Designed to be the enabler and bring more deals to the much more capable sales staff. The sales staff that got overlooked for the CE roles are the hunters. Now we have Client executives getting involved in all deals. I’ve personally witnessed CEs making deals smaller to show they add value. It’s a terrible sales play… CEs are managed by a sales leader and SSE is managed by another sales manager. Managers of managers! No one is able to hit the road sales plans are a priority!
. It’s a joke isn’t it nearly Q3 already ? Agree ?
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@rh Yeah. One of the better use cases for AI is to paste in a wall of text and say, "summarize this noise and tell me what it says in 20 words or less."
@qd Paragraphs are fundamental.
I agree. I think the real problem is that we seem to have confused adding layers with adding value. If the original idea was for CEs to be enablers, help open doors, coordinate the broader relationship and ultimately bring more opportunities to the people who can actually hunt and close them, then fine. There is a logic to that model. But if CEs now need to insert themselves into virtually every deal simply to demonstrate their relevance, you have fundamentally changed the purpose of the role. If deals are actually becoming smaller, slower or unnecessarily reshaped because of all these additional layers, that should concern everyone. Sales organizations exist to grow revenue and serve customers. The internal structure should support that objective, not become an objective of its own. The irony is that we keep talking about simplification, accountability and being closer to the customer while apparently building more overlapping ownership, more management structure and more people who need to participate before anything moves. Meanwhile, the hunters are left wondering exactly what they are supposed to own. The CE owns one piece. The SSE owns another. Different managers own different groups. Everyone has plans, reviews, priorities and internal expectations. At some point you have to ask a very basic question: who is actually out selling? A good sales model should become clearer once implemented. Sellers should understand who owns what. Customers should know who their commercial lead is. Management should be able to demonstrate that the additional structure is producing better outcomes. If months later people are still debating roles, ownership and how the model is supposed to work, at some point the model itself needs to be questioned. Adding CEs, SSEs, managers and additional internal coordination only makes sense if that complexity translates into better sales outcomes. Otherwise, we’ve built a very impressive sales organization that appears increasingly optimized for managing itself rather than selling. And approaching Q3, that’s becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss as simply growing pains.
The CEs were sellers that none of the geography leaders selected for their teams. They aren't the "best of the best". Believe when I say the sales planning (who to WFR, who to place where) for the F27 GTM sales model was an incredibly musical chairs game. About 1/3 of the way through, it became disorganized and desperate, and leaders started horse trading to the point the original intention became lost.
They also had to determine which of their top sellers would find another job if they lost X accounts and therefore manipulated the intended plan to work that.
This started as a well intentioned plan to copy how big performers like MS run their sales model but it imploded, time was running out, and people started to be randomly placed in spaces on the org charts that remained empty.
Yeah - I dont think we really thought about it pre purge.
'Yes I am the be all end all, I may be new and you may have laid off the consultants that could have helped me
Time to go bug the support teams.'
(I know yall got a bad hand too, but it's grating when it gets to the things that absolutely should not be our job).
I shouldnt already have horror stories of them not knowing what they sold or not being able to handle simple problems. I can count the ones who took it with grace on one hand.