Jason M. Lemkin advises founders that most companies cannot attract top-tier sales reps tied to "hot" brands, and therefore should promote an internally-minded, data-focused person into a new "chief orchestration officer" role (from product, marketing, or RevOps). This person should spend daily time managing sales/marketing automation agents; without hands-on oversight and iteration, purchased tools will yield little or no ROI. The speaker predicts high future employability for those who build these skills today.
Chapters
Most of us don't have the hottest brands and we don't have the most elite CROs running them. So we end up settling for not the best sales team. That's the truth. Most 99% of the best sales reps want to work just at the hottest brands. And the minute you're not, the minute your star fades just a little bit, they don't want to work. They immediately want to jump to the next one. It's just there's a lot of reasons why. So bear in mind, 99% of the world cannot attract a team of gens or better. And you know, people are posting on LinkedIn that they want to hire these GTM engineers or I don't think that role exists today. I worry when I see these roles. I think today. And listen, if we get together in 18 months, we'll update this because the world's changing so fast, right? I think today 95% of 100. You've got to promote someone internally. It's got to be a nerd. Someone that likes marketing and sales and is quant. You know, a lot of B2C people are frankly good at this stuff because in B2C sales and marketing are kind of the same thing, you know, but someone that's a nerd that loves to sit in front of data for a couple hours a day and route data and manage these agents and they come out of product, they could come out of marketing, but maybe they could come out of Revops, but they better be nerdy odds. They come out of regular sales approach zero. So I would find someone on my team that raises their hand and says, I've already done this, okay? I've already written 10 apps in REPL.it and I love Vercel and I did this and I've already tried these ones on my own. Can I please manage these for you and then have them be your chief orchestration officer. But it is a new skill set. It really is. And ultimately finding someone that's going to spend an hour to two a day to manage these agents is the new new frontier for us to figure out. They, they do not. They. They operate autonomously, but not without constant oversight and iteration. That's the confusing part. It. And, and you just, if you just buy one of these products and disappear, you will have zero roi. So maybe too long of an answer, but that's critical. And I just think, unfortunately you're gonna, you have to grow this resource at home today. Going back early in the conversation, if that is you, you're going to be super employable next year. You're going to have so many job offers, you're not going to know what to. You're going to have to beat them off.
