The Momentum Sales Model: Why Account Managers Should Own New Revenue

The Momentum Sales Model: Why Account Managers Should Own New Revenue

The hunter-farmer divide is gospel in B2B sales. Hunters chase new logos. Farmers nurture existing accounts. Never the twain shall meet. Preston Bryant deleted the entire framework.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Preston Bryant, Founder and CEO of Momentum, explained how his company scaled to over $150 million in transactions by collapsing sales and customer success into single, accountable roles. The result: better customer experiences, cleaner incentives, and revenue growth that compounds rather than plateaus.

The Problem With Specialization

The conventional wisdom makes intuitive sense: selling requires different skills than account management. Hunters are coin-operated, aggressive, focused on closing. Farmers are relationship-oriented, patient, focused on retention. Hire specialists for each function, optimize both, and revenue scales predictably.

Except it doesn’t. Not cleanly, anyway.

The handoff between sales and customer success creates organizational friction that customers experience as confusion and dropped context. The sales rep who promised custom integration doesn’t own delivery. The customer success manager who understands the account’s nuances doesn’t own expansion revenue. Knowledge fragments across roles, and customers navigate the seams.

Worse, the incentives misalign catastrophically. Sales reps optimized purely for new logo acquisition will oversell, overpromise, and move on. Customer success managers measured only on retention will under-monetize expansion opportunities and avoid difficult commercial conversations. Each role optimizes its local maximum while the customer experience deteriorates.

Preston saw this pattern play out and chose a different architecture entirely.

The Unified Revenue Role

Momentum’s approach is structurally simple: one person owns the entire customer relationship from first contact through ongoing expansion.

“Our account managers are also our salespeople,” Preston explains. “They’re really incentivized on net new revenue.” There’s no handoff from acquisition to retention, no organizational boundary for customers to navigate, no split accountability for outcomes.

This isn’t just organizational chart simplification—it’s a fundamental rethinking of how revenue roles should work. The account manager who prospects a new customer owns their onboarding, ongoing service, and all future expansion. Success isn’t measured by deals closed or retention percentages—it’s measured by total account revenue growth.

The incentive structure reinforces this holistic accountability. Account managers earn commissions on new customer acquisition and on expansion revenue from existing accounts. Poor onboarding that prevents expansion directly impacts their earnings. Great service that drives organic growth directly rewards them.

This creates powerful alignment: the best way to maximize compensation is to acquire good-fit customers, ensure successful implementation, provide excellent ongoing service, and drive continuous expansion. You can’t game the system by optimizing one metric at the expense of others.

The Product Precondition

Momentum’s unified revenue model only works because Preston made a critical product decision first: radical simplification of onboarding and implementation.

“We really try to make our product easy to use, easy to onboard,” Preston emphasizes. This isn’t marketing copy—it’s structural necessity. If onboarding required extensive implementation support, account managers couldn’t effectively handle both acquisition and ongoing management.

The self-service elements remain even for enterprise customers. The checkout process, order management, and core workflows are designed to require minimal hand-holding. This frees account managers to focus on relationship building, strategic guidance, and identifying expansion opportunities rather than getting mired in implementation details.

This reveals the underlying principle: unified revenue roles work when product complexity lives in the system, not the implementation. If your product requires extensive professional services to deploy, specialization makes sense. If your product is genuinely self-service, unified roles create better outcomes.

How It Changes Customer Conversations

The structural impact on customer relationships runs deeper than organizational efficiency. When account managers own both acquisition and expansion, the nature of customer conversations fundamentally changes.

Traditional sales conversations optimize for closing the initial deal. The sales rep’s job is to overcome objections, demonstrate value, and get the signature. What happens after signing is someone else’s problem—literally.

When account managers own the full relationship, initial sales conversations become longer-term relationship building. There’s no incentive to overpromise because you’ll own the consequences. There’s no benefit to forcing deals with poor-fit customers because you’ll spend years managing the fallout.

