Ryan Walsh

RepVue

Trusted insights about sales orgs available to candidates during the hiring process is non-existent, resulting in a hiring experience that is unbalanced and flawed.  This has manifested itself in skyrocketing attrition, dropping quota attainment, and reps in roles that are not a fit.  RepVue is challenging this status quo and flipping the odds to the favor of the candidate during the hiring process.

Work in a sales organization?  Anonymously and objectively rate your experience with that employer today at RepVue.com.

Founder and CEO

GrowthLine Consulting, LLC

(ON PAUSE WHILE I FOCUS 100% on RepVue)

GrowthLine Consulting helps emerging growth technology companies, focusing on their value proposition (art) and go to market strategy (science).  Engagements have included:

**Eton Solutions ~ Consultant and fractional CRO: 8/2017 through 4/2020
**Teamworks ~ Consultant: multiple engagements
**Bright Wolf ~ Consultant: 10/2019 through 12/2019
**Dor Technologies ~ Advisory Board member: 5/2017 through 8/2019
**Snapsolv ~ Advisory Board member: 8/2016 through 8/2019
**Epifany (Stealz) ~ Consultant: 9/2017 through 7/2018
**Spreedly ~ Consultant and fractional CRO: 9/2017 through 2/2018
**Icimo ~ Consultant: 9/2017 through 2/2018
**Remarque Systems ~ Consultant: 8/2017 through 1/2018 (successful exit via acquisition)
**ShiftWizard ~ Consultant and fractional CRO: 2/2017 through 9/2017
**Percona ~ Consultant: 5/2017 through 10/2017

Founder

ChannelAdvisor

Day 1 employee.  Rose through the ranks to build/lead ~230-person global sales org with operations in North America, Europe, South America, APAC. Results: 
   ---   3-year CAGR prior to taking over sales of 5.9%
   ---   6-year CAGR while running the sales org of 20.8%, $40m to $113m (IPO 2013)

It was not easy.

Chief Revenue Officer

Vice President of Sales

Director of Sales

Enterprise Sales Executive

GoTo.com, Inc

Category Manager

Passionate about:
Holding sales leaders accountable for the selling environment they are responsible for.
Helping sales professionals find roles that perfectly fit both their skills and their values.
Development and fine-tuning of SaaS and recurring revenue engines.

Top performers, when highly compensated, put up with a LOT.

But over time, small annoyances you don't think matter add up. Things like:

That small tweak to the compensation plan.
A slightly tougher internal deal desk review process.
Taking just a couple accounts away and giving them to the new rep.
(Another) new manager that’s slightly weaker than the last one.
Having to kind of train that new manager.
Continual change in their sales tech stack.
Adding another layer between them on the C level.
Layering on just one ‘more’ internal process to follow.

The breaking point for them is VERY quiet. It’s simply the difference between ignoring the recruiter outreach from that well known tech company vs. taking the call.

Your job, as a sales leader, is to ensure that they don’t take those calls.

Those little annoyances that you think won’t make a difference may not make a difference.

But over time, if there are enough of them, you’ll end up getting burned. And many times they won’t come to you first to complain. 

Because for most top performers, complaining simply is not in their nature.

Maybe go check in on a few of your top performers today.

Important: check salaries AND quota attainment at 13,000 of the world's most well known b2b organizations: https://lnkd.in/ew34ThC2

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Founder and CEO at RepVue | Former public SaaS CRO | Still sell EVERY DAY | Follow me for daily insights about anything you'd ever want to know about a career in sales.

I haven’t answered my phone from an unknown number in 8+ years.

Yet we’ve bought ~50 software tools over the past few years. It isn’t that buyers won’t get on the phone to talk with sales reps. They will. Even I will, I do it almost every week for something or another.

It’s just that they will ONLY do it on their timeline.

90% of the purchases we’ve made were initiated by us - nobody pushed us into the buyer journey, we took the first few steps (sometimes most of the steps), but then ALWAYS engaged a sales professional in the journey.

Here are 8 considerations (this is just my personal experience, someone else’s may be different) from a CEO who’s company has purchased over 50 software tools in the past few years.

1/ I don’t answer the phone 

2/ I don’t listen to voicemails, so there are no call backs. I typically don't read the voicemail transcripts.

3/ I read every email that comes in, and even if I’m not interested, if the email is relevant and personalized, I might respond letting you know we’re not interested, sometimes with a ‘reach back out in X months’. But I have a high bar for email quality. But I do read the emails.

4/ If the email isn’t great but still hits on a problem or pain that we’re actively considering, I will probably will forward it along internally.

5/ If a company has reached out in the recent past and I responded, I probably won’t respond the second time if nothing has changed, regardless of the quality of the message, unless it’s beyond the time of ‘reach back out in X months’.

