Even successful PLG companies like Figma eventually burn through their early adopter market. To avoid hitting an asymptotic growth curve, they must proactively build a traditional outbound sales team to tackle the enterprise market before the PLG engine stalls. Don't wait until you need it.

Combining new business "hunting" and account management "farming" into a single "360 AE" role is fundamentally flawed. The intrinsic motivations, skill sets, and behaviors for acquiring new customers are vastly different from those needed to nurture existing ones. Specialization is almost always more effective.

A one-size-fits-all sales role fails in consumption models. Success requires segmenting the team into specialized roles—new business acquisition, customer onboarding, and account management—each with distinct incentives aligned to their specific function, from initial sign-up to value realization and expansion.

Companies are replacing traditional, siloed sales assembly lines with a centralized "GTM Engineer." This technical role uses AI and automation tools to build revenue systems, absorbing the manual research and prospecting work previously done by individual reps. This allows for rapid learning and scaling of creative ideas across the entire team.

Figma's AEs don't just manage expansion; they generate it. They proactively run outbound-style campaigns within their existing customer base, creating a vision for a "best-in-class" deployment and showing happy customers the value gap. This treats every account like a new business opportunity.

It is exceptionally rare to find salespeople who excel at both acquiring new logos (hunting) and managing existing accounts (farming). The most effective, albeit costly, solution is to stop forcing reps to do both and instead create dedicated roles for each function.

AE prospecting fails when given a watered-down SDR activity quota. Instead, have AEs build a strategic plan to land three deals at 2x average contract value from a target list of just 10 accounts per quarter. This focuses their limited prospecting time on high-impact activities.

To overcome the perception that ABM is just a marketing initiative, leadership considered renaming it "Account-Based Selling." This simple change in terminology helps position the strategy as a sales-centric approach, emphasizing that the AE is in the driver's seat, not just receiving leads.

Figma avoids role confusion by assigning its high-velocity, product-led growth (PLG) "upgrade" motion exclusively to its SMB sales team. This allows mid-market and enterprise reps to specialize in a purely strategic, sales-led process without being distracted by transactional deals, ensuring maximum focus.