Account Executive

“This is important because if you don't increase the total addressable market and the opportunities, and if you don't increase the win rate, and you don't increase the ASP, but you add more AEs, what happens is that you're taking the same number of opportunitie…”

“In terms of prospecting help, which is the business development rep, they provide the right leads, the right kinds of quality leads into the pipeline, and so the ratio early on is one is to two, and then you can actually make it one is to four. And then in ter…”

“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, right?”

“We love the mentor system or buddy system, if you will, and allowing them to get deeper and really ride shotgun on a deal... SDRs and BDRs typically don't dive deep in any type of you know, demoing or, you know, procurement cycles, things like that. Negotiatio…”

“And we will definitely do a deal review for every deal that has been committed by the account executive. That's them saying this deal is going to come in. So we'll inspect that and make sure that they have the full team behind them.”

“What is, I think, special is that we're very data-driven around it, and we own what it is that we're putting into the scorecard... Different people on the panel are given very specific characteristics to dive into and to really understand at a deeper and deepe…”

“When you have AEs feeling that it's their responsibility to generate pipeline, now, number one, there's more pipeline, that's great, but number two, whatever pipeline they get from their SDRs or inbound for marketing is a gift from the heavens, and they treat …”

“When we hire a new AE, they have access to our recorded cab calls, and that allows them to learn very quickly how our customers are talking about us, how, ah, they make decision making, or how they make decisions to buy the software, and how they want to see u…”

“In the U.S., your best AEs should be making 300,000 for SMB, half million for mid-market, and a million dollars for enterprise.”

“And it's not AEs, so people closing deals that are driving, you know, the figures, the growth, but it's the SDRs, and especially SDR outbound, which will you know, generate new leads on top of the leads that will be generated by marketing.”

“Get two AEs that hit quota. One's not enough. If it's one, you don't know why. If it's one, the VP of sales doesn't know why. If it's two, the VP of sales is a hiring job mainly. If you have two hitting quota and the VP of sales is good, even if they're new, e…”

“Today at Snowflake, we graduate on average, 25 SDRs every quarter. 80% of them go into AE roles. The other 20% go into roles in marketing, operations. We even have a school for early sales engineers.”

“The smart thing also to do is make sure that your SDRs are on the call that they help set up for their AEs. They should be on every call. They'll learn the language. They'll learn what it is the product can do. They'll hear all the use cases and the stories.”

“When they get to 15 months, and they're at a certain performance level, they can put their name in the hat for a corporate account executive job”

“If you cut the bottom performing whatever percent of the AE team, what that means is you will give the limited number of opportunities that you do have to performers that have a higher conversion rate and actually convert more revenue or more sales with fewer …”

“One of the things we're doing is we're not, even though we're scaling revenue significantly, we're not adding account executives. We're actually putting that revenue to areas to make our current account executives more productive.”

“When you're ready to hire your first IE, leverage your network, whether it's former colleagues, friends, investors like, you know, don't gravitate towards putting a job posting on your website and seeing who's sort of like, Comes in.”

“It's we're back to three to five X OTE. So if a rep wants to make a 150 grand a year, us great. But if you're enterprise, you better close five times that mid market, four times SMB three times. Otherwise they're not efficient enough.”

“He talked about how even Brex, which is, which was still relatively SMB for a long period, how the AE's had to do half of their own deals through outbound, and so he really described, in a way, a full stack AE, right, and people talk about that, and I think th…”

“For most companies, AEs really should be sourcing their own revenue. There's almost never going to be this perfect equilibrium where you have exactly the number of demos and opportunities that you're working. That mean that as an AE, you're filling eight hours…”

“And it's actually a really common mistake to believe that a really successful account executive is gonna make a good VP of sales, ah, or a sales manager. Ah, these are two extremely different things. Ah, one is coaching, and one is, ah, being an independent co…”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”