The greatest AE survey/data we’ve ever seen

The Bridge Group put together a phenomenal survey of inside sales teams at 384 B2B SaaS companies. The median revenue of the companies surveyed was $27mm, the median ACV was $25,000, and median sales cycle was 60 days. The 77 page report is well worth the read and available at their site (bridgegroupinc.com). Below we summarize some of the parts we found most insightful.

-Leads are doled out by territory or round robin. 41% of companies under $50mm in revenue segment AE’s by territory while 48% simply round robin their leads. 76% of companies over $50mm in revenue segment by territory while only 22% round robin their leads. While round robin works for smaller companies, as revenue grows, unfortunately complexity increases meaning AE’ will have to be segmented by some criteria (territories, by vertical, named accounts, etc).

-36% of AE’s pipeline is from marketing. That means the other 64% needs to be filled by outbound efforts of the AE (every AE should do some level of outbounding), SDR team (generates 25% of pipeline), referrals, and upgrades. As companies get bigger, marketing becomes a smaller fraction of pipeline.

-On average, 66% of AE’s are supported by an SDR team. Even when ACV is small, 48% of those AE teams are still supported by SDR’s. When ACV is over $100k, 83% of AE’s are supported by SDR’s. It’s never too early to start an SDR team, and according to Bridge, an average SDR team will have a positive return so long as ACV is above $8k. The higher your ACV, the more of the pipeline will generally come from the work of SDR’s.

-At hire, the average AE has 2.6 years of experience and needs 4.5 months to ramp. Only 12% of companies require an AE have more than 5 years experience before hire. As ACV rises however, companies require more experienced reps and ramp time also increases. The average tenure of an AE is only 2.4 years meaning you only get 25 productive months out of each hire (tenure minus ramp time).

­-Customer Success reps have a base salary of $61k on average. That said, on target earnings are $100k for a CS rep. For an AE, the base is $62k on average with OTE of $126k. The higher the ACV, the higher the OTE. The average annual quota of such reps was $770k for a Bookings/Earnings ratio of 6.1x. As ACV rises, so does quota.

-67% of AE’s achieve quota. The average commission rate at quota is 10%, and 59% of companies pay the same commission on expansion as they do for a new booking. Notably, 34% of companies pay no commission for a renewal.

-AEs average 33 dials and 33 emails per day. Out of those 33 dials, there were 6.3 quality conversations per day, which results in 6.8 demos per week. The higher the ACV, the fewer demos per week. Companies also spend $477 per AE per month on sales tools/software.

-On average, 7.2 AE’s report to a sales leader. A “Sales Manager” on average makes $138k and a VP of Sales makes $243k.

The 77 page report is full of a lot more data and insights than presented in this blog. Their website is https://www.bridgegroupinc.com/ if you want to download the report directly. It’s the best sales data we’ve ever seen.

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