How to Create a $5M ARR AE with AI

What does the future AE look like in the age of AI?

Toni and Raul break down how AI could transform sales productivity, reshape go-to-market structures, and create the $5M ARR AE. From hyper-optimized workflows to the rise of the “celebrity AE,” this episode explores three new models that redefine what top performance looks like.

This episode is brought to you by Evergrowth  —  Their Agentic GTM Workspace enables revenue teams to collaborate and win with AI-powered teammates, breaking down silos and helping B2B teams grow smarter with fewer resources.

Want to work with us? Learn more: revformula.io

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (03:00) - The 5M ARR AE with AI
• (11:17) - Hyper Optimized Enterprise AE
• (15:18) - AI-Assisted Sales Meetings
• (19:04) - Maximizing Sales Efficiency
• (20:50) - Salesperson as a High Performer
• (22:01) - Factory Automation
• (24:42) - The SMB Multitasker
• (32:44) - The Celebrity AE
• (35:29) - Influencer Crossovers in Sales
• (39:00) - Wrapping up
• (40:42) - Next Week: The 2025 Hiring Playbook

Creators and Guests

Host

Raul Porojan

Voice of Reason in Revenue / Former Director Sales & CS at Project A

Host

Toni Hohlbein

2x exited CRO | 1x Founder | Podcast Host

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Raul Porojan, together they look at the full funnel.

With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.

If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.

TRF - 5M ARR AE
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Introduction
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[00:00:00]

Toni: Today I have Raul back on the show and we are discussing how we believe the 5 million a RR per year account executive can be achieved with AI, but also with a new power law of distribution we are seeing emerging in some elite sellers. If you haven't already, please consider subscribing to the show and now.

Enjoy. People are talking about the post CRM, like the post ai CRM basically. But what if the A doesn't need to touch the CRM at all anymore, and they're talking, it's still an hour or so, a day, like at, you know, for most AEs, what if all of that stuff is being taken care of? Uh, you know, Flink, all little fields that your rev ops put in, moving those deals, adding those notes, and doing all of that stuff for you.

Done. If that is something that can be achieved, could the AE actually run five, let's just say five meetings a day? Um, could that actually work out and does that translate into a massively [00:01:00] increased pipeline that they can work through and close and win and so forth?

Raul: Uh, in a world where a lot of sales is happening increasingly over social media, is it really impossible that there will be kind of a LeBron James Christiano, Ronaldo of sales?

Emerging. I'm already seeing account executives that are building up quite large followings. I'm already seeing SDRs in Germany. This is quite strong. SDR is building quite large followings of 50,000, a hundred thousand. The cream will rise to the top and uh, at, at the end of the day there will be AEs with 5 million, 10 million, 20 million followers all over social media.

Toni: So Ro and I were in Berlin last week and we had a really interesting session. With, I feel like 20 hardcore scientist nerds. Um, they were building companies in, you know, in farming and agriculture and carbon offset, whatever, all of these things. Ro and I have zero clue [00:02:00] about, um, what we could feel good for about a couple of hours teaching them about how go-to market works and that you can, what did we call it?

Science, the shit out of this. So, um, I feel that landed. Okay. I don't know. What was your impression, how it landed with those guys?

Raul: So it was a lot of fun. I went to an event after where, uh, these people connected and uh, that was a lot of fun. Um, and, and people are always very appreciative when they can, can.

Get more confident and get a better feel of what they're doing and why they're doing that. Yeah. Uh, and so that's always satisfying. I think that's also when I do a workshop, that's, that's what I'm focused on is, is making people actually better. And, uh, this often goes beyond just having like a. Two, three thing lists to do from next week on, but also goes into making them more confident, more knowledgeable, and now kind of a little bit more able to tweak the, the, the knobs on their own.

Toni: I mean, we have similar, similar goals with the podcast itself. [00:03:00] Right.

The 5M ARR AE with AI
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Toni: And, um, just jumping into our topic here today, we want to talk about how the future of an account executive could actually look like and meaning in, in this sense, you know, how could an AE. Get to, let's just say 5 million a IR close one per year, right?

