(163) How to Create a $5M ARR AE with AI - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdAIDAhNTs0

Transcript: (00:00) Today I have Raul back on the show and we're discussing how we believe the 5 million AR 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. (00:24) 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 we're talking it's still an hour or so a day like at, you know, for most AES. (00:41) What if all of that stuff is being taken care of? Uh, you know, filling all the little fields that your revols put in, moving those deals, adding those nodes, you're 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 increased pipeline that they can work through and close and win and so forth? 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, Cristiano Ronaldo of sales emerging? I am already (01:16) 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, 100,000. 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. (01:38) So R and I were in Berlin last week and we had a really interesting session with I feel like 20 hardcore scientist nerds um that were building companies in you know in farming and agriculture and carbon offset whatever. All of these things Roland and I have zero clue about. Um but we could feel good for what a couple of hours teaching them about how go to market works and that you can what did we call it? Science the out of this. (02:14) So um I feel that landed okay. I don't know what was your impression how it landed with those guys. 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 and 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. And so that's always satisfying. (02:40) 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 list 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. (02:59) I mean, we have similar similar goals with the podcast itself, right? 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 AR close one per year, right? One person, how how could they achieve that? And I think the the way Roland 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? We're we're seeing some use cases around (03:43) you know the whole list building prospecting thing which is I want to 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 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 so first of all yes I agree so the the (04:19) 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 let me correct that I don't know a single company who's actually achieving significant outcome comes with AI. I know a lot of companies who are kind of achieving some nice little cozy improvements here and there. (04:46) 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 10x their game because of AI or even 2x their game as in the actual revenue that's being uh committed at the end that's being made. And I think that there are some reasons for that obviously, right? Um, I do think obviously it's a hype topic. (05:09) Um, and people always expect more than there is of it. 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. (05:30) 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 will be all around the sales people. It will be in the phone. It will be in the computer. (05:52) 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 move the needle 2x, 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. (06:11) I think one of the realizations of the market is well, this AI thing really can't solve the the big problems yet. Or at least that's how we're thinking about it, right? We're thinking, okay, an AI started to replace an SDR, you know, that kind of happened and then unhapped. Um, but also while an AI should then therefore should replace an AE, right? And I think we're very far away from that. (06:36) Like that that's we're 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 going to replace the whole role. Let's just kind of agree there. I think that's uh it's it's not going to work for a couple of reasons. (06:54) 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 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 your 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 I from a zero perspective I think they're all laughable. (07:25) 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're 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. (07:51) Um and I think what Roland and 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 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 does between 500 and 1. (08:16) 5 million a year or dollars a year right roughly speaking and then what the take-home is 200k 300k depending on uh depending on how you know the uh the the commission accelerators 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. (08:40) 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 here today and we've brought what 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 failing in the go to market instead of (09:15) trying to figure out the mini bottom up stuff let's just look top down and find our way through the maze 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. (09:34) 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 and me 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 and and I think a lot of that scenario basically comes down to (10:05) 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. (10:29) Everyone's talking about AI features, automations, and agentic tools. But here's the truth. Most just create or even amplify silos and often make revops the bottleneck since they are the only ones with access to all of the AI goodness. Ever growth is different. It's the only shared go-to market workspace where revops train agents once and sellers can use them onetoone either in Evergrowth or directly inside any CRM be it HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipe Drive. (11:05) If you need to automate topfunnel research, equip sellers with better fit ICP accounts and generate research-based outreach that resonates to generate more revenue, visit evergrowth.com. And now back to the show. 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. So we're calling this the hyper optimized enterprise AE. Yeah. (11:30) And I want to 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 automate away it's like well what should we automate away and that then requires us to think about well what is it that an a a person an AE is actually good at (12:08) 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 well I think this whole agent to agent selling at least in the mid-market and up I think that's pretty far out and do people want to buy from a machine like upwards of 50,000 20,000 100,000 a year I I don't know so there's still going to be a 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 (12:46) 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 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. (13:13) So as humans, we probably have a lot of knowledge and a lot of that knowledge will be way below PhD level. So AIS, you know, take, you know, over some of those pieces, but 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. (13:31) Uh you have kind of your little, you know, specialtity areas, right? So really those two things we call them relationships and mastery right th those those will be the areas I think that even for ease and in 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. And if you run, you know, through the logical process here, what you get out (14:03) is something like the following. And I'm just going to 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 the customer. (14:22) 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 customerf 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. (14:48) 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? 