Bridge Group Benchmark Survey
Bridge Group Benchmark Survey
Bridge Group Benchmark Survey
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Introduction
Hello! And welcome to our sixth round of research focused on inside sales and SaaS companies.
Since 2007, we’ve been tracking the account executive (AE) role with a focus on how metrics and
compensation change over time. For this report, we used 384 B2B SaaS companies with closing AE teams
participating. We’ve organized the report into five sections:
1. Group Structure
2. Ramp and Retention
3. Quota and Compensation
4. Activity and Technologies
5. Leadership
We hope this report will provide guidance as you build out your strategy and think about what changes could
possibly bring you closer to alignment with industry standards.
If you have any questions, please reach out to us directly. We want to hear from you. Email us at:
[email protected].
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The Bridge Group is a B2B inside sales consulting firm
dedicated to understanding the models, metrics,
and motions that deliver scalable growth.
bridgegroupinc.com
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THE COMPANIES THAT
PARTICIPATED
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Study Participants
• 384 executives from a broad diversity of SaaS companies
• 89% with headquarters in North America
• $27M median revenues
• $25K median annual contract value (ACV)
• 60 day median average sales cycle
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PART 1
GROUP STRUCTURE
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Designing AE Territories
An overwhelming
majority of
companies use a
single factor.
We all know creating equitable territories is as simple as working a Rubik's cube. In this round of research, we
identified more than 16 different schemas for structuring territories. That being said, an overwhelming majority of
companies do use a single factor when building territories.
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Geographic Territories, a perennial favorite, remains the leading approach. This tried-and-true methodology
makes lead distribution and routing easy. There’s a belief that geographic territories are entirely a hold-over from
a bygone era. That’s not entirely true. Time zone alignment and local sub-verticals (e.g., startups in San
Francisco, Higher Ed in New England, Oil & Gas in gulf coast, etc.) are two pluses to geographic territories.
Unfortunately, a big drawback involves the difficulty drawing equitable lines on the map. Prospect accounts
stubbornly refuse to line up neatly and proportionally within geographic boundaries.
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At roughly $25-50M in revenues, territory design increases in complexity. As you can see from the chart above,
the percent of respondents using No Territories and Round-robin falls by half while usage of Vertical Territories
and Named Accounts more than double. The approach we’ve seen deployed most successfully is keep things
simple, until you can’t.
The no territories approach that served you well up to $10M ARR, might hinder your growth to $100M.
% using No Territories
and/or Round-robin
< $5M 61%
$5-20M 52%
$20-50M 31%
$50-100M 22%
$100-250M 19%
$250M+ 10%
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Marketing contribution
36% of an AE group’s
pipeline is sourced by
Marketing.
This includes inbound SDR support, but excludes outbound sales development efforts (discussed later).
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As revenues rise, the
% of marketing-
sourced pipeline falls.
Not surprisingly, as revenues rise, the percentage of marketing-sourced pipeline falls. But not by as much as
one might expect. At $28M ARR, marketing is sourcing roughly $10M in pipeline. Compare that to a $100M ARR
company, where marketing is sourcing three times as much pipeline (~$30M), although a lower total percentage.
As companies scale, outbound, expansion, channel, former customer, and AE self-generated opportunities
increase as sources of pipeline.
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Controlling for company revenues, the percentage of pipeline sourced by marketing decreases as ACV rises.
These percentages have remained remarkably consistent for the past eight years. We are interested in watching
this finding going forward.
Account-Based marketing is squarely focused on driving high-ACV pipeline from strategic accounts.
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Traditional demand generation strategies are highly-effective at medium-to-low ACV, but decline in effectiveness
as ACV, and account stature, rises.
ABM was born, in part, as a way to more effectively engage with larger organizations and their sprawling buying
groups. We’ve shared our take on Account-Based Strategies in two posts:
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Sales Development Support
66% of AE groups
are supported by
SDR teams.
66% of AE groups are supported by sales development teams. We observed no variation by company revenues;
companies under $5M were as likely to use the SDR role as those over $100M.
Based on a separate research project, we calculated the return – in additional revenue – from the average
unsupported AE versus an SDR-supported one.
