The pervasive negative image of salespeople discourages many people from entering the profession. This creates a smaller talent pool, meaning those who do enter the field and excel at it face less competition for top roles and can earn significantly more money than their peers in other departments.
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You cannot consistently achieve an income level that you don't subconsciously believe you deserve. Your internal self-worth dictates your confidence and ability to make the necessary asks to reach higher earnings.
The 30-40% pay premium for AI PMs isn't just because "AI is hot." It's rooted in the scarcity of their specialized skillset, similar to how analytics PMs with statistics backgrounds are paid more. Companies are paying for demonstrated experience with AI tooling and technical fluency, which is rare.
Across C-suite roles like marketing, product, and tech, base salaries are clustered between $120k-$200k. The significant differentiator is performance bonuses. Heads of Sales see the largest impact, with an average bonus of $125k on top of a $157k salary, effectively doubling their total compensation.
AI is not coming for the jobs of high-performing salespeople. Instead, it's replacing the roles people don't want and displacing mediocre or mid-pack performers. The best sales professionals will gain superpowers from AI, while the rest will find their jobs at risk.
AI won't eliminate sales roles but will automate the tasks of lazy, transactional reps, making them obsolete. Conversely, top performers who merge AI-powered insights with human empathy will become unstoppable, creating a more pronounced divide in sales team performance.
Top performers naturally gravitate toward each other, sharing strategies and reinforcing a winning mindset. Underperformers often commiserate, creating a cycle of negativity. To improve, salespeople must consciously change their work social circle to absorb the habits and attitudes of high achievers.
Instead of treating high commission payouts as a pure expense, view them as a marketing asset. Actively ensuring it's known that top reps make a lot of money serves as the best possible recruiting tool, attracting other A-players to your company.
Top salespeople aren't just skilled; they've mastered their internal psychology. Most performance issues stem from fear, lack of information, and self-limiting beliefs, which prevent them from taking necessary actions like making calls.
A salesperson's background as a teacher provided the unexpected key to crushing their quota. By applying a mathematical mindset from teaching, they developed a system that allowed them to consistently outperform, showing that non-traditional skills can be a significant advantage in sales.
A speaker's transition from teaching to sales resulted in immediate quota-crushing success. This highlights how an analytical, process-driven mindset, often honed in education, can be a powerful and unexpected advantage in sales, challenging the stereotype of the 'natural-born salesperson'.