One person, how, how could they achieve that? And I think that the way Ro and I arrived here was we talked about how AI is kind of still not breaking through com, you know, on the commercial side with most organizations, right? Where we are seeing some use cases around, you know, the whole list building prospecting thing, which is.

I wanna say hardly an AI use case there. There's certainly aspects to it, but, but it's hardly the one. Um, we're seeing some things that are happening on the coaching side, I feel. Um, but besides [00:04:00] that, it's still not fully. There and, and maybe we linger on this for for a second. Why, why do you think, why do you think this AI thing isn't breaking through on the commercial side as it has been arguably for, for the coding?

For, for developing, right.

Raul: So first of all, yes, I agree. So the, the actual results of whatever has happened in AI within the last year or two in go to market. Are mostly disappointing to be fair and, um, very few companies. Okay, lemme correct that I don't know a single company who's actually achieving significant outcomes with ai.

I know a lot of companies who are kind of achieving some nice little cozy improvements here and there. Um, or, or maybe they're automating this a little better or that research is a little bit better. Um, but I haven't seen anybody 10 x their game because of ai or even two x their game as in the actual revenue that's being, uh, uh, [00:05:00] committed at the end, uh, that's being made.

Yeah, and I think that there are some reasons for that, obviously. Right. Um, I do think, obviously it's a hype topic, um, and people always expect more than there is of it. Uh, I think that's true for most people. Um, I also think that we are. To some extent, we still haven't even scratched the big cases of, of, uh, of what will actually make money.

So just to, to, to give an idea there. So, um, a lot of people are thinking about how AI will actually change CRM and how AI will become more of a, an assistant or an assistant to a salesperson thing. I'm not even exactly sure how that will look like. It's just a lot of talk and a lot of thinking and people are thinking, well, it will be more like a sales OS than it will be a CRM, as in it'll be all around the salespeople.

It'll be in the phone. It'll be in the computer. They barely will have to move a finger and all that stuff. I think if we look at the concrete things, there's a couple use cases that are quite useful. And I can see those, but those don't [00:06:00] move the needle to X. Yeah, right. There's some productivity stuff, some research stuff.

There's a little bit of automation and there's some coaching that's happening right now and maybe a little bit of work with leads.

Toni: I think one of the realizations here of the market is, well, this AI thing really can't solve the the big problems yet, or at least that's how we are thinking about it, right?

We are thinking, okay, an AI started to replace an SDR. That kind of happened and then un happened. Um, but also while an AI should then therefore should replace an ae, right? And I think we are very far away from that. Like that, that's, we are pretty far away from that. So what then happened not only for the market, but also for, you know, all the vendors building these things like, oh yeah, wait a minute, we're not gonna replace the whole role.

Let's just kind of agree there. I think that's, uh, it's, it's not gonna work for a couple of reasons. For example, AI just doesn't learn that. That's kind of a big issue there. It just simply doesn't learn. But, um, the [00:07:00] other thing is, well, it can do all of these small little things here and there, right? Which is like, oh, you know, I can help you with this CRM notes and I can give you some call feedback and I can, um, I don't know, move this deal automatically for you and I can prep your, you know, all of these little things that one by one.

From a CO perspective, I think they're all laughable. It's like, okay, that it's all cute, right? It's all okay. It sounds great, but it's all, it's all just a little bit cute. Right? And I think what's happening here, and to a degree I think this is, this is where we are thinking about it in the, in the wrong way actually, is, um, we are trying to see all these small things and, and trying to bottom up our way of how the AE role could look like in a couple of years.

Um. And I think what Roland I just wanted to do is to scrap all of that. You know, throw all of that thinking out the window. I think that's, you know, somewhat wrong. Wrong thinking. [00:08:00] And instead we, we wanted to look at it from a top down perspective, basically saying, okay, well, right now, like a decent ae, depending on the company, depending on the deal size, just between 501.5 million euro a year or, uh, dollars a year, right?

Roughly speaking. And then what? The take home is 200 K, 300 k, depending on. Uh, depending on how, you know, the, uh, the, the commission accelerates and so forth, and we want to flip the concept on its head and instead of like finding all the little mini things that you could be doing today to improve your go-to market, I know everyone is looking for that, but instead of doing the mini things, let's just do a top-down approach here.

