Your AE role is becoming a customer success manager and nobody told you

The ANZ B2B sales playbook you learned three years ago is dying faster than anyone wants to admit.

Here's what's actually happening: Mid-market manufacturers are moving procurement online. Not eventually. Now. The same buyers who needed three discovery calls and a site visit in 2022 are now comparing vendors in a portal at 11pm on a Tuesday.

Your SDR team is burning out because conversion rates are tanking. Not because they're bad at their job. Because the buying journey moved to self-service and nobody updated the comp plan.

Meanwhile, every sales leader in ANZ is being pitched AI agents that will "transform" their pipeline. Translation: your company is about to spend $200k on tech that automates the parts of your job that still convert, while you're left chasing deals that should have closed online.

The real shift isn't AI. It's that B2B buyers now expect a B2C experience. They want pricing upfront. They want to trial your product without talking to anyone. They want to buy on their timeline, not yours.

What this means for your career: The traditional AE role is splitting in two. You're either moving upmarket to enterprise (complex deals AI can't close) or you're becoming a customer success manager who occasionally closes upsells. The mid-market transactional AE role you're sitting in right now? That's getting automated or eliminated in the next 18 months.

If you're still running the same discovery-demo-proposal motion you learned in 2021, you're optimizing for a job that won't exist. The companies figuring this out are hiring fewer AEs and more CSMs. The ones that aren't are the ones with "morale on the ground" and stalled revenue.

Check your pipeline. How many deals are stalling at demo? How many buyers ghost after pricing? That's not a you problem. That's a model problem.

The move: Go enterprise or go customer-centric. The middle is disappearing.