aynulhabib

I wipe the inbox for my test gmail account every hour at the :45 minute mark using a ruby script. I don't automate the sending because it's part of the education of the prospect.

Comment · 10 years ago

Luckily, SaaS sales compensation has been largely figured out and documented. I implore you to NOT benchmark numbers to inc.com guides or sales jobs in general.

If you do, you will likely frame your salary targets poorly against the wrong baselines and your reps will figure this out and quickly get jobs at other SaaS companies.

"Sales Rep" is a bit ambiguous to SaaS orgs which are usually made up of "Sales Development Reps" (entry level, openers, demo-bookers) and "Account Executives" (demo-performers, closers, opportunity managers).

I would search for the title "Account Executive" in your region on Glassdoor for hints on base salaries and total compensation.

Angellist is also a great place to get a sense for how similar start-ups are positioning themselves in job listings. (maybe look up your competitors)

Sales salaries are typically presented in OTE (On Target Earnings) or essentially, Base Salary + Commission for the year. OTE is usually around 20% of annual quotas. SMB annual quotas are usually in the range 300k - 500k quotas = so $60k-$100k OTE packages.

Best Practices: Cost of living should guide a guaranteed base salary. Don't be stingy on the commission, read the Jason Lemkin article at the bottom to get a sense for what those %'s should be.

Hyperbolizing a bit, but you generally get what you pay for, no SaaS company ever went under because it paid too much commission, assuming it did so with cash-flow in mind and had minimal churn. Also, uncapped commission is the norm in SaaS, don't brag about it, it's like bragging about having bathrooms.

Commission should also be a clear % of every incremental sale or super easy mental math, so that the rep can visualize for every X in sales they get Y without having to pull out an excel model. (although the best ones will anyway)

Try to avoid complicated accelerators, multi-tiered goal structures, decelerators and building a too Darwinian firing culture, those places can be toxic. 1 accelerator is okay.

DO - build a model where most hires can hit quota and that you can really kill it if you go above and beyond. A culture of winning.

DONT - make quota the pie in the sky, penultimate, out of reach thing. It sounds obvious but it's not, set people up for success and you will find it.

You should read everything by Jason Lemkin and Tom Tunguz on this topic, especially these two posts:

https://www.saastr.com/a-framework-and-some-ideas-for-your-f...

And really, really think about this: http://tomtunguz.com/smallest-acv-to-justify-inside-sales-te...