Currently an SMB AE and a well known SaaS company. Education is in engineering, enjoy sales. Comp over the last 5 years has look like the following, all at the same company.
Year 1 (SDR): 55k
Year 2 (Associate AE): 82k
Year 3 (SMB AE): 122k
Year 4 (SMB AE): 220k
Current Year (SMB AE): 150k, on track for 270k.
With 5 years experience I get weekly emails for jobs that offer 200k plus equity at startups with full remote option.
For anyone looking to get into tech sales, there is a website called RepVue (I am in no way affiliated and it's also a free resource) that gives you a breakdown of various sales organizations with scores that are aggregated anonymously based on ratings from reps that work there. It's like a Glassdoor type website but exclusively for salespeople.
You can see the percentage of reps that hit quota, average base salary, average OTE, top performer ceiling, inbound to outbound ratio, quality of training / enablement, product market fit and a whole bunch of other valuable pieces of information to help you make an informed decision.
Each organization is then given an overall rating and ranked relative to others. This puts a lot of the power back into the hands of sellers and gives you the insight to determine which sales organization is the best fit for you.
This is huge because if, according to RepVue, 70% or more of sellers at a certain company are hitting their quotas, the product market fit is solid, you get a good amount of inbound leads and the training is on point, then you know you have a 70% chance of making great money (as long as your experience aligns with the requirements for the role).
By the way, they have breakdowns by role too, so you can see SDR as well as AE data, and it's also broken down by market segment - SMB, Mid Market and Enterprise.
1) Move to high-profile tech company if possible. Even SDR role is fine. Better for literally everything.
2) Territory is king. Sure, there are exceptions but generally you want to make sure your territory is good before you start. Even the best sales reps get burnt out if their accounts are shit.
Best combination is good fucking product + good fucking territory.
3) Degree etc. doesn't matter in sales. If no degree, get into SDR role at startup. Hop to enterprise by prospecting the hiring managers (treat it like booking a meeting) after 6m. After that, you just need the jump to AE - and then you're golden.
4) At least in my country, most sales reps have either somehow landed in the role or are lazy. You'll stand out if you go into the role on purpose + work hard.
5) Amount of social skills you learn is unfathomable.
6) Politics matter. A lot.
Ego of sales managers is through the roof as well (generally, everyone in sales has a high AF ego)
If someone wants to do sales in Europe, do this (if desperate):
1) Move to Dublin and get entry job at high-profile Tech company. Yeah it sucks, weather is shitty, girls are fat - but eating shit is part of it.
2) Stay 1-2yrs and try jump to AE.
3) Move back to home country and always be the guy from "XYZ company".
4) Get recruiting messages everyday for remote positions
Spent close to five years in enterprise SaaS sales mostly at start-ups then Fortune 500 (started as an SDR -> AE). Don't do it unless you have no education or technical ability. You'll be stuck in a monotonous career you hate making a lot less than you would actually building the software or products you're selling. I've seen way too many career SDRs and AEs in their 30s with no skills and dismal future career prospects. Everyone thinks they're going to be the top rep when they start, but you never quite make your OTE and end up looking for a new job every 15 months or so.
Compensation is typically a 50-50 split between base and commission. SDRs start at $50-55K in high COL areas with an ~$100K OTE; AEs are usually at a $65K base. You might get 4 figures in commission in a good quarter. What you actually make in sales is a lot less than what you're told. The bigger problem is that it's difficult to get out of the field when you eventually burn out. You learn nothing tangible as a sales rep other than how to use a CRM. In retrospect, I'd skip the grind altogether and go into a technical role. You can (and should) learn sales on your own. No need to make a career out of it.
Typically technical roles cannot be classified as "careers". You are hard capped at a salary, which is strictly a time for money exchange where incremental effort does not result in additional income. This is a "job." I say this with experience, since I worked O&G engineering roles for the first few years of my careers and brown-nosing for an additional 2-3% salary bumps per years is no way to get "wealthy" at a young age.
The significance of a sales role is the ability to command your income through "events." Old WSP mentioned that only roles that have "events" of this sort can be considered careers. In old writings they suggested B2B SaaS sales, M&A, and technical roles that result in equity in the company (because of the possibility of a sale of the company) as examples of this.
I make more money now in technical sales, leveraging my engineering experience, than I could have in a strictly technical role in O&G, and with much less stress/time invested, so your experiences may be unique.
