Account Executives Moving Forward

As we all know, there are significant shifts happening as we move into the new fiscal year. It’s tough to hear about the impact on people in marketing, architecture, and other teams today. This is clearly just the first round. We’ve also seen more responsibilities being taken on by ATS, with customers being pushed into long-term agreements, which seems to be gradually reducing the need for AEs.

With the sales year ending in March, I’m sure AEs will feel some major impacts. What do we think this will look like? Will Enterprise AEs, with their higher OTEs, take the biggest hits compared to others? Does anyone have any updates or insights about what’s coming in January before the new sales year kicks off?

I just can't think that TK wants to run a business with no AEs who deal with the BS of all these major changes and give them to ATS. There is a reason ATS are not AEs.

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AEs here typically and historically know very little about the products or use cases. AEs cannot even present an executive overview deck without an ATS. They can't do a Account Review without an ATS. They have been quote generators and have leaned on the SEs / ATSs for most things. The reality is that AEs cannot do their job without a ATS.... ATSs do their jobs all the time without a AE. If there is one thing CSG finally has gotten right is that they see little value in a position where all they do is generate a quote when needed. It is taken too long to realize that AEs (most) are worthless and their job can be handled by anyone who knows the quoting system.

TIBCO US AEs just got obliterated. The rest of the BUs will see the same soon enough.

If AEs can be replaced by 'quote-generator' admin staff (or even AIs), they will be.

Also, why would they pay the huge commissions for AEs when they can just pay the much smaller “bonuses” for the ATS’s? I think the fact that they eliminated commissions for ATS’s this year was very telling.

There will likely be a large layoff of AE’s within the next year. The strategy of the PE regime is not to sell more products or grow the customer base. The strategy is to retain current customers for as long as possible while cutting costs to the lowest point possible. You don’t need AE’s if you aren’t trying to sell new products. All you need is a few renewals specialists who handle different accounts each year.

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Account Executives Moving Forward

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