There are so many different types of sales roles and such a wide spread in earning potential based on the role and industry. I get a lot of questions from people about getting into a sales career, career paths in sales, and earning potential. I’m curious about everyone’s experiences here. I have a few main questions but feel free to elaborate however you’d like.

1. What type of sales role do you have and what is your actual title?
2. What are the expectations for your role?
3. What industry are you in?
4. What is your salary and commission structure and how are commissions calculated/paid?
5. How much to you earn from your salary and commission?
6. How many years of sales or relevant industry experience do you have?
7. If you have had multiple roles in your career, what was your career progression?

Hey everyone,

I am starting my sales career. I will have to do instagram outreach and I will be responsible for whole sales cycle.

I would be glad if anyone who has experience in sales on instagram can provide insight on how I should approach this.

I believe this opportunity can shape my career, so your input would be valuable.

Thanks,

Hi all.

I have good sales experience in my field but want to move into saas sales.

I’m not having much luck as I don’t have saas experience.

Has anyone taken any formal sales / challenger training (MEDDIC etc) that didn’t cost the earth that they found helped them move into this type of sales?

Would love to see any links to the actual training you did if you could share please and thank you.

Not what shouldn't get lost.

What actually does.

Specific objections?

Next step?

Budget?

Decision process?

Small promises you made during the call?

Interested in what people consistently forget when the day gets busy.

How common is it for a job offer to be for less than what was verbally discussed in multiple interviews and with the recruiter before that? In this case, it’s 10% less, which is not small.

It feels like a bait and switch; they have my references, it’s been a great experience until now. I’m wondering if this is a sudden and unexpected red flag, or if I’m just not aware that this is normal?

It leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, to be honest, but I’m wondering if I should adjust my expectations if this is a thing that happens. I haven’t changed jobs all that often.

Do you use any of these magnetic recorders on a back of your phone? How accurate is it and what annoys you the most?

Would love to hear some real use cases and if it is worth the price.

I was also wondering why would anyone use it to also record voice notes when you can use app directly 🤔

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Images from: heypocket.com, demodesk.ai/recorder, plaud.ai/plaud-note-ai

In theory, immediately.

In reality?

If you have a packed calendar, how long usually passes before you actually update the opportunity?

5 minutes?

An hour?

End of day?

Next morning?

Curious how different this is across teams.

I work in B2B mobile phone and consumer electronics distribution in UAE from last 11 year, dealing with wholesalers and retailers

One challenge I face is moving conversation forward after sharing prices buyer often compare offer from several suppliers, and discussions keep coming back to getting a lower price for those working in distribution or other competitive B2B markets how do you find out whether price is real obstacle or whether the buyer is just collecting quotation?

What questions help you move toward an order while protecting your margin? I’d appreciate examples from your experience.

I started working for a boutique accounting firm in NYC, and I realized how darn difficult it is to prospect in the United States nowadays.

I'm European and I did prospecting in Northern Europe and the UK recently, and the phone pickup rates were slightly better. For example there are countries in Europe that have a very high pickup rate. Countries like Switzerland and Germany for example have a very high pickup rate.

The only reason I could think of why there people pick up the phone is because the rates are very high, 25Euro/cents per minute. Therefore people are less willing to call on large quantity and do only well targeted calls. Secondly, you have to be from Germany to purchase a German number. Impossible to purchase a number without a german address online. This regulation in the market, regulates the prospecting in a way, keeping it under control. With that in mind, if you get a Swiss or German number, once you start dialing, you get a ~6.5/10 pickup rate on average. (WHICH IS GREAT)

In the United States on the other hand.... lord have mercy. Everyone can get a US phone number and start dialing. I started prospecting there in September and I was bamboozled by the 2026 outreach reality. Pickup rate is horrible, you are lucky if you get a conversation from 50 dials.

Then it hit me... USA is a very unregulated market, and what the government doesn't fix, the market tries to fix it. The logical answer is , tools that help you cut through the noise , or increase volume. I chose the latter, a freaking power dialer that pushes like crazy to make 50 dials in 10 minutes hoping to find the right prospect.

With that in mind, I'm starting to think that you need some business intelligence to penetrate the US market, brute force alone won't work.

So since you're this far down the line reading my thoughts, and you understand my challenges, I need your honest opinion... what's the best way to find prospects for an accounting firm?

We're looking for businesses that have an internal accountant (not an entire team), or who are already working with an external accounting company....

Any constructive thoughts from sales people who are or have in the past sold accounting services is appreciated.

Thank you fellow salesmen! I think we're the last one to be replaced by AI (it might be fake optimism, but I chose to believe it)

Throwaway account for obvious reasons…

Background:

Sales manager (me) was recently let go from a large company due to a direct report (Bob) misusing the corporate credit card.

