Luckily, SaaS sales compensation has been largely figured out and documented. I implore you to NOT benchmark numbers to inc.com guides or sales jobs in general.<p>If you do, you will likely frame your salary targets poorly against the wrong baselines and your reps will figure this out and quickly get jobs at other SaaS companies.<p>"Sales Rep" is a bit ambiguous to SaaS orgs which are usually made up of "Sales Development Reps" (entry level, openers, demo-bookers) and "Account Executives" (demo-performers, closers, opportunity managers).<p>I would search for the title "Account Executive" in your region on Glassdoor for hints on base salaries and total compensation.<p>Angellist is also a great place to get a sense for how similar start-ups are positioning themselves in job listings. (maybe look up your competitors)<p>Sales salaries are typically presented in OTE (On Target Earnings) or essentially, Base Salary + Commission for the year. OTE is usually around 20% of annual quotas. SMB annual quotas are usually in the range 300k - 500k quotas = so $60k-$100k OTE packages.<p>Best Practices:
Cost of living should guide a guaranteed base salary. Don't be stingy on the commission, read the Jason Lemkin article at the bottom to get a sense for what those %'s should be.<p>Hyperbolizing a bit, but you generally get what you pay for, no SaaS company ever went under because it paid too much commission, assuming it did so with cash-flow in mind and had minimal churn. Also, uncapped commission is the norm in SaaS, don't brag about it, it's like bragging about having bathrooms.<p>Commission should also be a clear % of every incremental sale or super easy mental math, so that the rep can visualize for every X in sales they get Y without having to pull out an excel model. (although the best ones will anyway)<p>Try to avoid complicated accelerators, multi-tiered goal structures, decelerators and building a too Darwinian firing culture, those places can be toxic. 1 accelerator is okay.<p>DO - build a model where most hires can hit quota and that you can really kill it if you go above and beyond. A culture of winning.<p>DONT - make quota the pie in the sky, penultimate, out of reach thing. It sounds obvious but it's not, set people up for success and you will find it.<p>You should read <i>everything</i> by Jason Lemkin and Tom Tunguz on this topic, especially these two posts:<p><a href="https://www.saastr.com/a-framework-and-some-ideas-for-your-first-sales-comp-plan/" rel="nofollow">https://www.saastr.com/a-framework-and-some-ideas-for-your-f...</a><p>And really, really think about this:
<a href="http://tomtunguz.com/smallest-acv-to-justify-inside-sales-team/" rel="nofollow">http://tomtunguz.com/smallest-acv-to-justify-inside-sales-te...</a>