OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Cognition all claim to be building "the best GTM team in the world," yet the same sourcing company is doing the hiring for all three. Why do the new sales leaders at these AI natives all come from the same background: Snowflake, Grafana, MongoDB, Zscaler, Rubrik, Datadog? Why do they only seem to hire reps referred from one of these companies? It's called the playbook mafia, and it's part of the underbelly of tech sales today. The high-level story is simple. PTC was one of the moderately successful enterprise tech companies of the 1990s, and one of its sales leaders, John McMahon, popularized a qualification framework called MEDDPICC. The team that worked directly for John went on to different parts of the industry, notably companies like MongoDB and Snowflake. They created sales cultures built on high pressure to generate new pipeline and a big focus on following a single process in their daily work. Those who played along were paid handsomely, and those who didn't were kicked out quickly. Are these bad things? Not in isolation. We want mission-driven individuals in tech sales, and we want them to hold themselves accountable to a high standard. The catch with playbook companies is that nobody has rethought what the "playbook" looks like since its heyday at the peak of the ZIRP era. The profile for success is changing, and a heavy focus on personal drive and quality of execution is now table stakes. When they say "we will build the most successful GTM team in the world," the obvious question is: have you done it before? Microsoft Azure has built exceptional account teams, closing billions of dollars with single customers, and has $124B ARR. Anthropic reached $64B ARR while asking every employee to swear on the Claude Constitution. Databricks reached a $7B run-rate, outplaying Snowflake, which had a massive early lead. Yet for some reason, none of the best-performing sales reps at these companies are a "fit" for a playbook company. In fact, if you listen to a recent interview with Chris Degnan, their profile is undesirable. Sales reps who are industry experts, have technical insight and thrive at building successful long-term sales cycles (consumption contracts) are frowned upon. The goal is to only hire people who show "grit" and want to work for YOU. And if they do well, we will push the company to PAY AS HIGH AS POSSIBLE to retain them. There is no interest in what the best strategy is for the company or its customers. It's about MY team and MY people. So what we're seeing now is the same group of leaders, and the sales reps loyal to them, moving into AI-native companies. If you want a shot at working for those companies, you need to go back to the "training factories" like Snowflake or MongoDB first. In the ugly situation with Factory and Cognition, the tribal lines became obvious. The shocking part wasn't just the breach of trust of advising one company and then becoming CRO of its competitor. It was that the most important thing to mention in the announcement was "I'm bringing my friend and business partner to hire all the reps at the new company." What played out is no surprise to those who have seen firsthand how the playbook mafia behaves when things go sideways. Take a look at Lacework, and how Andy Byron (the CEO who famously got caught at a Coldplay concert cheating with his HR leader) got pushed into a leadership role at Astronomer. Something similar is playing out at OpenAI, where the current crop of sales leaders has been cleared out, even though the company had a great last quarter and pushed past Anthropic's ARR. If you're a sales rep at a playbook company, it's important to remember that you're just a product, to be upsold to the next employer as long as you keep your mouth shut and nod along.

Lost a deal bc the customer was pretty sour about how far we could get the price down and previous dealings with another rep. My manager: “Bummer, maybe we should use MEDDPICC better” That pretty much sealed the deal for me leaving

The best tech sales books are not written by MEDPICC types.

gotta do the hard things early

I explained what a SQL join is to a sales guy and he said it seemed “awesome” and “really useful”

Replying to a cold email you sent me in order to get it back to the top of my inbox is not the way to my heart.