{"id":318130,"date":"2025-09-09T09:15:35","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T16:15:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/?p=318130"},"modified":"2025-09-09T09:59:18","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T16:59:18","slug":"why-anthropic-cursor-fal-ditched-traditional-sales-playbooks-the-new-go-to-market-for-technical-teams-and-product-led-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/why-anthropic-cursor-fal-ditched-traditional-sales-playbooks-the-new-go-to-market-for-technical-teams-and-product-led-growth\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Anthropic, Cursor &#038; FAL Ditched Traditional Sales Playbooks: The New Go-to-Market for Technical Teams and Product-Led Growth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>From the <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.saastrannual.com\">SaaStr Annual \/ AI Summit<\/a> <\/strong><\/span>&#8211; How three breakout AI companies rewrote the rules of enterprise sales.\u00a0 And see everyone at <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.saastrannual.com\">2026 Annual + AI Summit May 12-14 2026<\/a><\/strong><\/span> and <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.saastrlondon.com\">SaaStr AI London Dec 2-3!<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Anthropic, Cursor, FaL &amp; Bessemer Venture Partners: The Realities of Scaling AI\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/cBKCpj84FOI?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1&#038;origin=https:\/\/www.saastr.com\"  allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" class=\"lazyload\" data-load-mode=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h2>Speaker Bios<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Talia Goldberg<\/strong><\/span> &#8211; Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners<br \/>\nTalia leads AI investments at Bessemer and has been at the forefront of understanding how AI companies break traditional SaaS metrics and business models.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Kelly Loftus<\/strong><\/span> &#8211; Head of Startup Sales, Anthropic<br \/>\nKelly has scaled Anthropic&#8217;s startup sales team from fewer than 10 people to over 150 as the company grew from 250 to 1,300 employees in just 18 months.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Jacob Jackson<\/strong><\/span> &#8211; Machine Learning Engineer, Cursor (formerly OpenAI, Tab9, Super Maven)<br \/>\nA veteran of the AI coding space, Jacob has been building developer tools since 2018 and joined Cursor 8 months ago after working as a researcher at OpenAI.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Gorkem Yurtseven<\/strong> &#8211; CTO and Co-Founder, FAL (Features and Labels)<br \/>\nGorkem leads the technical vision at FAL, the generative media platform that hosts open and closed source image and video models via easy-to-use APIs.<\/p>\n<h2>Top 5 GTM Takeaways<\/h2>\n<ol>\n<li><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>No Quotas, No Problem<\/strong><\/span>: Both Anthropic and FAL have completely abandoned traditional quota systems in favor of &#8220;shadow targets&#8221; due to unpredictable AI-driven growth patterns.<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Technical Sales Teams Are Everything<\/strong><\/span>: All three companies prioritize hiring technically sophisticated sales teams that can use their own products and understand complex technical buyers.<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Product-Led Growth Dominates<\/strong><\/span>: With massive inbound demand, these companies focus on fulfilling demand rather than generating it, requiring fundamentally different sales motions.<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Shorter Planning Cycles Win<\/strong><\/span>: Traditional annual planning is dead\u2014these companies are moving to quarterly or monthly targets due to rapid model improvements driving unpredictable adoption.<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Internal AI Usage = Competitive Advantage<\/strong><\/span>: Companies eating their own dog food internally create better products and more credible sales conversations.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<hr \/>\n<p>The traditional B2B\/SaaS sales playbook may not officially dead\u2014but it is at least according to three of the hottest AI companies on the planet. In a revealing panel discussion, leaders from Anthropic, Cursor, and FAL pulled back the curtain on how they&#8217;ve built hypergrowth go-to-market engines without quotas, with technical sales teams, and powered by product-led growth that would make traditional SaaS executives&#8217; heads spin.<\/p>\n<h2>The Great Quota Rebellion<\/h2>\n<p>The most shocking revelation came early: none of these companies use traditional sales quotas. Kelly Loftus from Anthropic dropped the bombshell first: &#8220;We still don&#8217;t really have quotas. We have shadow targets.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Why? &#8220;It&#8217;s really hard to predict exactly what is happening. The adoption is fast. A lot of this is driven by model intelligence, which you cannot predict over a long time period.&#8221;<\/p>\n<div class=\"embed-twitter\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">How AI has changed GTM with <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/TaliaGold?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@TaliaGold<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/BessemerVP?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@BessemerVP<\/a> + <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/AnthropicAI?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@AnthropicAI<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/cursor_ai?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@cursor_ai<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/FAL?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@FAL<\/a> <\/p>\n<p>Here&#39;s how Anthropic, Cursor &amp; FAL are rewriting go-to-market for the AI era:<\/p>\n<p>\ud83d\udeab NO QUOTAS: Both Anthropic &amp; FAL completely abandoned traditional quotas for &quot;shadow targets&quot; because AI-driven\u2026 <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/5Kla8QmKIp\">pic.twitter.com\/5Kla8QmKIp<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Jason \u2728\ud83d\udc7eSaaStr.Ai\u2728 Lemkin (@jasonlk) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jasonlk\/status\/1965353486909841592?