Good Morning. It doesn’t happen often, but yesterday we got reality TV level drama from the GTM world. Chris Degnan, Snowflake’s first sales hire and former CRO, was advising the AI startup Factory. Now he’s joining Cognition, one of Factory’s biggest competitors, as CRO. Factory’s CEO says Degnan was talking with Cognition while sitting in confidential meetings. Degnan and Cognition deny it. Then a bunch of VCs who invested in the two companies jumped in and started arguing on X. At this rate, I’m gonna need a Netflix doc about this story asap. Now, let’s get into today’s Follow Up. (:

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Early in my career, one of my sales managers told me a story about his experience selling at Salesforce.

They had so much demand for the product, and such a massive market, that territories were divided by ZIP codes.

There were literally enough potential customers inside one ZIP code to require a designated sales rep.

One rep’s ZIP code included Groupon when it was growing like crazy. That rep made seven figures that year.

I still think about that story all the time. Imagine selling a product that has so much demand and a total addressable market (TAM) big enough to give a rep a single ZIP code.

That, my friend, is what you call Product Market Fit (PMF).

It’s one of the most important ingredients in a good sales job, and can single handedly determine how much money you’ll make.

So today we’re breaking down product-market fit, how it relates to your sales job, and how to check if the job you’re taking gives you the best shot at making a lot of money.

Product Market Fit, or PMF, means your product has a ton of demand in a great market. People need the thing enough to buy it, use it, and keep paying for it.

Marc Andreessen describes the feeling like this:

“Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can.”

Before PMF, selling can feel like pushing a boulder uphill. With strong PMF, it feels like running downhill with the boulder chasing you.

You still have to sell. But having customers who actually want your stuff helps out a lot.

Andreessen says finding fit can require rewriting the product or moving into a different market.

As a rep, you can bring back customer feedback and test which messages land. You can help the company learn.

But the founders, product team, and engineering team ultimately own the decisions about what to build and which market to pursue. Your next hundred cold calls may give them useful information. But they’ll also probably leave you with a very small commission check.

Joining before PMF can make sense if you want to help build the business, wear a lot of hats, and accept the uncertainty. And if demand takes off, you’ve got a front row seat on the rocket ship.

If your priority is earning money soon, you want to see clear evidence that customers already buy the product, use it, and love it.

One of the best ways to gauge this is to speak with reps at the company before you join. Ask them how easy it really is to sell, and how likely they are to hit quota.

You’ll learn a lot about the job from a sales rep who’s doing it.

Amazon knew firsthand how much time and money it took to manage server infrastructure. That helped inspire AWS, which launched S3 storage in 2006 and EC2 computing a few months later.

Customers could use the server infrastructure they needed without buying and looking after all the hardware themselves.

And they used it. A lot.

S3 stored 2.9 billion objects by the end of 2006, 14 billion in 2007, and 40 billion in 2008.

Being a sales rep at AWS during those years was like fishing with dynamite. You had a great product, and almost every tech company needed it.

Twenty years later, and there’s still a ton of money to make selling it. Top performers on the AWS sales team can make around $600K/year.

Back to that ZIP code.

You could join a company with a great product and a huge market. You still need to find out how much business is available to you.

PMF comes in degrees.

Market size matters, too. Say you have the best product in the world, but only 1,000 companies could use it. How many have already bought? How big are the deals? How many reps are going after the rest?

The same goes for a company that found PMF a decade ago. Is demand growing faster than the sales team? Are new reps getting good accounts?

Ask how inbound leads get handed out, why the last rep left, and how many reps are hitting quota.

You’re allowed to want all the details before you quit your job.

A known brand and customers who already want to talk sound pretty good to me.

There’s so much truth to what Stuart says in this tweet.

Sales is a lot more fun when people want to buy what you’re selling. And it can really suck when no one wants your product.

Selling a product people don’t really want will probably teach you more about fundamental sales skills. After all, you’ll have to persuade people to buy something they don’t absolutely need.

But is your goal to be the best at the fundamentals, or to make a ton of money and have a great career?

Selling at a company with PMF will help you do the latter.

Today’s newsletter was written by Nic Conley