What is a going salary of a full-time sales person in web hosting?

Artashes

Artashes

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I understand it depends on experience and local economy, but if we are talking strictly North America (United States and Canada), how much does a full-time sales person receive in salary nowadays (a bracket would be fine)? How long on average does it take before that sales hire validate his salary (in terms of bringing in enough sales to cover himself as an expense to company)?

Have you ever had experience hiring outsourced sales resources? How did it go? Can you share your experience?

Please note that I am not speaking of any commission-based workers, only salaried employees or contractors.
 
If you're talking general support type sales (meaning available to answer the phone, helpdesk tickets or live chat), then usually that price is in the $10-15/hr range. However, most hosting companies also float those users over into (at minimum) Level 1 support, sometimes Level 2 (or more).

When it comes to outreach however, those generally fall into the commission end of things (we're talking people in charge of mailing campaigns, pounding the streets, conference attendance, cold-calling etc). There may be a base, but from what I've seen, most of the bigger places have moved into a 100% commission structure for outbound sales.
 
For us, we have paid based on a commission payout. We generally give the sign up payment to the sales person with a bonus if they stay for more than 3 months. I suppose you can consider it almost like an affiliate program. I'm sure there are a lot of other ways you can do it, but I feel the best way to pay sales people is based on how well they do and how much effort they put in. So a commission type payment seems best.
 
Artashes said:
I understand it depends on experience and local economy, but if we are talking strictly North America (United States and Canada), how much does a full-time sales person receive in salary nowadays (a bracket would be fine)? How long on average does it take before that sales hire validate his salary (in terms of bringing in enough sales to cover himself as an expense to company)?

Have you ever had experience hiring outsourced sales resources? How did it go? Can you share your experience?

Please note that I am not speaking of any commission-based workers, only salaried employees or contractors.
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You can give him target based salary around 100$.
 
I don't know about today, but I do know sales reps in data centers in St. Louis five years ago were making 36-42K per month plus 20% commission and that did not include answering any support tickets.
 
That's not bad. I was told by a Canadian operator-friend to expect at least $60k for a good sales person. And a good chunk more if they come with lots of experience.
 
$40k per a month plus 20% commission?! That's almost a half million dollars a year, more than most CEO's of datacenters. How is that even possible, the datacenter/host must be paying a ton out of pocket let alone make any money?
 
I'm looking for sales person from US and i liked the idea of commissions.
But these salaries that you're discussing are for companies of what size?
What do you recommend for a start up company looking for sales person?
 
I'd try looking at freelancer sites and posting a job offer with the payout being commission based or like xx% of the sale they make. You could also try posting in some job request/offers sections on various hosting related forums.
 
SenseiSteve said:
I don't know about today, but I do know sales reps in data centers in St. Louis five years ago were making 36-42K per month plus 20% commission and that did not include answering any support tickets.
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SolaDrive said:
$40k per a month plus 20% commission?! That's almost a half million dollars a year, more than most CEO's of datacenters. How is that even possible, the datacenter/host must be paying a ton out of pocket let alone make any money?
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With a 20% commission, I"m guessing the base salary was 36-42K per year rather than per month.

Although that said, there is definitely potential for making up to 40k per month. You have to remember, these are datacenter sales people. They're selling racks, and equipment, and installation service, and monitoring etc.

Take a standard 42U rack, lets say you put in 30 machines at $2k each (purchased), that's $60k + bandwidth + support. So on the first month, it could easily hit 100K in onboarding costs!

Then you have someone like my old company where we were $50k/month in server rental fees. If the agent is at 20% commission, then they're getting $10k/month just on ME, and I wasn't their only sale!
 
bigredseo said:
With a 20% commission, I"m guessing the base salary was 36-42K per year rather than per month.

Although that said, there is definitely potential for making up to 40k per month. You have to remember, these are datacenter sales people. They're selling racks, and equipment, and installation service, and monitoring etc.

Take a standard 42U rack, lets say you put in 30 machines at $2k each (purchased), that's $60k + bandwidth + support. So on the first month, it could easily hit 100K in onboarding costs!

Then you have someone like my old company where we were $50k/month in server rental fees. If the agent is at 20% commission, then they're getting $10k/month just on ME, and I wasn't their only sale!
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Yeah, that was supposed to be per year - my mistake. First one of 2017 :D
 
I would think it depends on the job requirements. If they are just answering incoming phones, chats, and tickets 5 days per week I would say anywhere from $2-3k/month salary, no commission.

If they are doing sales outreach in addition, I would throw in a small commission for motivation. But honestly I just dont know if that's required for this type of business. I would rather invest in white hat seo, ppc, social, and use a crm for leads.
 
I'm pretty sure most companies pay by state minimum wage for a remote position. I dont imagine they make much more then that depending on what low end / high end business likes to pay.
 
For outsource i guess india . There are lot many companies out their but you should be careful while choosing them.
 
Lunarvps said:
For outsource i guess india . There are lot many companies out their but you should be careful while choosing them.
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i agree, many an online Indian full time (8 hours works) only $150-300/month, just teach them the basic first what you need

but it depends the support departments & the experience too
 
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