Let's just say, okay, well, how would the role need to look like if an AE team reliably. Could turn over 5 million AI a year per ae. Right? How, how would that role actually then need to look like? And I think that's what what we want to unpack [00:09:00] here today, and we've brought. Is it three different aspects and solutions to look at this?

Let, let's see kind of how far we get through the whole thing, but really that was the initial thought here as we were discussing why AI is still filling in the go-to market. Instead of trying to figure out the mini bottom up stuff, let's just look top down and find our way through the ma. By going from the end in instead of the other way around.

I'm not sure if you ever played it this way, but anyway, kind of, that's, that's how we're trying to approach it.

Raul: So I think this is a very interesting concept. And, um, the, I don't know exactly if that number is 5 million or seven or four or eight or whatever the thought exercise and Tony Ami actually spent.

Quite a long time discussing this two times already. Uh, how would that look like? Actually three times. We even talked about this in the podcast before. Um, how could that look like, uh, when, when an AE makes that much revenue for a company and therefore also, uh, earns that much and, and would people even be happy about that?

And you as a founder? [00:10:00] And, and I think a lot of that scenario basically comes down to, I can see more, but there's kind of three main ideas how that would look like. And, uh, the first one would have to be, have to do a lot with the efficiency. The second one would have to do a lot with the move within the market.

So what, what would happen with the customers, what would happen with the deal sizes? And then the third one would have to do with, let's call it a little bit of a wild card, the account executive as a celebrity.

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Hyper Optimized Enterprise AE
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Raul: I think maybe Tony kick us off with, uh, what we discussed for the first one. I thought that was kind of the, the basic for this.

Toni: So we are calling this the hyper optimized enterprise ae.

Um, and I wanna just piggyback a little bit on. Something that we are now starting to see with the SDR role. Um, really single SDRs earning a lot more money because they're starting to, um, automate certain parts of their job and therefore getting a lot, you know, being able to run a lot more pipeline, for example.

Right. And the thinking behind this needs to be, well, what? Instead of thinking, what can we automate, uh, automate away, it's [00:12:00] like, well, what should we automate away? And that then requires us to think about, well, what is it that an A person, an A is actually good at? Like in general, what, what, what is that person good at?

And um, usually when you ask this question to people, they come up with two things. One is, while I think this whole agent to agent selling. At least in the midmarket and app, I think that's pretty far out. And do people wanna buy from a machine like upwards of 50,000, 20,000, a hundred thousand years a year?

I, I don't know. So there's still gonna be human component here. And people phrase this as like, well, the, the relationship building, the relationship building is still a unique key component of, uh, of us humans, right? Kind of selling to other people. And then the other piece usually is some kind of a, um, excellence or mastery in a specific area, right?

And, and that, that usually [00:13:00] comes from a perspective of AI is pretty smart, pretty good. Um. But it's not yet PhD level at everything yet. And maybe it will get there, but it, but it's not there yet. So as humans, we probably have a lot of knowledge and a lot of that knowledge will be way below PhD level. So ai, you know, take, you know, over some of those pieces.

Then there will be areas where we as humans are extremely good at, and that will be individual. Not everyone is good at the same thing. Uh, you have kind of your little, you know, specialty areas, right? So really those two things, we call them relationships and mastery, right? Those, those will be the areas I think that even for ease and a couple of years will still be extremely relevant.

So if that is the premise and you kind of work your way back from that, then you're basically realizing, okay, so everything that doesn't touch on either of those. We should probably strip this away as much as possible and give that to the AI to be automated. Um, and if you run, you know, through [00:14:00] the logical process here, what you get out is something like the following.

And I'm just gonna go through this one by one and let's, let's see where, where Raul Interjects and kind of thinks that's bs. Um, but the first step could be, well, if it's really about the relationship. Basically that means the interaction with a customer. Um, and that is sometimes expressed in terms of meetings a day, right?

Could you have, as a sales rep, let's just say five to six, let's say five, five meetings per day that are customer facing. What's, what's been the bottleneck to that recently, or up until now? Well, it's, you need to do, you know, preparation. You need to update your CRM, you need to do like, post call notes. You need to, you know, think into the account.