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All things being equal, we found that:
• An above average SDR team will have a positive return if ACV is higher than $4K
• An average SDR team will have a positive return if ACV is higher than $8K
• A below average SDR team will have a positive return if ACV is higher than $11K
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AEs receive an
average of 9.8 SDR-
sourced meetings per
month.
Those AEs supported by a sales development team receive an average of 9.8 meetings per month. As you
might expect, there was wide variation in this number with the median response being 8 meetings monthly.
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ACV impacts average
# of SDR-set meeting
significantly.
The number of meetings received per AE falls from double to single digits at roughly $15K ACV.
There are likely two drivers here: supply and demand. On the supply side, higher ACV companies are, in theory,
selling upmarket to more senior buyers. There are just fewer of those companies to target and pass. From the
demand side, higher ACV deals have longer and more complex sales cycles. These AEs generally require a
lower volume of SDR-sourced meetings to maintain a “healthy” pipeline.
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Outbound Sales Development
To recap, 66% of companies have sales development teams. Across all respondents, outbound sales
development generates roughly one-quarter of total AE pipeline.
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Controlling for company revenues, the percentage of SDR-sourced pipeline increases as ACV rises. That isn’t all
that surprising. The reality is that outbound prospecting is expensive. And for companies with lower ACVs, the
CAC:LTV math can be difficult to balance with an outbound sales development channel.
We examined companies with ACVs above $25K and divided them into two groups: those sourcing more than
half of pipeline from outbound sales development and those sourcing less. We found that AEs in the “more than
half” group have 19% higher quotas on average. That was one of the most significant factors that we were able
to isolate.
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Segmenting AEs and CSMs
YES NO
Smaller Companies
36% 64%
(Revenue below $5M)
Larger Companies
58% 42%
(Revenue above $5M)
51% of respondents reported separating new business reps (AEs) from renewal/expansion reps (CSMs).
All but the smallest companies use role specialization in this scenario. 58% of companies above $5M in
revenues specialize roles, compared to 36% of companies below $5M. These figures are in line with previous
years’ findings.
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In general, companies with month-to-month or semi-annual contract terms are less likely to specialize these
roles. Companies are more likely to specialize as ACV rises.
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On average, accounts are transferred 3.6 months after the initial close. The overwhelming majority, 81% of
respondents, transfer new accounts from AEs to CSMs in fewer than three quarters.
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Companies who transfer
accounts immediately
have 15% higher AE
quotas, on average.
As ACV rises, a higher percentage of respondents transfer accounts immediately. Higher ACVs require a longer
sales cycle with a larger buying unit. Moving the account to customer success immediately applies the right
resources to the right job: getting the customer up, running, successful, and (hopefully) increasing annual spend.
It also frees AEs to focus exclusively on new business acquisition.
Controlling for ACV, we found that respondents who transfer accounts immediately have 15% higher AE quotas,
on average.
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SDRs + AEs + CSMs
Only 4 out of 10
companies segment
into three distinct
roles for the customer
journey.
34% of companies support the customer lifecycle with three distinct sales roles—SDRs, AEs, and CSMs. When
we remove companies under $5M in revenues, that number rises to 40%. Beyond $20M in revenue, it is
surprising how little variation there is in deploying this approach.
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Average contract value, as you might expect, has a pronounced impact on the likelihood of three-role
specialization. Even when already controlling for company revenues, this approach grows more likely to be
deployed as ACV rises.
It is worth noting that the majority of companies have not adopted this approach. Judging exclusively by what’s
offered in blog posts and shared from conference stages, one might infer that this strategy is nearly universal.
Our data does not bear this out.
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Reps in multiple locations
Smart companies are
thinking about
remote offices as an
opportunity and not
a burden.
49% of groups have reps in the same role working in different locations.
The drivers are as you might expect. Offices are added via acquisitions. And increasingly, there is difficulty in
recruiting and retaining talent at headquarters (two examples being San Francisco-based Slack opening their
Toronto, Ontario office and NYC-based DigitalOcean with its Cambridge, MA office).
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IF THEN
California NY NC SC
Colorado CA MI TX
Massachusetts AZ CA NC
New York CA UT OR
Unlike previous years’ findings, companies investing in secondary sales locations are not finding much cost
savings. In fact, on-target earnings at secondary locations were nominally higher than those at primary
locations. Clearly, this is more often an access to talent play than a cost-cutting maneuver.
