5 Reasons To Choose A Career In Tech Sales
New tech products are coming out every day: Cybersecurity, 5G, The Internet of Things, Big Data, The Cloud, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Machine Learning, and the list goes on.
And for every new tech company that hopes to bring their product to market, they will need salespeople to sell it (just as much as they need engineers to build it).
The current tech boom hasn’t just created a surge in demand for software developers and engineers; it’s also created a surge in demand for salespeople.
Here’s why you should consider a career in tech sales:
1. Growing industry with a candidate-driven labor market
The labor market is controlled by supply-demand economics, just like any other market. Supply comes from employees (wage-earners) and demand comes from employers (wage-payers).
What we mean by a “candidate-driven” labor market, is one where the demand from companies is relatively greater than the supply of workers, causing wages and perks to increase.
This is the case for the tech sales labor market (especially in San Francisco).
In their 2020 Salary Guide, Michael Page reports:
“The employment market for San Francisco technology sales can be characterized as a candidate-driven market … there has been a shortage of qualified, readily available candidates … driving these companies to pay increased wages …”
The tech sales labor market is also growing on the national level.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects that employment for occupations across the whole tech sector will “grow 12 percent from 2018 to 2028, much faster than the average for all occupations.”
And employment for tech sales specifically will grow anywhere from 6-10% (depending on the exact occupation, e.g., Computer Support Specialists, Sales Engineers) over the same time frame. Again, “faster than the average for all occupations.”
You can read more about the projected growth of the tech sales labor market here.
2. Uncapped, performance-based earning potential
You control how much you make. It’s not based on waiting your turn for a promotion or asking your boss for a raise. Your earnings are directly correlated with your work output.
And your earnings are “uncapped” in the sense that there is no limit (for most tech sales roles) on how much commission you can make.
According to the 2020 Compensation Guide from Betts Recruiting, here are the average salaries for various tech sales positions in various cities.
For this guide, Betts used salary and on-target earnings (OTE) data from over 1,300 roles filled by their firm over a 12-month period in late 2019 and early 2020.
| Position (OTE*) | San Francisco | New York | Austin | Chicago | Los Angeles | Denver |
| Junior SDR | 80-95K | 65-80K | 70-75K | 70-75K | 65-80K | 70-75K |
| Account Executive | 120-170K | 120-160K | 90-120K | 110-140K | 110-140K | 110-140K |
| Enterprise Account Executive | 220-320K | 240-320K | 220-300K | 230-280K | 230-280K | 230-280K |
| Inside Sales Management | 260-340K | 240-300K | 190-220K | 200-260K | 200-260K | 200-260K |
| VP of Sales | 360-500K | 360-500K | 280-450K | 320-450K | 320-450K | 320-450K |
The figures above are in terms of “on-target earnings” (OTE), which refers to an employee’s composite pay structure made up of a base salary and an additional variable component (in sales, this usually means commission).
This is a term you’ll want to be familiar with for the tech sales interview process. Recruiters and hiring managers will often ask, “What range are you targeting for OTE?”
If you’re just getting started in your tech sales career, Sales Development Representative (SDR) is the most common entry-level position. Business Development Representative (BDR) and Account Development Representative (ADR) are two other titles for very similar entry-level tech sales positions. These are the entry-level positions where it is easiest to break in.
In most of these roles, you’ll be handling the wide-mouthed top of the sales funnel. This means making hundreds of cold calls and sending out mass email campaigns in an effort to set meetings with a qualified prospect for a more senior account executive (AE) to then pitch and close.
At some companies, there are entry-level AE positions, but these will be for smaller deal sizes (often selling to individual or SMB clientele). This is not a bad place to start your tech sales career, as you would be able to gain closing experience right out of the gate. The compensation will be roughly the same as the SDR compensation above.
For your future career pathing, the compensation ranges for senior and leadership roles are also included in the table above.
3. Faster-than-average career growth
In their 2020 Compensation Guide, Betts Recruiting reports:
“ … we’re seeing a continuation of the trend of promoting and hiring into senior roles with less and less experience.”
This trend is not an accident or a blip in the data.
There are two main reasons your career will grow faster in tech sales: (1) because you’re in tech, and (2) because you’re in sales.