You need to figure this out. You need to have all of these things. You need to, um, you know, juggle in your head. Um, and yes, maybe there aren't even as many opportunities to, to run this with. Right. [00:15:00] But what were to happen if you stripped all of those things away, right? Kind of, if, if, if we take this like this, like let's just say call prep is not you sitting down doing some searches and going through your notes and maybe listening back to a call and checking an email that you've written.

AI-Assisted Sales Meetings
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Toni: Um, but what if the preparation is, uh, a conversation with the ai, uh, 10 minutes back and forth? AI gives you a brief. That's what happened. That's what we need to achieve here. And you ask a couple of questions back and you have a back and forth for 10 minutes, and now you're prepped, you're prepped for the call, right?

What were to happen if, um, in key details during the call, you know, the AI maybe is there with its own whatever, avatar or not, or side panel or whatever. It doesn't matter. What if the AI is listening and then there's some detailed questions, suddenly something very specific about the product that the e stumbles and fumbles, and then the AI can help [00:16:00] out.

Or there's a legal question, or if there's a compliance question or if there's, um, a question around a previous conversation that the ae, you know, didn't have top of mind because it wasn't part of the prep and so forth, the air could jump in and, and provide some of that additional context, right. What if, um, the ae, you know, people are talking about the post CRM, like the post ai CRM basically, but what if the AE doesn't need to touch the CRM at all anymore?

Like, what if all of that jazz and we are talking, it's still an hour or so a day, like at, you know, for most AEs, what if all of that stuff is being taken care of? Uh, you know, filling all little fields that your rev ops put in, moving those deals, adding those notes, you're doing all of that stuff for you.

Done, uh, post meeting work, all kinds of like, oh, next steps. I need to write this email. I need to do all of, all of it done. Um, even hand over to the CSM team. Done all of that done [00:17:00] by the ai. Then the question really becomes, well if that is something that can be achieved, um, well, could the AE actually run five, let's just say five meetings a day?

Um, could that actually work out and does that translate into, um, a massively increased, uh, pipeline that they can work through and close and win and so forth? Probably it does. Probably it does, right. But that's kind of the, the hyper efficient version of a, I wanna say mid-market enterprise ae Right. Kind of role.

What, what, what do you, what do you think about this year?

Raul: There's this number, you've probably heard about it before, where. And there's been a bunch of research actually, and, and there's different numbers, let's say this, but there's an amalgamation of numbers which are talking about how much sales work is an a sales person actually doing in a day.

And people are typically surprised and that when they spend, [00:18:00] I dunno, whatever money they spend for a salesperson and they sit there for 10 hours a day, they're not selling for 10 hours a day. And in, in reality, the the ratio is, is even much, much lower. And so again, there's different numbers, uh, and then there's some anecdotal evidence also from my end.

But I would say if your salespeople are spending two to three hours of actual sales work. A day, you're probably even a little bit above average, right? Mm. And what do I mean with that? That's also a little bit fuzzy to describe because it's not necessarily only client facing time. It can also be writing emails.

Uh, it can also be, uh, calling, uh, uh, kind of like the old fashioned way on a landline or a mobile, but any kind of, uh, client relating work, right? Not updating the serum or not talking about the customer with your boss. And that is wild, right? There's a bunch of reasons why, and, and the first one is not necessarily because your people are lazy, but there's a [00:19:00] bunch of reasons why people are only doing two to three hours of sales work a day.

Maximizing Sales Efficiency
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Raul: And I'm saying this because, so part of the thinking is, well, what if we just make it so the rest of what they fill their day with, we can just condense into two, three hours. Instead of them spending seven, eight hours doing all kinds of other different stuff. Thinking about the account updating, talking to this person about that, passing it on to CRM, all the stuff you talked about before.

What if we can condense that into two or three hours and suddenly we can make people work two or three times as much? And I agree with that, right? So to some extent, as as simplistic as it is, I agree that that will happen. I do believe, though, that there's kind of a natural limit to how much the average salesperson, or let's say even the top salespeople are able to do.

Good customer facing, uh, uh, contact in a day. Um, and so it's not necessarily that if you make people four times as efficient, they will be able to handle four times as many clients just [00:20:00] because of the sheer amount of, of, of kind of load that that's put on, that puts on you maybe the social load or the conversational load or kind of the cognitive function that kind of, uh, is there or is not there anymore.

