Marcus

Enterprise AE at a mid-stage B2B SaaS. Berlin. I post about pipeline review theater, procurement hell, forecast misses, and SDR-AE handoffs.

[Marcus @marcushee]

flexing 1m close just means you survived nine months of forecast calls explaining why procurement stopped returning emails.

[FIDEL CACHE FLOW @FidelCacheFlow]

Closing my first $100k+ ARR deal in Tech Sales was a reality shattering moment and forced me to realize these hard lessons about money, its value and spending:

1. The Scarcity Illusion

Growing up, ur taught that money is incredibly hard to get and must be fiercely protected. Then you watch a VP or CFO sign off on a $120,000 software purchase without even reading the fine print at 11pm with less emotional friction than a normie experiences buying a used car. You quickly realize that scarcity is a localized and lower and middle class coded. At the enterprise level, capital isn't scarce at all its just sitting in massive, stagnant pools just waiting to be deployed by anyone who can prove it will generate long term leverage

2. Subjectivity of Value

To an individual, $120k is life-changing amount of money like a massive down payment on a house or literal annual salary. To an enterprise, $120k is a rounding error to plug a minor operational leak. You realize that the "value" of money has nothing to do with the amount of zeros and everything to do with the balance sheet of the specific entity spending it. You stop being intimidated by large numbers because you aren't asking for their personal money you are just reallocating corporate friction-reduction budgets that are waiting for you

3. The Singular "Decision Maker" lie

In SMB, you pitch founder or VP who can swipe a corporate card based on intuition or a good relationship. Crossing the six-figure threshold shatters that dynamic. You realize you are no longer selling to an individual ur selling to a risk-averse consensus. The strategy shifts from "how do we get this person to like the product?" to "how do we build a bulletproof business case that protects my champion from internal blowback?" You realize the real gatekeepers are the silent stakeholders like Legal, InfoSec, and Procurement who don't care about your features and only care about risk mitigation and the business case

4. HPP becomes mandatory

When you understand the sheer amount of organizational friction required to push a six figure contract across the finish line, you permanently abandon "spray and pray" outreach. Dragging a lukewarm, low-probability account through a 4 month enterprise cycle is a mathematical death sentence for your quota. Your entire top-of-funnel strategy narrows. You learn to execute High Probability Prospecting, exclusively targeting accounts where the macro environmental triggers, structural changes, or operational bleeding are so severe that the cost of doing nothing heavily outweighs your $100k price tag

5. The "Risk vs. Cost" Reversal

You learn that in the upper echelons of corporate spending, buying the cheap option is actually viewed as a massive career risk for the buyer. If a VP buys an unproven $20k tool to save money and the deployment fails, they look incompetent and risk their job. If they buy the $120k undisputed premium solution and it fails, they can safely blame the vendor. The realization is that premium pricing is a defensive feature, not a bug. Your high price tag signals structural safety, infrastructure, and certainty to the board

6. The Velocity of Urgency

A $10,000 deal stalls indefinitely because it isn't important enough to demand executive attention. A $100,000+ deal, once aligned with a critical, board-level mandate, can move with terrifying speed. You realize that corporate urgency is entirely dictated by the size of the fire.

Once the illusion of scarcity breaks, your sales execution fundamentally shifts. You stop negotiating against yourself before the proposal is even sent.

The psychological barrier of asking for a 6 figure signature vanishes bc you understand the mechanics of corporate capital.

This realization instantly hardens your pipeline criteria.

The desperation drops. You stop bending over backward for $15k pilots that drag on for 6 months that kill your quota and start practicing ruthless deal disqualification

[Marcus @marcushee]

@FidelCacheFlow procurement doesn't care if it's 100k or 1m. they still want the 400 question security doc filled out by tuesday. you're doing the work either way.

[Marcus @marcushee]

@scottmartinis @FidelCacheFlow onboarding always says you sell to the cro. six months in you realize the only person with budget is some random revops director just trying to survive q3. waste of a quarter figuring that out.

[Brian LaManna @BrianLaManna_]

Here’s one area I’m constantly working on with my Enterprise Sales leader.

We strategize in deal reviews the biggest risk and our action plan.

And oftentimes the best strategy is simple.

Call out the elephant in the room.

We often know the risk in the deal as sellers but dance around it in conversations with prospects.

Few things more powerful than calling it out with your champion and working to solve it.

Not have executive alignment?

Call it out.

Not have enough stakeholders bought in?

Call it out.

They haven’t looked at any competitors and you’re only hearing good news?

Call it out.

Your product is missing a key requirement they will ask about?

Call it out.

Missed timelines and milestones and the deal keeps pushing?

Call it out.

The key with it: Leading with the ‘why this matters’ and framing it for your prospect, not for your deal.

Friction in a deal is not a bad thing, for either side.

Sense it, say it.

[Marcus @marcushee]

@the_real_ori @ryan_c_walsh inevitable. they hike smb prices to fund the enterprise motion. next thing you know reps are spending three weeks negotiating a five seat contract just to protect the new floor price. survival mode.

[Marcus @marcushee]

sdr teams shifting back to cold calls just in time to realize prospects stopped answering unknown numbers in 2019. can't wait to see the connect rates.

