r/sales

I started at a new company after a rather bad falling out with a startup that let me go to save on the $150,000 commission I was owed.

Few things about the new job to set the tone. It's in the trades and mainly focuses on multifamily/industrial clients, my year one target is $2,000,000, and I was given no book of business.

I love a challenge and I have a long history in the industry and plenty of contacts so that lack of book doesn't bother me.

Strike one - When I interviewed we discussed why they were hiring a new salesperson and I was told that their last and only one just retired and it was time for someone new. Well long story short after starting I quickly found out they already have a second salesperson that absorbed all the clients and business. This other salesman is a lazy order taker that has let the book fall apart and has claim to any and every client imaginable without putting in the work.

Strike two - Within the second week of me being on the job, I realized I will still be short of the agreed upon ote if I hit my goal of $2,000,000. To reach my ote I need to be at $3,000,0000 which would put me 1/4 of the companies total revenue alone.

Strike 3 - I'm averaging 80 hours a week and can't keep up this routine for much longer if I intend to stay sane.

All this to ask do I start looking for a job or try and talk with the ownership about the issues. I am on track to crush my quota as I am currently sitting at $615,000 in my first 3 months with another $250,000 about close this week and $1,750,000 in the current pipeline.

Been at this long time and just feeling lost and love to get some opinions from you fine people.

I am a founder of a small SAAS company who is looking for our 1st real Account Executive (AE). I don't want to call us a startup because we are not. We are bootstrapped and small and it took many years to figure out our ICP/PMF. I did hire a few people in sales over the years not knowing what I was doing and mostly failed.

The good news is that there is real PMF and I am really seeing that vision/growth that I have always wanted as a founder. 75%+ of our customer base is now our ICP after experimenting for years with the product.

So I am in the market to find someone who will be the only salesperson other than me to sell our SAAS product. Naturally, this role is usually called "Founding AE" etc but I find that cringy.

For me, it is about getting that sales person (call them whatever) who has sold a software product before and is entrepreneurial (even though they wouldn't need to work like a founder).

- Does this exist or am I chasing a unicorn ?
- If such role exists, how do I find someone like that ? I don't think this can just be a regular job posting or am I over thinking this ?
- What would be a good base salary for this (US east coast/Philadelphia region)

EDIT: People asked to clarify a few more things:
- Product is complex platform and has various moving parts.
- Hybrid (2 days together in office, 3 days WFH)
- SMB is our primary ICP
- Average sales cycle can vary as sometimes the customers are just in early search phases. But those ready to buy, it can be 4-6 weeks
- Product currently is mostly sales led but with AI, we are trying to play with a smaller self serve option to see if it works well. For sales led pricing, it can be usually average from $12K (floor)-$20k/Year (average, enterprise plan will higher usage pay more).

I am having a bit of a dilemma with my career. We get salary plus bonus based on YoY sales.

I had a kick ass year last year and got $25k bump to my base salary and this also comes with a larger bonus potential. Essentially we have different "levels" and the higher your level the more money you can get on your bonus.

Been in the job for about 5 years and I know long term I dont want to be in street sales. My company has a great track record of promoting from within. Id like to explore a management track.

Jobs at the level above me rarely open. In the time I've been with the company only 1 of the 10 manager positions have ever come open. The big boss has let me know there are 3 coming very soon due to 1 retirement and 2 promotions.

Next week I will get the biggest bonus check of my life. 3x what I was able to get prior. My biggest customer recently expanded and I will easily make the same figures for the next 10 to 11 months.

Its incredibly tempting to ride out the money and make more money than I've ever seen. However the leadership roles rarely come up. To have 3 in one shot open is as rare as Haleys comet. I dont want to hold out for the money and it takes another 5 years for a spot to open up.

My dilemma is do I ride out the year and make more money than id ever dreamed of or forgo that to advance my career the way id like? Management comes with a modest increase in salary but their bonus potential is about a third of what I can do now, and its entirely dependent on the team.

I dont NEED the bonus money to pay my bills, my salary covers us with a little cushion. But man its hard to not want to bank as much as possible. Any advice appreciated.

