In the SaaS world, metrics can be finicky beasts. What works at LinkedIn, Salesforce, Twilio, or Zendesk might not be transferable from one to the other, let alone work for you.

Questions around how can I benchmark myself make leading an AE group all the more challenging. In our 2017 SaaS AE Metrics & Compensation Report, we analyze the biggest shifts in recent years and provide core metrics to measure AE teams. We also break findings down by company revenue, ACV, and other factors.

This is our sixth round of this research project and I can honestly say it's our best release yet. The report is organized into five sections:

1. Group Structure
2. Ramp and Retention
3. Quota and Compensation
4. Activity and Technologies
5. AE Leadership

384 Executives from a broad diversity of SaaS companies participated. 89% were headquartered in North America. Median respondent revenue was $27M and median respondent ACV was $25K.

Do your SDRs often remark about how much they love using Salesforce? Do they feel bad for peers at other companies with poorly configured CRMs? Are they thankful that, unlike those poor sods, they aren’t drowning in manual steps and byzantine processes.

I suspect this isn’t a sentiment you hear very often.

I’ve asked dozens of SDRs to describe the experience of doing their jobs inside Salesforce. The responses ranged from “death by a thousand cuts” to “running in mud wearing cement shoes” to “sitting in the dentist’s chair five days a week.” I once heard “it’s fine” and considered that rather high praise indeed.

For all the attention and buzz the SDR role has received, the way companies support sales development in Salesforce hasn’t advanced much in the last 10 years. Where AE, managers, and senior leaders have been drowning in innovation and improvement, SDRs have been logging clicks and filling fields in ways that would be entirely familiar to a time traveler from 2008.

So I wrote a book about fixing it.

Lightning Sales Ops was just released. I interviewed 34 sales executives, SDR leaders, marketers, operations pros, and Salesforce admins for this book. I hope the stories, strategies, and thinking I share will inspire you.

It's a book for SDR managers and biz ops / marketing ops / sales ops pros. It’s a book with five parts:

I ran across a question on the Inside Sales Experts LinkedIn group last week. As luck would have it, I’ve been working our 2017 SaaS AE Metrics & Compensation (due out next month) and have just the perfect dataset. The question read:

Manager Earnings vs. Rep Earnings
 
I think we would all agree that top reps will and can always make more than their sales managers. But where should that line be? Has anyone seen any data that identifies where manager compensation should be relative to their reps?
 
This is one of those questions that causes a gut reaction. I’m sure you’d agree that a “top rep” should outearn their direct manager. But how many top reps? Is true for every #1 rep in every group?

Beyond making for fantastic cocktail party conversation, this is an important question.

As anyone with a pulse and open AE headcount can tell you, we’re in a highly-competitive market for top talent. If your compensation plan limits, caps, or otherwise blocks AEs from the potential to outearn their boss, something is wrong. I hope you’ll evaluate your own plans as you read through these findings.

Account Execs, Inside Sales Reps - whatever you call them, the metrics that drive the AE role are always in demand. Today, I'm excited to launch our latest research focused on Account Executive teams (ISRs, AEs, AMs, etc.).

This is our sixth round of research, since 2007. The key themes we'll explore include:

• Rep profiles: experience, tenure, ramp time, career path
• Compensation: base, OTE, accelerators
• Quotas: average quotas, % attainment
• Technology stack: categories, adoption, impact
   

We worked hard to make this year’s survey easier and it will take roughly 6 minutes to complete. If you lead an Account Executive group, please participate.