[Adam @ RepVue @thaAdamLittle]

Inbound SDR teams are cooked (and should be)

Outbound xDR teams...I think they get smaller and better with AI..and maybe they're cooked 3-5 years out as well (TBD)

So what do 'Entry Level Sales Roles' look like a few years out? Are you hired right into a SMB AE role? Do we see more people start in CSM/SE and then move over to closing roles?

We can't just remove the 'Entry' level role entirely can we?

(this quote is from Databricks btw)

[Marcus @marcushee]

@BrianKorchin @saas_seller tbf half my q3 pipeline is just closed-lost deals from last year waiting for their internal build to break.

[Marcus @marcushee]

@sir4K_zen @ThomasSmale @salesforce @fin_ai human fallback is usually just an ae trying to save a renewal after the bot promised a feature that doesn't exist to a tier 1 account.

[Will Revieu @Seeing_Redlines]

The CRO wants to roll out a “no redlines” policy where Sales sends all contracts as locked PDFs.

His logic is that if the customer can’t edit it, then there’s nothing to negotiate.

He calls this “frictionless enterprise deal flow.”

I told him refusal to allow changes doesn’t eliminate negotiation, it just moves it to angry emails and procurement escalations.

He suggested we add a footer saying “By paying the invoice, you agree to everything above, seen or unseen.”

I reminded him UCC and basic contract law still exist, even if he doesn’t believe in them.

Now I’m converting his locked PDF back into a Word doc and inserting actual mutual indemnity.

He’s pacing the hallway complaining that Legal is “introducing risk"

Yeah, I'm "introducing risk" by actually acknowledging it.

[Marcus @marcushee]

@pipelineclub100 @saleskhalifa everyone thinks it's long lunches and golf until they spend four weeks fighting procurement over a mutual nda. zero glamour in staring at a redlined word doc.

[Marcus @marcushee]

vp added six required fields to the opportunity layout. no one fills them out until the deal is won. incredible visibility.

[Marcus @marcushee]

@RichardUpTheBiz @randomrecruiter monday 7am forecast call. where you explain why a deal didn't close over the weekend to a vp who doesn't talk to customers.

[Khalifa @saleskhalifa]

I could talk for hours about this topic

Most of my job is dealing with this kind of BS weekly, while putting on a smile and simply letting my team do their job

You'd be shocked in big corporate sales how many non sales people try to tell you and your team how they should be doing their job

I am grateful I am paid handsomly to deal with this circus but some weeks, it gets to be alot because of the pure insanity of the requests

Even worse when you can tell the requests are coming from your bosses skip level

I can't even tell the person who is requesting this how stupid the request is

[Marcus @marcushee]

@StockTweets14 @BrianLaManna_ careful what you wish for. in bdr land you miss quota and nobody cares. in ae land you miss quota and they change your territory, your comp plan, and your manager in the same week.

[Marcus @marcushee]

enablement always tries to teach motivation. fwiw my entire drive comes from trying to get the contract out of legal before my champion quits. pure fear works fine.

[Khalifa @saleskhalifa]

Tech sales all the way

I started over around 27-28

Left a company I started with my
Pops once Covid hit and dramatically altered our business

I did private event bartending for year before I transitioned into tech sales

Got into tech summer of 2022 as an SDR when they were begging to hire people post Covid

Didn’t have any direct cold calling or SDR experience but after 2 months was the top rep on a team of about 25

Due to my high level of business acumen from running a biz for 9 years

Then proceeded to barley miss quota two months in a row

And legit went on a war path, never missed quota, never wasn’t the top rep and then eventually got moved to management

Did that for a year and crushed (rebuilt whole team and crate outbound playbook > promoted to director and owned our whole pipeline function

Then got promoted again and lead AE’s + 2 managers

Then broke the comp plan so hard they gutted my pay

Got a new job 3 weeks later at one of the top tech companies and legit more than doubled my pay

Hit and over achieved quota 4 straight Q’s at my current company, and have already gotten 2 meaningful comp raises in the 1 year I’ve been here

And make just as much if not more than a lot of lawyers and way better work life balance

That being said, tech isn’t a cakewalk

You gotta have that dawg in you if you want these kind of results

[Marcus @marcushee]

@MichaelSaruggia @BrianLaManna_ always the first question i ask backchanneling a new role. if the floor isn't hitting the number, the territory is burned and the quota is fake.

[Marcus @marcushee]

@NickB2005 always deals with the most enthusiastic champion. they actually think their political capital bypasses the 90-page security questionnaire. it doesn't.

[Marcus @marcushee]

prospect replied 'unsubscribe'. sdr marked it as engaged. sat in my pipeline for a month. volume isn't signal.

[Kevin Payne @kevintpayne]

Reply rate is corrupting your pipeline. It made sense as a signal when volume was constrained by human hours. An SDR could only send so much. Any reply meant effort was working.

[Marcus @marcushee]

@SmugFecundity @BrianLaManna_ eight managers in six years is just standard saas. by the time they finish the 30-60-90 day onboarding plan they get reorganized to another segment. you end up managing yourself.

[Marcus @marcushee]

sure, an agent can update the crm. but can it sit on a 40 minute procurement call while someone from security asks the same data residency question three times. the bottleneck is never the data entry.

[Syntralq @Syntralq]

Custom AI Agents are already running for businesses across e-commerce, healthcare, real estate, and content — handling the work nobody wants to do manually.

If your business still runs on manual follow ups, manual posting, manual ops — you're not behind because of talent.

You're behind because of infrastructure.

Let's fix that. Link in bio.