Was threatened with a PIP or termination based on “conduct”. Said my cross-functional collaboration and deal management skills were unreliable and unprofessional. Provided 30 days notice that if it didn’t improve… PIP or termination.

I’m #2 in attainment on my team (2/7) and about upper middle of the pack across the whole company (~35 reps).

When asked for evidence, examples or how I’ll know if I’m improving, none could be provided. Am i cooked?

P.S. this is conveniently 3 months before a certain “incentive” is paid out.

TLDR: Indian agency hired me to break them into US market with paper thin resources and no patience. After 90 days we couldn't agree on how to move forward even though there were positive signals. They wanted me to take all the risk so I said no.

I was hired by an international company that wanted to break into a very niche fintech sector in the US Market. They were organically getting inbounds from this niche looking for offshore dev support, and spent about 18 months on their own trying to become an official partner in this software without success. None of those customers would agree to provide a case study unfortunately.

In May, they sent me to an event that the software throws for partners and customers to do some recon and see what is possible.

After the event I proposed 5 paths to revenue for them in the market, and only 1 required them to try and be a partner. For context, the software was not going to likely accept their bid for partnership.

We decided to target the highest tier of existing partners and offer white label dev support and staff augmentation. They didn't want to apply a lot of resources, so we agreed to do a 90 day pilot with me acting in a mix of market research and sales to go after these named 32 accounts. The inbounds they had gotten were from mid tier partners, but they dont get as many projects and like I said, weren't willing to give us testimonials or a case study.

I updated their website in a 2 week sprint to match this play, used blinded case studies, and got started on LinkedIn with a mix of warm and cold outreach. I engaged on targeted account pages and posts, I had a budget for gifting, and it was a tiny ABM play without any ads. Each target had their own landing page, etc.

I had a 9% conversion from cold to conversations with me, and closer to 25% connection acceptance rate. 2 meetings where I was told they must have US based devs due to the sensitivity of their financial data. After the website update, organic search from the US went up 53% in the 90 days, and direct traffic from the US went up 104% bc ppl I pinged looked up the agency I was representing. I also earned them a referral partner channel that was promising, but would be lower volume and wasn't the whale they were after.

Some things were working, not enough though and the metrics I had initially set were not on target from a pipeline perspective.

At 90 days I refreshed my proposal to actually launch a US based company they could own, but it would be fully staffed and ran by the US team I build for them. People were interested in me, but not the agency from India.

They said no, they had already sunk so much in their first 18 months on their own and didnt think having a US based company would improve their chances of getting accepted as an official partner (I disagree).

They tried to get me to pivot to another one of their brands, an agency that works with early stage founders as a fractional CTO/technical foudner for startups and asked for me to put together a budget.

So far, they had paid me about $19k and I had done work that I would have billed $27k for one of my standard contracts, but times are tough and they aren't a US company and I understand their budgets aren't the same.

I asked for $22k for a pilot for this other brand, as it ia essentially a startup itself and I would need an assistant and promotions budget to launch it and get meaningful traction.

I also didn't want to burn the relational equity I had developed in the fintech software space so I offered 10% of my time to keep working that too, outside of the $22k bc the commissions on those contracts are super healthy. Even though they weren't on target, I don't think its a dead end we just need more time to build trust.

They said no, they wanted an agreement that is purely funded by revenue I generated, and for me to come out of pocket for the assistant and promos.

I told them no. If I'm putting sweat equity and promo budget in out of my own pocket it is going to be for a startup I have meaningful equity stakes in, not just commissions.

Did I make the right call? Should I have done something different in my first 90 days?

What would you have done differently? I hate walking from something thay could be great but I can't do it for them all by myself.

Edit: typos

I work for a direct energy supplier and have been having trouble with brokers lately. These guys are unregulated by my countries government and are known to be dishonest, offering their services for "free" while actually taking a percentage off an energy suppliers fee. So they might take 0.5c off a 1c supplier fee.

For a large energy user this naturally can drive their costs up by thousands as the supplier needs to increase their fee to cover the brokers fee and their own profit. But the employees don't seem to care and either won't talk to me or when they give me the time of day sign back up with the broker.

Has anyone run into this before or have any advice on what I can say?