6/ If we’re in a position to evaluate the product my first step would be to forward this to whoever internally who owns this part of the business (this is true for us even though we're only like 15 employees)

7/ Marketers: 90% of the purchases we have made were initiated by us - nobody pushed us into the buyer journey, we took the first few steps (yes this is important). Awareness matters.

8/ The CEO is rarely the decision maker.

The best sales orgs are really good at driving top of funnel awareness and you won't have to just grind outbound for every opportunity. Top of funnel awareness and how that is accomplished is IMO going to be one of the largest shifts in buyer/seller interaction over the next 5 years. New mediums, etc.

We’re tracking seller sentiment on inbound lead flow at the organizational level - it’s the worst sentiment scores of everything we track (“I don’t get enough leads!!!”). Make sure to dig into how a potential organization is driving funnel, and get really specific when you’re interviewing for that 2025 role.

Here are 14,000 sales orgs with salaries, reviews, quota attainment, and top of funnel / lead flow ratings: https://lnkd.in/et56cuxT

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YingJie Chin 陈颖杰

Are you paid what you’re worth? Are you paid a reasonable market rate?

How do you even know? Well, if you’re in tech sales, this is what your peers are earning as of last month - October 2025.

You have to compare apples to apples though, because ‘enterprise AE’ at one company may be totally different than ‘enterprise AE’ at another company. Heck one company’s ‘enterprise’ may look more like another one’s ‘SMB’ division.

So look at it from a few angles:

 -- Are you doing similar deal sizes?
 -- What should my quota be? We’re still seeing 10x base as the quota for tech and software roles (so base of $100k, you’d probably have around a $1m annual recurring revenue quota.
 -- How hard are your deals, how long do they take?
 -- Very important - how many people are actually getting to the OTE (or is it a FauxTE)!!

In any case here’s a quick view to what some of the tech compensation metrics looked like in October of this year. Will try to update this monthly and share here (drop a follow).

Could be aspirational for you, or possibly a gut punch.

You can check these types of metrics (salaries, quota attainment, etc) at the company/role level as well for most GTM roles here: https://lnkd.in/eZx4zq3j

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15 years at a company, laid off via email.
15 years at a company, not a phone call.
15 years at a company, no word from the manager.
15 years at a company, no opportunity to give feedback.
15 years at a company. See ya.

"But hey we did so well with a severance package, it's better than average."

"The 'impacted' employees will always be part of the fam."

Remember this kind of stuff when you are:

*Considering backing out of an offer you accepted for a better one
*Considering leaving a company for a better opportunity
*Considering taking that recruiter call for a co. that looks intriguing
*Considering how much work-life balance you sacrifice for your 'work-fam'

They will 100% look out for number 1.

So should you.

Free resource with employee sourced salaries, reviews and ratings of 14,000+ orgs here: https://lnkd.in/ezpN47v5

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Sales teams are expanding, not contracting. Counter-narrative alert 🚨

Few know this, because of doom scrolling. They’re hiring sellers. Hiring folks that support sellers.

Hiring managers.
They’re growing.

They want to do more revenue in 2026 than they did in 2025.
They want to do more revenue in 2027 than they will do in 2026.

There isn’t a playbook to do that effectively without more sellers.
There isn’t an AI tool that has solved this riddle, even though there are a lot of great 'efficiency tools'.

So please, take a break from doom scrolling and consume some facts.

Of the ~250 largest b2b sales orgs (mainly tech) that we track, roughly 70% of them are growing RIGHT NOW. They’ve added more heads over the past 3 months. 12 months? No brainer, yes.

Net, there are an additional 3,000 tech sales roles across these orgs that didn’t exist 3 months ago (NET!).

I’ll share a sample of some of the ones that are growing, and some that aren’t just to balance it out a bit.

We have 10s of 1000s of salaries, reviews, and jobs for these orgs, adding 1000s every week: https://lnkd.in/eJdTXvJh

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When a top performer is passed over for a promotion in favor of an external candidate, they'll almost always start exploring other options. Unfortunately, the org won't realize what they had until it's too late.

The org always figures they can keep the top performer AND hopefully add another one externally.

Oops - see below for how big a mistake this could be for their bottom line.

This is at 85% attainment. Imagine the impact at 150% attainment.

"Management" usually doesn't think through:

-- The time a seat is open (there's always a gap)
-- The hard and soft costs for training someone new
-- The realistic ramp up time for someone new ("REALISTIC")
-- Then how these things and more compound in an ARR model

This is just a basic template I'm sure some folks have one that's more involved... But it will tell the same story.

Salaries for 13,000 companies (+ quota attainment): https://lnkd.in/e9dvpR63

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Product market fit can come on quickly.  It can also vanish quickly.

