Why Anthropic Are Causing a Comp Crisis & Why You’d Never Hire From Salesforce or ServiceNow
Summary
Two legendary sales leaders reveal why hiring from Salesforce or ServiceNow is a mistake—their employees are order takers, not pipeline builders. They're launching a new venture to solve the #1 pain point for startup CEOs: building effective sales teams in an AI-driven era where product alone can't carry you.
Key Takeaways
- Hire sales talent based on new logo acquisition, not brand pedigree. Ask candidates for 2-3 new logos opened in the last 24 months, then probe deeper on champions and economic buyers—if they falter, they're lying.
- Best-in-class sales teams combine outbound-driven go-to-market with product-led growth (PLG) layered on top. Neither strategy alone is optimal; you need both to maximize revenue capture.
- Even with exceptional products, poor sales execution leaves money on the table. The belief that great products sell themselves is 'total shit'—differentiation requires world-class sales people finding new business.
- Anthropic's compensation packages ($100M+ for CRO roles) are distorting the market, creating a 'comp crisis.' High-cash companies may not prioritize sales excellence despite their financial advantage.
- Order takers from enterprise software companies (Salesforce, ServiceNow) lack pipeline generation skills. They've spent years managing existing accounts, not acquiring new ones—a critical gap for scaling startups.
Related topics
Transcript Excerpt
Even if you have the best product in the world, you're still going to leave money on the table if you have shitty salespeople. If a guy's been at salesforce.com for the last 5 years, he's never opened a new logo. Service Now. Service Now. Why would you want to hire people from Service Now? They don't know how to do any pipeline generation. We have two of the greatest sales leaders of the last decade joining me. Chan Pet is the most no BS, incredible sales leader who's worked across some of the most category defining companies of the last 10 years. And joining him we have Chris Daggen who took Snowflake from zero to over four billion in ARR. This is a melting pot of 20 years of sales wisdom condensed into one incredible conversation. The Ford deployed engineer is a glorified professional se…