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">September 9, 2025<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/div>\n<p>FAL&#8217;s experience was even more dramatic. &#8220;Beginning of this year, we were looking to hire a head of sales,&#8221; Gorkem shared. &#8220;Any good head of sales candidate was trying to negotiate a quota system. We thought doubling next year would be a good target. During the interviews and negotiations, we grew maybe 50%. We were almost halfway there already. We decided this is useless. We are not doing quotas.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Both companies are experimenting with shorter-term accountability\u2014quarterly or monthly targets instead of annual quotas\u2014because the pace of AI model improvements makes longer-term predictions meaningless.<\/p>\n<h2>Technical Sales Teams: The New Requirement<\/h2>\n<p>All three companies have made a fundamental bet on technical sales teams\u2014and it&#8217;s paying off massively.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We have a very technical sales team,&#8221; Jacob from Cursor explained, &#8220;partly because it&#8217;s a technical product, but also because there are a lot of ways the sales process can be accelerated with software and with Cursor.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t just about understanding the product\u2014it&#8217;s about being able to use AI tools to accelerate the sales process itself. Cursor&#8217;s sales team actively uses their own product to build tools that help with sales, creating a virtuous cycle of internal usage and external credibility.<\/p>\n<p>Anthropic has scaled from fewer than 10 go-to-market people to over 150 as the company grew from 250 to 1,300 employees in just 18 months. Kelly&#8217;s approach focused on building for scale from day one: &#8220;When I joined, we did not have the concept of quotas. What I did was let&#8217;s just build a team around feedback, knowing this team is going to scale from 10 people to hundreds.&#8221;<\/p>\n<h2>Product-Led Growth on Steroids<\/h2>\n<p>The demand dynamics for AI products have created a fundamentally different go-to-market reality. Instead of generating demand, these companies are primarily focused on fulfilling it.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;At Cursor, many of our first enterprise customers bought Cursor because their developers came to their management and they said we need this tool\u2014or in many cases they were already using it,&#8221; Jacob revealed.<\/p>\n<p>This bottom-up adoption pattern means traditional enterprise sales motions are less relevant. &#8220;There&#8217;s so much demand for AI that people don&#8217;t need these massive sales teams and they can get things done with much leaner teams,&#8221; Gorkem observed.<\/p>\n<p>The result? Revenue per employee ratios that &#8220;totally break the brain&#8221; according to Talia from Bessemer, with all three companies achieving growth metrics that shatter traditional SaaS benchmarks.<\/p>\n<h2>Internal AI Usage as Competitive Advantage<\/h2>\n<p>Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of these companies&#8217; success is how aggressively they use AI internally\u2014creating better products and more authentic sales conversations.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Anthropic&#8217;s Knowledge Bot<\/strong>: &#8220;One of our favorite use cases is a Slack channel where employees can ask questions, and Claude searches our internal knowledge bases and answers,&#8221; Kelly shared. &#8220;It&#8217;s been extremely useful for productivity and time to onboard, especially across time zones.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cursor&#8217;s Background Agents<\/strong>: Jacob highlighted their most advanced internal use case: &#8220;You can give tasks to AI that it will complete asynchronously. If it&#8217;s 90% right and 10% is off, you can easily drop into what the AI has been doing and correct it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAL&#8217;s Research-Driven Hiring<\/strong>: Gorkem revealed an innovative approach: &#8220;We hired maybe four people through our research grants program. You send us an email with a project, we give you compute for a couple of weeks with no strings attached. People have been doing great projects, and we ended up hiring them.&#8221;<\/p>\n<h2>The New Metrics That Actually Matter<\/h2>\n<p>When traditional SaaS metrics break down, what do you measure instead? Each company has evolved different North Star metrics:<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAL focuses on customer concentration<\/strong>: &#8220;We care about big logos, but we want to make sure revenue is coming from at least 30 to 35 different companies rather than being concentrated at the top.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cursor prioritizes product truth<\/strong>: &#8220;The thing we care about most is whether we personally want to use it in our day-to-day life. Revenue lags behind users, and users lag behind the fundamental quality of the product.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Anthropic emphasizes feedback loops<\/strong>: Rather than traditional sales metrics, they focus on &#8220;getting feedback on our models and continuing to work with partners to push model capabilities forward.&#8221;<\/p>\n<h2>The Economics Behind the Revolution<\/h2>\n<p>The fundamental reason these companies can abandon traditional sales playbooks comes down to unit economics that traditional SaaS executives would find terrifying\u2014and liberating.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Before, if you were selling a SaaS product, the marginal cost was very little,&#8221; Gorkem explained. &#8220;But with AI, everyone has less margins because it comes with a real cost to serve each customer.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>However, this trade-off enables something powerful: value-based pricing that scales with customer success. &#8220;When I first started selling developer tools for $49, I thought, &#8216;How much does this need to increase productivity to be worth it?&#8217; It&#8217;s like 1% and it&#8217;s worth it,&#8221; Jacob noted. &#8220;Many people have been accelerated more than 2x already.