1 min lesson
Who you work with - the account team
Use "You own a slice of a unified account team and the seams between those slices are where deals quietly die" to describe the practical rule.
Step 1 of 3
You don't own the customer alone. You own a slice of a unified account team and the seams between those slices are where deals quietly die.
Three functions surround you at Cursor: Sales, Field Engineering and Product. Each has a distinct relationship to the account and your value is partly defined by how cleanly you hand off to and from them.
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Advanced table
Your lane is the realized value between the close and the renewal
- Partner
- Sales / AE
- What they own
- Commercial relationship and the close; the contract and the quota
- Your interface with them
- You inherit the relationship at signature and own the realized value; you feed them expansion signals
- Partner
- Field Engineering
- What they own
- Deep pre-sales technical muscle, POCs, hard architecture questions
- Your interface with them
- You partner on rollout architecture and escalate gnarly technical blockers back to them
- Partner
- Product
- What they own
- The roadmap and what ships next
- Your interface with them
- You are the customer's voice upstream - you carry synthesized friction and feature gaps, not raw complaints
| Partner | What they own | Your interface with them |
|---|---|---|
| Sales / AE | Commercial relationship and the close; the contract and the quota | You inherit the relationship at signature and own the realized value; you feed them expansion signals |
| Field Engineering | Deep pre-sales technical muscle, POCs, hard architecture questions | You partner on rollout architecture and escalate gnarly technical blockers back to them |
| Product | The roadmap and what ships next | You are the customer's voice upstream - you carry synthesized friction and feature gaps, not raw complaints |
Your lane is the realized value between the close and the renewal. The partners flank it.
The handoff from Sales to post-sale is the single highest-risk moment in the account's life. The AE has months of context - who the real champion is, what was promised, which exec cares about what - and most of it lives in their head. If that context doesn't transfer, you restart discovery from zero and the customer feels it.
Interactive diagram. Step through it with the Next and Previous controls below, or Tab to a region to read its detail.
Run the AE's context through these stages before kickoff - the agreed first win is the gate that protects momentum.
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Optional practice
Practice: Who you work with - the account team
QWhich moment carries the highest risk of an account stalling and what makes a strong version of it?