Turn on economic news these days and it’s nearly impossible to miss stories about the tight labor market and (depending on how you measure it) moderate wage growth. 

The chart below compares the Unemployment Rate  and Average Hourly Earnings indexed to June 2009--the official end of the last recession.

Net-net, the unemployment rate has fallen by ~60% while earnings have increased ~30%. 

We’ve been diligently working our way through our latest round of AE research and I wanted to share a preview of what I'm seeing. If the AE role were following the larger economy, we would expect to be seeing 2.5% compound annual growth in On-Target Earnings. In other words, a $100K OTE in 2009 should be roughly $124K today.

In reality what we're seeing is much, much bigger. 

Gartner's 2019 Current and Emerging Technologies in Sales is making the rounds on LinkedIn.

I’ll be honest, I spent quite some time trying to grok what it was saying. I’m more of a numbers person than a visual learner, so I made a bit of a remix. I thought I’d share it here to get the community’s feedback.

First, I spreadsheet'd their data out by adoption, current ROI, and future importance. I used distance to center to measure Deployment Level  (1-9 scale) and followed their size and color key for Current ROI and Future Importance (1-3 scale).
  

Today, we launch our Account Executive research focused on B2B closing teams.

This is our seventh round of research since 2007. We asked a group of VCs, CROs, and Sales VPs to weigh in on the key questions for building and leading teams today. They came back with items like:

• Pipeline source: What's the mix between inbound, outbound SDR, and self-sourced pipeline? How do high-growth companies differ from the pack?
• Compensation: What's the going rate for OTE (by experience, location, and quota)? Outside the mega-hubs, where are companies building teams?
• Quotas: What are average quotas (by company stage, by ACV, etc.)? What % attain the number?
• Technology: What makes up the sales stack? Which tools actually move the needle on performance?
   

This year’s survey is more streamlined than prior and will take roughly 5 minutes to complete. If you lead an AE group, please participate. 

All answers will be aggregated anonymously. We’ll be sharing the results with you and the rest of the community in the coming months. I appreciate that so many of you take the time to share. We couldn’t do it without you.

Here at The Bridge Group, we’ve been doing rep and manager comp research since 2007. (You can get the latest SDR report here and AE report here.) Although we’ve been asked about CRO/SVP of Sales compensation a lot, it’s one area we’ve never delved into.

Until now.

Before we launched the project, we reached out to a half dozen senior sales leaders in our network to ask them what they’d like to learn from anonymous peer research. Their responses centered around:

• Responsibilities (by size of company)
• OTE & equity package
• The relationship between revenue contribution and earnings

In short, what’s within the CRO span of control, what quota are they signed up for,
and how much are they paid to deliver it.