For the top five to 10% of salespeople, maybe that works a bit better for others not. But I do think there is a natural limit. I don't think we've scratched the surface of what that limit is yet. Yeah. Um, but I do think it is there. So we kind of have to figure out how that happens. And then, and that's the last point that I was gonna go into, uh, what leverage can we even find to increase that limit?

So will this become a game where, at the end of the day. It is even about getting another hour or another two hours of Tony in a day, rather than him already being a top 2% salesperson with five hours of contact, cl uh, uh, uh, client contact in a day. How can we get the six or the seven? .

Salesperson as a High Performer
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Raul: At that point you kind of arriving very close to a, um, high performing, even athlete kind of vision of what a salesperson even is.[00:21:00]

So is the Tony Holbein salesperson of the future. Uh, getting the LeBron James treatment, is he getting the whatever sales, uh, equivalent is of ice baths and physiotherapy every single day? Uh, and, and people making sure that he's ready for the day, every single day. Is, is it even worth maybe having that kind of person to deal with him or maybe he will pay that person, uh, on his.

Um, and I don't know, I, I, I do believe that if that happens and if kind of the additional productivity and the longevity of a salesperson is worth that amount of money to a company, that that might even happen. And then we're talking about squeezing out the extra 10, 20% of a salesperson. I think that that's not gonna be gonna be the first thing.

First. We have to kind of get a salesperson to their natural limits, and then people will, uh, work much more with coaches and mental health coaches for salespeople and specialized physiotherapists For salespeople who sit at the desk all day and massage therapists who massage the salesperson while they're on a call [00:22:00] and all that stuff, I think it's gonna happen.

Factory Automation
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Toni: I think the same person listening to this would basically say, why don't I just hire another person? You know, why, why, why squeeze another 20% out of that guy? If I can just hire Jane and Joe and, and, and add to it like this, I think, I think there, you know, there will be those discussions, right? But I think the, the other way to look at this, um, if you walk into any kind of factory these days, and we're talking real actual, you know, assembling physical goods kind of factories.

Um, there are now many, many factories where basically, uh, people are shutting the light off. Um, because there's no human being in this factory anymore. The whole thing just runs by itself. Um, the only reason why they need light is for humans to walk in and, and install and tweak and, and and maintain or something like this, right?

But everything else just running by itself 24 7, you know? Um, so that is, that is the most [00:23:00] modern that factories run today. And then you go back to when this whole automation process started, I wanna say in the eighties. Uh, something around there. Um, and when you looked at those factory flaws back then that were heavily operated by humans, they were just not compatible with this crazy stuff that people are doing now.

Right. Kind of. There's a, there's an evolution that needed to happen for those factory lanes. To be able to be automated in this way. Right. And they had processes before, like they had that they were running on a schedule, they were kind of doing these things, et cetera. And I think we are at a similar point in time right now with the go to market profession.

Um, whether that's the whole thing or very, you know, very specific part of it. But we are, we are running companies like automation was run in the eighties and factories. Some people are imagining how it could look in 2025 and um, and that those two worlds kind of [00:24:00] clash. But once you, once you, once you're okay with that, I think then thinking in the direction of like, well, yeah, maybe we would actually have a sales coach that focuses on one person, right.

Or on very few people, and really kind of tries to get the last. Uh, you know, uh, juice out of that, uh, person. I think that that becomes a little bit more realistic. Now thinking about the next way people are thinking about this. So the first part was, okay, we have this one superstar ae, um, and how can we optimize everything around her to make sure that she can sell as much as possible?

The next way people are thinking about this though, is what we call the.

The SMB Multitasker
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Toni: Um, the, the SMB multitasker, right? And this is really a little bit of a return to the full cycle a, uh, concept, uh, but maybe going a little bit further than we might have thought previously. So this, I think thinking about this in a sense that it's still an [00:25:00] account executive, I think might actually be misleading.

Uh, I think people should be starting to think more about it as the, um, a commercial manager actually right. This now goes into the way of thinking of, okay, you have your funnel in front of you, um, and maybe some of the selling can be done by an ai, um, that, you know, doesn't require you to be present at every single step.