The correct "take" is that you should find a role that allows you to play to your strengths while also maximizing your earning potential, minimizing your stress, and minimizing your time investment (because you need to invest time in starting other forms of income or else no matter how much you work you're NGMI).
Be prepared to bust ass no matter what. Don't shy away from hard work.
To add to this... If you're unwilling or incapable of starting and growing your own business, then GIGA is correct, you might have better long term prospects working in a technical role where you will be chained to your desk for life.
However, if you foresee yourself starting a business and freeing yourself from the rat race... then "career prospects" are entirely meaningless, because you will have broken free after 7-10 years of churn.
1) What was your performance like in your sales roles?
2) How did you go from pure sales --> technical role?
It's true that a lot of your success in tech sales is based on your territory / account list and timing. If you have good accounts, you can perform extremely well without being exceptionally good at sales. If you have shitty accounts, then it will be much tougher to break in and ultimately close deals, no matter how good you are.
The timing component is huge too. You can hammer an account endlessly to no avail, and then all of a sudden something breaks on their end and a buying window opens. You just have to stay top of mind until that happens. Persistence + messaging + timing. Creating demand and fabricating pain is a lot harder than people think, especially when selling to a "know it all" technical audience.
Even if there is some pain, if they can live with it, they will often choose that route versus engaging in a lengthy sales cycle, going through legal / security reviews and having to learn a whole new solution while also performing their core job functions.
That being said, sales does offer you the opportunity to make six figures out of school and multiple six figures (seven in rare cases) down the road once you make it to enterprise or upper leadership, and without working 80 hours per week or having to go through extensive schooling.
I think a great move would be to learn sales and also improve your technical acumen, as you then have both the social / sales skills and the technical knowledge needed to transition into sales engineering. Either that, or you can go into a technical role if that's where your interests lie, although I will say a pure engineering role seems incredibly boring (correct me if I'm wrong) and the people you work with are typically very weird from what I've heard.
You're spot on with your questions... lots of variables and it's not as one dimensional as GIGA puts it.
Again, old WSP philosophy was to determine your strenghts and play to them. If you're socially inept (an actual autist), no sense in being in a role that heavily requires social skills.
100%. That advice holds true for everything. I know people who struggled as SDRs and barely cracked $60k and I also know enterprise account executives in their late 20s / early 30s who earn $500k per year and drive around in AMGs. So many factors to consider - product / market fit, company culture, territory, market segment, outbound to inbound ratio, company growth stage, training, support from other members of the org (SDR team, sales engineering, legal, etc.), as well as where your natural talents lie. Things are rarely that simple.
Either way, as you put it, the end goal is to own a business so you can have both the money and the freedom to actually enjoy it.
I went the coder->technical sales route. Spent 10+ years as a developer and stumbled into sales engineering because I wanted to get more face time with people. Best accident I ever had.
Don’t be like me, make a plan and hit it without all the mucking about in stagnant coding positions (minimal upside earnings).
thank you! The type of sales I am in right now is more so consultative selling various RE services, its kinda cool but I do want something different I think.
don’t know comp at these firms. Take a look at glassdoor for that and ask ppl in linkedin. personally believe these will be displaced soon by Amazon/DoorDash. if not sure, focus efforts in tech space.
Try looking for big F500 corps with a "sales academy". No personal experience with it but have seen a few out there. Also look at Okta, saw a post a while back about them starting to hire SDRs from nontraditional sales backgrounds, which you would fit the bill for.
Look at Tech Qualled, a sales training program for vets. Also Shift has multiple programs to help explore and connect with tech-related careers, and recently started a Biz Dev apprenticeship program.
Reach out to vets on Linkedin that have already made it to your target career, most will be happy to help out a fellow vet once you indicate you are putting in the work
This has been a fantastic read. But does anyone have any advice for someone who's been out of the workforce for a couple of years over the pandemic? Would be much appreciated.
I've been in Corp FP&A at SaaS companies for the past 4 years. It's stable but low leverage with a really boring career trajectory unless you jump on to a rocketship at the right time. Been thinking about pivoting into Sales for a while now. Seems like the main (only) route is to get an SDR role and then move your way up. Does that check out? Should I just be scoping SDR gigs on LinkedIn and putting my name out there?
