The Sales Strategy Conquering the AI Market

What happens when technology evolves faster than your sales process can adapt?

The last fifteen years, startups focused on building software around very well understood processes. We had built an assembly line for software sales, SDR to AE to customer success manager. We calculated ratios between these three total cost of sales and drove the factory to ever improved yields.

AI is upending all of that.

The underlying workflows are changing so quickly, software buyers no longer know what the ideal processes are, much less which is the best software to buy.

Model capabilities have evolved at 10x improvements every two years. Users are grappling to understand how to take advantage of these advances while boards are pressing teams to adopt AI.

A combination of all these factors has led to a reinvention of customer success : the forward deployed engineer.

Forward deployed engineers (FDEs) are the new customer success managers, the new solutions architects. They spend their time working with customers, understanding business challenge, and using technology to solve them - selling usage & outcomes.

In a software sales environment where buyers seek education, the underlying technology is advancing very quickly and there’s no stability. There’s no surprise that this role has become critical.

OpenAI has offered consulting services as well as Anthropic for custom enterprise deployments. Anthropic builds specialized enterprise implementation teams. Sierra employs agent engineers.

Palantir created this model. Their core insight, success comes from delivering outcomes on some software platform is now the standard for mid-market and enterprise software. The costs simply don’t justify themselves below price points of $100,000 or less per contract. Staffing a FDE costing $200k for a $10k contract - the math doesn’t work.

These forward-deployed engineers take the core platforms of AI and then mold them and tune them to work, defining new ways of building sales and marketing. Marketing and engineering teams - for example, agent managers.

The ability for customer success managers of the future to vibe code new platforms to deliver success on a basic platform is real . And it will be a requisite for these teams in an age where customer expectations of delivering value are shorter than ever.