The expansion conversations change even more dramatically. Traditional customer success managers often avoid commercial discussions because they’re not wired or compensated for sales conversations. They focus on adoption metrics, health scores, and renewal risk—important work, but it leaves expansion revenue on the table.

Momentum’s account managers approach every customer interaction as both service and revenue opportunity. When a customer mentions a new facility or expanding operations, the account manager doesn’t just note it for future reference—they actively explore how Momentum can support the expansion. The commercial conversation flows naturally from the relationship conversation because it’s the same person having both.

The Efficiency Equation

Beyond customer experience improvements, unified roles create operational efficiencies that pure specialization cannot.

Knowledge transfer between sales and customer success typically requires extensive documentation, handoff meetings, and CRM hygiene. Account managers who own the full relationship accumulate context continuously without transfer costs. They know the customer’s business, decision-making process, pain points, and growth plans because they’ve been involved from day one.

This accumulated context compounds over time. Year-two conversations build on year-one knowledge. Expansion opportunities get identified earlier because the account manager understands the customer’s roadmap. Problems get resolved faster because there’s no need to escalate to someone with more context.

The hiring and training efficiency also improves. Instead of maintaining two separate hiring pipelines, training programs, and career paths for sales and customer success, Momentum invests in developing complete revenue professionals. The skills are harder to find—you need relationship building and commercial acumen—but the organizational complexity decreases.

When Specialization Still Wins

Preston’s model isn’t universally applicable. The conditions that make unified revenue roles effective are specific, and violating them leads to failure.

First, product complexity must be low enough that implementation doesn’t require dedicated resources. If onboarding takes months of professional services, account managers can’t effectively manage multiple customer lifecycles simultaneously.

Second, deal velocity must be moderate enough that account managers can nurture relationships over time. If you’re running high-volume transactional sales with short buying cycles, specialized hunters may outperform unified roles.

Third, expansion revenue must be substantial enough to justify the model. If customer lifetime value comes primarily from initial purchase rather than expansion, pure hunter economics may be superior.

Fourth, the market must value relationships over transactions. In commodity markets where customers switch based purely on price, relationship continuity matters less than aggressive new customer acquisition.

Momentum operates in a market where all four conditions align: implementation is straightforward, sales cycles allow relationship building, expansion potential is significant, and customers value reliable partnerships over transactional relationships.

The Compensation Challenge

The hardest part of unified revenue roles isn’t structure—it’s compensation design. How do you fairly incentivize both new customer acquisition and account expansion without creating perverse outcomes?

Preston’s approach: commission structure that rewards net new revenue regardless of source. “They’re really incentivized on net new revenue,” he notes. Whether that revenue comes from a new customer or expansion of an existing account, the commission rate is equivalent.

This prevents the common failure mode where account managers focus exclusively on easy expansion within existing accounts while neglecting harder new customer acquisition. It also prevents the opposite problem where account managers chase new logos while neglecting expansion opportunities in their book of business.

The key insight: measure and reward total account portfolio growth, not activity metrics. Account managers who maximize their total book of business revenue—through whatever combination of new acquisition and expansion works best—get rewarded most.

What B2B Founders Can Learn

Preston’s sales model reveals several principles that transfer beyond recycling marketplaces.

First, organizational structure should optimize for customer experience, not internal role clarity. If handoffs create customer confusion, eliminate the handoffs even if it complicates hiring.

Second, compensation drives behavior more than job descriptions. Unified roles only work if compensation rewards holistic account growth rather than narrow activity metrics.

Third, product simplicity enables organizational simplicity. The investment in self-service onboarding pays dividends in cleaner revenue team structure.

Fourth, relationship continuity compounds in ways that specialized efficiency cannot. The account manager who’s been with a customer for three years knows things that no amount of CRM documentation can transfer.

The unified revenue model won’t work for every B2B company. But for businesses where relationships matter, implementation is straightforward, and expansion potential is significant, collapsing sales and customer success into single accountable roles creates advantages that specialized teams cannot replicate.

Preston proved that sometimes the best sales organization is the one that refuses to separate selling from serving.