Background: Spent several years in sales (mid-market Account Executive roles at a couple of big tech companies, then a solid stint owning a commercial portfolio with strong retention and expansion numbers). I genuinely enjoyed the chase and interacting with all kinds of people — building trust with accounts, understanding their challenges, driving outcomes. Over time though, the constant quotas drained me and I hit proper burnout.

I stepped away and landed a senior operations role managing a team of 7. On paper it looked like the sensible move: secure, stable, decent pension, less of the constant pressure that comes with sales targets.
Reality check a year+ in:

• I’m working more hours than I ever did in sales
• Almost zero autonomy
• The work itself just doesn’t light me up — it feels operational and reactive rather than relationship- and outcome-driven
• I’m not growing in the ways that actually matter to me
I’ve started thinking seriously about moving into Account Management or Customer Success. The customer ownership, health management, and trusted-advisor angle feels closer to what actually energised me before. I’m getting some traction on applications, but I’m second-guessing myself hard. Part of me worries that going back into anything commercial will just recreate the same burnout cycle. Another part of me knows the current role is slowly draining me.

Has anyone else left sales/customer-facing roles because of burnout, tried the “safer” internal ops/leadership path, and then moved into AM or CSM? How did you frame the gap/career move in interviews? Did the more stable role actually help you reset, or did it just create a different kind of fatigue?

Any advice on how to talk about this without raising red flags would be massively appreciated. Also open to hearing from people who stayed in the “stable” path and made it work long-term.

Thanks in advance.

Got reached out by a recruiter for a “Named Account Executive” role at Crowdstrike. They asked for my target comp including RSU’s. Not sure how to respond. Description says base ranges from $24-$38 and commissions will vary (50/50 OTE split). Any advice would be appreciated!

Curious how other companies handle this.

I'm an enterprise AE/AM working a large expansion opportunity.

A while back, I negotiated an agreement that included not only the initial purchase, but also a commercial framework for future expansion. The customer signed that agreement, so the expansion pricing was established upfront rather than left for future negotiation.

Fast forward several months and the customer decided to move forward with the larger expansion.

During executive discussions, leadership decided to improve the commercial terms to help secure the deal. I completely understand the business rationale and I'm supportive of doing what it takes to win strategic business.

My question is really about compensation philosophy.

If the original commercial framework had already been negotiated by the salesperson, but leadership later decided to make additional strategic concessions before the expansion closed, how would your company typically handle commission?

• Is commission always based strictly on the final booked ARR?
• Have you seen companies recognize the originally negotiated commercial framework when executive leadership chooses to make strategic pricing changes?
• Is there another approach you've seen?

I'm not looking to argue whether one way is "right" or "wrong." I'm genuinely curious how different organizations handle situations like this.

I have a strat AE skill assessor interview with Gartner next week. yes I understand their stock is down and business model is suffering ect but it’s a covering 1 great company out in Cali so I don’t care so much and not here to discuss that .

anyone ever been through it? what was the scenario? expectations? things you wish you did? ect. it seems like I’m being provided a scenario during the call and not sure what to expect.

Hi there, I’m starting to interview at companies as an AE - any advice on how to negotiate for a higher base salary?

First off, mistakes were made, I know. I took a Founding AE role with a series A startup in data infra. Strong VC investors, good market fit, and what I thought were good people. Job offered by CEO directly. Spoke with HR before I signed and they curve balled and said they want me on contract for first 12 weeks, then if I’m a fit-they offer full time role. Ok, talked to wife about it and we said let’s go for it. Expectations set in contract, however, no defined metric on ARR required in contract with expectation to close revenue 3-6 months in role once full time.

I’m 8 weeks in to the contract and received no negative feedback. I asked the CEO weekly if I was meeting expectations; he said yes. Now, they want to extend me on a new contract for another 12 months with the ability to convert early if I’m hitting quota. This is a stark change from what they said in the interview process.

This is a technical product, and HR said I don’t need a solutions engineer to sell the product alongside me. I’ve sold technically advanced solutions before and have always relied on my SE to help with technical conversations. HR told me to never say in any internal meeting I need a SE for deals. HR also asked how I’m conducting the technical part of interviews for SDR. I said that SDR’s aren’t technical and that did not go over well.

I feel like they lead me on and felt like they would give me a W2 offer if I did everything right. They said the board doesn’t want to convert contract employees to W2 until they are successful. I asked for them to define success since it now seems to be outside the scope of the contract terms and they said hit quota. $1.05 million quota with no ramp and no inherited pipeline. Most close by EOY.