We’ve included the most common secondary office locations by primary office in the IF THEN table above.
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PART 2
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AE Experience
Average experience prior to hire is 2.6 years. This has remained remarkably consistent since our first SaaS
research project in 2009.
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40% more companies now require <2 years or 5+ years’ experience than did in 2012.
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Not surprisingly, as ACV rises, companies require more sales experience from candidates. Respondents with
$100K+ ACVs require nearly 70% more experience than those with ACVs below $5K (3.1 years and 1.8 years
respectively).
An open question is which way does causality run? It stands to reason that every company would like to hire
grizzled, seasoned AEs. But experience like that comes at a price – as you’ll see in Part 4. Perhaps, it isn’t just
that higher ACV companies are the only ones seeking more experience reps. But that lower ACV companies are
requiring less experience because they can’t compete with compensation expectations for more senior reps.
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AE Time to Ramp
Sales enablement has
finally taken a seat at the
table. Companies are
investing in this role and
focusing on more
effective onboarding.
Average ramp sits at 4.5 months. This is a ~20% improvement over 2015’s finding of 5.3 months.
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The long-term trend continues to show a steady rise in the percentage of companies with 5+ months of average
ramp. While the average is improving, it isn’t evenly distributed.
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As ACV rises, so does average ramp time. Respondents with average contract values greater than $100K
experience 50% longer ramp than those with ACVs below $5K (5.6 months and 3.7 months respectively). That’s
about as surprising as finding water to be wet.
Even when we isolated just those companies that are hiring the most experienced reps, we still found that higher
ACV correlates with longer ramp time. Said another way, while prior sales experience does shorten ramp time to
some degree, it is outweighed by the increased complexity of high ACV solutions.
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AE Tenure
Smart sales managers
plan for attrition.
Virtually unchanged since 2010, average rep tenure sits at 2.4 years. This has been remarkably consistent over
the life of this research project.
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We found that average tenure rises alongside ACV. In theory, these two metrics should be unrelated. But the
finding persisted when we controlled for company revenues, on-target earnings, and other factors.
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Are you surprised that
companies hiring less
experienced reps report
shorter average tenure?
We suspect not.
The more experienced a rep is at hire, the longer the average tenure. As you’ll see in Part 4, for each additional
year of sales experience, base pay and on-target earnings increase. As you saw earlier, the more experienced a
rep, the more attractive they are to companies with higher ACVs. Given these facts, and the tight labor market, it
is surprising average tenures exceed two years.
Every sales leader wants a stable and predictable team. As you build out future plans, take average tenure into
account. Always be actively recruiting. Open territories will kill your ability to make your number.
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Productivity = Tenure - Ramp
Doing so, we found an average of 25 months at productivity. Even controlling for experience at hire, months at
full productivity rises as ACV increases. Companies with ACVs below $5K reported 15% fewer months than
those with $100K+ ACV. This is particularly impressive considering the longer ramp time (+30%) associated with
higher ACVs.
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Attrition
Total turnover fell slightly from 2015 and now averages 30%, with involuntary attrition making up slightly more
than half of that. For our purposes, we defined involuntary turnover as attrition resulting from termination and
voluntary turnover being attrition initiated by the rep (e.g., resignation). We asked respondents to exclude
promotion and/or internal transfers from these calculations.
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PART 3
COMPENSATION &
QUOTA
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CSM Compensation
CSMs
Base Salary $61K
OTE $100K
Mix 60%-40%
Base and OTE are down slightly from 2015. As a general rule, customer success reps earn lower on-target
earnings with a higher percentage of total compensation delivered as base (roughly 60:40).
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AE Compensation
AEs
Base Salary $62K
OTE $126K
Mix 50%-50%
Continuing a seven-year trend, total compensation rose to record highs in 2017. We found an average base
salary of $62K and on-target earnings of $126K. This reveals the typical 50% : 50% (base : variable) split.
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Median OTE now
exceeds $110K.
The percentage of reps with six-figure OTEs has been steadily rising. We noted for the first time, median on-
target earnings exceed $110K.
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Note to AEs:
If you want to earn
more money, sell at
a higher ACV.
As alluded to earlier, as ACV rises, so do on-target earnings. This is true even when controlling for required
experience and other factors.
