account executive who doesn't fundamentally understand the product.”

“What you need to ask yourself is if the way I got from zero to one, Gave me a recipe that I can pick up an AE from the street and make them be able to do the same thing I just did. If that's the case, then you're gonna accelerate from one to 10.”

“I'm not one of those who's trying to say that, you know, AI SDRs are going to replace the whole need of sales or account executives. That's not going to happen anytime soon.”

“I think it's really hard to sell any kind of AI product now without actually being fluent in The product and be able to demo the product, right? So like, you know AEs need to be like se fluent as well.”

“Again, if you can get your AI to be decent to the level of you yourself, that's probably the quality you should aim for. They will prefer that to, you know, a AE or SER that is one day in at your company saying, hey, have you heard of Saster?”

“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.”

“Then when it comes time to do your first hire, it's really a trick question too. You don't hire one, you hire two. You need to hire two AEs, because, or call it, you know, junior salespeople, or just salespeople with a little bit of experience, because those t…”

“I'm not into the full cycle rep because I believe much more in specialization. A's don't want to prospect. Cold calling's hard.”

“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…”

“A company called AES. It's a energy utility. It's an energy company. It builds you know, and delivers energy different parts of the world. It used to take them 14 days to run their end of quarter audit. They do it in one hour now.”

“I'll name a few that are public. Intersect Power, AES are a couple that we have agreements with. Basically, they say, look we'll put some cash down to reserve your manufacturing capacity over the next few years so that we have access to your technology in our …”

“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…”

“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…”

“The AE sourced opportunities converted at a significantly higher rate to customers, and they generated far more revenue. So the ACV of AE sourced outbound opportunities was significantly, almost exponentially higher than the SDR sourced opportunities.”

“So if your reps don't have 15 meetings a week, then what that means is one of the ways that you can drive improved efficiency is by reducing the number of reps. I'm sorry to be callous like that, but the point is great companies are routing more resources, mea…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“What would happen is they would, when somebody wanted to buy a new product, they would float it back to the new logo rep that closed it maybe two years ago. So a new logo rep's doing like 20 demos a month of new logos that are much, much larger deal size. And …”

“Any great sales leader always has a couple of folks ready to go with her the next day. They, and I know you got to be careful with this word this day, but it's true. This word, they groom them. They groom them. The best sales leaders are meeting with tons of f…”

“So a good rule of thumb is about a five to one ratio between new signed ARR and total compensation for a salesperson, including commission.”

“I was doing all the sales. I was doing marketing. I was doing implementation of the product. I was doing a lot of those things until we got to about one and a half million or thereabout in revenue. That's when we hired our first CSM. To help implement so that …”

“The second, I think, is blending of a role. There'll be no more SDRs, CSMs, AEs, BDRs, XDRs, all of these. I see them converging into one role, essentially.”

“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…”

“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…”

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“I was like excited when a first AE sells his first deal. That's a big thing for a company, right? It's not like me selling. It's somebody who has been trained and can convey the value. There's some repeatability element to it.”

“Eight SDRs, outbound reps need one manager, eight AEs, eight sales execs need a director above them. And then when you really scale, you know, eight directors, you're not really ever gonna have eight directors, but eight directors could have a VP or eight repo…”

“What I haven't found work is that an account executive will magically be full stack. They will do outbound themselves. They will develop, they'll go use zoom info and Apollo and develop a list themselves. They will manage that outbound list themselves. If they…”

“Most founders have enough stamina to manage a couple of these AEs, these accounting executives, these folks who work the leads. Most founders do not have the stamina to manage 10 kids fresh out of college that need to be micromanaged on an hourly basis to call…”

“Another mistake that founders often make is they hire the number one account executive at a hot company to be their head of sales. It's not the same skills. Most sales executives should not be managers.”

“Most companies will hire their first AE before a head of sales.”

“So if you think about U S based not oil and gas, but just like electricity companies, very few of them have significant operations outside the United States. AES would be an exception to that, but very few others. Whereas if you look at the European majors, an…”

“But the biggest mistake in technical sales is when you hire a generic AE and don't put anyone, no solution of any form. Yeah, no, no chance, right?”

“Most of them, unfortunately, and this is why it's exhausting to build an outbound team, the best ones will wait a year at most. So if she or he is saying, I want to be an AE, if you don't give it to them, they're going to quit anyway.”