It is.

Just not your first month.

Most SaaS companies generally work on a 10%/10% model — roughly. A sales rep effective takes home about ~10% of each deal she gets done in salary, and another ~10% in bonus. It can be a bit less (more mature companies, bigger deals), or a bit more (very low deal sizes), but it’s a close enough approximation for typical sales-driven B2B SaaS.

So if you close $500,000 in business over a year, you might make $100,000 in salary (10% + 10%).

Now what if you just knock it out of the park … and close $3m in deals. You’d make $600k!

It’s not always quite that linear, or simple.

But it often is in fast-growing startups. Ever SaaS CEO will remember the day when a rep first made $1m a year. Say, when that one field rep that is just so good at closing the big whales, closes $4m-$5m that year.

There’s usually just 1 or 2 of these folks — sales is hard. It’s especially hard to close 5x–10x more revenue than the next rep down the list. That doesn’t happen every day. And you have to get big enough ($30m+ in ARR) for there to be enough velocity for your best closer to make that much.

After that, everyone congratulates her.

And the plan is usually changed so no one makes quite that much next time 🙂

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