Salesforce is a massive company. Here's how much it pays its sales reps.

Published: Wed, 12/15/21

December 15, 2021

Good morning. We’re halfway through another glorious week, and the clock is ticking down to January 1, when all of this year’s efforts will be wiped away in one fell swoop. We’re right there with you, but for now, let’s take your mind off the grind with this week’s Quota. Today, we’ll look at how much Salesforce pays their reps across divisions, find out how many people actually intended to go into sales, and give some advice to a frustrated young seller who doesn’t think he’s getting his due. Let’s dig in.

NUMBER OF THE WEEK

4.8%

The average voicemail response rate.

Source: ZoomInfo

SALES ROUNDUP

Here’s what’s happening in the sales world this week:

Is buying and selling cars as a woman more difficult than it is for a man? A former car saleswoman and writer for the car site Jalopnik makes the case that it is, referencing a recent story of the UK car salesman who harassed a prospective customer, sending her dozens of texts over several days before eventually being fired. You can read the Jalopnik article here, and find out more about the original story here.
In a bit of fun Christmas-sales news, The Daily Mirror reports that Prince Harry (who we thought was no longer a prince?) was recently mistaken for a Christmas tree salesman while shopping for a tree in Santa Barbara with his wife Megan. A boy, who happened to still be in the shop with his family after it had been cleared out for his majesty (is that what you’re supposed to call them?) ran up to Harry and asked if he worked there, presumably looking for the best price. (For what it’s worth, we think Harry looks more like the guy who would chop them down than the guy who’d sell them).
A federal jury in North Carolina recently convicted a 40-year-old former AT&T sales consultant who used his position to access customer’s personal information in order to steal their identities and commit fraud. Alejandro Garlynn Williams and his accomplices would open new phone lines using the stolen identities, then resell the phones (which required little money up front) on the black market. Williams was found guilty on 21 counts. You can read more about the case here.

FEATURE

"Marc Benioff-3" by jdlasica is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Salesforce is a massive company. Here's how much the salespeople who work there (and the companies they’ve acquired) are making.

Salesforce is a behemoth. The San Francisco company, founded in 1999, has a market cap of 260 billion, and annual revenue of approximately 26 billion (and growing). It controls about 20% of the CRM market share, and is used by over 150,000 businesses worldwide. To say that it dominates the sales technology space would be the understatement of the century.

Salesforce employs a whopping 56,606 people worldwide (as of Jan 21, 2021), many of whom have become Salesforce employees through its various acquisitions. In fact, Salesforce has acquired a total of 69 companies, more than half of those just since 2015.

We were curious to find out how much the biggest player in the sales space pays their salespeople, so we reached out to RepVue, a platform where you can discover 1000s of peer-rated and top-paying sales orgs, to get some figures.

For this article, we’ve decided to focus on the following metrics: base pay and OTE (on-target earnings), quota attainment (the percentage of sales team hitting quota), average deal size, and an average of how much the top earners are expected to make (according to sales reps from that organization). Furthermore, we’ve broken down the numbers based on which segment the salespeople are targeting, then further by division (the companies Salesforce owns which have their own sales teams). Here are the numbers:

Key Accounts

At the top of the food chain are Salesforce’s key account reps, with average deal sizes of $198,571. Key account reps earn a base pay of $127,142, and OTE of $270,000, the highest on this list. Quota attainment is fairly low at 43.6%, but the top earners can make $892,857, with potential to make well over $1m annually.

Enterprise

The second-highest tier in terms of comp is Enterprise. Mulesoft, a technology company owned by Salesforce, has the highest OTE, at $244,545, with a base of $120,277. Average deal size is $216,818 (the highest on this list), and 50% of reps are hitting quota. The top enterprise earner at Mulesoft can expect to earn $773,636.

Tableau, another Salesforce-owned tech company, pays their enterprise reps a base pay of $120,937, and OTE of $239,375. Average deal size is $127,218, and quota attainment is 59.4%. Top earners at Tableau can expect to make $605,625.

Enterprise sales reps working directly for Salesforce have a base pay of $122,922, and OTE of $238,571. Average deal size is $204,448, and quota attainment is 51.8%. Top earners selling Salesforce enterprise can earn $642,337.

Slack, the popular communication platform owned by Salesforce, pays their enterprise reps a base pay of $133,333, and OTE of $238,333. Average deal size is $161,875, but quota attainment is fairly low at 32.5%. The top earner can make $530,833.

Mid-market

Moving down to mid-market, Mulesoft once again tops the list with a base pay of $90,000 and OTE of $182,500. Average deal size is $136,250, but quota attainment is 26.8%, the lowest on the list. Still, the top earner can make $606,428.

Slack is more competitive in their mid-market segment, paying their reps a base pay of $97,333, and OTE of $180,666. Average deal size is $68,966, and quota attainment is 52.3%. The top earner selling Slack in the mid-market segment can make $321,333.

Salesforce’s own mid-market reps make a base pay of $90,074, and OTE of $176,865. Quota attainment is at 47.2%, and average deal size is $72,201. The top earner can make $427,164.