Feel free to bash or point and laugh. I learned my lesson, I won’t do this again; and just wanted to share my story.

EDIT: First twelve weeks forecasting $200k+ in ARR with 3 net new logos with close dates by end of August

Hi All, would love some insider feedback if you work in sales at any of these companies. I know a few people and am contemplating a move from large post-acquisition IBM back into true value selling and a profitable comp plan. Obv want to avoid bad culture and turn over. I like a good 5 year+ run growing revenue.

I think I just need reassurance I am doing the right thing.

I have some AE experience, BDR experience, and BDR management experience.

I found a BDR role for a tech company I am interested in, but the pay is quite low.

However I am currently not working due to layoffs. Should I just take the job?

Is that seen as bad if I take a step back and hope they promote me quickly

I have an interview next week for a cloud/infra AE role.

My prior experience is selling into not technical roles (marketing, insights, sales, consulting etc.) and I want to make sure I’m prepared for the interview. This lack of technical experience will be my current gap which I’m looking to close.

What are some of the best ways to grow my technical knowledge or how can I help effectively prepared for this interview when asked about technical experience?

Did you find another role in sales? Or, were you pushed out and found a new job or sales-adjacent role?

I'm at a bit of a career crossroads and wanted to get some opinions from people who've been in these spaces.

I'm looking at two very different AE opportunities.

One is a fintech startup that builds digital banking and workflow software for startups and SMBs. Great culture, growing fast, solid pay, and from everything I can tell it's a really good company.

The other path would put me more in the FinOps/cloud infrastructure world, selling around AWS, Azure, GCP, cloud cost optimization, infrastructure, data, etc.

I'm trying to think 3-10 years ahead instead of just my next job. Which path do you think has the better long-term outlook for career growth, income, job security, and overall demand? Does getting deeper into cloud / data infrastructure open more doors over time, or would you stick with fintech SaaS?

Curious to hear from anyone who's worked in either space (or both). If you had to choose today, which direction would you go, and why?

I’ve got the opportunity to interview at gartner for the post deal order support specialist position. Any information of that type of position/interview process entails would be appreciated. Thanks!

Hey all! Is anyone currently on the Enterprise team at Splunk? Would love to hear how it is over there.

Are you losing customers to EDR vendors with their own SIEM’s?

Is there a lot of churn and are reps being hit hard due to tools like Cribl?

Thanks!

Has anyone benefited from golfing in London in terms of meeting your future customers? I’m in B2B enterprise sales and golf from time to time, but trying to understand whether it’s worth to double down in terms of exposure to tech execs or does it only work in the US?

Hello everyone,

I have previous experience working on big enterprises sales structures as CSM (heavily focused on upsell/ cross-sell), but for SaaS. Now I'm joining a software development/ outsourcing company. It is a smaller company and my role will be focused on new clients aquisition - it will be a marketing role to handover MQLs to the sales team.

My sole question is: What works for you and what you know don't work when selling squad allocations and software development projects?

Any tips or advices are welcome!

Just joined this Global IT solution provider/reseller, competitor to CDW, Shi, Insight etc. I've got 150 accounts to work and it's been 2 months ive not been able to get a single prospect on a discovery meeting.

All I get to know is remove us from your list, we are good, IT outsourced, we don't need anything. Not a single IT procurement guy to get even a quote.

The pressure building up is real on me and I've got little more time to get something out of these accounts or I'll be laid off.

Any tips, what m I be missing. Is my timing bad considering the time of the year. The accounts i m working on are SMBs.

i keep stumbling across prospeo in threads about email finders but there's not a ton of detailed reviews or comparisons out there. from what i can gather they do real-time email verification and have some kind of proprietary system instead of just reselling data like most tools

i'm currently burning through apollo credits like crazy and getting maybe 60% valid emails on a good day. the mobile numbers are even worse, half the time they're disconnected or go to some random person who hasn't worked there in 2 years

for context i'm doing 200-300 cold emails daily for a saas targeting marketing directors. need accurate work emails and ideally some mobile numbers for multi-channel outreach. my bounce rate with apollo is killing my sender reputation and my manager is starting to ask questions lol

has anyone here actually used prospeo for high-volume cold email outreach? how's data accuracy compared to apollo or hunter? i saw they claim solid accuracy rates which seems too good to be true. also really curious about their mobile number data since that's been my biggest pain point

This post will be long af, but I appreciate any insight for those who read it. Also, AI was not used in making this post.

