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.

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At Dreamforce last October, a few colleagues and I were sitting at a hotel bar when a gentleman took an empty seat next to us. After a few minutes, he turned to me and asked, “Are you Trish Bertuzzi from the internet?” I replied that I was.

We started to chat and he shared that he had founded a tech company in San Francisco. My first thought was "yup, you and about a million other people." But the more he shared his vision, the more interested I became.

That “guy” was Roy Raanani, CEO and Founder of Chorus.ai.

We exchanged business cards and agreed to have a call a few weeks after Dreamforce. (Roy smartly closed on scheduling the meeting there and then.) On that initial call and over the next few months, I got to know Roy, his vision, and his team. The more I learned, the more I knew I wanted to be part of their future.

End result – I met a guy in a bar and now I’m on his company’s Board of Advisors. Funny how these things turn out.

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It's 2017 and I’m on a mission to educate the market about the difference between account-centric and account-based thinking. The truth is that most companies don’t understand the distinction. Just drawing a box around a set of accounts and then executing your same old demand generation strategies won't get you to the promised land of larger deals in strategic accounts. 

That’s why I’ve asked Jon Miller, Engagio CEO and former Marketo cofounder, to share his thinking. Without further ado, here’s Jon.
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The B2B landscape is changing, fast.

In 2011, CEB concluded that there are 5.4 decision makers in a B2B sale. Just a few years later, new studies revealed that number has jumped by 30%. There’s even research that indicates as many as 17 decision-makers in enterprise sales. That’s exactly why more and more companies are adopting account-based strategies across their Sales and Marketing teams—it just makes sense to reach out to multiple decision-makers and influencers.

But doing it well goes beyond simple buzzwords; true success requires an orchestrated approach. Call it Account Based Everything. Call it Account-Based Revenue (as The Bridge Group does).

Call it whatever you want – the bottom line is to execute a strategic go-to-market approach that personalizes marketing, sales, and customer success efforts to land and expand at named accounts.

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I think we can all agree that “account-based” is a leading contender for 2016’s phrase of the year. If you watched a webinar, read a blog post, or attended a conference and had account-based as your drinking word, you’d have a frequent flyer number at your local ER.

Beneath the buzz, however, this one has some there there.

There are two tides propelling the account-based movement. One, the number and diversity of people involved in purchasing decisions has changed. The “buyer” has become the “buying unit” and is quickly growing into the “buying battalion.” Just about any single sale process seems to require dozens of yeses and risks running aground in the face of a single no.

Two, it is getting harder and harder to scale what worked in the past. Killed it at that BigCon tradeshow last year? Great! But doubling your spend next year won’t net you double the new logos. Same goes for PPC, social advertising, PR, etc.

Death, taxes, and diminishing returns are the immutable laws of our world.

I was working with a client recently charting their $10M to $100M trajectory. (They were kind enough to let me share these numbers with their name removed.) The path that got them to $10M looked like this:

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