$230k total comp + Startup Equity People Really Want
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I’ve been teasing something big for a few weeks now… Here it is. Katie (name changed for privacy), joined my Summer Career Accelerator at the end of June… And she recently signed an offer with Harvey, the AI Legaltech startup, with a £170,000 OTE + RSUs. If you’re making USD, that’s ~$230,000. And for you Brits, don’t let anyone on Twitter tell you there are no high salaries to be found in the UK. All it took was ~6 weeks of focused execution with tight feedback loops working together. When Katie joined The Accelerator, she was in a common situation for mid-career AEs. She was a talented rep who’d made a few bad company selections. I won’t get into the specifics for the sake of her privacy, but let’s just say she had good reason to be looking for a new company. But the raw ability was there. So when she came into the accelerator, we focused on a few things, including:
Because she’s a great candidate, she had multiple opportunities. And frankly, all of them were good. One was an exciting early stage company. Another was a large brand that’s created thousands of great salespeople. But I encouraged her to take a punt on Harvey. To her full credit, she did a great job interviewing, and made sure she covered her bases on due diligence. Here we are weeks later, and she’s taking a well deserved vacation before she starts climbing the leaderboard. There were a lot of micro details that helped create this outcome that I’ll get into in the coming days, but for now, here’s the deal: I want to keep stress testing my frameworks with small batches of reps, so I’m about to run another highly personalized cohort. I’m going to announce this to my 7000+ Twitter followers on Thursday, but I want to give you first dibs as an email subscriber. If you want to work directly with me to make a big move over the next month and a half, reply to this email and we’ll discuss details. Talk soon, Sam P.S. I’m always going to be careful about not promising hyper-specific results. This isn’t a Lambo guru situation. Katie is a strong rep and she executed with intensity from day 1 of the accelerator. But I will say… If you knew how comically bad her situation was in June versus how great it is now… it’s almost hard to believe. Reply to this email and we can discuss details. |
Hiring for Sales
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I’ve listened to a fair number of “success story” interviews over the years. And there’s one point that comes up again and again. To paraphrase: “Yeah it took longer than I thought… but honestly I was just spinning my wheels for the first year or so. Once I really kicked it into high gear, the result actually came pretty quickly.”I can relate far too well from my own experience building my recruiting business. There was a multiyear stretch where I was “in the trenches,” “grinding,” and all...
Let me tell you a bit more about Katie, the woman I worked with who recently signed a deal for $230,000 + a bunch of RSUs at Harvey. If you’re even vaguely aware of the game, you should be aware that Harvey isn’t the average startup to work for. It’s like joining Databricks in 2019. Stripe in 2014. It's resume gold. I could go on. But let’s get back to Katie. She emailed me on June 12th of this year asking a few questions about how to find good companies to work for. I’ll discuss this in more...
The raw number of salespeople that startups need to hire is far higher than you think. Let's take an example, with a hypothetical sales team that is doubling in size from 20 → 40 reps in one year. For the sake of this exercise, we're going to assume that the sales team is 50% SDRs and 50% Account Executives. Sales Development Representative Attrition You can expect an SDR to stay in their seat for a year. You might be able to extend this a few months longer, say to 14-15 months. Go beyond...