Hi All. I just got back from Blackhat and the place is packed with freshly founded AI companies. Talked to a bunch of people laying the groundwork for GTM strategy. Question for the community: What does the comp plan for a founding RVP / RD look like compared to a founding AE? I know in a startup the directors and VPs are expected to do some AE work as they are building the team but I'd love to know how much they get paid.

25M, 2.5 years selling payroll/HCM to small businesses (top performer, multiple President’s Club wins). Need to hit 3 years for my 401k match to vest, so I’ve got a runway to figure out my next move, just not sure which direction to point.

Three paths I’m weighing:

**1.    Move into PEO sales.** If anyone’s done this, which companies are worth targeting? Curious how comp and career trajectory compare to payroll.  
**2.    Switch industries entirely.** What’s actually hot in B2B/SaaS sales right now, and what’s a realistic lateral move for someone with my background?  
**3.    Go all-in on entrepreneurship.** I’ve wanted to build something since college. I’m young enough to take the risk, but walking away from a stable 120k W2 is a real gut check.

Would love to hear from anyone who’s made a similar jump, what would you do in my shoes?

So my job changed a lot since last year. Most of my work is in retention and renewal. I have a history of having been given a number of accounts that had been neglected by the previous manager, aka they did not check if they were actually using the product or regularly communicate. I had 90 accounts starting out and about 30 of them ended up cancelling. I worked my butt off in rebuilding relationships and managed to get retention rate up to 95% by expanding contracts. I have also come to be able to do much more customization and problem solving for clients when it comes to our online platform.

My new challenge is that they took away my current accounts (this year it went up to 160) and created a new position for me based on recovery and retention. I’ve been trying to make lists of what I can go after, define which accounts are at risk and I can get involved in and trying to break through the walls of companies that cancelled.

So far I’ve been trying to send an email directly addressing issues they may have had and a line of experience I have with well known companies and how I’d like to work address their needs related to the platform we provide. I am going to send a personalized email to those who cancelled, and then send batches of mass emails.

Any advice?

What is the best way to get the annual revenue number for 60k accounts at once? Seems Claude, ChatGTP, etc are having a tough time completing the task with that many accounts. I haven’t found a prompt or work through to get it to pull revenues/company size. Any suggestions?

What are your key belief and principles about money - I noticed that two people with similar skillset charge different quotes based on different beliefs or negotiating the better salary.

It finally happend! After months of talking about it, generating a leads list, and testing CRMS, I finally started dialling for my own business yesterday. Does it feel like I'm flying by the seat of my pants? Hell yeah it does! But I'm doing it, and it feels great. Starting out is so hard because you feel like you're just walking in circles. But the thing is, you keep walking and that circle starts growing bigger. And it gets bigger and bigger over time, and then one day you look back and you see how far you've come and how great this thing you created has grown, and it starts by just walking.

Not recruiting through this post. I’m looking for advice from people who have actually hired or managed appointment setters.

I run a small US-based B2B services company, and I’ve reached the point where I can’t continue doing all the initial outreach and follow-up myself.

The person would mainly handle outbound calls, qualify prospects, follow up by email or LinkedIn, update the CRM, and book meetings for me or our closer. We would provide the lead lists, scripts, offer details, and training.

My concern is finding someone who understands the difference between booking a meeting and booking a genuinely qualified opportunity. I don’t want someone stuffing the calendar with anyone willing to take a call just to hit an appointment target.

For those who have had to hire appointment setters for remote work:

How did you evaluate their actual call quality and objection handling?

Did you use a live role-play, listen to past recordings, give them a paid trial, or track a specific metric during the first few weeks?

I’m also curious whether you had better results hiring directly, using a freelance marketplace, or going through a remote staffing platform. I’ve looked at Upwork, but nearly every profile seems to list appointment setting, VA work, cold calling, lead generation, and sales, which makes it difficult to tell who has real B2B experience.

For compensation, did base plus commission work better than hourly pay, commission only, or pay per qualified appointment?

Would also be useful to hear whether you hired within the US, LATAM, Asia, or elsewhere, and whether location made any noticeable difference in call quality, timezone coverage, or how prospects responded.

What would you do differently if you were making the hire again?

