Death of an AE: How to Spot Bad Account Executives In Your Startup And What to Do

Steve Jobs used to say that it’s the marketing and sales that drive a company, while the product is what gets them in a position to hire those said “biz” ppl. It’s often true that companies lose sight of their product to cater to the demands of outside investors who you are bound to reciprocate with growth.

As a technical founder, I’ve built my own SaaS back in 2009, still running and profitable. I’ve hired and fired people. Running a business is not a popularity contest. To be an effective delegator of tasks, you need to separate it from being ‘nice’. This means looking at reality in the now, how people are today and their potential tomorrow. It is an art itself.

By no means am I claiming to some authority on this topic. I’m just another schmuck on HN with at tendency towards knowitallism. But I sure as shit know night from day from the analytical observations I’ve made working with different AEs at different stages, for different companies of my career. I hated it, but looking back, those cumulative experiences at working cut-throat startups in Vancouver, BC, one of the lowest paying and high cost of living in the scene (that’s another topic), has given me a glimpse at what it takes to be an AE, and how to quickly determine if you got what it takes to continue or switch careers.

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman left a deep impression on me in my senior high school. Largely because it convinced me that being an AE involved being wildly optimistic and impulsive, because that’s the strawman we’ve built up collectively through inaccurate reporting and films like Glengarry Glen Ross.

So, now let’s get to the real meat of why you are here. Let’s build a profile of a good AE so that we can build upon a common ground truths. Simply negating the positive points is not enough. Often they may share some traits but as I will break down in steps, why they can’t have all the pre-requisite requirements. Just because somebody is an “extrovert” doesn’t mean he will do well, just because somebody used to be an “engineer” doesn’t make him any less successful.

The good AEs are but not limited to:

1. High level of emotional resilience and empathy
2. Malleable but principled and consistent in their day to day effort.
3. Only talks when necessary or asked to, doesn’t go on a wild rant on Slack blaming engineers for not meeting their quota.
4. Not afraid to disagree while respecting the disagreeing person’s character.
5. The wins are not as enjoyable because you’ve had your heart broken.

Un: Bad AEs are emotionally weak and lack empathy.

Hearing ‘no’ is often bound to have devastating compounding effect on those individuals that lack empathy. Lack of empathy towards others requires you to be not empathetic towards yourself. This creates a cycle of self doubt, unaddressed anger, even bigotry appears among those who have filled this void with narcissism. But this is not empathy towards oneself, it’s creating a distorted ego inflatable and easily burstable, with the slighest setbacks to holding the minimum responsibility and duty.

I’ve witnessed one AE have a nervous breakdown in front of me after months of announcing to the company that he “got the deal 100%”. It was clear he was not going to meet his quota. He lowered his head with face covering his face, seemingly sobbing. I tried to cheer him up but he was having none of it.

In contrast, another AE who closed the biggest deal in the company history, was rather *quite modest* about it, and didn’t seem as elated as the CEO. I’ll never forget these words: “There is just no hack to enterprise sales, its a grind. I’ve head my spirit *crushed* in the past. The wins no longer feel special and the losses don’t feel as bad.”

Conclusion: Good AEs are emotionally resilient, apathetic to outcomes.

Deux: Bad AEs are stubborn, their output depends largely on their emotional state.

We are all bound to feel fluctuations in how we assess our current life situation and we ponder the quality of the decision making that got us here. It is through empathy towards others but more importantly *for yourself* that produces an honest, unbiased, raw view of reality.

For AEs, that reality is uncertain, unpredictable, unknown. This is why they make the most money in a startup. It’s their job, like a detective, to gather intel on a prospect’s organizational, budgetary, alignment and time frame. The account is their livelihood and quota is like a constantly sliding screen in a 2d platformer. You have finite time to work , and time is NOT on your side.

Juggling all of these different variables requires a consistent and calm state of emotion to prioritize and execute on strategic sales activities. If you get angry because the prospect is stalling, you are being stubborn to the fact that you are well out of sync and the account is at risk. You need to be honest and ask for help. If not, by telling everyone everything is cool, you end up like the Boy who Cried Wolf. Even when you have an actual win, people won’t see it. They only see the lies you told to get where you are. In effect, if you are getting angry at yourself then you get angry towards others. It’s called projecting and brings us to the next point.