So what does this tell us? It suggests that to find increased OTE, reps should seek out companies with higher
ACVs. For every jump in tier (e.g., from $5-25K to $25-100K), reps can expect earnings to increase by ~15%.
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As in previous years, SaaS AEs overwhelmingly own an individual revenue quota. Those companies using
shared quotes are much more likely to be high ACV sales. Companies assigning a shared quota reported
average ACVs nearly triple those with individual quotas ($132K and $47K respectively). That being said, 67% of
companies with ACVs above $100K assign individual quotas.
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AE Quotas
We found average annual quota to be $770K in ACV. The median response came in slightly lower at $690K.
For those respondents with individual and shared quotas, averages were $450K and $1.9M respectively. For
those respondents with a single, shared number with the Field, average quota was $3.6M.
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As ACVs rise, so
do quotas.
As ACVs rise, so do quotas. It is worth mentioning that quotas in each ACV band increased from 2015 to 2017.
The average increase being roughly 8%.
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67% of reps
achieve quota in a
given group.
On average, 67% of reps achieve quota in a given group. There has remarkable consistently around this metric
over the years. Two-thirds of reps achieving quota seems to be the natural equilibrium.
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Commissions
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COMMISSION ON RENEWALS COMMISSION ON EXPANSION
Commission isn’t paid 34% Commission isn’t paid 13%
Paid at lower rate than new logo 50% Paid at lower rate than new logo 23%
Paid at same rate as new logo 16% Paid at same rate as new logo 59%
Paid at higher rate than new logo 0% Paid at higher rate than new logo 1%
We found that commission on renewals are either non-existent (34% of respondents) or lower (50%) than the
new logo rate.
Expansion commissions, on the other hand, are much more likely to be paid at the same rate (59% of
respondents) as new logo business.
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ACCELERATORS & DECELERATORS
47% of plans use
Using neither 27% both accelerators
and decelerators.
Decelerators only 4%
Accelerators only 22%
Using both 47%
73% of respondents use accelerators and/or decelerators in their compensation plans. In case you are
unfamiliar, accelerators adjust commission rates up to incent over-achievement while decelerators push them
down for under-achievement (e.g., 80% of the base rate for achievement below 100% of plan).
As you can see above, accelerator-only plans are much more common than decelerator-only ones. Plans
utilizing both are the most common of all.
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CLIFF BREAKPOINTS
At 25% of quota 31% 47% of plans use
both accelerators
and decelerators.
At 50% of quota 38%
At 75% of quota 31%
One-fifth of companies use a cliff – a percentage of quota below which reps earn no commission. Nearly seven
out of ten of those companies set their cliffs at 50% or 75% of quota (i.e., reps don’t earn incentive
compensation until they achieve 50%+ in a given time period).
Compensation plans using cliffs have become more and more common since 2012. One factor worth calling out
is that cliffs have gotten a whole lot taller. The percentage of companies setting their cliffs at 75% of quota has
nearly doubled since 2015.
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Taking a closer look at the various compensation plans, we found four flavors: flat, gradual, sharp, and steep.
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• Flat plans are just that – flat. They pay 1X linearly across attainment. Hit 80% of quota, earn 1X the base rate.
Seventy-three percent of plans are flat.
• Gradual plans often use accelerators and sometimes decelerators. Their most prominent characteristic is
accelerating gradually. Hit 80% of quota, earn .9X the base rate. Hit 130%, earn 1.25X. Ten percent of plans are
gradual.
• Sharp plans nearly always use accelerators and decelerators. Their most prominent characteristic is
acceleration for overachievement. Hit 80% of quota, earn .6X the base rate. Hit 130%, earn 1.4X. Twelve
percent of plans are sharp.
• Steep plans always accelerators and decelerators and almost always have cliffs. Their most prominent
characteristic is significant acceleration for overachievement. Hit 80% of quota, earn .4X the base rate. Hit
130%, earn 1.8X. Five percent of plans are steep.
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PART 4
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Activity Levels
AEs average 33
dials + 33 emails
per day.
We found an average of 33 dials per day. This is consistent with last year’s findings. There is much debate over
the usefulness of this metric. It remains, however, one of the few levers that AE are able to pull. Dials are 100%
under your reps’ control - conversations, demos, and meetings are not.
