Jason M. Lemkin advises founders on realistic expectations for managing account executives (AEs). He emphasizes role specialization—AEs typically want to close handed leads while SDRs generate demand—and warns that founders can usually manage a few AEs but lack the capacity to micromanage a large team of inexperienced reps.
There's no if you want a tip for founders, I know you want this full stack ae. And they do exist when they're micromanaged in certain high performance sales organizations, but they don't exist in real life. Right. They're specialized. So most AES, they want to be closers. They want to be handed a lead, a contact me a lead. They want to work the lead and close the lead, and you hire some SDRs to help generate more demand. And so those are the, those are the, those are the basic acronyms. What, what's hard for most founders, most, here's the tough part. Most founders have enough stamina to manage a couple of these AES, these account executives, these folks who work the leads. Most founders do not have the stamina to manage 10 kids fresh out of college that need to be micromanaged on an hourly basis to call leads. So.