And, um, and that then leads to a commercial manager maybe being responsible for 5 million in SMB sales, which is a lot more when you think about it. Um. That then handles both the, uh, inbounds and outbound. So, uh, inbound in terms of qualification, outbound in terms of like cold emails linked and whatever, um, handles theis that are doing the closing.

So the q and a, and it's usually more of like a how to conversation, not like a valued, you know, [00:26:00] finding situation. Uh, handles some of the onboarding handles, uh, the renewal and upsell and so forth that comes potentially out of that. And in this world, that commercial manager becomes more of a person that, uh, supervises and tweaks and improves those agents. We're now kind of seeing examples where people are really going deep into the AI agent space to handle, really handle commercial tasks. And some of the complaining we're hearing, complaining, realization rather. Is that, oh geez, this is a lot of work to, to tweak those agents to kind of give feedback, make sure they're doing the right things, supervise them, you know, read all through all of that stuff.

Well, that might become just its own role in itself, right? Uh, really people making sure that all of these things are working as they should. Um, and then in this, you know, multitasker setup we are thinking about, um, you know, now calling it an AE that does jump into critical. [00:27:00] Situations and conversations where he or she doesn't want to hand this over to the ai, maybe there is a critical event on churn or upsell or maybe there's a high value prospect that they want to jump into.

Right? And, and then basically, uh, being able to, um, to switch in the human and then have the human take takeover some part of that process, right? Really, uh, making sure that the whole thing really fully works out. Um, and that then can, you know, it's, it's hard to say where that ends and how that scales and so forth.

But I think that's the other vision people are having is, um, that, uh, you basically have, uh, you know, one person managing a team of agents that are spanning the whole funnel in that sense. Right. Role. Do you think, you know, did, did the obvious questions like, well, why isn't that one person just doing a hundred million in revenue?

What, what do, what do you think are the limitations, uh, in a setup like this? So

Raul: this is kind of the complete opposite of the setup [00:28:00] before, right? Yeah. So in, in this setup, the, the work is being done by default, by automation, and then the whatever kind of sales person is making sure that nothing breaks down and jumping in when they need to.

Okay, cool. Now, the underlying assumption of that is that sales being done primarily by agents, bots, whatever you want to call it, automation. Will work. Uh, if I had to bet my own money, by the way, I would say it will, it won't, at least not within the next 20 or 30 years, uh, maybe let's say 10 years.

Toni: I think it is already happening in the lower ACVs.

I think it is happening in the, in the SMB realm where people don't need the, the whole orchestra to play for them to buy where it's, where it's predominantly. Okay, I wanna. I don't know, um, wanna go from my free currently to a pro plan or something. [00:29:00] Um, and yeah, I have a couple of questions and it's, it's almost a mix of the, the FAQ chat bot and, and a, and a little bit more commercial spin, so to speak.

And some of this already. Playing out right? Kind of this, uh, what is it? Adam Robinson, uh, with his RB two B. They're apparently using AI agents, kind of, you know, versions of him to, to sell, um, to sell his tool. And I think this is primarily FAQ and, you know, q and a based, basically, right? It's not a mid-market sale where they first discover the pain and then do an internal, you know.

That it's, it's not that complicated sell. It's more the simple stuff. And I think in the SMB space, that is how the majority of the sales is done. And I think that part is already on the cusp of being done by, uh, by agents actually. So I just wanted to interject there that at least that part is more reality now than it is in 20, 30 years.

Raul: So I agree with that. And, and [00:30:00] that's where I was thinking as well, is that. How do you achieve very large numbers of revenue? Well, it doesn't necessarily have to be large basket sizes. It can also just be a lot of, uh, accounts on a small basket size question is why do we even need a sales person then anymore?

Mm-hmm. Um, and I do think the more you go through this exercise, the more you actually arrive at kind of, and one kind of template of how PLG is being run nowadays. Um, and, and to some extent. It could even be that this is the evolution of PLG. So we're, at this point, we're not actually even talking about sales growth anymore.

We're talking about PLG, but with a very sharp distinction where the sales manager is leading that distinction and jumping in and switching it over to playbooks. So there needs to be kind of a handover and, and, and a switch between those playbooks. And I'm not sure that that is the case. There's even, this is a wild one, right?