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 um but what if the preparation (15:21) is uh a conversation with the AI uh 10 minutes back and forth gives you a brief hey 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. (15:51) But what if the AI is listening and then there's some detailed question suddenly something very specific about the product that the AE stumbles and fumbles and then the AI can help 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 EAE, you know, people are talking about the post CRM, like the post AI CRM basically. But (16:26) what if the EE doesn't need to touch the CRM at all anymore? Like what if all of that jazz and we'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, filling in all the little fields that your revops put in, moving those deals, adding those nodes, you're doing all of that stuff for you. Done. (16:51) 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 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. (17:29) Probably it does, right? But that's kind of the the hyperefficient version of a I want to say a mid-market enterprise AE, right? Kind of ro what what what do you what do you think about this here? 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. (17:48) Let's say this, but there's an amalgamation of numbers which are talking about how much sales work is an a salesperson actually doing in a day. And people are typically surprised and that when they spend, I don't know, 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. (18:12) And so again there's different numbers uh and then there's some anecdotal evidence also from my end but I would say if you're sales people are spending 2 to three hours of actual sales work a day you're probably even a little bit above average right and what do I mean with that that's also a little bit fuzzy to describe because it's not necessarily only client-f 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 mobile, but any kind of uh client relating work, right? Not (18:50) updating the CRM 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 bunch of reasons why people are only doing two to three hours of sales work a day. (19:09) 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 filled 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 So to some extent as as simplistic as it is I agree that that will happen. I do believe (19:39) 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 customerf 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 because of the sheer amount of of of kind of load that that's put on that puts on you. (20:05) 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 5 to 10% of sales people, 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. (20:23) So we kind of have to figure out how that happens and then and that's the last point that I was going to 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 5 hours of contact uh uh client contact in a day. (20:49) how can we get the six or the seven? At that point, you're kind of arriving very close to a um high-erforming even athlete kind of vision of what a salesperson even is. So, is the Tony Holine salesperson of the future uh getting the LeBron James treatment? Is he getting the whatever sales uh equivalent is of ice baths and physiootherapy every single day? Uh and and people making sure that he's ready for the day every single day. (21:19) is is it even worth maybe h having that kind of person to deal with him or maybe he will pay that person on his own. 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. (21:41) Yeah, I think that that's not going to be going to 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 sales people who sit at the desk all day and massage therapists who massage the saleserson while they're on a call and all that stuff. I think it's going to happen. I think the sane person listening to this would basically say why don't I just hire another person, you know? Why (22:06) why why squeeze another 20% out of that guy? Uh if I can just highlight Jane and Joe and and and add to it like this. I think I think that 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 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 (22:47) 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 modern that factories run today. And then you go back to when this whole automation process started, I want to say in the 80s, uh, something around there. (23:12) Um, and when you looked at those factory floors 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, etc. (23:35) 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 80s in factories and some people are imagining how it could look in 2025 and um and that those two worlds kind of clash. (24:02) Uh 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 uh a sales coach uh 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. (24:20) 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 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 (24:57) about this in a sense that it's still an 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 and 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 (25:39) then handles both the uh inbounds and outbound. So uh inbound in terms of qualification, outbound in terms of like cold emails, LinkedIn, whatever. Um handles the AIS that are doing the closing. So the Q&A and it's usually more of like a how-to conversation, not like a value, you know, finding situation. (26:05) 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 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 gez 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 (26:38) 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're thinking about, um, you know, now calling it an AE that does jump into critical, uh, situations and conversations where he or she doesn't want to hand this over to the AI. (27:06) 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 over some part of that process, right? Really uh making sure that the whole thing really fully works out. (27:26) 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 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 