Manuel H.

I can’t wait for the resounding failures / consolidations in that space.

While I haven’t been an AE, I can give you my thoughts. Ever since crossing $Xk in annual comp for the first time, I’ve stopped increasing my spend with every raise / promotion and instead lived like I was making just $Xk/year. That’s allowed me to build several other income / dividend / rent streams over time. Lifestyle inflation is a real issue, but a very controllable one (aside from actual monetary inflation, which is harder to control). Preventing lifestyle inflation once you get past your “comfortable enough” number is the path to building self-sustaining wealth.

The breadline?

I’ll take a well crafted cold email over a LI message, but that’s just me

Hi Jordan, while I didn’t use it for a CRM (SFDC was ingrained), I did successfully implement DevRev as an AI-native customer service system. DevRev had, at the time, effectively all the functionalities of a CRM that we actually used (SFDC is a swiss army knife, but most people just use one or two implements), it understood accounts, could track opportunities, create reports, etc. Depending on where you are at, I think it’s a fine CRM all the way up to around $20M in ARR, and possibly beyond. Being AI-native also means you can have it perform a lot of things autonomously.

I have contacts at both if you’d like an intro Peter P.

I’ve used and brought in BackEngine a few times now, yes. AIcelerate is similiar, but more focused on large enterprise versus BackEngine being more mid-market focused.

Legacy CSPs are struggling to remain relevant, I agree. Any CSP that requires human care and feeding (of data) is unfortunately highly exposed. There are some neo-CSPs as I call them, execution intelligence platforms like AIcelerate and BackEngine which passively ingest all the signals and then provide signals output which can be automated. Traditional CSPs have been about making sure work was being done and logged. EIPs are focused on the outcomes.

Hi Scott, great question, definitely an opportunity I’ve run into. IMHO, when it comes to sales forecasts, there is one for the “company”, and then there are nuanced department-level ones. Both are important ones IMHO. Sales may be more optimistic on what they plan to close, but the company shouldn’t count on that until it manifests. Similarly, CS might be more conservative / realistic when it comes to predicting churn versus what the company might require. My recommendation would be to have one common company-level forecast that the exec team uses for board reporting / company forecasting, but delegate to each group their own modified version of that and have them call out where and why they deviate at the forecast call.

pure gold