Pure Sales role just seems to intimidating. Yes Sales is needed in everything. But a pure sales role of just cold calling and talking all the time, just sounds like hell. A Tech role in process design or customer experience or something in between (synthesizer) seems much more rewarding.
My default is introverted, the guys who absolutely smash these SDR type roles that I have met are more often you're typical extroverted types.
You can strike a balance for sure… look into solutions consulting/technical sales roles where you still leverage technical expertise to make a sale.
You’re not wrong that a large portion of reps are very extroverted, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find a good role that still allows you to make a commission as a part of the sales cycle.
I think I am following this path but did so unconsciously.
I am in sales at a startup with a base of 40 and uncapped commissions OTE this year will be somewhere around 60-70.
What would you consider "major progression" in the business? here are some things happening in the company:
- Prop Tech industry is growing very quickly
-headcount doubled since COVID
- Revenue is up and to the right
-recent salary increase
- office was planning on reopening but because of varient no plan in site to open
Lately I have bene thinking about going and doing a bootcamp for UI/UX design because it is more aligned with what it is I want i guess. I am a high performer for the the org I am with and have equity being vested.
Don't know enough about the space so probably best to ask one of the sales guys. If you're at a growing company it's a lot easier to move up and make more, also a lot easier to start a side business as you can grow revenues without killing yourself
I followed this path to a point a few years ago.
Pissed away my twenty's in accounting & alcohol. Discovered WSP and decided to stop wasting my life away.
First: SDR role at a start-up in Paris
Second : SDR Role at FANG level company in Ireland
Third : SMB AE at High Growth Tech company selling all over Europe @90k
All in 2 years.
Then started programming to understand tech better and discovered I was so much better at tech than sales it wasn't even funny.
Fast forward 3 years and I'm an independent developer @140k
Great work!
Currently an SMB AE and a well known SaaS company. Education is in engineering, enjoy sales. Comp over the last 5 years has look like the following, all at the same company.
Year 1 (SDR): 55k
Year 2 (Associate AE): 82k
Year 3 (SMB AE): 122k
Year 4 (SMB AE): 220k
Current Year (SMB AE): 150k, on track for 270k.
With 5 years experience I get weekly emails for jobs that offer 200k plus equity at startups with full remote option.
Well done ser. Now wen side biz...
Can’t wait to see those numbers when you’ll be tackling ENT accounts 🦍
ENT accounts?
Enterprise Accounts
For anyone looking to get into tech sales, there is a website called RepVue (I am in no way affiliated and it's also a free resource) that gives you a breakdown of various sales organizations with scores that are aggregated anonymously based on ratings from reps that work there. It's like a Glassdoor type website but exclusively for salespeople.
You can see the percentage of reps that hit quota, average base salary, average OTE, top performer ceiling, inbound to outbound ratio, quality of training / enablement, product market fit and a whole bunch of other valuable pieces of information to help you make an informed decision.
Each organization is then given an overall rating and ranked relative to others. This puts a lot of the power back into the hands of sellers and gives you the insight to determine which sales organization is the best fit for you.
This is huge because if, according to RepVue, 70% or more of sellers at a certain company are hitting their quotas, the product market fit is solid, you get a good amount of inbound leads and the training is on point, then you know you have a 70% chance of making great money (as long as your experience aligns with the requirements for the role).
By the way, they have breakdowns by role too, so you can see SDR as well as AE data, and it's also broken down by market segment - SMB, Mid Market and Enterprise.
My addendums:
1) Move to high-profile tech company if possible. Even SDR role is fine. Better for literally everything.
2) Territory is king. Sure, there are exceptions but generally you want to make sure your territory is good before you start. Even the best sales reps get burnt out if their accounts are shit.
Best combination is good fucking product + good fucking territory.
3) Degree etc. doesn't matter in sales. If no degree, get into SDR role at startup. Hop to enterprise by prospecting the hiring managers (treat it like booking a meeting) after 6m. After that, you just need the jump to AE - and then you're golden.
4) At least in my country, most sales reps have either somehow landed in the role or are lazy. You'll stand out if you go into the role on purpose + work hard.
5) Amount of social skills you learn is unfathomable.
6) Politics matter. A lot.
Ego of sales managers is through the roof as well (generally, everyone in sales has a high AF ego)
If someone wants to do sales in Europe, do this (if desperate):
1) Move to Dublin and get entry job at high-profile Tech company. Yeah it sucks, weather is shitty, girls are fat - but eating shit is part of it.