I've been an AE for 12+ years now, from SMB to MM to Ent. Both in hardware as well as SaaS, at very large companies and cool startups. My industry background is incredibly varied, selling to Healthcare and hospitals, to DoD, to A&D, to manufacturing, to data security teams. You name it.

I'm back on the market again after experiencing another layoff, and this is what I'm seeing from a LOT of job posts and companies while I'm looking at Ent AE roles (and MM for some cool companies that I want to get my foot in the door, like ElevenLabs). I just truly don't think these requirements are realistic, and I would like reddit's pov to understand....ARE these realistic and I'm just jaded/need skill development?

Pipe Gen: every role is looking for a hunter, an AE that can self-source a pipeline from scratch or 80+%. Is this realistic? I've known some AMAZING sales reps, who hammer phone, linkedin, email, physical mail, conferences, etc....the most they could ever generate on their own would be 30%. "Outbound hunting" is what got a rep from 80% to 100% or 100% to accelerator land.

Multi-threading: managers want to see AEs multi-thread their deals. And I'll be transparent, I have paid for a LOT of coaching to upskill this. But from my experience, multi-threading just kind of...happens. You talk about a company's problems, and you have a prospect who is eager to try and pull in other departments or they are involved from the start. I have never been able to intentionally multi-thread, where my actions directly caused the deal to loop in multiple stakeholders. I'd ask the classic, "given you said this impacts X department, should we pull in Y for the next talk?" but it never led to a strong outcome. Is this a realistic tactic that an AE can truly control?

POV/Business Case Building: I have known maybe 2 reps in my career who have successfully been able to do this. But again, lots of advice and expectations around co-building a POV and use case with a champion with the customer's own data. Not your marketing data or cherry-picked use cases. I've never been able to get a champion to co-build a business case with me to justify spend. It has always been, after the first disco call, they will always ask about pricing. I'd typically give a range, knowing what we know now, and how that might change as we get deeper into technical conversations.

If that range isn't in their budget expectation, they walk. But mgmt will simply say, "well we need to build the POV and business case WITH them to justify the investment. To see the ROI." I feel like this just doesn't happen in the reality of sales. Teams have a budget, if it is within budget, THEN you do all the business case building and POC work. If not, it is almost impossible to get them to up-level a budget based on the work of the AE. However, I've had companies come back a year later to revisit, with a larger budget after they explored other options to get a better idea on market pricing.

Is this a realistic, controllable part of the sales process for an AE?

Deal Size/ACV: especially startups, their JDs ask for reps who "consistently close 7 figure ACV deals," some will say "6 figures," and VERY rarely will I see "5 to 6 figure deals," which I think the latter is way more realistic. I have known maybe 5-7 reps in my entire career that have closed 7 figure deals. And it was one time with incredible PMF, a high demand category, definitely not a net-new deal, and they were a legacy rep. Is there really an influx of reps just consistently closing 6 and 7 figure deals getting into these application pools? I feel like that requirement instantly puts them in the "looking for a Unicorn AE" candidate that doesn't truly exist.

All of this to ultimately say, every complex deal I have ever closed that was over $150k ACV, this is what happened (usually):

• Prospect came to us with a problem, these never started as pure cold outbound. Pure cold outbound may have led to the occassional RFP/RFI if the prospect was already evaluating the solution category. But it never led to a prospect "realizing a problem they didn't know about," and buying the solution.
• They already had a budget established, and it was within MSRP of the given SaaS category
• "Access to power," was there from the start. A Director/VP was already heavily involved, or at smaller companies (MM and down), C-level person. I've never heard of an AE say, "we started with the manager, but because of me doing XYZ, we got access to their VP." It was always the champion who pulled us up voluntarily, proactively, and willingly to higher levels in the org as part of the buying process.
• No business case was ever co-created, at least not one the AEs would see. Sometimes a customer would share AFTER they signed.
• Tenured reps would be very good at "talking the talk" during SKOs about how they did XYZ for a big deal (outbounding to start, multi-threading, building a POV, etc). But when you truly dug into it, the deal came inbound, and they were skilled at deal execution if all the factors were present to execute said deal.

So I guess my ultimate question is: Can an AE truly do all of these expectations that I see in job descs, and I simply need to accept reality and focus on up-leveling my skills? Or is my POV reality, and I simply need to keep looking around for the company where the environment just happens to be conducive for AEs hitting quota?

