My sales blogs and guidance can generally be applied to any sales role, no matter what you are selling. However, I come from a primarily tech (software) sales background and therefore many of my posts are software specific.
That being said, even “Software Sales” is a bit of a catch-all, since software sales varies greatly depending on:
- The type of licensing you’re selling
Most software today is cloud software, sold on a termed contract. In this model you will often have long term relationships with your clients as companies want to encourage renewals, upsells, cross-sells etc.
However, there are still on premise software companies out there and in this model your transactions are most often one-and-done. - The complexity (and cost) of your product
Complex solutions require longer sales cycles, and stronger client relationships. You will likely have fewer sales, with less clients to focus on but larger opportunities. Simple solutions are generally quicker, smaller sales and the focus is on customer volume. - The type of customer you are selling to
Enterprise clients tend to make larger investments requiring longer sales cycles and stronger relationships, whereas lower and mid market clients will be smaller opportunities (in terms of revenue), but more of them and therefore again the focus here would be volume - The size of company you work for
Here’s the one I thought I would focus on today, because when looking for a sales job I often see people take into account the items listed above, and disregard the importance of company size.
I’ve intentionally used the vague term “Big Company”, but essentially you want to take these things into consideration when applying for a new sales role:
- What resources do they have?
Your job as an Account Executive is to create/build relationships with your clients while providing them with all the information they need to make an informed buying decision. This means they need to know about the product, the support, the pricing, the contracting etc.
So the question is – does your company have experts in these areas to support you, or are you the expert?
In my first small software company I worked for I was it. I did the discovery call, the demo, the pricing, the contracting the legal negotiations, the support – oh, and I also did invoicing for a little while. Moving to a global multinational company I now instead own the client relationships and there are experts in each area for support.
Some people love to have control, while others prefer the support model – it really just depends on your strengths and preference. - How many employees do they have?
In software this is a very important question. We’ve all seen massive layoffs in recent years, from any and every size company. However, when those announcements are made – what do the numbers actually look like? A small company who lays off 10% of staff is going to make a huge difference compared to the same percentage of a large global company. I’ll also note that you may want to take note of the country they are headquartered in – some countries are more “employee centric” than others when it comes to both layoffs and sales culture. - What investments do they make in R&D?
Software is constantly evolving, and companies that innovate will stay alive. If you are looking for job security I would encourage you to look into R&D spending which will give you a good idea on how long they’ll remain relevant for in the market. - How agile are they?
In this sense, I am using agile as a term to refer to how flexible are their processes.
In my first company when I took over the sales role I noticed a few things that didn’t make sense to me and I just changed them. I didn’t even run it by the company owner, I just made some changes and they improved sales. It was pretty easy too, especially considering I was the only sales person – I didn’t even have to share the changes with a team. Similarly, if I wanted to send a proposal to a client I simply created a word template, converted it to PDF and sent it over within a few minutes.
A large company, on the other hand, will have some pretty specific processes in place and usually multiple layers of approvals. There are no “quick changes” and things generally take much longer overall for every step in your sales cycle. I’ve seen many people leave sales roles in big companies for much smaller companies because of this factor alone. - What does total compensation look like?
How you get paid is important – especially in sales! Companies will offer you “OTE” (on target earnings), which is a blend of base salary and commissions, commissions being earned for hitting your quota. It’s important to ask in any size company what the percentage of reps who hit their quota is on your team, because a very high OTE doesn’t matter if only 10% of reps actually make that much.
I encourage you to also look at other benefits. Large companies will often have excellent extended benefit plans, and partnerships with companies for free employee perks. They may also offer daily lunches for staff, and company events such as free pancake days – all of which are helpful to take into account for total compensation.
Lastly, larger companies are often publicly traded so your compensation may be a blend of salary, commission and shares which could be greatly beneficial in the long term.
There are of course other differences. Larger companies often have higher competition for talent, which means you work with some pretty amazing colleagues but it’s harder to get in the door initially and you may have to start lower on the totem pole and work your way up.
Each option certainly has pros and cons and you have to decide based on what is best for you – and sometimes you don’t exactly have a choice. Many sales reps need to start off in roles they aren’t exactly keen on and work their way into a more tenured role.That being said, it’s good to have an idea of where you would want to be ideally and I hope this has given you a few things to think about.
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