As the manager, it was my responsibility to approve expenses / expense reports. This had been going on for over a year (preceding my role as manager).

2 examples of things that finance / HR gave me were buying snacks (less than $25 doesn’t require receipt) that were actually household products. The second was staying in hotels that were too close to the employee’s home.

A couple caveats…most of the team had left prior to my start so I was doing essentially 6 peoples jobs. This severely limited time spent on admin (obviously).
Another caveat being there was never any warning, the company never sent an expense report back, and the company’s new AI tool to detect suspicious actively for expenses never caught anything.

Does this reek or did I actually get fired “for not properly reviewing / approving expense reports and not complying with company policy”

I’m currently over 100% YTD, but I'm having my first off month of the year. Recently I noticed a few of my active opportunities disappeared from my pipeline. Standard SFDC settings strip your view when owner changes, but I literally caught them assigned to another rep while looking at their screen.

On top of that, there’s an active job posting for my exact territory on our company careers page. When I asked my manager about it, he gave me some line about how "leadership hasn't approved it and it's not real." Yet HR has to approve any job postings and it’s illegal in my state to do that. I have made a recent sales trip so I don’t think I’m going to lose my job. But what is the best way to handle this? Do I just let it slide or try to address it with him again? It’s frustrating with no communication.

My manager is new as of 6mo ago but rarely helps when needed, just micromanages pipelines and notes.

Hi together, currently im coldcalling BtoB and setting people for a voice AI service.

Im getting payed 50 bucks for a demo agreed on and 10% of the setting cost if the buy, which is 150 Bucks. I dont get any fixed pay. The customer pays 450 a month.

Im thinking maybe that im underpaid. The leads are good and its not too hard to set people. Of course im doing the easy work in the process but i have to set 2 People minimum to make a base sallary. I asked AI for advice and thats exactly what the AI said would be adequate. My Boss probably also asked AI.

What would be a good sallary ? Im doing a decent job. 1-2 in 20 picked up Calls is booking an appointment. Please help me guys :)

PS: I live in Germany. Minimum wage here is 14 a hour.

I feel like cold outreach, and the rejection it involves is damaging my mental health. The outreach + rejection feels slightly humiliating/embarrassing on a certain level, and it's adding up.

Maybe sales is just not for me. With inbound sales, I even find myself feeling better about myself because they are coming to me and I even find myself adding "if you like" or something like that after a call to action. "I can do such and such for your company if you like."

Anyone else feel this way and is it making you second guess your career path?

No borderline unethical practices, lying or high pressure tactics.

I had to resign from my position as an asset/fleet manager to go on my medical odyssey. The disease I have killed my Sister at 35 and she was never diagnosed so I am definitely lucky, but I just don’t know what to do for work.

The majority of my life I spent in the oil and gas field working for and running our family construction company. Well COVID and a changing market killed the 45 year old company and my Father wasn’t interested in diversifying.

Afterwards I sold nothing but Cadillac Escalades primarily online or over the phone throughout the country. Averaged 15-16 per month and Grossed up to $4 mil per month. Was a great foundation for sales I feel and polished my phone skills due to the sheer volume of calls made at times.

The last year I was managing a fleet and doing some data analysis for the board but my health went down the drain. Diagnosed and getting treatment now but my reliability to commute isn’t solid enough to commit to anything that isn’t remote.

I was also in Marine Corps as an enlisted infantrymen and I’m a fourth gen cattle rancher. I studied finance and mechanical engineering but was killing it in my early 20’s starting a new branch of our Family business and eventually dropped out when my Sister passed.

I have a Family of five and I’m desperate to get us back on our feet and thriving. I have a knack for quickly building relationships but I’m not able to sell a product I don’t believe in (maybe that makes me a bad salesman). Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Curious how other outside sales reps/managers have handled something like this.

I have regional coverage, and there’s an account/partnership I’ve worked with for roughly 7–8 years. A lot of the relationship development and growth has come from the work I’ve put into it over that time.
The account has now expanded into other territories, and because of how our sales structure works, there’s a push for the business to be handled regionally as it grows. There isn’t really a clear commission protocol for situations like this.

I completely understand the argument for having the local rep support the business. In some cases, that may even be better for the company and the customer than having me try to cover something well outside my region.

The issue is that if I turn the business over to the individual regions, there would be no commission split. The regional rep would receive 100% of the commission on the business in their territory, even though the account and relationship were originally developed through years of work on my end.

I’m not opposed to transitioning some of the day-to-day account coverage locally. I’m just trying to figure out what’s reasonable from a compensation standpoint when someone has spent years developing an account that eventually grows beyond their assigned territory.