Your product evolves, changes, grows, improves, expands. The market does too.

Especially now, your org has the ability to evolve and improve much much faster than the market will evolve, which is a more organic thing.

And as you grow, evolve, improve, leadership increases sales capacity.  Adds more sellers. Grows the team.

And keeps growing. And growing.

And then, all of the sudden, the capacity has outpaced the size of the market. And the growth rate of the market isn't fast enough to keep up with the hiring.

And that, simply put, is why the quota attainment metrics are falling.

Yes, there is more that can play into it, but this is the starting formula for how you should evaluate opportunities.

Below are the top 20 VC backed orgs based on quota attainment YTD, with a min of 25 ratings from only current verified AEs YTD.

Side note, we are customers of 4 of these orgs - can anyone name even one of them?

Quota attainment data on 10k+ sales orgs: https://lnkd.in/eNEFURBF

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World's top 20 publicly traded tech companies for sales people as of October 2025 (min 30 ratings):

1. Guidewire Software 92.99
2. Google 82.57
3. Vertex 88.99
4. Pure Storage 88.55
5. ServiceNow 88.33
6. Crowdstrike 87.58
7. Workday 87.45
8. The Trade Desk 87.41
9. Snowflake 87.40
10. Toast 87.36
11. Arista 87.25
12. Workiva 87.03
13. Tyler Technologies 86.52
14. Microsoft 86.28
15. Sailpoint 86.25
16. Monday (dot com) 86.25
17. Samsara 86.18
18. Doordash 86.02
19. Box 85.99
20. Cisco Systems 85.78

Filter 1,600 public companies or 14,000 total companies in our company database here: https://lnkd.in/ersAwUs3

What surprises you about this / who's missing?

Want to earn $1M in 2026 in your sales role? It's not easy, but possible.

I've seen/managed a lot of top performers, and they are WORLD CLASS professionals. Want to join them in the $1M w-2 club? Check as many of these boxes as you can:

-- Always be on time. Calls, meetings, presentations, follow ups.

-- If you committed something to a prospect, do it. When you said you'd do it. A follow up question, materials, a proposal, whatever. In other words, have impeccable follow-up skills (do it quickly, do it succinctly, don't leave anything out)

-- Take notes and be able to reference those notes in the future (I'm not getting into what systems to use, just that you need to be able to VERY quickly reference prospect pain, next steps, key players, etc)

-- Have a professional demeanor. Yes, getting friendly with your prospect can pay dividends, but the pinnacle of top earning reps are ALWAYS professional.

-- High activity. Even enterprise / strat reps are high activity. Especially when you might not think they need to be active. They are active. Every week. Every month. Every quarter. Always thinking 6 months out with activity.

-- Add value to prospects. They take time to be a student of the prospects' businesses AND a student of the industry. They share relevant articles. They converse intelligently about macro factors impacting the prospect's industry. This takes time. This takes effort. The best of the best put that time and effort in.

-- Genuinely curious about the prospects' business, value proposition, customers, model, strategy. They know the businesses inside and out.

-- Lastly, and you knew this was coming: It's really hard for poorly run sales organizations without very strong product-market fit to sustain $1m w-2 earners. World class sellers recognize this and ensure they are in an environment that can support it. They KNOW if their territory can support the earnings they want.

This isn't a be-all list, but common themes I've seen in 1% reps.

We're now tracking >150 sales roles where top performers earn $1M or more. Check them out and 1000s of other company profiles: https://lnkd.in/gJJGsCjk

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There was a shortcut that fast tracked me from AE to CRO in ~6 years.

I was an AE from ‘02 - ‘07 (or so) selling SaaS. 6 years later I was the CRO of a then public SaaS co. 

Before I share the shortcut, sit through the crap we had to do back then (boomer post): 

 - We used to log everything in the CRM manually. It’s way easier now. 

 - We used to manually drip prospects every month with fresh content (I took the bcc approach). It’s way easier now.

 - We used to do our own demos. It’s way easier now (someone else can do them - something called a sales engineer!).

 - We used to manually cadence closed lost deals (usually via a CRM task). It’s way easier now.

 - We used to do research to find accounts and then ‘trade’ contact information via Jigsaw (IYKYK). It’s way easier now. 

 - When we found contacts we'd email them and call them manually. It’s way easier now.

I did have an incredible shortcut back in the day though. It was working really really hard; harder than everyone else on the team. The above playbook? I just got into the office and did it every. single. day. Day after day after day.

Many think their shortcut is going to be some technology or tool, or hack, and are constantly in search of it.

Those can save time and help the process for sure, and combined with being talented, you can be successful in sales (if you land in the right org).