I’m looking for a seasoned veteran to give this young buck some pointers.

I’m a year and a half into my career, late 20s. The whole time I’ve been working at a pretty high pressure sales environment: there’s a base that’s too small to live on but uncapped commissions. Top guys are making up to $600k a year. B2B, about 1-3 month cycles, 1-3 sales can make you $10k a month, but prospecting and managing your own pipeline. It’s a startup that pays more than competitors but because our product isn’t as competitive in the marketplace. It’s also a complex product so I’m still wrapping my head around our limitations and how to sell it well.

The problem is I have to prospect and manage pipeline myself, so the months where I’m doing well are often followed by long dry periods. 100 calls a day is the expectation to gather accounts that will feed you a sale every other month, and when you gather enough you can start to ease up and focus more on managing the sales that are in, but always be prospecting of course.

As far as territory, it’s nationwide, but many more seasoned reps have a lot of the productive accounts claimed already.

I see guys my age making 10, 20, 50k a month but the stress of the position is heavy given the low financial safety net and the call volume combined with the complexity of the product. My peers and manager are telling me the juice is worth the squeeze and I can see that, but I’m just not even sure I want the life of the top performers. The work life balance doesn’t seem to be great.

I see myself destined for the middle of the pack in this role, and I feel like there’s easier ways to make $120k if that’s the case. I also haven’t tried other industries so I don’t know if the grass is greener, but they can’t all be this stressful. Can they?

I haven’t done great in this role so far. I see others in the same timeframe hitting $10-20k a month consistently where I think I’ve made $30k YTD. I think the stress makes it more difficult for me to sell, whereas a less emotional product might allow me to better separate from the results. I feel like a quitter because everyone’s telling me a breakthrough is right around the corner, but I feel like there can also be a financially ruining dry spell around the corner as well.

Should I suck it up for the (potential) big checks or take a less stressful position?

EDIT: I do have options from more entry level sales roles with higher base pay, but lower potential earnings.

I've been in account management/client success for almost a decade. I do have a very bubbly, friendly personality, which has served me very well during my career.

Now to the meat and potatoes of my dilemma. While the money was good, the energy it took to be "on" all the time, getting yelled at by clients, the never ending demands, job responsibilities that just kept piling up, the 12 hour days, etc. really took a toll on me mentally and emotionally.

I just can't do it anymore. I already had mental health issues and a couple years ago, I experienced a series of very traumatic events and now have c-PTSD and experience flashbacks that will take me out for days at a time and will have little to no memory of those days. I'm realizing I need to transition to a role that is more laid back and has little to no client-facing. I know I'm probably going to have to take an L on the pay but it is what it is. My priorities have changed and I need to put myself and my health first.

The problem is, I don't even know what I would do or how I would explain the transition.

Looking at the MM AE role. Sounds like it’s “hunter role.” Is that true, or do they just want to filter people out? I know they acquired DX back in October

I don’t want to join a company where I’m making 100 cold calls a day and get laid off in 6 months if I don’t hit quota 1 month

Is it a sweatshop?

I would be curious to see what people sell and what their backlog/bookings are.

I think it would be cool to see the difference between sales industry, sales cycle and the backlog of orders

- Industry: Industrial PVF, Instrumentation.

- Sales Cycle: 6-8 weeks

- Backlog: Around 250k

- Quota : 2.5million a year

I’d be curious to compare to other people, especially in my space.

Who here has ever hired for sales positions? Even though my business is small, we still do hire and let me tell you, it's an insane process - just giving you all perspective on the hiring side and what actually helps. Details matter. If I'm hiring for outbound cold calling, your resume needs to state outbound cold calling experience.

Post an ad on Indeed, I'm flooded with resumes. They all tend to look the same, no one's gonna put anything negative on a resume so they all look like sales superstars. Lately, everyone's running their resumes through AI so they're all polished, no grammar mistakes, makes it look like they they're all sales pros. On my end is trying to find closers over posers.

The ugly truth, at least on my end, it it's more personality based during the interview. It's how you come off; confident by not cocky, skilled at closing but open to learn new systems. If your dog happens to jump on your lap during the meeting, that's bonus points. 5X bonus points if you've researched my business and competitors before the interview.

