The end of cushy tech sales jobs

Published: Wed, 12/20/23

December 20, 2023

Welcome back to The Quota. Just a heads up: we’ll be taking next week off for the holidays, but will be back the following week with another glorious issue to kick the new year off right. For now, settle in with this week’s issue, where we’ll talk about the end of cushy tech sales jobs, share a Fail about selling to friends and family, and give some advice to a rep who's falling short on his goals. Enjoy.

NUMBER OF THE WEEK

37% of salespeople closed deals of $500,000 or more without meeting the customer in person.

Source: LeadSquared

SALES ROUNDUP

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

The Daily Mail recently wrote an article about Paul Maddison, a double-glazing (this means windows, we looked it up) salesman, who, in 1995 won a £22 million jackpot with his business partner, at the time, the largest jackpot in UK history. Maddison recently passed away, and the Mail wrote about how tight-fisted he was with his winnings, which, we should add, is unlike the typical sales rep. You can read more about Paul here.
Sales tech giant Salesforce has gobbled up another company, acquiring automated commission-management platform, Spiff. Founded in 2017, Spiff serves up a low-code interface designed to make it easy for businesses to create a sales compensation plan. You can read more about the acquisition here.

FEATURE

Arnett Murry/shutterstock.com

Salesforce Signals the End of Cushy Tech Sales Jobs

It’s been a pretty brutal year at Salesforce. Or a great one, depending on whom you ask. If you’re one of the 8,000 people who have been laid off since January, it’s probably the former. If you’re one of the activist investors watching stock prices soar, it’s probably the latter.

Bloomberg interviewed over 40 people at Salesforce for a recent article, and the general sentiment was that the “golden age” of sales, which began in the 2010s, was at an end. It used to be the philosophy at Salesforce that you couldn’t have too many salespeople. And when the company hired 30,000 workers during the pandemic, (most of them in sales and marketing), it really drove that point home. But the company expected the pandemic culture of remote work to continue, and instead, many people went back to in-person work when it subsided. This took a toll on the company that had just nearly tripled its staff and spent $28 billion acquiring Slack. The tech industry at large was no longer growing the way it had been, and the easy money from renewing contracts with growing companies was starting to dry up. The sharp dropoff in in-person meetings made closing deals harder, too. When the company found itself in excess of thousands of salespeople amidst slowing growth last fall, a series of layoffs began, and the workforce has since been slashed by 10% this year alone.

In the boom times, multiple people could make commissions off of the same sale, a practice that forged camaraderie among employees, Salesforce COO Brian Millham told Bloomberg. Now, fewer people can claim commission from one sale, forcing colleagues into fierce competition.

Over the last decade, social media influencers have built up sales as one of the most lucrative and exciting types of work, and the solar sales culture is a testament to that. Sales, TikTok and Instagram personalities promised, was a job where you could make a lot of money while wining and dining high-profile customers, and the most important qualities for the job were simply affability, charisma, and charm.

Now, the remaining staff at Salesforce is experiencing harsh and often unattainable quotas and the threat of PIPs (performance improvement plans) that herald the pink slip down the line. Managers are keeping a closer eye on performance, publicly ranking every salesperson’s results, and using AI to catch those who are fudging numbers by overestimating leads or discounting prices for clients too easily.

Many younger people in the sales industry have only known the boom times, but Salesforce is entering a different era — “ohana 2.0,” as Benioff told Bloomberg, or, put another way, “performance culture.” Meanwhile, job satisfaction at Salesforce has declined significantly since the tech downturn, according to data from RepVue Inc. “Now it’s just another big tech company,” Bloomberg concludes.

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MEME OF THE WEEK

Source: Instagram -- Sales Humor

QUIZ

Which state has the most real estate agents in the U.S.?

A. Florida
B. California
C. Texas
D. Wyoming

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).

I used to sell home improvement services for a pretty big regional contractor. This was my first sales job, so I hadn’t learned some of the “lessons” one learns after spending enough time working in sales. We had good inbound lead flow, and we did a lot of prospecting from networking events and things like that.

A friend of mine found out where I was working and reached out to me. We weren’t super close, but we had been friends since elementary school. I was excited to have sourced my own deal and was going to make a higher commission rate on it than if it had been a deal that came in from one of our mailers.

He had just bought a house and needed a bunch of new windows, which was basically our bread and butter. I quoted him out and he agreed and gave us a nice deposit. Everything was going well and I was convinced that since I knew him, he would be an easy client and one I wouldn’t have to worry about at all.

Well, as it turns out, this became one of my most pain in the ass deals I’d ever worked. His wife, who I had met a handful of times, became the point person for the job, and basically treated me and the company as if we were her servants. She changed the color of the windows and hardware at least three times, then, when the windows finally came in, she actually refused to let us install some of them because she claimed they weren’t what she ordered.

To make matters worse, she had her husband calling me all the time to complain about what was happening. He would sigh after I picked up the phone and practically beg me to just make the changes because "she was going to kill” him if he couldn’t make it work. It was the most stressful deal I’d ever worked because I actually cared about his friendship and didn’t want to tell him off like I probably would have if it had been anyone else.

We ended up getting everything done but by the end of the job, his wife pretty much hated me (for no good reason) and our friendship was never the same after that. After this experience, I pretty much stay away from selling to friends and family. It almost always gets weird and usually isn’t worth the money or the trouble.

Anonymous Location withheld

GRAPH OF THE WEEK

Source: LinkedIn Poll -- December 2023

WORTH A PEEK

What are the characteristics of an ideal sales hire? According to a recent article in HubSpot, it’s not always what you think. Check out which characteristics sales recruiters should look for here.

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

This is my 3rd year as a sales rep. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my business degree after college, so I decided to give sales a shot. People told me it would be a good first career to help me learn how to deal with people in a professional setting and that I could make a ton of money.

I set a goal for myself to make six figures this year, which only the top five percent of reps in my company are making. Well, the year is coming to an end and it doesn't look like I'm going to hit my goal. I'm three years in and I'm still not making the type of money I thought I'd be making by now. Even though I hit my quota this year, I'm still not in the six-figure club.

I do enjoy the highs of the job, like when I close a big deal, but I've been getting discouraged at not being one of the top reps at my company yet. Even with all the hours I'm putting in, I'm still not reaching my financial goals. Any advice?

Discouraged in the Midwest

Dear Discouraged,

If only the top five percent of reps at your company are making six figures, then it’s no wonder you haven’t managed to hit your goal. It’s not that you shouldn’t strive to be in the top five percent (of course you should), it’s that you need to put yourself in a position that maximizes your chances of making as much money as possible.

There are plenty of companies out there where you can hit six figures just by being average. Some industries that come to mind are tech, pharmaceutical, and any industry where you’re selling high-ticket items. Too many reps decide to climb a mountain without taking the time to consider which mountain is the best one to climb. Do your research, then put yourself in a place where you can maximize your time and efforts. Good luck.

Quiz Answer: A. Florida (222,293 real estate agents) — (you can read the source article here)

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Today's email was written by Ken Kupchik, Erica Furgiuele, Steve Rado, and Emily Hill.

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