There’s a brutal truth about B2B sales that most founders refuse to acknowledge. HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan just laid it bare at a recent conference, and it should make every SaaS leader uncomfortable.
Your sales reps only cover 40% of their assigned accounts.
Not 80%. Not 60%. Forty percent.
Give your salespeople 100 accounts, and they’ll actually work 40 of them with any meaningful depth. The other 60 accounts? They’re ghosts in your CRM—names on a list that rarely see a meaningful touchpoint, let alone a thoughtful follow-up sequence.
But here’s the kicker: this isn’t a new problem. It’s been this way for decades.
Will AI change this? We did a deep dive on the topic with Yamini Rangan, CEO of HubSpot, at SaaStr Annual + AI Summit 2025:
The Numbers That Haven’t Moved in 20 Years
Rangan dropped two statistics that should haunt every go-to-market leader:
25-35% — The percentage of time sales reps spend actually in front of customers. This number has been stuck in this range for more than two decades.
40% — The percentage of assigned accounts that actually receive proper coverage from your sales team.
Think about that for a moment. Despite all the sales enablement tools, CRM sophistication, and “sales productivity” solutions we’ve built over the past 20 years, we haven’t moved the needle on the two metrics that matter most: time with customers and account coverage.
Why? Because we’ve been fighting symptoms, not the disease.
A few examples from SaaStr speakers:
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David Sacks (Craft Ventures, Yammer) has talked about how, in early-stage SaaS, even with a small sales team, you often see only 50%-60% of assigned accounts getting proper follow-up. This is especially true when reps are overwhelmed or when there’s no clear SLA in place to enforce follow-up timelines.
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Mark Roberge (ex-HubSpot CRO) has emphasized that in scaling sales teams, the percentage of accounts followed up with can drop to as low as 30%-40% if reps are overloaded with leads or if there’s no strong lead routing and prioritization system. He’s a big advocate for using automation and AI to ensure every account gets touched.
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Nick Mehta (Gainsight) has shared that in customer success, a similar issue arises. Without proper segmentation and automation, only 40%-50% of accounts might get the proactive attention they need, especially in high-velocity SaaS models.
The Administrative Quicksand
The real enemy isn’t laziness or poor prioritization. It’s administrative quicksand.
Your sales reps are drowning in tasks that have nothing to do with selling:
- Data entry and CRM hygiene
- Proposal generation and customization
- Meeting scheduling and follow-up coordination
- Lead qualification and research
- Activity logging and reporting
- Contract management and renewal tracking
All necessary. All time-consuming. All pulling your reps away from what they should be doing: having conversations that create value for prospects and customers.
This isn’t just inefficiency—it’s strategic failure. When your sales team can only meaningfully engage with 40% of their assigned accounts, you’re essentially running your go-to-market motion at 40% capacity. Imagine telling your board you’re only using 40% of your AWS infrastructure or 40% of your engineering team’s output.
Why AI Changes Everything (This Time For Real)
Here’s where Rangan’s insight gets interesting. She’s not talking about AI as another productivity tool. She’s talking about AI as a fundamental shift in how sales work gets done.
The difference is architectural. Previous sales tools made existing processes slightly better. AI eliminates entire categories of work.
Account Research: Instead of reps spending hours researching prospects, AI can instantly analyze company financials, recent news, leadership changes, technology stack, and competitive positioning—then synthesize it into actionable insights.
Personalized Outreach: Rather than sending generic sequences, AI can craft individualized messages that reference specific company challenges, recent achievements, or industry trends relevant to each prospect.
Meeting Preparation: AI can pre-populate account context, suggest talking points based on the prospect’s role and company situation, and even recommend specific product features to highlight.
Follow-up Automation: AI can automatically craft contextual follow-ups that reference specific conversation points, attach relevant resources, and schedule appropriate next steps.
Pipeline Analysis: Instead of reps manually updating forecasts, AI can analyze conversation sentiment, deal progression patterns, and engagement metrics to provide accurate pipeline insights.
The result? Your reps can finally do what they’re actually good at: building relationships and having strategic conversations that move deals forward.
The Productivity Multiplier Effect
When HubSpot measures AI adoption in their engineering organization, they’re seeing 95% of developers using some form of AI-assisted code generation daily. That’s not 95% trying it occasionally—that’s 95% making it part of their core workflow.
The productivity gains are so significant that Rangan mentioned they now have to be more selective about what they ship to production. They have more feature output than they can responsibly deploy.
This same multiplier effect is coming to sales, but it will manifest differently:
Coverage Expansion: Instead of meaningfully working 40 accounts, reps could work 80-100 accounts with the same level of depth and personalization.
Customer Face Time: Instead of spending 25-35% of their time with customers, reps could spend 50-60% of their time in value-creating conversations.
Deal Velocity: With AI handling research, preparation, and follow-up, deals could move through the pipeline 2-3x faster.
Win Rate Improvement: Better preparation and more consistent follow-up naturally leads to higher conversion rates.
The Leadership Imperative
But here’s what separates the leaders who will capitalize on this shift from those who won’t: belief and demonstration from the top.
Rangan sends a five-minute video to her entire company every Friday showing how she personally uses AI and highlighting how different teams are getting value from AI tools. She’s not delegating AI adoption—she’s leading it.
This matters because AI adoption in sales isn’t just about buying new tools. It’s about changing fundamental workflows that have been entrenched for decades. Sales reps won’t abandon familiar processes for new AI-driven approaches unless they see leadership betting their own productivity on these tools.
If you’re a founder or go-to-market leader, you need to be the first person in your organization to:
- Use AI for customer research before important meetings
- Leverage AI for competitive analysis and positioning
- Implement AI-driven follow-up sequences in your own outreach
- Share specific examples of value you’re getting from AI tools
Your sales team will follow your lead, but only if you’re actually leading.
The Early Mover Advantage
We’re at an inflection point similar to the early days of CRM adoption. Companies that moved first to Salesforce in the early 2000s gained sustainable competitive advantages that lasted for years. The same opportunity exists today with AI-driven sales.
The difference is speed. CRM adoption took years to show meaningful results. AI productivity gains are measurable in weeks or months.
Companies that crack the code on AI-enhanced sales coverage will:
- Capture market share while competitors are still figuring out basic implementation
- Build deeper customer relationships through more consistent touchpoints
- Achieve better unit economics as sales productivity scales without proportional headcount increases
- Create network effects as better customer coverage leads to more referrals and expansion revenue
The Implementation Reality
None of this happens automatically. The tools exist, but the organizational change is complex.
You need to:
- Map your current sales processes to identify which tasks can be AI-enhanced or eliminated
- Pilot AI tools with your top performers first to build internal case studies
- Redesign territory assignments and quota structures to account for expanded coverage capacity
- Retrain your sales team on new workflows that blend human judgment with AI efficiency
- Adjust your metrics and compensation plans to reward quality customer interactions, not just activity volume
Most importantly, you need to accept that this transition will be messy and require continuous iteration.
The Bottom Line
For two decades, we’ve accepted that sales reps can only cover 40% of their accounts and spend less than a third of their time with customers. We’ve treated these as natural laws of sales physics.
AI doesn’t just offer incremental improvement on these metrics—it offers the possibility of fundamental change.
The question isn’t whether AI will transform sales coverage and customer engagement. The question is whether you’ll be among the first to capture that advantage or among the last to realize what you’ve missed.
The 40% problem is about to become a 40% opportunity. But only for leaders who act like they believe it.
And our full deep dive with Yamini here:
