003: 8 Things to Know When Considering a Tech Sales Career
[SS Podcast] Ep. 003 - 8 Things to Know When Considering a Tech Sales Career
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[00:00:00] Intro
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Mike Bird: Hey there. Welcome to episode three of Sales Seekers. We're getting serious now. I'm Mike Bird. And in today's episode, I wanted to share eight different things that I think folks should know if they're considering a career in tech sales.
There's a lot of advice out there. There's a lot of great stories, success stories that get published online. And I wanted to share thoughts based on my own experiences and the people that I know and what they've experienced when it comes to their careers in tech sales. And this isn't going to be an exhaustive list. And it's in no particular order, I'll say either.
But, the idea here is to give you some food for thought, if you're thinking about either moving into tech sales for the first time- B2B tech sales- or maybe you're considering a transition from one role to another, and maybe you're not sure if you want to continue to stay in tech sales. These are going to be perspectives that might be useful to you.
These won't be super specific necessarily to, to various roles like an SDR, AE, account manager- type positions. We can cover those at another time.
And I'm also not trying to sort of bucket these ideas into good or bad. It's up to you to decide how you want to interpret some of these ideas.
Last thing I'll say is feel free to reach out to me with any questions that some of these ideas might spark for you. Mike@salesseekers.ca, sales with an "s" seekers dot CA. I'd love to see what conversations come out of this and if I can help expand on anything that's discussed in this episode.
So without further ado here, let's get into this number one of the eight things to consider if you're jumping into a career in tech sales.
[00:01:52] 1. Tech sales has very high earning potential
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Mike Bird: Number one. Tech sales has very high earning potential. For a role that doesn't require something like medical school, something like becoming a lawyer. Spending your career as an engineer. There's definitely a huge learning curve to sales, but, what can happen for people who master it is the payout can be enormous.
An enterprise account executive working in a tier one market in the United States can expect to have on-target earnings somewhere in the ballpark of $300,000 US. I've seen Enterprise AE job postings in Canada, in places like Toronto, where the OTE was capped out at over $400,000. And so for people who do get onto a really successful track in tech sales, there can be massive payouts. Oftentimes the on-target earnings, even for an SDR role could be higher than average starting salary of a lot of roles in a lot of other fields.
So just getting into tech, getting your foot in the door in tech can often be a massive upgrade in terms of your earnings. In really, really successful tech companies, the best reps, some of them. It's a rarity. These are the best of the best. They're usually in some of the best situations for being a tech salesperson. The best reps can actually earn over a million dollars. If they hit large, large seven figure deals and hit a commission, that's relative to that.
[00:03:23] 2. There are different ways of succeeding in sales
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Mike Bird: Number two, there are different ways of succeeding in sales. For some, a path to success might come from being in an early stage company that engages their creativity and their scrappiness and entrepreneurial spirit. And they help to build that company. They build their own careers. Maybe they have a successful exit and they ended up with a significant payout from that. Sometimes success for folks in sales looks like joining a large enterprise that has a more formal sales process and culture, and that may be a more stable fit, a better fit for their lives, and it can be a pathway to great earning potential as well. But ultimately it's a very different reality than selling in a small, early stage environment.
And then in terms of mechanics too, sometimes reps will be really great cold callers and really active on the phone in terms of developing leads. Others may write their way to success using great email and social copywriting. Some may record videos or create content like this podcast that allows them to grow the awareness that the market has for them and their offerings. Some people get out into the field. Some people love to network, go to events, attend conferences and that's how they build the pipeline that ultimately leads to closed-won deals.
So lots of different ways of getting it done.
[00:04:47] 3. Success in sales isn't guaranteed
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Mike Bird: Number three success in sales isn't guaranteed. I mean, this one might be a no brainer. But, what people often don't talk about in sales roles is what you're selling and who you are selling to matters. Some markets are extremely difficult and bureaucratic to sell into. I think of government markets. I think of higher education. I think of really, really big sort of older, more conservative, sectors sometimes like financial services.