But if you want to get to the C level… Well, there is a shortcut, and it’s doing hard things over and over.

I guarantee you someone else on your team has this already figured out.

At least there's a shortcut to vet sales orgs from other sellers to see which ones are awesome and which ones suck (we built it!): https://lnkd.in/esGEkvhj

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Congrats to Navan on the IPO! They raised $923M via this public offering. 

This implies a $6.7B valuation (need to also check where they end today as it could vary significantly), this is good but also lower than a >$9B valuation they did in the private markets most recently. Raised a total of $2B in VC/private funds through some tier 1 investors over the years.

I summarized this one a month or so ago (pic). This is great news for the tech ecosystem, we need more of these >$500M ARR companies going public!

Super interesting list of 219 tech companies that are currently VC backed with more than 1,000 FTEs.

https://lnkd.in/e3x4GPqH

Who's next from this list?

2023 CFO: "The last 20 reps we hired are bringing in $312.7K new business per year, let's add another 10."

(SOME) 2025 CFOs: “How can we make our smaller team of sellers even more successful without just adding heads or much cost?”

The problem is not enough CFOs (and CEOs) have moved on from 2023.

You should be able to feel one of these two vibes in your organization in daily actions, communications, and decisions.

The 2023 CFOs will eventually become the 2025 CFOs.

Just hope it happens to your org before 2027.

Cheat code to check 13,000 orgs and see which bucket your org falls into: https://lnkd.in/ere_zkdY

Either way, keep grinding.

I swear if I get asked again "can you tell me if company XYZ has raised quotas" I'm gonna need to take my first ever personal day but whatever I get why it's important just please stop asking we have a lot of other $%#^ we gotta work on.... ok ok fine we'll do it.

Even know it may never be used the "Decreased" button does actually work.

We're now tracking which orgs are raising and lowering quotas.

Here are the 10 most rated companies on RepVue yesterday (Wednesday 10/15/2025) by volume:
Salesforce
Gartner
NetSuite
HubSpot
Splunk
ServiceNow
ZoomInfo
Docusign
Rippling
Snowflake

Salesforce

Gartner

NetSuite

HubSpot

Splunk

ServiceNow

ZoomInfo

Docusign

Rippling

Snowflake

Partial list of roles that robots aren't replacing:
Enterprise Account Executive
Mid Market Account Executive
Commercial Account Executive
SMB Account Executive
Senior Account Manager
Strategic Account Executive
SLED Account Executive
Federal Account Executive
Pharmaceutical Sales Rep
Territory Manager
Sales Engineer
Outbound SDR
Regional Sales Manager

See where we're going with this?  And by the way Amazon bought this warehouse robotics company 13 years ago, this isn't some new AI thing.

1000s of b2b sales roles here: https://lnkd.in/ezH78tHM

Good luck.

Why You Should Negotiate Your Sales Job Offer and What to Ask For

The reasons for negotiating your job offer are many. The reasons for not negotiating your job offer is a smaller list, of only one reason.  And it’s not a good one.

Before we get into specific reasons WHY you should negotiate, let’s get one thing out of the way right up front.  They offered you the job. You are their first and primary candidate.  Were you their overall first candidate? Who knows - but you’re first now.

They WANT you at the company.  They are excited to bring you on board. If they weren’t, you wouldn’t have received the offer.

So, don’t forget that, and know that it means you are in a position of power.

With that out of the way let me give you three great reasons why it’s important to negotiate:

1. The hiring manager may actually be looking for an ask from you as a sign of your negotiation skills. I was NEVER offended when a candidate brought an ask to the table and if it was reasonable we just considered the negotiation part of the process.

2. Related to number 1, given many hiring managers expect some asks, the offer many times is presented with room for potential negotiation. In other words you are probably leaving something on the table if you don’t go back.

3. You have a zero percent chance of getting something you don’t ask for. 

So what is the one reason not to negotiate? It’s fear. Fear that if you ask for something, ask for more, you’ll somehow offend someone and they will pull the offer. Who would you be offending?  Businesses don’t have feelings.

You have to remember they want you there and your confidence will shine through! 

Oh and If they do pull it based on a reasonable ask… you likely dodged a bullet.

As a bonus I’m going to share a quick list of reasonable asks, especially if there isn’t a ton of movement on the compensation.  Try these:

  --  More comp on the variable side (i.e. performance based, you are putting your money where your mouth is)
  --  Some guarantee on the variable during the first few months (I don’t like the term draw but just some kind of floor given ramp)
  --  More equity (you believe in the company and mission!)
  --  Some flex in the work arrangements (WFH, etc)

1300+ sales orgs hiring AND check 13,000+ organizations for salaries of all their sales roles here: https://lnkd.in/e3aY-sJS

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