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by pmarreck 725 days ago
My research seems to indicate the opposite

Sales engineer average salary: https://builtin.com/salaries/dev-engineer/sales-engineer

Various pure sales salaries (I picked Tech Sales Representative but all of them seem lower except for senior titles like VP Sales): https://builtin.com/salaries/sales/tech-sales-representative

This is for software/technical sales, I believe, and not necessarily industrial technology sales

Perhaps your pure sales peers were just very good, or they undercut you, or you were in an industry that didn't correlate with this... Or my data is wrong, or something else is amiss to explain this /shrug

1 comments

Your data is wildly wrong for B2B tech sales.
I mean... From a single anecdotal data point, you can extrapolate in any direction...
Sure, and without understanding the context of the data you are looking at, you can make all sorts of basic mistakes. Which you have done here. For instance, your "sales person" salary page you linked to is more likely to capture data for Sales Engineers than Account Managers. (Nobody calls their AMs "technical sales representatives.") I'm guessing you also don't understand the typical differences in base / commission ratios for account managers versus SEs - account managers are usually 50:50 while SEs are usually 70 - 80% base pay. That has a dramatic impact on total comp when someone is above 100% of their goal, especially with the impact of accelerators. Did you know sales engineers are frequently "pooled", supporting 2 - 4 account managers, with their commission typically being an average of the AMs they support? That's another thing that can drag SE comp down that basically never happens to AMs. And on and on and on.

But, rather than admitting that you are out of your depth and showing some curiosity, you went with the "I spent five seconds googling this and you're wrong" shtick. Good job, or something.

As for me, I'm not extrapolating from a single data point here. I worked in the industry for 15 years. I was a hiring manager for 5. I spent a lot of time talking to a lot of people about their salary expectations, both at the company I worked for and others.

Alright, fair enough. I'm curious about the space, and you've elucidated some things. Sorry for seeming like a know-it-all from a single source.

Is the job "fun"? (For someone's definition of "fun", when it comes to work, of course... A big payday may be "fun", entertaining clients may be "fun")