And, whether your product has great fit or not, that's going to have a significant impact on how easy it is to actually get a deal across the line. If you're working for a company that's earlier stage, less mature, doesn't have the same level of product market fit as a big brand name competitor. It's going to be something that impacts potentially your success rate and knowing whether or not you're actually out there solving a real pain or are just sort of this nice to have product for folks is one way to get a sense as to whether or not you're on the right track or could be on the right track to have a more successful career versus one that's less successful in the environment that you're in, maybe all you have to do is switch from one company to another that has stronger product market fit or a stronger brand. More traction. That can make a huge difference in terms of your overall success.
[00:06:20] 4. The flexibility of sales can be liberating
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Mike Bird: Number four, the flexibility of sales can be liberating. One thing that I have experienced for sure is that outside of my internal meetings, I largely have control of my own schedule. And when I work, and generally speaking, I do work sort of regular business hours. But I have a lot of flexibility, I can step away during the day if I have to do something.
And that might make me a better partner allowing me to support, in my case, my wife would things that she has going on or be able to look after our dog. If I was someone who had to care for a parent, that flexibility would be really, really important. If you're a caregiver. Especially, although they're getting harder to find remote sales roles are incredible when it comes to offering a ton of freedom.
And that doesn't mean that you're not working. I'm not trying to make it sound like there's, there's no work to be done. But there's flexibility in this career that doesn't exist in a lot of other fields. And if that's something that you may benefit from, or even need based off of what you have going on in your life, around your nine to five. Then that's something to consider as well.
The flexibility that you gain is something that you can always adapt and adjust as you go through different phases of life. Oftentimes there will be different and new demands on your time based off of things that are going on that may or may not be within your control. But all of these kinds of things can be supported more easily thanks to the flexibility that comes from a sales role.
[00:07:55] 5. The pressure of sales is real
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Mike Bird: Number five. The pressure of sales is real. I got to say carrying a quota can be emotionally pretty challenging. And some organizations are very, very harsh on sales reps who miss quota, which is usually not a super productive response. I would say a lot of the time from the folks that I've seen, who work in organizations, where there is a really strong amount of pressure on quota attainment.
I'm in a situation where it's not that I have no pressure on quota attainment, but it's much looser. And that's also a function of being in an earlier stage company. But the pressure in that situation is also a little different where with a very tiny salesforce, each seller is literally keeping the organization alive, keeping the lights on. The need to hit revenue milestones or targets that may be required in order to raise capital or just to get to profitability if you're a bootstraped company. These are real emotional burdens that can land on a sales rep and sometimes organizations have to part ways with their underperforming reps because oftentimes an AE, for example, is a fairly expensive resource. And, even solid sellers can sometimes be laid off in cases where the organization isn't meeting revenue targets.
So, it is real for people who think that there's a lot of pressure to being in sales, I've certainly felt it and learning to manage that pressure is certainly key to being able to stay in it. Stay in this role for a long period of time.
[00:09:31] 6. Strong mental health can be difficult to maintain
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Mike Bird: Number six. Strong mental health can be difficult to maintain. And I don't say this to scare people away. But I think it is something that people need to be honest with themselves about. A sales career, at least for me, has taught me a lot about my own psychology and whether or not I get attached to externalities like hitting quota. Sometimes it can be easy to measure yourself and your self-worth based off of how close to, or far away from your number, you are. As opposed to focusing on the effort that it took you or that you may be putting in regularly or the skills that you may be building in order to become the kind of rep who does actually get to quota.
Because managing a complex B2B sale or a complex client can take a lot of work. And since a lot of AEs and account managers usually have a lot of different accounts to work on at any given time work can become very consuming.
There can be a lot of context switching, which can be mentally draining in the long run can sometimes create burnout. These are things to definitely keep in mind. Learning to take regular breaks. And that's both within a day, and one day I'll talk about energy management and sort of how I think about energy management to manage my day, but also when it comes to having larger stretches of time scheduled into your year so that you're not always working and you're not always grinding along.
