Table of Contents
- What does "selling software" mean?
- The 3 responsibilities of an entry level software sales rep
- Career progression in software sales
- FAQs on software sales roles
In Australia, entry level software sales roles earn an average of $95k per year*.
Within 4-5 years of starting in software sales, you could be selling to 1000+ employee companies and have a total package north of $250k+ per year.
But why are packages in software sales so high?
It all comes down to what you’re selling - business-to-business software tools (ie: UberEats).
The increased adoption of software in recent years has seen employee count in the software industry grow twice as much as any other industry in Australia during the last decade (Tech Council of Australia, 2023).
Sales is the second most in-demand role for software companies (behind engineers) as reps are responsible for finding new business customers to adopt their tools.
Yet, there’s a distinct skill shortage as many job seekers think they require a technical background or previous sales experience to get started - which simply isn’t true.
Let’s dig into some more info to help break this myth down and uncover if software sales is the right career for you.
Introduction To Our Guests
To pull together this article, I interviewed two graduates who landed roles through our program.
Massive shout-out to Raiden Long (MDR @ Verkada) and Mia Muriti (SDR @ Buildpass) for their time 🧡🧡🧡.
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What Does "Selling Software" Mean?
Unlike the majority of sales roles, which sell directly to consumers (eg: insurance & solar).
Your job will be selling software tools to other business owners.
Think about selling tools such as Canva, Xero or Uber Eats to businesses of all shapes and sizes.
Deal sizes are usually an annual subscription that range anywhere from $10K to $10M+ per year. Explaining why software sales reps are paid higher than reps in other industries - higher deal size = higher commission cheques.
Here’s an example: did you know that the majority of restaurants on UberEats were onboarded by sales reps?
Busy restaurant owners don’t have time to download and learn how to use a software tool.
It’s the job of a sales rep to uncover business problems and provide a personalised demonstration of that product.
Most reps start off working with small businesses (eg: 5 to 20 employees) and overtime start selling into Governments or ASX Listed companies with 1000+ employees.
The software sales cycle
The software sales cycle is a 7 step process, describing the usual “buying process” that businesses go through when procuring software.
Why 7 steps? Unlike direct-to-consumer sales, it’s unrealistic to expect a $10k+ / year deal to be closed over one cold call. The 7 step sales process helps companies build trust with potential leads, to receive the required approval across all business stakeholders.
Here’s a hypothetical example from an Earlywork Academy partner company, BrightHR.
BrightHR is a HR & safety software platform used by over 95,000 businesses worldwide.
To bring on a business customer it’ll often require more than just a phone call and a contract being signed as the internal implementation processes are complex.
A potential sales cycle could look like:
- Prospecting: identifying and researching small to medium sized businesses that would benefit from the BrightHR platform.
- Outreach: contacting the right person from that company to let them know about BrightHR.
- Qualification: running a Discovery Call to see if they will actually benefit from the BrightHR platform.
- Pitch & Negotiation: coordinating a product demo to the company use case. The demo is often personalised using information found in the Prospecting and Qualification stages
- Closing: finalising important documentation and alignment on contract details.
- Account Management: ensuring that the company is onboarded to the BrightHR platform correctly, based on information gathered in the Pitch and Negotiation stages.
The 3 Responsibilities Of A Software Sales Rep
The most common industry title for an entry level software sales role is called a Sales Development Representative (SDR).
You may also see the titles Business Development Representative (BDR) or Inside Sales Representative (ISR) used interchangeably with SDR, though sometimes, there may be slight differences in seniority or the types of customers you focus on.
For most entry-level software sales positions, your main objective will be to generate new business opportunities by way of booking discovery calls for the Account Executive you work with (a more experienced sales team member).
Account Executives are responsible for ultimately closing the sale, though in some cases, an entry-level salesperson will still be involved in the discovery call.
Breaking down the 3 responsibilities
Now that we understand that the key responsibilities of an SDR are to find new business opportunities for AEs to close - the three key buckets of responsibilities for an SDR begin to make sense.
Effectively the SDR role is concentrated on the first 3 steps of the 7 step sales process (see image below 👇)
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An important caveat, the amount of time spent on say prospecting vs outreach will differ from company to company.
