Sales Used to Be the Engine. For the AI Leaders, It’s Often More the Caboose.

There’s an argument going around right now that sales isn’t as important as it used to be. Still important. Just not as much as it once was.

Bear with me here.

It’s not an argument I agree with. But I can’t argue with the logic.

The point is this: the world has bifurcated. And what sales does on each side of that split is now almost two different jobs.

The AI Leaders Still Have Sales Teams. Sales Just Isn’t What’s Driving the Growth.

The hottest B2B + AI companies all still have sales teams. Anthropic and OpenAI have sales teams. So do Replit, Lovable, Harvey, Legora, Sierra, and basically everyone at scale.

No one is saying sales is dead. The opposite. At scale, you need it.

But the argument goes like this. So much of the demand at these leaders is inbound, and the growth is so absurd, that sales has become more of the caboose than the engine in the go-to-market machine.

You still need a sales team. It still closes the deals, expands the accounts, handles the enterprise motion, and keeps the largest customers happy. But it’s not the thing manufacturing the growth. The product is. The category is. The wave is.

When a company is growing 300%, 500%, sometimes more, the sales team is processing demand more than it’s creating it. And that changes its place in the org. The reps aren’t conjuring pipeline out of nothing. They’re keeping up with a firehose that exists whether they’re great or merely good.

Anthropic Is the Cleanest Proof

You don’t have to take the argument on faith. Eleanor Dorfman walked through Anthropic’s go-to-market at SaaStr AI Annual this year. 54% of their new enterprise logos came through self-serve. They built the enterprise self-serve motion as an MVP in January, shipped it to production in February, and it was already closing more than half of new enterprise deals.

Anthropic is landing the majority of its new enterprise logos without a rep in the loop. At north of $45B in revenue, the GTM org is small relative to that number. The sales team is real and it matters. But it’s catching demand the product generated. It’s not generating the demand itself.

That’s the caboose, in data.

On the Other Side, Even the Best Sales Team Can’t Save You

Now flip it.

The companies not riding AI budgets have watched growth fall off a cliff. Budgets that used to flow to traditional B2B tooling got redirected. And even the best sales team on earth can’t convince people to buy a product they’ve decided they don’t want to buy.

A great rep can win a competitive deal. A great team can out-execute a rival. What they can’t do is reverse a budget that has quietly moved somewhere else. You can’t sell your way out of a category in decline. You can stretch it, slow the bleed, hold a few accounts longer. But the macro pull is stronger than any quota.

So on this side of the split, sales also isn’t the engine. The lack of demand is the engine, running in reverse.

Pre-AI, the Math Was Different

It wasn’t always like this.

Pre-AI, a lot of B2B startups were growing at roughly similar rates. Same category dynamics, same budget environment, comparable products. In that world, a great sales team was the differentiator. It could take you from 80% growth to 120% growth.

That’s a massive gap. And compounded over a few years, it was the difference between a good outcome and a category-defining one. Sales was the lever that mattered most, because everything else was close to parity. The team you hired, the playbook you ran, the reps you kept: that was the edge.

So we all built around it. We obsessed over it, rightly. The best B2B companies of the last decade were, in large part, the best sales organizations.

Now the Gap Is Set Before Sales Even Shows Up

The new reality is that the spread between winners and losers isn’t 80% versus 120% anymore.

It’s 500%+ versus 15%.

And when the gap is that wide, the sales team isn’t what’s creating it. The demand environment is. If you’re growing 500%, you’re in the right category at the right moment with the right product. If you’re growing 15%, you’re not, and no comp plan fixes that.

The benchmarks say the same thing.

In post-sales it was wider: $1.1M versus $600K per head, an 83% gap. That spread isn’t a story about better reps. It’s a story about which side of the AI demand line a company is sitting on.

You’re either working harder than ever to capture 10x growth, or you’re in slow-growth, and there’s less and less in between. Same split, seen from the rep’s chair instead of the cap table.

Sales still matters in both worlds. Of course it does. At 500% you need a team that can scale fast enough to capture the demand without breaking. At 15% you need a team disciplined enough to defend the base and win every contested deal. Both are hard. Both are real jobs.

But in neither case is sales the thing setting the trajectory. The trajectory was largely set before the reps picked up the phone.

A Cog in the Wheel, Not the Wheel Itself

So that’s the argument. And again, I don’t fully buy it. I’ve spent too many years watching great sales teams turn a decent quarter into a great one, and watching mediocre teams squander real demand, to believe sales is ever just a passenger.

But I can’t argue with the underlying logic. The center of gravity has moved. In the pre-AI era, sales was often the single biggest variable you controlled. Today, for the companies on the right side of the split, the biggest variable is whether you’re in an AI-budget category at all. Sales executes inside that answer. It doesn’t write it.

Pre-AI, sales was the wheel.

Now, for a lot of companies, it’s more of a cog in it.

Still essential. Still something you can’t ship without. Just no longer the thing that decides where the whole machine is headed.

I’ve lived having one of the best sales teams in B2B. It makes such a huge difference. Build one. Do whatever it takes.

It’s just, I get the point that if AI demand is off the chart, sales isn’t quite the engine of growth it once was.