2) Stay 1-2yrs and try jump to AE.
3) Move back to home country and always be the guy from "XYZ company".
4) Get recruiting messages everyday for remote positions
Thanks for this. Just curious, why Dublin lol
most tech orgz have based their European HQ in Dublin for tax reasons. That’s also where their sales team are based off.
Helpful, thank you!
+1
Spent close to five years in enterprise SaaS sales mostly at start-ups then Fortune 500 (started as an SDR -> AE). Don't do it unless you have no education or technical ability. You'll be stuck in a monotonous career you hate making a lot less than you would actually building the software or products you're selling. I've seen way too many career SDRs and AEs in their 30s with no skills and dismal future career prospects. Everyone thinks they're going to be the top rep when they start, but you never quite make your OTE and end up looking for a new job every 15 months or so.
Compensation is typically a 50-50 split between base and commission. SDRs start at $50-55K in high COL areas with an ~$100K OTE; AEs are usually at a $65K base. You might get 4 figures in commission in a good quarter. What you actually make in sales is a lot less than what you're told. The bigger problem is that it's difficult to get out of the field when you eventually burn out. You learn nothing tangible as a sales rep other than how to use a CRM. In retrospect, I'd skip the grind altogether and go into a technical role. You can (and should) learn sales on your own. No need to make a career out of it.
This is an awful take.
Using concepts from the old WSP site...
Typically technical roles cannot be classified as "careers". You are hard capped at a salary, which is strictly a time for money exchange where incremental effort does not result in additional income. This is a "job." I say this with experience, since I worked O&G engineering roles for the first few years of my careers and brown-nosing for an additional 2-3% salary bumps per years is no way to get "wealthy" at a young age.
The significance of a sales role is the ability to command your income through "events." Old WSP mentioned that only roles that have "events" of this sort can be considered careers. In old writings they suggested B2B SaaS sales, M&A, and technical roles that result in equity in the company (because of the possibility of a sale of the company) as examples of this.
I make more money now in technical sales, leveraging my engineering experience, than I could have in a strictly technical role in O&G, and with much less stress/time invested, so your experiences may be unique.
The correct "take" is that you should find a role that allows you to play to your strengths while also maximizing your earning potential, minimizing your stress, and minimizing your time investment (because you need to invest time in starting other forms of income or else no matter how much you work you're NGMI).
Be prepared to bust ass no matter what. Don't shy away from hard work.
To add to this... If you're unwilling or incapable of starting and growing your own business, then GIGA is correct, you might have better long term prospects working in a technical role where you will be chained to your desk for life.
However, if you foresee yourself starting a business and freeing yourself from the rat race... then "career prospects" are entirely meaningless, because you will have broken free after 7-10 years of churn.
Good luck, see y'all on the island.
Running a business does not imply you are out of the rat race. Depends how you play your cards. Freedom is being completely out of the game.
This shit right here, no one talks about.
Thanks GIGA
I have two questions if you don't mind me asking:
1) What was your performance like in your sales roles?
2) How did you go from pure sales --> technical role?
It's true that a lot of your success in tech sales is based on your territory / account list and timing. If you have good accounts, you can perform extremely well without being exceptionally good at sales. If you have shitty accounts, then it will be much tougher to break in and ultimately close deals, no matter how good you are.
The timing component is huge too. You can hammer an account endlessly to no avail, and then all of a sudden something breaks on their end and a buying window opens. You just have to stay top of mind until that happens. Persistence + messaging + timing. Creating demand and fabricating pain is a lot harder than people think, especially when selling to a "know it all" technical audience.
Even if there is some pain, if they can live with it, they will often choose that route versus engaging in a lengthy sales cycle, going through legal / security reviews and having to learn a whole new solution while also performing their core job functions.
That being said, sales does offer you the opportunity to make six figures out of school and multiple six figures (seven in rare cases) down the road once you make it to enterprise or upper leadership, and without working 80 hours per week or having to go through extensive schooling.
I think a great move would be to learn sales and also improve your technical acumen, as you then have both the social / sales skills and the technical knowledge needed to transition into sales engineering. Either that, or you can go into a technical role if that's where your interests lie, although I will say a pure engineering role seems incredibly boring (correct me if I'm wrong) and the people you work with are typically very weird from what I've heard.
