Question
I am budgeting for building out a sales team in the US/Canada for a B2B software. How much should I budget for a Sales rep in a year in the US? And in proportion, what sort of a quota can I expect an experienced sales person to carry in ratio to their salary? The kind of information I am looking for are some general guidelines. Something like - 5 year sales experience 100,000k (mix of fixed + variable) and 500k in revenue. etc. I know it depends on the industry and if the sales rep comes from the industry I am in etc. Any sort of advice on how to go about planning quota vs sales salary would help?
PS: I looked online but the ranges are so large, I can't tell if it would fit well to my industry etc. Just so that there is context about the product, industry, and deal size, it is a Learning Management System (LMS) to be specific sold to Learning and Development/Training/HR decision makers in companies between 250 to 1000 employee size range. Average annual license cost would be 15,000 USD. Sales cycle may be 3-6 months. And I would be passing on inbound leads and hiring 1 to 2 outbound SDR to feed the sales person leads.
Answer
Kevin Yang's answer is good and a model that is commonly used. It will depend on where in the United States they are going to be based. If you are in San Francisco you will be paying more than if you were in Denver or Dallas.
A question you should consider is how are these salespeople going to be managed? If you need help with that, I'd be more than happy to walk you through some options. I just set this up with an Australian company that expanded to the US.