Job Description 1: Prospecting
Prospecting is the process of identifying and researching high quality leads that could potentially turn into new business for your company. It’s made up of two tasks:
Understand your ICP
An ICP is your Ideal Customer Persona. In B2B SaaS these are the set of characteristics (eg: employee number, company age…) that define the type of company you should target with your outreach.
Manav comments that he likes spending a high percentage of his time identifying the correct ICP. Often re-visiting his ICP daily and funnelling it down by the 3Ps - pain, person & product.
Identifying customer personae and conducting research
After compiling a list of companies that match your ICP, an SDR would often dive deeper into the company employees on a tool such as Linkedin.
Doing so allows the SDR to understand who they should reach out to initially.
Job Description 2: Outreach
After identifying and researching the relevant economic buyer or decision maker, it’s time for the SDR to make contact.
As your role consists of finding and qualifying new business opportunities, initial contact will often come in the form of cold outreach - reaching out to someone who has never heard of your company before.
Here are some channels that an SDR would use to contact a lead:
- Cold emails
- Cold calls
- Cold Linkedin outreach
- Referral or introduction from a mutual contact
Both Raiden and Mia mentioned that they spend between 50%-60% of their time in a week reaching out to new leads.
Manav notes that outreach can also come in the form of engaging with potential leads on social media or creating social media content on your own accounts.
Job Description 3: Admin and follow ups
As an SDR, your quota will often be a certain amount of discovery calls booked in a month or quarter (depending on the company). Meaning that you’ll often be identifying, researching and contacting 100s of leads in a week.
Raiden comments that in order to keep on top of lead activity it’s important to log all outreach with specific notes and follow up tasks.
He personally dedicates around 10% of his time every week to revisit these notes in his Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and cites it as a key practice to consistently follow up. As most leads won’t book a discovery call from just one point of contact.
Career Progression From The SDR Role
At any given time, there can be 100s of business leads moving through each of these steps.
Making it impossible for one person to manage all of their leads through each sales cycle step.
Hence, to perform each of the steps well, companies have allocated different stages of the sales cycle to two common roles, split by seniority:
- Sales Development Representative (SDR): focused on prospecting, moving and qualifying leads through the sales pipeline. This role will focus on generating new business opportunities and your commission is paid usually on a set dollar value for each meeting booked.
- Account Executive (AE): if you’re meeting SDR quotas, you will be promoted to the closing role of an AE. You will own the pitch, negotiation and closing aspects of the cycle and your commission is a percentage of revenue
From day one, you will be in the new business development role of an SDR. As you progress and better understand the business, you can quickly be promoted to an Account Executive role within 12-24 months.
After moving into an AE role, you start off closing smaller deals and over time ramp up to larger deals in the millions of dollars a year - see image below.
FAQs On Software Sales Roles
How much do I get paid in software sales roles?
In Australia, entry level SDR roles average out to $95k on-target-earnings (OTE).
Within 12-18 months, you can be promoted to an AE working on smaller deals with a total package around $150k OTE ($100k base, $50k expected comms).
Within 4-5 years of starting in software sales you can become an Enterprise AE, selling to 1000+ employee companies and have a total package north of $250k+ OTE per year.
How does compensation work for SDR roles?
An SDR’s compensation package is usually made up of two components; base salary and expected commission from hitting target. Before taking into account any commission, base salaries normally range from $60k to $75k for entry level SDR roles.
Regarding commission, this varies from company to company, however, most companies work off a set dollar value per discovery call booked.
Are you making in person sales or via the phone?
Unless you apply for a field sales role, SDR jobs are all done over the phone, email or video meeting (eg: Zoom, Google Meets).
Choose to work from home or in an office, you’ll be provided with the right equipment and software to excel in your role.
Can you work remotely in software sales?
Absolutely (but clarify with the company you’re interviewing for).
Working in any sales role at a software company allows for hybrid working conditions as the product itself doesn’t require any in-person demonstrations
Although uncommon for SDR roles, we’ve spoken to AEs in the past who live in the Gold Coast and work at companies based in Sydney.
*Salary data in this article is an average from the compensation packages of 100+ program graduates who have landed software sales roles.