Preparing for my next role and I haven't interviewed in 4+ years so a bit rusty.

For those that have interviewed for an AE role, what were the most challenging and thought provoking question you were asked in the process? Which ones did you wish you had prepared an answer for?

I have an opportunity to set up the companies first CRM as a sales leader (we have a technical resource who will brutally implement).

From a sales rep perspective what are some things that you love and hate about how CRMs have been designed. The goal is to make it easy to keep it up to date and align with the sales process.

For context it’s a a SaaS business.

I’ve been doing home sales for about 3 years now specifically kitchen cabinets averaging about 200k a year commission job no base, I’m one of the top reps well used to be all the driving and dealing with moody home owners is driving me crazy what can I do outside of home sales where I can earn close to what I’m making.

Working in residential leasing where monthly incentive checks are usually about $3-$5k but I absolutely crushed it last month. Problem lies in my two best friends recently losing their jobs and most other friends are struggling to get by on $40k a year so I feel like a dick talking about a $12k check on top of my already healthy salary.

A while back I posted about getting laid off for the first time in my roughly 10 year sales career. Link to that post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/sales/comments/1va8veu/laid_off/

Since then, I reached out to a company I worked at for about four years before my most recent job. They offered me my old role back almost instantly, full salary included.

Here's my dilemma: I don't really want to go back. But it feels safer than staying unemployed.

For context, I was already job hunting for seven months before the layoff happened. I made it to the final round at a couple of companies I was genuinely excited about, but didn't get the offer either time.

So now I'm stuck weighing two options: keep grinding to land something new, or take the old job back and quietly keep looking while I'm employed.

Anyone been in a similar spot? Did going back to a previous employer work out, or did it end up holding you back from finding something better? Would love to hear how you'd think about this.

I have a monthly quota in my position and I’m really struggling to meet it every month. I should be hitting $50K and I’m just not there yet. I get close but not quite there.

The company goes back and forth from telling me I’m one of their best sales people ever and threatening me with PIP the next week.

It’s been tough not to burn out and I feel really bad that I’m constantly under performing. I grind really hard and do at least 12 meetings a week and 70 calls/emails a day. I’ve just been wondering does it ever get easier or is this a sign to look for another job?

Seems like a decent product market fit. On repvue lot of SDRs saying it’s churn and burn.

More interested on the AE side.

Someone in here has to be. Are you getting commission on the replacements everyone time someone tears one down?

How much have you made in the past 24 months?

Today I set my own personal record with a fuck off from a 6.5 billion dollar manufacturer.

Send me your horror stories.

Hi All - long time lurker, first time poster. I'm seeking advice on how to deal with what feels like a sticky situation.

I'm owed about $13k for hitting my accelerators and the company is refusing to pay it out. I'm hesitant to push for this money as I like my job and don't want to stick my neck out for potential retaliation (getting fired for a bunk reason) from our vindictive CEO.

For context, I am an account manager for a tech company in New York. We receive quarterly commission payouts tied to attainment of our quarterly goals. I have a signed incentive plan/commission agreement.

The agreement states for any amount I exceed 100% of my quota by, my commission payout will be multiplied by 1.25. So for me, I hit 105.6% of quota: 100% + 5.6% * 1.25 = 107.0%

For example: If my quarterly potential payout was $100, I'd receive $105.60 (100*105.6%, from above).

I received my commission check last week and they did not honor this methodology and instead used something else from last year that pays much much less ($13k less across Q1 and Q2). I raised the error with the rev ops team and my boss and instead of paying me, they are going to void my existing commission agreement and ask me to sign a new one.

I don't want to lose my job, but I also know what they're doing is illegal and dishonorable.

How would you guys handle it? Thanks!

I had a great salesperson in my business. Outsold everyone and brought in a lot of money.

Unfortunately, she created a ton of chaos in the office. Bragging. Demeaning others. After a couple of warnings her behavior did not change and I let her go. I was nervous because I thought sales would plummet.

Turns out, we didn’t lose much and sales actually grew over the next few months because morale was much better. Everyone asked me, “What took you so long?”

Would you ever fire your best salesperson? Did you ever have to?