As little as possible, at least, one you have $1m+ in ARR.
We’ve all figured out the past few years that specialization is where it’s at in sales. The “full stack” AE that markets, prospects, and closes is just too inefficient. You get a resource that isn’t that great at any of it.
Instead, you want to specialize around what folks are good at:
- Demand Gen
- Outbound & ABM
- SDRs, often in both marketing (demand) AND sales orgs
- AEs that are closers.
In an ideal world, at least in a transaction model (with lower ACVs) … an AE walks into work with 4+ appointments already set up in her calendar.
Her job is to close. The other folks handle the rest of the funnel.
Once you do this, you probably need to raise quotas. The extra resources have to be paid for, somehow.
But this is where we’ve all gone.
The age of the Generalist, Do-It-All, Almost Full Stack AE?
Gone