Um, this is actually a, a kind of shower thought I had. There I can even see a [00:31:00] world where the product is becoming the salesperson. And what I mean by that is, so this is different from the concept of PLG. This is the idea that, uh. I don't know if you remember in, uh, I don't know what it was, like Excel or Word.

There used to be kind of like a pin clip needle or whatever. Clippy. Clippy. Yeah. Everyone knows Clippy. Right. And to some extent, Clippy was kind of the personification of Excel in a very dumb way. Right. And, and it helped you and it spoke to you, kind of spoke to you. Um, now forget the, the kind of gimmicky part about like it being a cartoony character and all that.

But maybe there is gonna be a couple of freaks out there who are gonna kind of put a persona on their product and, uh, that that product will then speak to you and work with you, uh, as you, as you go through it. Just like maybe a human would onboarding you, guiding you through the way, upselling you, doing all that stuff.

Behind that. So again, this is a shower thought, [00:32:00] right? But behind that is a person, um, maybe making sure that they jump in and switching over to an actual person. Uh, and, and, and that clippy thing will say, oh, I'll connect you to Tony and he'll talk to you about this. Right. Hmm. This is kind of a wild out there idea, but I don't know why this wouldn't happen.

Right. In that case, maybe even the ACVs are even a bit higher because then you can go into products that are a bit more complex and that need a bit more interaction and need a bit more handholding, and you still have all the reigns in the hand of one salesperson.

Toni: So we had the hyper-efficient enterprise ae, we had the multitasker SMB ae.

And now I'm just gonna give the headline and then roll. You take it from there.

The Celebrity AE
---

Toni: Now we're gonna talk about the new Rolodex Power law. Ae tell us more about that role

Raul: or slash the celebrity account executive. Yeah, so, and of all the three, I think the third [00:33:00] one is most likely to happen actually. Uh, I'm not sure like how big of an effect it will have and if it will bring really the 5 million.

Uh, or 10 million a AE person. But so, so here's the groundwork, right? In a world where everything just moves to the top, now you have to kind of agree with that premise, and I, I'm a hundred percent set on this one. Attention, especially moves to the top, uh, on whatever kind of platform you're looking at, whether it be sales, commercial, attention in general, or attention on social media.

Uh, in a world where a lot of happening is happening, uh, a lot of sales is happening increasingly over social media and increasingly over some kind of attention or influence, uh, that is given, um, beyond to the product in itself. Call it personal brand, right? Is it really impossible that there will be kind of a LeBron James Christiano, Ronaldo of sales emerging?

And I'm [00:34:00] talking not just like, uh, kind of like the. Revenue architecture or go-to market leader? Uh, part I'm talking about actual salespeople. Yeah. Um, and you see, I kind, I kind of am going back to the athlete thing, but um, I'm already seeing account executives that are building up quite large followings.

I'm already seeing SDRs in Germany. This is quite strong. SDRs building quite large followings of 50,000, a hundred thousand, uh, people on, on Instagram, 200,000 sometimes even. Um, is it inconceivable that as this game is being refined, give it a year or two and a lot of people will jump on that. The cream will rise to the top.

And, uh, at the, at the end of the day, there will be AEs with 5 million, 10 million, 20 million followers all over social media. Um, especially if they, uh, target, uh, as an audience, not just maybe salespeople themselves, but maybe even the wider public or especially also public within, uh, their product niche.

Don't quote me on that. I'm not necessarily sure where that [00:35:00] audience will come from, but in that world, if attention is that center centered with a top. Um, all of a sudden you're looking at a lead magnet or an attention machine that kind of gets you a lot of volume through the door based on a lot of preselection, a lot of trust, and possibly also a lot of volume that can be pushed through by that person.

Yeah. I'm not saying that that's gonna happen necessarily for 2 million ERP software, but maybe there is going to be a segment where that will happen. And building

Influencer Crossovers in Sales
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Toni: on that, I think this is, it sounds a little bit like an influencer play. Um, but it's, but it's actually not, it's, it's different from that and it's different from that in, in a very specific way where, um, really, yes, they have a bunch of reach, but at the end, the product that they're selling is not some shitty, um, course or some, some shitty product placement.