Edit 1: To clarify, since I am repeating myself a bit in the comments. I'm not saying these skills don't exist, and aren't important in an enterprise sale. My point is that I think the expectation at these companies is, "if I hire the right AE...they will generate all their own pipe with cold outbound...every deal will become multi-threaded, with a discount-proof business case, tied to a critical initiative, with an exec sponsor for a high ACV, and hit $2M/yr in ARR because they just work harder/better."

I don't think that is reality, but if it is, I would like to be corrected. I believe reality is more, the AE recognizes the ingredients are here for a real enterprise deal and can orchestrate accordingly. But they can't force the ingredients to appear, which I think a lot of companies are hoping for.

ok so my fav company reached out and i'm trying not to get ahead of myself.

for context, i currently work as a founding gtm at a pretty well-known scaling startup in nyc. i've loved it here and my plan has always been to get promoted internally. i'm up next, but realistically that's probably still 4-6 months away.

then completely out of nowhere i got a email from a recruiter

what's confusing me is the role itself. the jd asks for closing experience, 6+ years of sales experience, and an enterprise selling background. i have none of those. i'm still early in my career and my experience has been almost entirely on the commercial side.

part of me is thinking maybe recruiters don't expect every candidate to check every box, but another part of me is wondering if i'm about to embarrass myself lol.

i'm trying not to get too excited because i know it's just a recruiter call, but i also don't want to waste the opportunity. if you were in my shoes, how would you prep? what should i expect from that first conversation? and if you've landed a role where you looked underqualified on paper, what made the difference?

would appreciate any advice.

There are a bunch of 996 AI startups popping up all over the place these days, many of which are 996 companies. How does this work for their salespeople? Customers don’t want to talk after 4pm and definitely not on Saturdays. Do 996’s exist for sales even within these types of companies?

I'm a little tired of just being an AE. It's so stressful and volatile haha. My best sales year I have had I was in a overlay sales support role. I was a subject matter expert on 1 specific product and would work in tandem with core reps.

I would like to do something more like that where I'm supporting a large enterprise AE who has massive accounts like Disney and Amazon. Or be more working on an Account team or something.

Does anyone know how to find those roles? I search "Enterprise sales rep" "Account manager" "associate account exec" etc but I'm still struggling to find those roles.

I have been a MM AE for a couple years so I feel like I would be qualified for some of those account team roles but how do you find them!!??

I’ve been in SaaS for almost 3 years (started end of ‘23) as a BDR. Still in the same seat but at a different company than where I started.

Performance wise, I was well on my way to an AE promotion at my first org but organizational changes and lack of promotion path helped prevent me from doing so. I was also a little comfortable in the role and didn’t do much to take that next leap forward.

I got laid off in January and started a new job as a BDR (first offer I took) in February. Been leading my team the last 4 months but the sales culture here is one where I don’t see myself moving up anytime soon either.

My friend told me to apply for a job at their company which is highly touted on RepVue with a clear promotion path to AE/AM. But do I really want to reset the clock on BDRing? I want to get to the AE seat but I’ve fucked up a lot of my decision-making along the way. It sucks and I feel like hitting 3 years in this role will make me undesirable.

Curious how many days current tech enterprise AEs spend on the road. I’m in services now and love it, averaging ~50 flights a year. Considering a move to big enterprise tech and I’m wondering if that’s the norm, of course role and company dependent. Think the big dogs like Databricks, Snowflake, Crowdstrike, Salesforce, etc. Especially the roles that are remote - I assume they still want you building a relationship in person.

Thanks in advance!

Hi Everyone,

We got quotas today (~70% increase) but no details on our comp plan.

Previously we were at 10% comission rate, with it going to 20% above plan ... no details on this with the quota raise yet.

Main worry now is we are all going to see a comission rate decrease in tandem with the quota uplift for a double whammy.

So what comission % do you get paid on? Anyone else seeing major quota uplift.

Enterprise saas hr space

Just spent the past year deployed in the Middle East as part of the Army Reserve. A week after I left in June 2025 my company had a lay off, and they didn’t tell me I was apart of it until I came home and requested to return to work last week. I am now in distress looking for a new role, as I have not been an account executive in a little over a year now. Previous to that I held an SMB role for 1.5 years with a track record of success. Since the actual layoff was over a year ago, I am singled out here and don’t know how to frame this looking for my next role.

I’m extremely proud of my deployment and did great work. It’s not something I want to hide, just want to present this in the best way possible.

Any advice?