In the technology space, companies grow fast. And this means their people have to grow fast too. Especially at earlier-stage companies and startups, headcount can double, even triple, in less than a year.
In order for this to happen, the company has two options: promote from within or hire from outside.
Promoting from within seems to be the more popular choice among companies because, as Michael Page (another recruiting firm) points out in their 2020 Salary Guide:
“ … increased salaries of valuable talent is dwarfed by the overall cost of finding and training new employees.”
Also because, if you were an early employee at a tech company that has experienced rapid growth, you likely possess extremely valuable organizational knowledge.
That knowledge is an expensive asset for a company to part ways with.
Now, the second reason you’ll experience fast-track career growth in tech sales is because of the sales side of things.
As a salesperson, your destiny is in your own hands. If you perform (i.e., beat quota), then you’ll be promoted.
Your promotion doesn’t depend on someone above you retiring or getting fired. It also doesn’t depend on company politics or rubbing shoulders.
Because in a sales organization, there’s no question about who the top-performers are.
It’s like in a sports game—when the time runs out, everyone looks at the scoreboard, and there’s a winner and a loser. The winner gets promoted.
So I should clarify what I’ve been saying. Career growth in tech sales isn’t automatic. You won’t get promoted just by waiting your turn. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Most will fail.
At my first tech sales role, less than 10% of my training class was still at the company after the first year. Not because they were fired. Most of them quit.
They didn’t see success in the first few months and they gave up (we’ll talk more in the next section about why tech sales is like running: easy to start, but hard to keep going).
But those of use who remained had been promoted, were on track to be promoted, or at the very least, were making a lot more money from commission.
So, to clarify the heading of this section: You will experience “faster-than-average career growth” in tech sales, if you perform.
4. No prior experience required for entry-level positions
While other careers with similar benefits require a stack of degrees and a half-decade (or more) of expensive schooling (e.g., law, banking, medicine), many entry-level tech sales positions require no prior experience. Some of the most successful tech salespeople I know never finished their undergrad.
Now, that’s not to say that a degree from Harvard or a track-record of sales performance wouldn’t help. But they’re not required.
As long as you can ace the interview process (read more here) then you can at least get in. And as long as you can perform once you’re in (read more here) then you can grow your career.
My old boss used to say that being in sales is like riding the New York subway.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a Wall Street executive wearing a suit, a freshman heading to class at NYU, or just going to get groceries.
Everybody’s in the same boat when they’re on the subway together. If there’s a delay, everyone is equally inconvenienced. If it’s hot (like it is in New York in the summer), everyone is sweating.
At the same time, that also means everyone can get where they want to go.
It’s all about performance. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you did before. If you can beat your number, then you’re a great salesperson.
All in all, getting into tech sales is a great opportunity for the same reasons that a tech startup is a great opportunity: low barriers to entry and huge potential upside.
But there is risk involved, and it’s not easy (just like a tech startup).
Companies are happy to hire entry-level salespeople with lower base salaries and compensation more heavily weighted to variable terms like commission and bonuses.
This makes it a win-win for the company. But it’s still a win-lose for the salesperson.
If you don’t hit your commission targets, you lose.
If you don’t hit your promotions, you lose.
But if you win, you’re getting all the benefits mentioned above: uncapped earning potential, fast-track career growth, and a seat on the rocket ship.
5. Early access to startup equity
Salespeople are among the first employees hired at early-stage startups.
And it pays to be early.
The largest chunks of equity at a startup go to the employees who were there first (when the risk was greatest).
This is consistent with what Michael Page reports in their 2020 Salary Guides:
“We’ve also noted the increasing availability of equity features in compensatory packages for Product, Marketing, and Sales professionals. We speculate that this increase is designed to be a tool to inspire longer tenures, as most Silicon Valley professionals seem to transfer between companies frequently — sometimes in less than two years of tenure.”
This is a great opportunity to gain access to an investment that is usually only available to venture capital firms and very wealthy individuals (a.k.a, “angels”).
How much equity? Read more from Paul Graham, Fred Wilson, and Holloway.
Conclusion
So there you have it, the top five reasons to choose a career in tech sales:
- Growing labor market
- Uncapped earning potential
- Fast-track career growth
- No prior experience required
- Early access to startup equity