Good Morning. If you feel like you’re having a bad day, just be grateful you’re not aboard the Villa Vie Odyssey. A company sold cabins on a cruise ship starting around $120K, and basically promised a forever cruise. But this week, just two years in, passengers were told to pack their bags and get off in Cambodia, because the company can no longer afford to keep sailing. A good reminder that selling the dream is only half the job. Always make sure you can actually deliver it. Now, let’s get into today’s Follow Up. (:

“Check back in the new year” 🗣
30 sales follow up templates ✍
Sales lessons from Anthropic 🤔
Where AE’s are becoming sales leaders 📈
Sales jobs & a meme 😂

Sales Tip of The Day 💡

When a prospect says, “Follow up with me in the new year,” find out if January is when they want to start talking or when they need things in place.

If they need it ready in January, waiting until then would put them behind.

Walk through how long everything takes, then work backward together to figure out what needs to happen before the holidays.

And if they have no need now and just want you to check back, ask what they expect to change in January. If it’s nothing, then it’s probably a waste of your time.

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6 Sales Lessons From Anthropic’s S-1

Earlier this week, Anthropic filed its S-1, giving us a rare look inside the business before it goes public.

In the section on sales, it says: “By the time our direct teams engage a customer, Claude is often already in use.”

That sounds like a dream job to just about every sales rep I know.

When reps talk to a prospect, their team is already using the product and wants more of it.

I dug through the filing to see how they do it, what it costs, and what the rest of us in sales can learn from it.

1. Selling to Current Users

Anthropic says Claude is often “already in use” when its direct team arrives. The rep’s job is to build “executive sponsorship” and help usage spread.

That still takes a lot of strategy and sales skill. But most of us don’t have the luxury of selling a product like Claude.

This is what you’d call farming vs hunting.

A lot of Anthropic reps are ‘farming’ or growing the usage of existing accounts, rather than hunting for brand new users.

Oh, and Anthropic reports 900% net revenue retention. Which means their (qualifying) customers spent about 9X as much in the third quarter of 2026 as they did a year earlier. A really good SaaS company usually aims for about 120%. Customers really, really love Claude right now.

2. Getting customers to use Claude

Anthropic’s Applied AI teams help customers build Claude into their systems and workflows. The filing calls the direct and Applied AI teams a “hybrid sales and engineering function.”

In plain English: the rep helps get the deal moving, and technical people help the customer actually use it in their workflows.

Getting a customer to buy a product and getting them to use it are two different things, and Anthropic is getting really good at doing both right now.

3. Watch what customers do instead of just what they buy

Anthropic calls its main pricing model “pay-for-intelligence.” Customers pay as they use Claude, and consumption supplied 80% of revenue in the first half of 2026.

That can make the value of two users at the same company look very different to Anthropic. In the third quarter, enterprise users who didn’t use Claude Code spent under $75 a month on average. The top 5% of enterprise Claude Code users spent about 20 times that amount. Source

And the 900% net revenue retention number makes more sense. Anthropic compares a qualifying group’s revenue over three months with what that same group spent in the corresponding period a year earlier. It leaves out fixed-price Pro and Max subscribers. I wouldn’t stack it against a typical software company’s annual retention figure and declare a winner.

For a rep, the better question is: what work makes a customer come back and use more? That’s where the expansion lives.

4. Channel & partner sales are key

AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure marketplaces brought in 48% of Anthropic’s revenue in the first half of 2026.

Anthropic says the cloud providers’ “large combined field teams” help sell Claude, and customers can buy through the marketplaces like AWS.

But those sales channels aren't cheap. Anthropic spent $3.17 billion on sales, marketing, and partnerships in those six months. Channel partner fees drove $2.7 billion of the increase from the year before.

5. Revenue per person

Anthropic brought in more than $6.6 million in annual revenue per employee.

For a sense of scale, Apple’s 2025 sales were about $2.5 million per employee. These are different businesses measured over different periods, so it’s not apples to apples. But it shows just how quickly AI companies like Anthropic can grow revenue without having to add employees at the same rate.

6. Employees are making a lot of $

Anthropic had $2.2 billion in stock-based compensation in the first half of 2026, about 69% of its personnel expense.

I went looking for what the sales reps earn. Sadly, the S-1 did not include a commission leaderboard.

But I can confidently say there are about to be a lot of very, very rich Anthropic sales reps when the company goes public. And I’m definitely not jealous, like… at all. (: