Tech Sales Career Options (with earnings)

Tech sales and the earnings with it can be life changing. But nobody really provides that roadmap to you when you first start out of all of the different options that come once you start as a sales development representative for a company. So I'm going to break that down today. Typically entry levels, you join a tech company as a sales development or business development representative. The acronym for this is SDR or bdr. It typically means the exact same thing. It's in terms of what you're actually doing. In short, you're calling prospects, you're emailing them, you might be LinkedIn messaging as well. And your goal is to set meetings or set appointments that could turn into potential opportunities where they're interested in buying your solution or buying your software. If you're really successful as a sales development representative, SDR, Typically in the course of nine to 18 months, you, you'll have the opportunity to get promoted into what's called an account executive. So SDRs, sales development reps and AES, account executives, they work hand in hand together on these different accounts to help close the deal. So I think of SDRs as the folks that are helping set the actual meetings and then the account executives are the ones that are talking to the prospect on a zoom. They're walking them through the solution. They're helping frame further understand all their pain points and their challenges. As an entry level SDR, typically your on track earnings or OTE is around 70,000, which means if you hit around 100% of your goal, meaning your quota, that's the amount you'll earn. If you exceed that, you can make well in excess of 70,000. And if you perform below that, you'll also earn below that 70,000. So there's a little bit of wiggle room in there, but it's also very good for people that are highly motivated by having those different objectives where it's really in your control how much you're able to earn from an entry level account executive. Once you get that promotion, you could earn anywhere from 100,000 to 150,000 for your on track earnings, which is completely life changing, right? So if you are successful as an SDR and get promoted after a year, within one year you could be earning six figures. Plus if you, if you're able to hit around 100% of goal, which is amazing, once you've been in that closing role for at least a year as an account executive, your options, they really open up. You could continue working your way up the promotion path of account executive or maybe you start with more Small businesses, then you work with larger ones in mid market, then someday enterprise. Or you could pivot into something like customer success, where you're speaking with customers on an ongoing basis, learning about how they're leveraging the tools, sharing best practices, doing more training. It's a little bit of a safer option, gets you away from closing deals quite as much and ensures more that they're happy and that they're retained and that they're getting the utmost value from your solution. Account management is another option as well, where it's similar to customer success in a lot of ways, where they're active customers but maybe there's additional products or additional services. You could also offer them for them to see increased value with your solution. Right? Assuming that your company has more than one product that they might sell, there's other options as well. You can head into sales enablement, where you actually go into more of a training type role for account executives or sales development reps. In that case, you get to listen back to calls, you get to roll out new training programs, run role plays, help onboard new reps, and get them fully up to speed. There's also a more technical role from an operations standpoint, typically referred to as revenue or sales operations. We were doing more of the behind the scenes work, making sure the quoting process for proposals looks good, helping identify where there's gaps in the sales process, running different data behind the scenes and identifying how the team can get more efficient and more productive. The last option as well is you could work your way into management, of course in any of these positions. But if you're a really successful account executive and you're earning a 150k plus, maybe you go into mid market, then next you're working even bigger accounts. You could go into a sales manager position where then you're managing a group of account executives. You might have four or five or six account executives under you and then they're working with yourself as a manager to be that expertise, to plug them into calls, to help them with strategy, to do a lot of that coaching and enablement as well. Tech sales is truly life changing. There's a lot of different roles and responsibilities as well. Well, that aren't included in this path I shared, but hopefully this is helpful for anyone out there that's considering a profession in the space.