Trois et Quatre: Bad AE is a grenade, one that kills the crucial harmony between Sales and Product.

I would say this is the most important and dangerous signs you need to find a replacement AE, immediately. Taking to company wide chat to express frustrations about how everybody is not working as hard as him because he is failing to close all these deals while grossly bending truths to give the impression that in the end, it’s not his fault that he is the bottom rung.

“Engineers are fucking assholes” said the bad AE. To me this was the moment of truth. I was deeply offended as an former engineer myself. He went on further to promote the idea that somehow he was the victim. It was the product team and engineers for “not working as hard as him”, that contributed to his failure to meet quota.

An AE’s role is never to work hard, it’s to fucking close sales and move the needle forward. Working hard, getting stickers for effort…what the fuck is this, a Kindergarten? Someone growing up with a privilege of never having to take responsibility for their actions, is not an adult but a petulant child.

Unfortunately, in some cases the CEO failed to intervene in time, psychological lines got drawn between silos, and now these “assholes” that built the product, that provided opportunity for sales and marketing folks, whom already have a unanimous consensus on ranking AE’s competence, or the lack of, did not help things at all. In fact, I’d argue that engineers were looking to add features than getting rid of technical debt which I identified to be the determining factor in hindering our sales. I tried my best to bridge the disconnect by building automated internal tools for the AEs that multiplied their output. It worked for a while, got a few sales from the Proof-of-Concepts I demo’d with another AE, raised morale until the grenade went off.

In fact, as this AE witnessed my rise, he increasingly became hostile towards me. Dog whistling to promote his ideas on what a man should be and not be, who should be in Canada and who shouldn’t, using an offensive racial stereotype photos during a company wide presentation with people laughing is , a testament to his cultural contribution in a startup that widely advertises “diversity”. I recall a lawyer telling me, companies do this when they’ve skeletons in the closet. I don’t know if this is the case but I would not be surprised.

The first day I joined this company, they used an African American meme in one of the company presentation. There was only one black lady, and our eyes briefly met and there was just this blank stare and tinge of pain clearly visible. They shortly got rid of her. It was a sign of things to come and what was already taking place. A line had been drawn long before I joined and in the next paragraph I document what seems to be very dishonest and intentionally opaque sales figures.

All in all, I feel bad for the CEO and founders who are ultimately responsible for hiring AEs. But this was a classic case of “fresh out of school kids” who got lucky, watched too much Silicon Valley season 1, raised too much money, hired too fast, fired too much. I can’t fault them for thinking they could hire their way into product-fit in early stages instead of doing the work themselves, you would need to be exposed to hierarchial corporate environments to emulate the organization properly to be a fit for large enterprise companies.

Cinq: Bad AEs take wins and losses personally.

I think this is a beaten horse I covered above. The common AEspeak is terms like “negotiation tactics” are often used to obscure the bad quality of the deal. When you take things personally, you do stupid things like getting in the way of the prospect’s demand for accurate information that minimizes their time to ROI, promising the world when your “asshole” engineers can’t even deliver on features that fall well outside of the vision of the product. I’ve seen technical debt rise to unmanageable levels causing further delays and upset partners, and customers who end up with a vulnerable product, do not fuck around. They will end your startup if not your investors by now, who realize they’ve been duped. Such as writing on glassdoor how great their company is while attacking critics, or how they’ve met the quarter sales target only to have customers pull out once they realize, they are paying for open-source product freely available from Google. Double ouch.

Parting Words

I hope that some of what I wrote could be of use and that you’ve had insight into filtering out the bad AEpples. I hope those AEs I’ve labelled as bad, aren’t necessarily bad people, but it’s their behavior that is so offputting. There’s a certain socially accepted threshold for putting up with an AE’s bullshit, you can’t be respected if you don’t respect your peers, even those who hate you. Nothing but love regardless of the past, I’ve forgiven that racist, homophobic AE and I hope he finds his path, I’ve found mine. TBH, my view of AEs are jaded but don’t let that discourage you from making friends with the good ones, you learn a lot about sales as an engineer, and make good hires.