How is the...

Question

How is the lead flow/inbound situation at Gartner.  Are the AE roles heavy prospecting? Or are you getting most of calls set up by SDR team?

Former Employee · Accepted Answer

The answer to this is highly dependent on what BU you are in (GTS, GBS, Conference, etc) what region you are in, etc. some teams/regions have pure hunting teams called Biz Dev that acquire new accounts while AE’s manage and grow existing. Others have AE’s hunting about 20 net new accounts beyond their book. The crm is horrible, the data is horrible. There are large potential customers not in the crm that slip thru the cracks bc no one ever added them. There are no SDR’s at Gartner outside of a couple pilot teams in GBS (at least when I left in 2021). Great product, great culture, terrible data and terrible sales ops make this a harder gig than it needs to be. I had one true inbound lead there in 4 years.

Former Employee · Answer

The AE role has a moderate amount of prospecting, but not nearly as much as BD roles. As an AE you will be prospecting new seat holders in your existing accounts and you may have several new to world accounts. There is little to no SDR support in the AE roles, however, most of the day to day client support is managed by a client success team. You will partner with the client success team to learn about potential leads.

Former Employee · Answer

The inbound situation and leads are borderline non-existent. As an AE in field sales, you had some prospects but there was no BDR/SDR support in multiple channels. You did the prospecting, demo, pitch - everything. Having moved onto a software company, it is WONDERFUL to have BDR/SDR and solution architects, to help our mission of growing the business.

Current Employee · Answer

The answer is going to vary vastly depending on the business unit you’re inquiring about. Gartner doesn’t have SDRs (at least that I’m aware of). I’ll speak to my experience in the midsize enterprise HT Macro ($5M - $250M rev) channel. As an account manager, you’re primarily managing a book of existing client accounts and are responsible for renewing and growing those accounts. You’ll have a list of about 15-30 prospect accounts that you’re expected to prospect into as well (only in Macro, Micro <$5M rev does not have prospects and isn’t expected to prospect at all). Occasionally you’ll get a marketing lead from one of those prospect accounts or an existing account, but not often and usually they’re garbage leads. On the other hand, our Business Development unit has a much larger prospecting territory since they don’t manage accounts. They’re job is only to sell to net new clients and they run the full sales cycle. It’s still mostly outbound though. We also have a “Become a Client” team that ONLY takes inbound leads that have indicated they would like to become a client. They’ll either run the whole sales cycle, or run the first 1-2 calls and then pass it off to the aligned account manager to finish the sales cycle. Either way the account manager will still get 100% credit for the sale. TLDR: The AE/AM role is not heavy prospecting. The BD role is only prospecting (similar to an SDR/BDR except you run the full sales cycle).

Current Employee · Answer

AES absolutely prospect. The lead is much warmer since you have live accounts but within large enterprises, there a thousands of people to look to prospect.

Current Employee · Answer

Gartner AE here for 1+ yrs in mid-size enteprise (Uk).

Yes AEs will have to prospect. 
Yes there is an inbound flow from marketing however this is small and often under qualified - think 2 to 5 leads per month.

As an AE in small/mid-size you can expect to spend 1-2hrs prospecting (email, cold call, LinkedIn) daily to build your pipeline of net new opportunities.

As below, you do also have aligned account (usually 4-10 accounts) which you can grow .

Your target is a contract revenue figure for the year. Some AEs do this through renew/growth of their accounts only whilst others only focus on a net new.

Hope that helps

Current Employee · Answer

There is an inbound sales team that manages inbound flow. There were 50k+ MQLs that were directed towards the sales team last year and on occasion, there is a specific team that will run the sales opportunity to close for you and you'll get full credit/commission for the lead closing, depending on which channel you're in. To the other answer, yes the homegrown CRM is pretty bad, but they're in the middle of rolling out an official CRM platform to alleviate (hopefully) the internal crossing of lines.

Former Employee · Answer

AE’s do not prospect. Gartner is segmented between Business Development teams, and Account Management teams. AE’s live in the account management teams, and your entire role is to grow your book of business through upsell. You may have a small list of prospects (less than 10), but it’s very few, if any, and there’s no metric you are tracked on for prospect activity.

The Business Development teams lead flow is much different. It’s a lot of outbound activity and Gartners CRM is terrible, so a lot of times they’d be outbounding to people who have been clients for years already.

Hope this answers your question!

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Anonymous Q&A

How is the lead flow/inbound situation at Gartner. Are the AE roles heavy prospecting? Or are you getting most of calls set up by SDR team?