Rounding out the mid-market segment, Tableau reps make a base of $86,000 and OTE of $168,500. Average deal size is $75,600, and quota attainment is at 55%. The top earner can make $369,000.

SMB

In the SMB segment, Mulesoft once again dominates with a base of $78,000, and OTE of $156,000. Average deal size is a high $131,000, and quota attainment is a meager 27%. Notwithstanding the low attainment, the top rep can make $550,000.

Reps selling Salesforce’s own SMB products have a base of $67,635, and OTE of $130,506. Average deal size is $31,932, and quota attainment is 48.2%. The top earner can make $297,567.

Those selling Slack’s product to SMBs can expect a base of $75,000 and OTE of $130,506. Average deal size is $15,700, and quota attainment is a whopping 81%, the highest on this list. The top earner in this segment will make $238,000.

At the bottom of this list are Tableau’s SMB reps, who will make a base of $63,500, and OTE of $111,500. This is likely due to the small average deal size of $11,950. Quota attainment, however, is a respectable 67%, and the top earner will make $231,000.

Conclusions

While these figures can be a bit difficult to parse, when we look at the data, a few things become clear. The first is that there isn’t all that much difference between comp among the various divisions of Salesforce’s companies. The second is that there is a strong correlation between deal size and comp -- the bigger the deals, the higher the compensation. Lastly, every one of these roles has a RepVue score higher than 89, which means they’re highly-rated by the people who work there.

We hope these figures help shed some light on the sales tech giant’s ecosystem, and if you’d like more in-depth compensation and company ratings data, check out Repvue here.

MEME OF THE WEEK

Source: Instagram -- Sales Humor

QUIZ

What is the current Guinness World Record for most cars sold in a single year?

A. 988

B. 2,044

C. 1,425

D. 1,582

SALES FAILS

Each week, we bring you the most cringe-worthy sales moments from across the web. To submit your sales fail story for consideration, click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

“Early in my career, I was selling insurance -- inside sales, phone job. One month, when I happened to be struggling, this older guy called in. He was super talkative and was telling me about life in Vegas back in the fifties, and how you could make so much money in real estate. So we start talking about how many residential apartment buildings he owns and how he wants to switch all the policies over, and even about changing out his life insurance plan, and I’m thinking I’m about to make my whole quarter off this deal, so I’m thrilled. I spent four hours on the phone with him, convinced I’m gonna close it.

We finished the call, but I didn’t hear back from him the next day like we planned. So I called the number he gave me a bunch of times with no answer. Eventually, I figured out which number he had actually called me from and called THAT one. Turns out, the number was to a nursing home and the poor guy suffered from advanced dementia and somehow got ahold of a phone line and started dialing out. Needless to say, it did not close.“

Anonymous, 44 Littleton, CO

GRAPH OF THE WEEK

Source: Sales Humor -- Instagram Survey

ASK THE QUOTA

Want to submit a question and be featured in our advice column? Click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

Dear Quota Team,

I’m new to “real” sales but I’ve been selling my whole life. I’ve had one hustle after another since high school, and I’ve always made more money than anybody my age. I went to college for a year before deciding it was a waste of time, but even then, I had an off-campus parking business and an alcohol delivery business while the other people in my class were doing work-study jobs or mowing lawns for minimum wage.

The point I’m making is that I know business pretty well even though I’m still young. It comes natural for me. The problem right now is that I’m doing sales at a company that doesn’t seem to understand business at all. They’re a manufacturing distributor, but their website looks like it’s from the 90s and they barely have any social media presence at all. The company’s been around for decades, and even though the son and daughter of the original founder run it now, they’re not doing all the obvious stuff that I’d be doing if I was running it.

The same thing goes for the sales team. The sales manager doesn’t want to try any of my ideas like focusing more on social selling, or sending videos to prospects. He shoots all my suggestions down and basically just tells me to focus on my job and not to worry about the higher-level strategy. But I know more than any of them about what’s gonna work these days, so it’s frustrating to not be treated like an equal. I get that older people don’t like change, but if it’s gonna make them more money, they should listen to good ideas, right?

Frustrated in New Jersey

Dear Frustrated,

Someone at your company definitely deserves a raise. But it’s not you, it’s your sales manager, who should get paid extra for putting up with your nonsense. For someone who claims that business comes naturally to them, you don’t seem to know the first thing about it. The fact that you, someone working their first sales job, thinks you know more than the people running a decades-old business speaks to your lack of humility, but even more to your delusions of grandeur.

While it’s true that companies can get stuck in their ways and might miss opportunities, there’s no law that says once you reach the age of forty, you have to defer all decision-making power to someone who’s under twenty-five. And a letter like yours could only have been written by someone who’s never truly paid their dues and never earned something through patience and hard work.

So here’s our advice to you: quit. Leave this place that obviously doesn’t value your brilliance. Then, take your skills and start your own company. That way, you can run it any way you want, and you won’t have to worry about any old people slowing you down. But there’s a problem you might run into -- you need money to start a company. And unless you have rich parents or can convince investors to give you the seed capital, there’s really only one way to raise that cash: stop bragging, stop complaining, pick up the phone, and do your job.

Quiz Answer: D

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Today's email was written by Ken K., Steve R., and Emily H.

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