the obvious question is like well why isn't that one person just doing a 100red million in revenue what what do you think are the limitations uh in a setup like this. (27:58) So this is kind of the complete opposite of the setup before, right? So in in this setup, the the work is being done by default by automation and then the whatever kind of salesperson 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. (28:29) 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. I think it is already happen 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 want to I don't know um want to go from my free calendarly to a pro plan or something um and yeah I have a couple of questions and it's it's almost a mix of the the FAQ chatbot and and a and a a (29:08) little bit more commercial spin, so to speak. And some of this is already playing out, right? Kind of this uh what is it? Adam Robinson, uh with his RB2B, 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&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 (29:43) 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. So I agree with that and and 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 (30:12) you even need a saleserson then anymore? 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. (30:36) 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. I'm not sure that that is the case. (30:53) There's even this is a wild one, right? Um this is actually a kind of shower thought I had there. I can even see a 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 I don't know what it was like Excel or word there used to be kind of like a pin needle or whatever Clippy. (31:20) 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 going to be a couple of freaks out there who are going to 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 (31:53) through the way, upselling you, doing all that stuff. And behind that, so again, this is a shower thought, 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. (32:13) " Right? 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 that need a bit more handholding and you still have all the reins in the hand of one salesperson. (32:30) So we had the hyperefficient enterprise AE, we had the multitasker SMB AE and now I'm just going to give the headline and then roll you take it from there. Now we're going to talk about the new Rolodex power law a tell us more about that role or slash the celebrity account executive so and of all the three I think the third 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 a 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 (33:19) that premise, and I I'm 100% 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 Cristiano (33:56) Ronaldo of sales emerging and I'm talking not just like uh kind of like the revenue architecture or go to market leader part. I'm talking actual salespeople. Yeah. Um and you see I kind I kind of I'm going back to the athletes thing, but um I'm already seeing account executives that are building up quite large followings. (34:18) I'm already seeing SDRs in Germany. This is quite strong SDRs building quite large followings of 50,000, 100,000 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 AEES with 5 million, 10 million, 20 million followers all over social media. (34:46) 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 audience will come from. (35:05) But in that world, if attention is that center centered with the 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 pre-selection, a lot of trust, and possibly also a lot of volume that can be pushed through by that person. (35:22) I'm not saying that that's going to happen for 2 million ERP software, but maybe there is going to be a segment where building 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 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 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 (36:10) want to 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. (36:38) Right? Maybe they bring the audience, but then they only have shitty products to sell, 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 and and 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. (36:55) You put a product in their hands combining best of both worlds. And then then you could totally imagine that you 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're happily employed by this one um competitor in the space and then well what could be a growth tactic for a new entrance into the space a new competitor? Well, the growth tactic could be to try and hire you. (37:27) 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. (37:50) is like it's not only making my team stronger, it's also making yours worse. Uh so therefore there's there's a differential benefit in here. Um and and then obviously the AE knows his or her worth. So it's not you're not going to be having a conversation about what is a fair salary. You're going to have a conversation about like what's the RARI? You know what what have you brought to that competitor in the last year? Okay, 5 million. (38:17) Well, you know, I think maybe I can bring 6 million to you, but I want to have, I don't know, 3 or 4 million in return. I mean, that's going to be the conversation. It's it's it's not going to be a salary thing. And maybe yes, it's going to be landing on your W2 or kind of for the Europeans on on your salary form. (38:35) Um maybe it's going to land like some differently, right? But suddenly that is the play and that's how you um as an AE going to turn over a lot of money for your company but also at the same time going to 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 want to call it um but that's the other piece here right these are all um especially the first two they were kind of AI centered I think the last one could happen regardless of what happens with AI. Now you combine that with AI (39:12) 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 of are looking at a at a completely different game. (39:30) 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. (39:47) Um, which is already not even that far off, especially when you're looking at at large large enterprise sales. 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. (40:04) If we're talking about the outliers, the top two, three, four, 5% of sales people or even top 1% of salespeople, within the next 5 years, we will see a sharp increase in the earnings of those uh as compared to the others. Yeah. Okay. Let's wrap it here, Ro. So, that's that's our vision of what is it the 5 million AR. maybe should call it rather the 20 million AI now 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. (40:42) Next week Rol and I are discussing how the new hiring playbook looks like in 2025. It's not only about autoscreening CVS any longer. It goes actually a lot deeper than that. And if you don't want to miss it, consider subscribing to the show and see you next week.