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>As Talia summarized: &#8220;COGs are the new CAC. You can spend a lot on cost of goods sold, but it means you can&#8217;t be spending a lot on customer acquisition because if you have low margins and really high acquisition costs, that&#8217;s tricky. But the good news is all of your products kind of sell themselves.&#8221;<\/p>\n<h2>The Symbiotic Competition Model<\/h2>\n<p>Perhaps the most fascinating dynamic revealed was the relationship between Cursor and Anthropic\u2014simultaneously customer\/supplier and collaborative competitors.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We want to partner with companies like Cursor to drive the models forward,&#8221; Kelly explained. &#8220;Cursor has given us feedback on our models in the coding area and had access to our models before we released them.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Jacob reciprocated: &#8220;Whenever the models get better, we&#8217;re very happy because it means Cursor becomes more valuable to our users.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This collaborative competition represents a new paradigm for B2B relationships in the AI era, where ecosystem advancement benefits all players.<\/p>\n<h2>Implications for B2B Leaders<\/h2>\n<p>The lessons from these three companies extend far beyond AI:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Question Annual Planning<\/strong><\/span>: In rapidly evolving markets, shorter planning cycles may be more effective than traditional annual quotas and targets.<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Hire Technical Sales Talent<\/strong><\/span>: As products become more sophisticated, sales teams need deeper technical understanding to be effective.<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Embrace Product-Led Growth<\/strong><\/span>: When possible, focus on fulfilling demand rather than generating it through traditional sales and marketing motions.<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Use Your Own Product<\/strong><\/span>: Internal usage creates better products and more authentic customer conversations.<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Collaborate with Competitors<\/strong><\/span>: In emerging markets, ecosystem advancement can benefit all players.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>The traditional SaaS sales playbook assumed predictable growth, high gross margins, and demand generation challenges. AI companies operate in a world of unpredictable hypergrowth, real marginal costs, and demand fulfillment opportunities.<\/p>\n<p>The companies that recognize this shift earliest\u2014and adapt their go-to-market strategies accordingly\u2014will define the next era of enterprise software.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h2>Quotable Moments<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Gorkem Yurtseven (FAL)<\/strong><\/span>: <em>&#8220;We thought doubling next year would be a good target for quotas. During the interviews, we grew maybe 50%. We were almost halfway there already. We decided this is useless. We are not doing quotas.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Kelly Loftus (Anthropic)<\/strong><\/span>: <em>&#8220;We still don&#8217;t really have quotas. We have shadow targets. It&#8217;s really hard to predict exactly what is happening when adoption is fast and driven by model intelligence you cannot predict over a long time period.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Jacob Jackson (Cursor)<\/strong><\/span>: <em>&#8220;Many of our first enterprise customers bought Cursor because their developers came to management and said we need this tool\u2014or in many cases they were already using it.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Talia Goldberg (Bessemer)<\/strong><\/span>: <em>&#8220;COGs are the new CAC. You can spend a lot on cost of goods sold, but you can&#8217;t be spending a lot on customer acquisition when you have low margins and high acquisition costs.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Anthropic, Cursor, FaL &amp; Bessemer Venture Partners: The Realities of Scaling AI\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/cBKCpj84FOI?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1&#038;origin=https:\/\/www.saastr.com\"  allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" class=\"lazyload\" data-load-mode=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the SaaStr Annual \/ AI Summit &#8211; How three breakout AI companies rewrote the rules of enterprise sales.\u00a0 And see everyone at 2026 Annual + AI Summit May 12-14 2026 and SaaStr AI London Dec 2-3! Speaker Bios Talia Goldberg &#8211; Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners Talia leads AI investments at Bessemer and has been&#8230; <br \/><a class=\"more-link fade\" href=\"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/why-anthropic-cursor-fal-ditched-traditional-sales-playbooks-the-new-go-to-market-for-technical-teams-and-product-led-growth\/\">Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":318131,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpscp_schedule_draft_date":"","_wpscp_schedule_republish_date":"","_wpscppro_advance_schedule":false,"_wpscppro_advance_schedule_date":"","_wpscppro_custom_social_share_image":0,"_facebook_share_type":"default","_twitter_share_type":"default","_linkedin_share_type":"default","_pinterest_share_type":"default","_linkedin_share_type_page":"","_instagram_share_type":"default","_medium_share_type":"default","_threads_share_type":"","_selected_social_profile":[]},"categories":[24898,31,24987],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-318130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-blog-posts","category-saastr-ai"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.saastr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/bvp-scaled.jpg?fit=1000%2C563&quality=70&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5oib2-1kL8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318130"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318171,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318130\/revisions\/318171"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/318131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}