Sales reps make more than their managers?

Breaking down Manager vs Rep Comp

Happy National Kobe Bryant Day! RIP to one of the best to ever do it. Let’s pay our respects and channel our inner Mamba Mentality on the phones today. 🐍 

In today’s Follow Up:

  • Top sales reps making more than their manager 🤑 

  • Tip of the day ✍️ 

  • Sales in the news 🗞️

  • Tool of the day 🛠️

  • Jobs for closers 📞 

Sales Fact of The Day

Personalized subject lines boost response rate by 30.5%.

Source: Backlinko

Sales Reps Make More Than Their Managers?

Every good sales rep faces this dilemma at some point in their career:

Rise the ranks as an individual contributor or become a people manager. 

There are pros and cons to each path.

On one hand, managers get to lead a team, take a seat at the management table, and rise the ranks. Meanwhile, individual contributors rake in the high commissions and are only responsible for their own performance, so they don’t take the heat when their team misses quota.

But, as salespeople, we’ve always got one thing on our minds:

Money.

Top pro athletes make more than their coaches. But is the same true in the corporate world?

To get to the bottom of this, we called in a favor from our friends over at RepVue.

RepVue is the friend who knows way too much information about that one topic. Except that one topic is sales compensation and they get their info straight from the source: sales reps at the top companies in the world.

So how do average earnings between AE’s and managers stack up?

Let’s take a look at the results from RepVue. 👇

Source: RepVue

Out of the 11 companies listed, only two of them show average top earning potential for AE’s (individual contributors) is higher than their AE managers.

So, does this mean you can only make more than your manager at those two companies?

Well… not really.

Our friends at RepVue said it best:

Can you make more money than your manager? Yes.

Will you? Most likely not.

If you’re the top performer on your team? Almost certainly.

- Adam Little, Director of Product @ RepVue.

Besides the earnings potential of the two paths, there are a few key differences you should know about.

As a Manager, you will be judged and rewarded for your leadership skills.

As an Individual Contributor (IC), you will be judged and rewarded for your tactical skills.

How well can you do the job vs. how well can you lead others to get the job done?

If your goal is strictly to make as much as possible every year and not worry about the success of others, then the IC route is likely best for you.

But if you want the chance to climb the ranks from Manager → VP → C-Suite, you’ll need to make the jump into management.

There’s one thing that holds true in both paths: you need to be a top performer.

If you’re not a top performer, you won’t make more than your manager and you won’t rise the ranks of management.

Do you make more than your Manager?

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Sales Tip of The Day

Try using the *magic wand question*.

🗣️If you could wave a magic wand, what would the perfect solution look like to you

This question can be used for selling almost anything by swapping out the underlined half of the question.

This question helps you understand what your prospect really wants and allows the prospect to visualize the solution they really want.

Sales in the News 🗞️ 

Sales Weapon of The Day

Smartlead: Generate cold email leads on autopilot. Connect unlimited email addresses and send unlimited emails with one tool.

Cool Jobs at Cool Companies

Graph of The Day 📊 

What They Say vs What They Do

source: RAIN Group

Sales Meme of the Day

And that’s a wrap!

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