We've probably all heard the idea that there are these three key pillars of a healthy life, one being diet, two being exercise, three being sleep. And all of these things are super important to stay on top of, along with other self-care activities that you might uniquely find helpful to you. So maybe you love reading a book. Maybe you love going to a spa, hiking, getting out in nature. Playing sports. Seeing friends. Things like that.
The last thing I'll add to this is having a therapist can be a major advantage as a seller. I don't always see my own therapist, but when I do, I always come away a little bit healthier mentally and emotionally. Sales is pretty taxing on those two parts of who we are and it's important to always be strengthening yourself here. Just as you might go to a gym to strengthen yourself physically to strengthen your muscles, you need to also be able to strengthen your brain. And therapy for me has always been that opportunity to learn more about myself, to heal, and to become stronger over time.
[00:12:08] 7. You'll be bad before you're great
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Mike Bird: Number seven. You'll likely be bad before you're great. And because, the bar of entry is so low for people to get started in sales. There are a lot of people who enter the profession with limited to no prior training. In other words, a lot of people start out as beginners. And I know I wasn't far from that myself when I was formally hired into sales. Beginners typically suck. Just to be, I guess, really blunt about it and that's totally normal.
I think that's it doesn't matter what it is. When we're starting something new, we can never really expect to naturally be great. We might have some natural ability early on in our journey, but it's more normal to see people start something new and have to take time and practice and repetition to build up the skills that are required and develop competence over time.
The best things that you can do, I would say are accept it as a natural part of the process. And be ready to just invest in your development and get the bad stage over with as quickly as possible.
[00:13:14] 8. Succeeding in sales takes patience and humility
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Mike Bird: Number eight succeeding in sales takes patience and humility.
And this is sort of building off of number seven. I've got a guest that's coming up a little bit later on this year on the show who talks about the fact that it's taken her over 10 years to really get to the skill set that she has today. She's now 13 years into her sales career. So after 10 years, she finally felt like she had a pretty strong grasp of what she was doing. So it doesn't mean that she was bad at sales before that. But it's something that is a good reminder of just how long it can take to really develop things like executive presence, confidence in messaging, the ability to communicate effectively. The ability to manage a complex group of people of stakeholders to have sort of the emotional intelligence component figured out so that you feel like you can really reach all of the different people that are required to be engaged in a complex B2B deal or to work with a complex B2B client.
So, a gentle reminder that for even the best of us, it usually takes a lot of time to get to that point and it can be humbling. And I think we could probably all use that sometimes. If we think that we are a little too good for what we're doing, sales always has a way of reminding us that we have ways to go.
[00:14:43] Summary
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Mike Bird: So that's it. I'm going to pause there. This was a quick hitter, eight things to know when considering a tech sales career. If you're planning on getting into the field, or if you're planning on going from one role to another.
Things to keep in mind again, just top to bottom. Number one, tech sales has very high earning potential. Number two, there are different ways of succeeding in sales. Number three success in sales isn't guaranteed. Number four. Flexibility of a sales career can be extremely liberating and helpful and beneficial. Number five, the pressure of sales is real. It's not a myth. Number six strong mental health can be difficult to maintain, but it can be maintained and there's lots of ways to do it. Number seven. You'll likely be bad before you're great. And that's just normal. Number eight. Succeeding in sales takes patience and humility.
Sales has taught me those two things, patience and humility, probably more than anything else has in my life. Curious as to what sales has taught you, if you're already in a career or if you're considering a career in sales, which of these eight jumped out to you? I'd love to know. He hit me up, again, the email address, mike@salesseekers.ca. You can also go to my website if you want to communicate and get my biweekly email: salesseekers.ca/tips. That's a good way to start a conversation with me as I'll show up in your inbox every two weeks. Okay, enjoy the rest of your next two weeks.
I will see you in a couple. Bye for now.