You're spot on with your questions... lots of variables and it's not as one dimensional as GIGA puts it.
Again, old WSP philosophy was to determine your strenghts and play to them. If you're socially inept (an actual autist), no sense in being in a role that heavily requires social skills.
100%. That advice holds true for everything. I know people who struggled as SDRs and barely cracked $60k and I also know enterprise account executives in their late 20s / early 30s who earn $500k per year and drive around in AMGs. So many factors to consider - product / market fit, company culture, territory, market segment, outbound to inbound ratio, company growth stage, training, support from other members of the org (SDR team, sales engineering, legal, etc.), as well as where your natural talents lie. Things are rarely that simple.
Either way, as you put it, the end goal is to own a business so you can have both the money and the freedom to actually enjoy it.
This is rock solid.
I went the coder->technical sales route. Spent 10+ years as a developer and stumbled into sales engineering because I wanted to get more face time with people. Best accident I ever had.
Don’t be like me, make a plan and hit it without all the mucking about in stagnant coding positions (minimal upside earnings).
Whatever you do don't go into mutual fund/annuity wholesaling. Made that mistake out of college and it set me back ~3y. Software sales is the way.
thank you! The type of sales I am in right now is more so consultative selling various RE services, its kinda cool but I do want something different I think.
a
Thanks this post is a goldmine.
What's your assessment of being an AE (field sales, yet now mostly remote work with online meetings) in a firm like FedEx/UPS?
don’t know comp at these firms. Take a look at glassdoor for that and ask ppl in linkedin. personally believe these will be displaced soon by Amazon/DoorDash. if not sure, focus efforts in tech space.
thanks man for giving some direction.
What is the best way to get ahold of the referenced E-book?
Send me an email about it at bowtiedcocoon@gmail.com and will send it to you.
Anything you would change or add for a 40 year old retiring from the military?
Try looking for big F500 corps with a "sales academy". No personal experience with it but have seen a few out there. Also look at Okta, saw a post a while back about them starting to hire SDRs from nontraditional sales backgrounds, which you would fit the bill for.
Thanks brah, I’ll check it out!
Look at Tech Qualled, a sales training program for vets. Also Shift has multiple programs to help explore and connect with tech-related careers, and recently started a Biz Dev apprenticeship program.
Reach out to vets on Linkedin that have already made it to your target career, most will be happy to help out a fellow vet once you indicate you are putting in the work
You are a moon among men, thank you
This has been a fantastic read. But does anyone have any advice for someone who's been out of the workforce for a couple of years over the pandemic? Would be much appreciated.
I've been in Corp FP&A at SaaS companies for the past 4 years. It's stable but low leverage with a really boring career trajectory unless you jump on to a rocketship at the right time. Been thinking about pivoting into Sales for a while now. Seems like the main (only) route is to get an SDR role and then move your way up. Does that check out? Should I just be scoping SDR gigs on LinkedIn and putting my name out there?
Pure Sales role just seems to intimidating. Yes Sales is needed in everything. But a pure sales role of just cold calling and talking all the time, just sounds like hell. A Tech role in process design or customer experience or something in between (synthesizer) seems much more rewarding.
My default is introverted, the guys who absolutely smash these SDR type roles that I have met are more often you're typical extroverted types.
You can strike a balance for sure… look into solutions consulting/technical sales roles where you still leverage technical expertise to make a sale.
You’re not wrong that a large portion of reps are very extroverted, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find a good role that still allows you to make a commission as a part of the sales cycle.
I think I am following this path but did so unconsciously.
I am in sales at a startup with a base of 40 and uncapped commissions OTE this year will be somewhere around 60-70.
What would you consider "major progression" in the business? here are some things happening in the company:
- Prop Tech industry is growing very quickly
-headcount doubled since COVID
- Revenue is up and to the right
-recent salary increase
- office was planning on reopening but because of varient no plan in site to open
Lately I have bene thinking about going and doing a bootcamp for UI/UX design because it is more aligned with what it is I want i guess. I am a high performer for the the org I am with and have equity being vested.
Don't know enough about the space so probably best to ask one of the sales guys. If you're at a growing company it's a lot easier to move up and make more, also a lot easier to start a side business as you can grow revenues without killing yourself
thank you! I sent my resume to the email attached to this. Hoping to hear from him on this. Another great post, thank you BTB!