Next Venture

Next Venture is a recruiting agency that focuses on helping VC backed Startups

1) Move beyond Founder Led Sales 
2) Scale their Sales teams 
3) Expand into the US

Founder

The Collective Search

Managing Partner

At The Collective Search I connect top salespeople with VC backed companies that are making it happen.

Talent Partner

Candidate Development Specialist

I help VC backed founders 
1) Move beyond Founder Led Sales 
2) Scale their Sales teams 
3) Expand into the US

Once you're an Account Executive, there aren't many benefits to a bigger title

Any competent recruiter is going to be asking  
• Deal size
• Quota
• Achievement

And triangulating off of that

Importantly: a unique title means you often won't show up in recruiter searches

Sam Marelich

Founder | Hiring great salespeople for venture backed SaaS startups

Some rapid fire takes on career strategy for salespeople: 

1: The highest earning salespeople are noticeably less concerned about OTE vs. the average software salesperson

2: Startup success is significantly more predictable for salespeople than most other roles because salespeople join quite late in a company’s early life

3: The most important question an SDR needs to be able to answer is “does this company promote SDRs” - and if the answer is no, they should leave ASAP

4: If the team looks “weak” (not coming from winning backgrounds) you can guarantee they pay very badly

5: Learning even a basic history of Silicon Valley is a very high leverage use of 10-20 hours of your time

6: If you are starting your career in SaaS sales in the USA the two best cities are NYC or SF

7: If you can’t stand those two options, your best bets are: Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, LA or Salt Lake City

8: If you aren’t getting at least a few messages from recruiters every month, your LinkedIn probably needs some serious work

9: Two years at a brand name company covers a lot of sins

10: Tracking your numbers is a 10 minute a month task most reps don’t bother doing. All top performers do though

11: Being overly concerned about “benefits” (past 401k and health insurance) is usually the sign of someone who isn’t that serious about moving

12: Remote as an SDR = purgatory. Remote as an Enterprise AE = the way it’s always been done

13: Deals get done over iMessage. Sorry android bros

14: SDR jobs are not that hard to get. If you’ve been actually trying to break in, and it’s not sticking, there’s another issue at play

15: The average VP of Sales isn’t quite sure what to do with SDRs right now - pipeline generation is harder than ever, and the old playbook doesn’t work. At the same time, they need a future pipeline of account executives.

16: People who want things move quickly. This applies to candidates and to companies hiring in equal measure

17: Trying to artificially speed up a hiring process (when you are a candidate) almost always ends badly for you

18: Sales resumes should always be black and white and saved as PDFs. Most of the time they should be one page

19: If your company gets bought by Private equity, life is going to start sucking for you very soon

20: We’re bringing (enterprise function) to everyone” = you’re going to a company selling to broke people

21: However much you think product matters, double it. Then double it again. A winning product makes your life so much easier

22: You should be grabbing drinks/ coffee with people often. Clients, prospects, colleagues. More than you’re currently doing

23:  Learning your way around excel is more important than learning to code. Zapier / make should become your friends as well

24: “Easy apply” = no one will see your application

25: The most important question account executives need to be able to answer: “can I make a lot of money at this company, and live with the trade offs?”

Imagine working here

Full commission 

Getting that founding AE equity

Selling AI with Meek Mill

The easiest way to make more money in sales is very simple: 

You need to figure out how to sell bigger (and probably more complicated) deals to bigger companies.

Enterprise deals, bigger logos, longer sales cycles

Here's the catch - the deals get bigger, but–depending who you are–so do the trade-offs.

• The sales cycles stretch to 6, 9, 12 months.
• The customer personas get more complicated.
• The politics get heavier.

You might find yourself making great money selling $3mm cybersecurity deals to Exxon Mobil but absolutely hating your day-to-day life.

The same way companies think about product-market fit, you need to think about your fit with what you’re selling and who you’re selling it to.

You may love putting your 48 Laws of Power hat on and immersing yourself in the corporate politics of Exxon for a year.  

Or maybe that sounds miserable.

There’s no right or wrong, just what works for you. 

The real play?

Figure out the most complicated, high-value deal you can take on while still liking your life.

Example:
Most people hate selling to HR.
But if you can actually charm the nice HR ladies? 
You should lean into that.

There’s real money there–and if you like it and you’re good at it, it has your name on it.

If you’re still thinking about your sales career the way you were in 2021 or 2022, it’s time to wake up.

That market was a one-off.

A once in twenty year abnormality.

Maybe it happens again someday, but for now, the meta has changed.

If you’re making career decisions based on what worked a few years ago, you’re in for a rough ride.

Some realities of being an SDR in 2025:

• A whole class of SDRs have gotten stuck
• A few batches of grads have entered the market
• And the industry is smaller than it was a few years ago.

Still growing–but not inflated like 2021/2022. 

It was too big, too fast. Now it’s corrected. 

If you’re operating with a 2021 mindset–whether it’s comp expectations, remote expectations, or opportunity timelines–you’re playing a game that no longer exists.

You need to update your brain to match the real meta of today.

It is not your fault, but it is reality.

And being in reality is where the juice is

If you ever want engagement on LinkedIn from software salespeople, simply offer them email messaging that works if they reply to your post

Thousands of sales reps think that’s their biggest problem

It isn’t

It’s that they’re selling something no one wants

They’re never going to hit their quota because they are fundamentally selling something that does not matter

But its a hard problem to solve for in your career, because it requires thinking further upstream

Which is good news: if you can learn this: you’ll get rich

While everyone else is chasing a slightly more generous comp package or fighting the thousands of other reps who want to work at the “hottest” company

Both poor strategies

So, how do you do it?

Two strategies here:

1) if you’re looking for a new job, ask yourself: is (company) I’m looking at solving a real problem, or are they making a nice to have?

Example of a real problem: payroll

Example of a fake problem: “employee engagement software”

Companies are going to forever pay money for software that handles payroll

Regardless of the economy: it’s a must have

But employee engagement software?

Ehh

Same with those AI meeting note takers 

Anything blockchain or web3

basically boils down to knowing your niche inside and out

What competitor just got bought by private equity and is about to become whole lot crappier?

What company has the best technical setup?

The second one sounds trivial, but it really isn’t.

It’s easy to gloss over this: but every software company that has gone on to genuinely enormous heights is competing from a place of genuine technical advantage

You probably can’t determine this without niche knowledge though

I have a daily email list that I send a lot of content around advanced career strategy to

If you’re a sales rep and you want to make $250k+ per year… you should get on it

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