GTMnow

𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐮𝐞 𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐲𝐞𝐞 is a metric companies are increasingly referencing. You might have seen it in Klarna’s earnings release back in Feb. Or more people referencing it on social.  So we pulled it across 10 companies and mapped the 10 factors that actually move it. Every company sampled has seen improvements from 2022 to ~today on the metric.  Revenue per employee is the cleanest read on whether revenue is growing faster than headcount, which is why it's being commonly referenced as an efficiency metric of the AI era. But it doesn't measure how much productivity you gained - it measures what you decided to do with it. There are many factors that go into the metric (AI being one of them): 1. Labor intensity of the business model 2. Product vs. services revenue mix 3. Pricing power and deal size 4. Headcount definitions, since contractors and outsourced work sit outside the denominator 5. Sales motion / model  6. Workforce geography 7. Growth rate and demand shocks 8. M&A timing, where people arrive at close and revenue arrives on a lag 9. Hiring and backfill policy 10. Automation, including AI AI changing your workload and AI changing your headcount are two different things, and only the second one moves this number. Revenue per employee has exactly two inputs, so if AI clears half your support queue and you keep the same team, the ratio doesn't move at all. The gain is real, it just lands in your margin instead of here. That's why the biggest movers on this list are the companies that shrank. Full breakdown of the 10 factors and 10 companies in the latest The GTMnow Newsletter (in the comments).

Will anyone log into a CRM again? 🤔 This is one of the questions that the EVP & GM of Agentforce Sales at Salesforce answered. Sitting in Salesforce Tower, he also answered other key questions that shape this era of software/AI, along with sales tips and stories. Some of the standout quotes and takeaways from Kris Billmaier:

NEW: Kris Billmaier on GTMnow. He's the EVP & GM of Agentforce Sales at Salesforce, where he leads the business formerly known as Sales Cloud. Highlights: 02:25 How Salesforce adapted across cloud, mobile, social, and AI 03:32 Why Sales Cloud became Agentforce Sales 05:17 Renaming the category: from CRM to agentic revenue orchestration 06:56 Will anyone log into a CRM again? 09:08 Build vs. buy, vibe coding, and the context moat 11:01 The Momentum acquisition and memory fragments 13:04 Sellers managing teams of agents, and the $100M pipeline story 15:03 The agent stack: prospecting, engagement, pipeline, quoting 18:03 Why Salesforce is hiring more sellers 19:16 What the modern sales role looks like 20:08 Sponsor: Primer 21:34 How AI changed hiring: from "what" to "how" 23:48 The window: shipping weekly, not on three annual releases 25:13 What product-market fit means now 26:05 Software vs. services, and the $10T question 33:16 Being "chief repetition officer" and educating the field 35:00 How a 70,000-person company stays agile 36:48 The biggest lesson from Marc Benioff 37:57 Pricing: seats, flex credits, and outcome-based metrics 40:53 Are we in a SaaSpocalypse? The full answer 42:08 Where Kris gets his learnings 43:07 World Cup picks Full episode: https://lnkd.in/gv-eiNPT

A great interview on GTMnow is in the books (both literally and figuratively)… and it’s dropping tomorrow 👀

He helped scale with Deel from $1M to $1.5B in revenue. Some of the standout quotes and takeaways from Chris Lee on the journey:

The price of tokens is decreasing, but your AI bills are going up… we broke down why in the latest The GTMnow Newsletter.  This felt super timely and important to share given last week's price cuts to GPT-5.6 Luna and Terra, plus DeepSeek dropping V4-Flash the same day! Hope you find it valuable - and thanks, as always, to those of you for being part of the GTMnow Network :)

This is a killer episode for our CROs out there. Chris Lee scaled Deel as a sales leader from $1M to $1.5B.  I have so much respect for operators who endure through the scaling journey like this.  One of the biggest blunders I see companies make is layering for the sake of layering. It's usually driven by a misguided board. "The current person did great, but now we need someone who's seen $100m to $500m before." I've seen it backfire more than I've seen it work. Props to Chris. He hired A+ talent around him and gave them room to operate. He shares a lot of inside baseball in this episode, like asking Scenario questions > Behavioral questions.

I recorded my first podcast 🎙️. No book or anything to shill. Just been heads down the last 6 years growing Deel from $1M to $1.5B. I've turned down a lot of podcasts in the past because I don't have the time. A friend changed my mind saying my experience is unique and there's people who want to learn from it. If you're a Founder trying to grow at lightspeed, in Sales Leadership, or an SDR/AE then I think you'll fine value in the pod. GTMfund got the exclusive interview. Hope you find value. If you don't, please roast me like it's a Reddit forum. Your criticism is my fuel to improve the next one 👌