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The quota model
The standard software sales model sets a quota capacity for each rep: around 1.2 to 1.5 million dollars for an account executive early on, 750 to 850 thousand for the inside reps, rising to 2.5 million in enterprise. Financial models start there, take a discount on attainment, and divide up territories, West Coast first, then East, then Central.
Pull changes the math
Every piece of it rests on pushing demand. An AI-enabled product that feels like magic pulls demand instead, and the first company to offer it sells far more than 2 million per rep. Reps at some of these companies do 10, 20, or 30 million, and one recently hit 50.
Founders as closers
Quotas still matter somewhat, but they are not the first constraint. The leaders who adapt start from first principles: where the bottlenecks sit on delivery and where they sit on demand. At these companies the best salesperson is usually the founder, who connects the jagged edge of the models, the uneven shape of what they can and can't do, to what the customer is able to use.
Why does a pull product change sales?
Marketers distinguish push strategies, which promote a product through sales effort and distribution channels, from pull strategies, which create demand so customers seek the product out. A pull product shifts the sales job from finding buyers to handling the buyers who arrive. Philip Kotler's textbook Marketing Management, first published in 1967, set out both approaches.
Why is the founder the best salesperson?
A founder knows the product's limits and can promise changes to it on the spot. Buyers of new technology want to talk to the person who decides what gets built. Paul Graham's 2013 essay Do Things That Don't Scale advised founders to recruit their first customers by hand, doing the work themselves.
How do bottlenecks shape an organization?
Eliyahu Goldratt argued that a system's output is set by its single tightest constraint. Improving anything other than the constraint changes nothing about total output. A sales organization can find its constraint in lead flow, in delivery capacity, or in the supply of the product itself. Goldratt called this the theory of constraints in The Goal, published in 1984.
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