But the [00:36:00] product that they're selling is the one of the company that they're currently being employed by. Right. Um, meaning those kind of influencer crossovers I wanna call them, um, don't only bring an audience and reach, but also a very useful heavy product market fit and probably expensive and valuable, uh, product that they're then selling at the same time.

Right? So basically benefiting both from the top funnel and from a strong. Conversion, uh, further down the funnel, which is what, by the way, what influencers in general kind of struggle with, right? Maybe they bring the audience, but then they only have shitty products to sell,

Raul: right? And, and this is actually the reality.

A lot of influencers are trying to monetize by going their own way and selling garbage products. Yes. And then monetizing their audience. Right. What if you put a good product in their hands, and sorry for getting in there, but this is exactly the thing. You could approach products in their hands. That's I'm saying, yes.

Combining best of both worlds.

Toni: And then, then you could totally imagine that, you know, [00:37:00] let's just, let's just say you are, you are working, you're an account executive in a competitive space, and. You have a large following. You are happily employed by this one, um, competitor in this space. And then well, what could be a growth tactic for a new entrant into this space?

A new competitor? Well, the growth tactic could be to try and hire you. So now though, what you're worth to them is not, um, you know, the typical AE salary. What you're worth to them is also. Almost the competitive loss to your competitor, kind of by being able to take, think about how, how players being traded in, in soccer and football and so forth, right?

Same, same thing. It's like it's not only making my team stronger, it's also making years worse. Uh, so therefore there's, there's a differential benefit in here. Um, and, and then obviously the [00:38:00] AE knows his or her worth. So it's not, you're not gonna be. Having a conversation about what is a fair salary, you're gonna have a conversation about like, what's the ri, you know, what, what have you brought to that competitor in the last year?

Oh, okay. 5 million. Well, you know, I think maybe I can bring 6 million to you, but I want to, I don't know, three or 4 million in return. I mean, that's gonna be the conversation. It's, it's not gonna be a salary thing. And maybe yes, it's gonna be landing on your W2 or kind of for the Europeans on your, on your salary form.

Um, maybe it's gonna land like some differently, right? But suddenly that is the play and that's how you, um, as an AE gonna turn over a lot of money for your company, but also at the same time gonna turn over a lot of money for yourself, right? Um, and that's, you know, again, the crossover influencer or the, the, the new Rolodex, power law, whatever you wanna call it.

Um, but that's the other piece [00:39:00] here, right?

Wrapping up
---

Raul: These are all, um. Especially the first two, they were kind of AI centered. Yeah. I think the last one could happen regardless of what happens with ai. Now you combine that with AI and now having a person who has that reach, who has all that influence, who captures all the attention, then being able to convert that in a much more efficient way.

Now all of a sudden you kind overlooking at a, at a completely different game. Yeah. And maybe you will have people able to sell 10 million, 20 million. Well, those are crazy numbers and I don't know if they will happen, but maybe these things can happen when you combine all these moving parts together.

Yeah. And in that world, well, maybe those people will earn three, four, 5 million or maybe at least one or two. Um, which is already not even that far off, especially when you're looking at, at large, large enterprise sales. Yeah. Um, I don't think that this will happen in every segment. I don't think this will happen for every product.

Uh, but I do think that. If we're, and I would probably even be willing to bet on this [00:40:00] if we're talking about the outliers, the top 2, 3, 4, 5% of salespeople, or even top 1% of salespeople within the next five years, we will see a sharp increase in the earnings of those, uh, as compared to the others.

Toni: Yeah. Okay.

Conclusion and Future Topics
---

Toni: Let's wrap it here, Rahul. So that's, that's our vision of. What is it, the 5 million ai, maybe you should call it rather the 20 million ai. You know that we've gotten to the bottom of this, but uh. I think that's how you should starting to be thinking about. Um, and yes, AI plays a role here, um, but it's probably not the full picture.

Thanks everyone for listening and, um, see you next week. Thank you.

Next Week: The 2025 Hiring Playbook
---

Toni: Next week, Raul and I are discussing how the new hiring playbook looks like in 2025. It's not only about auto screening C Visa any longer. It goes actually a lot deeper than that. And if you don't wanna miss it, consider us subscribing to the show and [00:41:00] see you next week.