This month I had about 60 one-on-one conversations with sellers. Founding AEs. Mid-market reps. A few sales leaders. I also sat in a roundtable with a dozen founding AEs comparing notes on what's working and what isn't.

Some booked time because they were looking. Most booked because something felt off and they wanted to talk to someone outside their company about it.

One of them was at 265% of quota.

Read that number again. Top of the leaderboard. The rep a founder brags about on a board call. And he was walking me through his options.

He wasn't alone. At least nine of the sellers I talked to one-on-one were hitting or beating their number. One was at 141%. Several others were comfortably over plan. All of them were thinking about what's next.

For years the deal was simple. Hit your number and you're safe. Miss it and you're exposed. That deal is breaking, and most sellers haven't caught up.

One in eight

Of the sellers who booked time with me this month, roughly 1 in 8 had lost their job to a layoff, a restructure, or an acquisition. That's not a market survey. It's my calendar. But it's a lot of people.

Almost none of those stories were about performance. One rep got let go over the phone by a CEO, with no real explanation. Another company got acquired, and the whole team is on a contract that ends in December. Others were riffed when the company lost its direction.

None of that shows up in a pipeline review.

If you were recently let go, hear this: it's happening more and more, and it says very little about you. You can do everything right and still be on the wrong side of a spreadsheet someone else built.

Don't spend six months treating it like a verdict. It isn't one.

The ground moves under people who are winning

The more interesting conversations were with sellers who still had jobs, and were good at them.

At the roundtable, one founding AE described his week. He'd built most of the company's accounts himself. Then the company hired another AE, and that rep finished ramping. So now the existing book gets split. Accounts he built get handed over, and new inbound gets round-robined.

He's still the favorite. He said so himself. And his book is still getting smaller.

Nobody did anything wrong there. That's what a growing company does. But if you're the seller, your best quarter and your shrinking territory can happen in the same month.

Seven of the sellers I talked to one-on-one described comp or quota moving against them. A commission rate cut nearly in half. A capped plan. One rep did $925K on a $1M quota, then watched next year's number go to $1.4M. In the same stretch, the VP who hired her left, and then her manager did too.

About ten raised something about leadership. A new CEO. A new VP. A founder with five new ideas a week and a different priority on every call. Not villains. Just people running a company that's changing faster than anyone is explaining.

Six or seven had real doubts about the market. The ICP moved. One founding AE told the roundtable that all of their inbound leads were small businesses, and small businesses weren't the customer anymore.

Notice what's missing from that list. "I can't sell." Nobody said that.

Why good numbers fool you

I watched this happen in 2022.

I was at Outreach. Tech was going through a bloodbath, and sellers were getting laid off all over Silicon Valley. Outreach sold to salespeople. When salespeople lose their jobs, the companies that sell to them make fewer sales.

So the layoffs came for us too. Some of the people who lost their jobs were really good sellers. They didn't do anything wrong. The market just stopped favoring selling to sales teams at tech companies, and there wasn't much any rep could do about that.

A great quarter tells you about the last ninety days. It tells you nothing about the next comp plan, the next board meeting, or whether your buyer will still be buying in a year.

Your number is a lagging indicator. The things that decide whether you're safe are leading indicators, and most sellers never look at them.

Healthy skepticism, not panic

I'm not telling you to quit. If you're in a role you like, at a company you believe in, stay and win.

I'm telling you to pay attention. Things are changing fast, and healthy skepticism is part of the job now. Three questions worth asking every quarter:

Which way is my comp plan moving? Not this quarter's payout. The trend. Higher quota, new caps, a split book, slower payment. One change is noise. Two in a row is a signal.

Is the customer still the customer? If the deals you're closing look less and less like the ICP leadership describes, someone is going to reconcile that gap. Usually not in the seller's favor.

Could I prove my results tomorrow? This is the one almost everyone fails. When I ask sellers what they've done, most describe activities. Few give me numbers. More than half of my calls this month ended with the same advice: quantify it. Revenue closed, percent of quota, deal sizes, cycle times, new logos. Write it down now, while you have access to the data. Not when you need it.

Pick a lane

A lot of sellers I talk to are proud of how much they've done. Every segment, every vertical, every motion.

That reads as range to you. To a founder, it reads as unclear. Founders hire specialists. They want the person who has sold this buyer, at this stage, in this kind of cycle. If you can't say in one sentence what you're best at, nobody else will say it for you.

You don't need to be looking to do this. Knowing your lane makes you better in the seat you're in.

Don't be the person things happen to

I said some version of that line on call after call this month.

The sellers who come out of this market fine aren't always the ones with the best numbers. They're the ones who see the change coming, keep their results current, know exactly what they're good at, and make decisions before someone makes them for them.

Hit your number. Then look up.

If you want to talk through where you stand, you can find me at daverubinstein.com/foundingae