Google is shaking up its sales strategy to push its most important AI-powered product to more advertisers

• Some Google sales staffers are moving from selling into large companies to mid-sized companies.
• The move comes as Google’s “rocketship growth” slows.
• These staffers are heavily incented to sell AI products like Performance Max.

According to multiple sources, Google is changing the way its sales teams work as the internet giant tries to promote an important AI-powered advertising product.

According to multiple sources, some of the ad giant’s sales staffers who work with large companies are shifting to sales teams dedicated to selling to smaller, less sophisticated advertiser clients.

According to a Google source, these smaller advertisers work with the Google Customer Solutions (GCS) team and spend between $250,000 and $2 million per quarter. Meanwhile, large companies typically spend at least $4 million to $5 million per quarter with Google and work with a Google internal team known as Large Customer Sales (LCS).

Google is shifting resources to middle-tier advertisers because larger advertisers no longer require the same amount of resources from Google as they once did, according to current and former employees. Many of the larger advertisers have their own internal Google team or work with agency specialists who can provide hands-on service.

Google is also making a concerted effort to automate the services it provides to customers using technology such as artificial intelligence.

According to multiple sources, since Google cut 12,000 employees in January, a slew of LCS employees – who are typically more senior, experienced, and expensive – have been laid off. An official restructure of the sales team has not been announced internally, but recent sales moves, according to those sources, reflect this broader trend.

Several ad agency experts have noted that these changes are occurring as Google’s advertising revenue growth has slowed, with one search consultant stating that Google is attempting to “give more help to faster-moving segments.”

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is scheduled to release earnings later Tuesday.

According to one Google employee, while the company is no longer experiencing “rocketship growth” like it did two years ago, “there’s still growth in the right pockets.”

One of those pockets of growth appears to be Performance Max, a tool in which advertisers let Google’s AI decide where their money should be spent across Google properties such as search, YouTube, and the Google display ad network. Since its inception in 2020, Google Performance Max has been a major initiative.

According to a Google source, Performance Max is a good way to generate “incremental revenue from advertisers,” and there is a strong internal incentive to promote it. According to multiple sources, Google has been particularly aggressive in selling this solution to smaller and mid-sized advertisers. According to Google, advertisers who use the Performance Max product achieve better results on average.

“Performance Max has been around for three years, keeps getting better and drives increased performance for advertisers,” according to a spokesperson for Google. “We’re continuing to invest in support and sales teams to service both large and mid-sized customers who benefit from this product and the higher conversion rates it provides.” Of course, we are constantly looking for ways to improve our support models in order to help all of our customers, large and small, succeed.”

In some teams, sellers are rewarded with points for meeting targets and selling Google products. “The weighting on [Performance Max] is definitely higher because it is a priority product,” according to a current Google employee. According to a former Google employee who recently left the company, “every single person has some sort of PMax target.”

Google salespeople have also been seen attempting to sell Performance Max to mid-sized advertisers, according to agency executives. “Hell yeah.” “I can confirm that,” one source said. “Historically, we’ve had a great relationship with our sales team; they never really pushed the other products.” However, Performance Max has recently been pushed.”

However, some users of the product are skeptical of Google’s sales strategy.

“The argument goes, automation will solve problems so you can focus on strategy but that’s somewhat of an empty promise when you don’t provide the rationale to agencies to promote strategy, or give an inside element to understand how they can work Performance Max into their own systems,” a former employee of Google said.

Several ad agency employees expressed reservations about using Performance Max because the tool does not yet provide them with the controls they need to dictate where their ads can and cannot run.

“Performance Max, in my opinion, is a crock,” said a previous agency source. This person was skeptical that the tool was delivering the results it claimed to deliver because the reports it generated did not provide detailed information about the performance of things like clicks and searches. “It’s yet another example of going for growth,” said this source. “If Google can simply go after budget without question, and no one is going to look at these reports, then they can simply demand $500,000 because we perform.” But all they’re doing is claiming credit for things that aren’t directly related by running a corollary attribution.”

Google has also been vying for social ad budgets with Demand Gen, an AI-powered product. Demand Gen, which debuted three months ago, selects an advertiser’s best-performing video and image ads and serves them across YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Google Discover, and Gmail.

Despite the fact that the broader ad spend winter of 2022 and 2023 appears to be thawing, advertisers are still scrutinizing their spending. According to a current employee, Google’s latest moves are an effort to ensure that it is doing everything possible to ensure that advertisers choose it over the other digital ad giants.

“What can we do to compete with Meta, TikTok, and others?” asked this individual.