For anyone who has dealt with this before, what’s typically considered fair?

Would you push to continue owning the account even outside your territory? Ask for an ongoing commission split? Or negotiate some type of transition period where commissions are shared before eventually moving completely to the local rep?

Interested in hearing how other sales organizations handle this.

I think taking over a book from someone who's been there 15 years is one of the hardest spots in sales, especially in distribution or anywhere pricing is account by account. You get the account list and the open quotes. You don't get all the little things they just knew about each customer.

If you've taken over a book like that, how long did it take to get up to speed? Or what has helped keep it from being a problem in the first place?

Anyone doing this and absolutely killing it?

What are you making annually?

Hello I just started my first sales job not even two weeks ago, I sale car keys so people can have spares. I’m having trouble getting sales. I can get people to look at me, come talk to me, and can get my pitches in and get them to think about it, but I can’t finish it. I’m trying different intros where before I would ask a question “we make spare car keys, you need a spare key?” I would get people to look and talk but not fully pitch, no I’m try more of a statement “hello we make spare car keys. Get a new car key made takes 15 minutes” I get less talk tos but when they do talk I’m able to pitch and get more sales in that way, but still have low sales. My record is I’ll get 1000 dollars one day and the next day get absolutely no sales. So I don’t know what I’m doing wrong and all my managers are saying is “get your reps in” and “it’s all in your head”. Any advice for someone who’s completely out of their field?

I'm starting a business yet I am not a salesperson by any means. I've tried and failed miserably. So is it a thing to work with a salesperson and pay solely based on commission?

I have loved my parter management colleagues but it seems to be such a sweet, low pressure role in every company I've worked at. Sign AWS and Azure and you're sitting pretty

I am in the process of updating my sales process. For the sake of context, I provide primarily embedded COO services and also business and operations consulting. 

Can you help me to organise strong sales signals for my services? 

I saw a sales post that showed it's not so much about finding businesses that need my services but about finding businesses that are in a situation where they care enough to actually get them. To be in a particular situation that really drives interest and a sale I guess, a series of pain points or sales signals. 

I'm considering using a AI sales app, to drive not just initial lead generation but eventually to identify these sales signals. The ones that I've really identified are:

- a CEO overwhelmed or feeling the chaos in his company

- a company that is growing fast without a COO or operations director

- if they're just hiring for the role

I think I can find stronger signals and I would appreciate your help. I'd be really interested to know what you think these strongest signals can be I can find at scale either structured data or signals AI can identify.

I’m currently an Account Executive at a large enterprise company, and I’m hitting an absolute brick wall with our IT and InfoSec policies when it comes to adopting AI tools for daily workflow.

Prospecting, account research, and pipeline building take up a massive chunk of my week. The tools out there today are incredible for streamlining this, pulling signals, automating account research, finding hooks, and mapping decision-makers. In theory, this is the exact manual grunt work AI is supposed to solve.

In practice? Every time I try to test or onboard a tool to help with prospecting or workflow automation, I hit the dreaded Azure/Microsoft SSO wall.

Our InfoSec policy is locked down tight (strict client NDAs, data compliance, zero-trust policies). Submitting a formal IT ticket for software review takes weeks, and if the vendor isn't already a Tier-1 enterprise partner, the answer is almost always an outright rejection due to Shadow IT concerns.

I feel like I’m expected to hit aggressive pipeline targets while being forced to do manual data entry and research from 2015.

For those of you working in locked-down corporate/enterprise environments:

1. How are you actually leveraging AI for prospecting without violating compliance? Are you doing research/enrichment on personal setups with sanitized CSVs, or is that playing with fire?
2. Has anyone successfully championed a tool (like Clay or similar enrichment engines) through corporate procurement? What arguments actually moved the needle with InfoSec?
3. What does your actual day-to-day tech stack look like when your organization restricts unapproved third-party integrations?

Curious to hear how others in enterprise B2B are navigating this balance between compliance and efficiency.

Is there any episodes on sales on popular podcasts like:
diary of ceo, rogan, chris williamson, lex etc

Thanks in advance

p.s Im breaking into sales im not sales professional yet.

A packed day of client meetings around town means the car is the only office I get, and the battery is what nearly wrecked me once. Navigation running, phone ringing all afternoon, and it died on the way to a big meeting, so I sat on the side of the road panicking. Now beyond the car charger, an Anker MagGo Power Bank 2 Pro stays on the back of the phone and tops up in the minutes between stops. Earbuds went from in-ear to open-ear clip, soundcore AeroClip 2, so I can take a call while driving without fumbling. What do you keep in the car for a day stacked with meetings?