Preston Clark, President of EdTech SaaS company, EverFi, wrote on LinkedIn about The Rise of the Silent
Sales Floor. It is well worth a read.
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AEs average 6.3
quality conversations
per day.
Another useful metric is the number of quality conversations. Respondents reported an average of 6.3 per day.
This is down from 2015, but we should note that we better defined our terms this year. Specifically, respondents
were asked to include “connects or responses where at least one piece of qualifying/disqualifying information is
learned.”
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AEs average 6.8
demos per week.
On average, respondents reported 6.8 demos per AE per week. The median response was 5, with two-thirds of
responses between 3 and 9 demos per week.
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As you might expect, the higher the ACV, the fewer demos per AE per week.
When we controlled for ACV, we were able to compare those groups supported by SDRs to those without SDR
support. We expected to find a large uplift for the latter, but in fact, we did not. SDR-supported AEs reported only
.8 more demos per week on average.
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Acceleration technologies
We noted no significant variation in number of tools by ACV, company revenues, and other factors. That’s
surprising! The median response for a $500M+ company was four tools. And for a $5M company? Still four.
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Technology Adoption Lifecycle
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Email automation and tracking, contact data and account intelligence, and contract e-signature tools are the
furthest along on the adoption lifecycle. These classes of technologies are the only three to have crossed into
the late majority stage.
All of the remaining technologies (but one) have “crossed the chasm” into the early majority phase of adoption.
Gamification and leaderboards sit right on the cusp, but today remain in the early adopter stage.
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Spend on Technologies
On average, companies reported spending $477 per AE per month on acceleration technologies. Below we’ve
analyzed the most common bundles.
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For under $100 in monthly spend, the most common double-play includes:
• Email automation, tracking, and cadence
• Contact data and account intelligence
For under $500 monthly, the most common four technologies include:
• Email automation, tracking, and cadence
• Contact data and account intelligence
• Contract e-signature
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator
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PART 5
SALES LEADERSHIP
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First-Line Leadership
In 2015, first-line leaders most often had Vice President titles. Today, they are more likely to be “Managers” or
“Directors.” One item worth nothing is that the percentage of respondents reporting leadership falling to Team
Leaders decreased by half. Woot! We haven’t been shy about our dislike of the Team Leader role. Hiring an
individual contributor with one foot in management and one foot as a rep can be a recipe for failure.
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If you’ve identified someone with the potential to be a fabulous leader, promote him or her. Asking someone to
have one foot in the AE world and one in the management realm is unfair and counterproductive. If you do opt to
head down the team lead path, here’s one piece of parting advice. Assign a fair quota.
Let’s say you expect your team leads to manage three reps at about 30% of their time. How much quota relief
should that give them? A rule of thumb is to take the estimate for “time spent managing,” add 20 percentage
points, and reduce their quota by that amount. If you suspect 30% of their time will be spent on management,
you should budget for a 50% reduction in quota.
If you aren’t willing to allow for that much quota relief, we strongly suggest you reconsider the role.
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As a rule, AEs at companies below $5M in revenue are much more likely to report directly to VP or C-level
leaders (53% of respondents versus 8% at companies above $50M.)
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Think about just how rare it is to find someone who combines vision, business acumen, and the ability to inspire
others. But that is exactly what a sales leader needs to possess. To set the stage, here’s our take on the levels
of sales leadership.
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Manager to Rep Ratio
On average, 7.2 AEs report to a single leader. This is up from 2015 and a continuation of a long-term rise.
As a general rule, the higher the company revenues, the more AEs a single leader supports. Logically, this is
sound. As companies find product market fit and grow, there are more moving pieces and evolving processes.
AEs need a lot more individual attention. Once a company has moved from identifying repeatable and scalable
to growing and expanding, leaders tend to become less hands-on, at least in theory.
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Leadership Compensation
2015 2017
Manager $140K $138K
Manager and Director total compensation has remained flat (in real terms) since roughly 2012. Compensation
for Vice Presidents, however, has jumped appreciably in recent years.
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Controlling for company revenues and other factors, leadership on-target earnings rise as ACV increases.
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Top Challenges
We asked respondents to identify their top two challenges in managing AE groups. Below are the results and
how they’ve changed since 2012. Notice the remarkable consistency of the top four challenges.
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Inside Sales Consulting & Execution
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THANK YOU!
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