Enterprise sales have become the number one priority for SaaS organizations, AI vendors and tech companies across all growth stages. However, it is easy to underestimate how much strategic effort goes into talent acquisition and team-building for go-to-market (GTM) roles at this level. Targeting enterprise-sized accounts successfully typically requires having a full team of experienced, knowledgeable and skilled sellers with specific expertise in their areas, from technical to persona-based engagement.
The new Enterprise Compensation Guide by Betts Recruiting covers all this and more, providing the knowledge and tips your tech company needs to find the best talent for your enterprise-level GTM strategy. This blog will expand on these resources and outline how to build the right team for successfully selling into and retaining enterprise-sized accounts:
Part 1: Understanding the Foundation of Enterprise Sales Success
While mid-market tech sales motions often focus on features and competitive differentiation, enterprise sales are fueled more by relationships and mission alignment. Success requires understanding complex organizational dynamics, navigating multi-stakeholder decision-making processes and positioning solutions to address strategic business objectives rather than just tactical pain points.
Many successful GTM teams operate on three core principles for enterprise selling:
- They prioritize relationship-building over transactional selling, recognizing that enterprise buyers make decisions based on trust and long-term partnership potential.
- They embrace consultative selling methodologies like MEDDIC to navigate complex deal structures.
- They maintain technical depth to credibly discuss integration challenges, security requirements and scalability concerns with stakeholders.
When building your enterprise tech sales team, you should follow our general model for startup GTM recruitment outlined in our Scale Guide series. Establish revenue milestones, avoid hiring too many sales reps too early, establish a product-market fit, and ensure your revenue generation is scalable and repeatable.
Part 2: Your First Enterprise GTM Hires
Building an enterprise sales team starts with making your foundational hires strategically, guided by your specific sales motion. By understanding what you need, you will be able to develop the ideal persona for your unicorn seller – the perfect fit for who you need to scale your revenue and grow faster. Arming your hiring managers with this picture of your right candidate makes it much easier to scour the talent pool for your best match and avoid dragging out your search.
Here are the first couple of roles you should seek to fill and what to look for:
When to Hire Your First Enterprise Account Executive
You should consider hiring your first Enterprise Account Executive (EAE) when your company is ready to target larger accounts with deal sizes of $250,000 or more, when sales cycles have become more complex and involve multiple stakeholders, and when you need someone who can effectively engage with executive-level decision-makers. Your EAE will have far more experience and often more technical knowledge than traditional Account Executives. They are veteran sales professionals who understand the unique needs of enterprise prospects, can speak to product value in the same language as C-level clients, and can turn executive challenges into selling points.
Your first Enterprise Account Executive hire should have at least 5 years of sales experience with a proven track record closing six-figure deals. Unlike traditional AEs who might focus on volume, EAEs will manage no more than two dozen high-value accounts ranging from $100,000 to $250,000 in deal volume, depending on your specific org chart and sales motion.
Adding Sales Engineer Support
Sales Engineers (SEs) become essential for GTM teams when deals cannot be closed without answering sufficient technical questions, when Account Executives lack the technical knowledge to explain a solution in detail, when there is uncertainty about prospect fit for current product capabilities, when customization is needed to meet customer needs and when you struggle to differentiate from competing solutions. SEs play a critical role in successfully closing deals by conducting in-depth product demos, addressing integration concerns, and building relationships with your prospect’s IT team or service provider.
The partnership between Enterprise Account Executives and Sales Engineers forms the foundation of successful enterprise pre-sales processes. EAEs focus on executive relationship building and commercial orchestration, while SEs provide the software engineering credibility essential for enterprise-sized deals. This collaboration is crucial as enterprise-sized buyers are increasingly risk-averse about technology investments and require comprehensive technical validation before making purchasing decisions.
Part 3: Adding Technical Sales Expertise
As your enterprise sales motion matures, you will need to begin sourcing for more specialized technical roles that explicitly bridge the gap between sales and product engineering:
When to Hire a Solutions Architect
Solutions Architects (SAs) should be added to enterprise sales teams when deals require consistent and complex technological validation, such as deals where prospects routinely request detailed documentation before purchasing, win rates are lower for multi-layered deals, the company is moving upmarket to enterprise customers, expanding into new industries with specialized requirements, increasing average deal size beyond $250,000, or expanding into multi-product solutions requiring integration knowledge. They typically require years of software architecture experience and deep expertise in cloud platforms, security frameworks and compliance requirements.
An SA serves as the bridge between sales focused on business challenges and the technical validation for product fit. They design and customize functionality that meets prospect requirements while ensuring successful implementation within existing IT ecosystems. Unlike Sales Engineers, who work primarily in pre-sales capacity discussing concepts and possibilities, Solutions Architects turn these ideas into reality, identifying necessary changes and ensuring project success.
Part 4: Division of Enterprise Accounts
As your enterprise sales motion matures and your company begins taking on larger deals, you will need to divide ownership and responsibility for handling different size accounts among members of your team:
Matching Role Seniority to Deal Complexity
Enterprise sales roles are often defined by deal size thresholds, ensuring alignment between experience and account complexity. The easiest way to divide these at scale while ensuring success is to assign each level by seniority and specialization:
- Enterprise Account Executives typically handle deals from $250K to $500K
- Strategic Enterprise Account Executives manage opportunities between $500K and $1M
- Directors of Enterprise Sales focus on deals ranging from $1M to $2.5M
- VPs of Enterprise Sales concentrate on the most strategic opportunities at $2.5M and up
This progression ensures that sales reps, managers and executives with the right experience handle opportunities according to the levels of complexity and expertise required, while also establishing clear advancement paths for enterprise sales talent.
Compensation Alignment for Enterprise Sales Hiring
Compensation trends reflect the scale of experience and specialization required for successful enterprise sellers, aligning with the growth of deal size and complexity assigned to each role:
- EAE level ($250K-$500K deals): $150K-$165K base with equivalent variable
- SAE level ($500K-$1M deals): $165K-$175K base with equivalent variable
- Director level ($1M-$2.5M deals): $200K-$225K base with equivalent variable
- VP level ($2.5M+ deals): $250K-$275K base with equivalent variable
Industries with a stronger need for technical sales experience like AI, cloud security and digital infrastructure, typically offer an additional 10-15% salary premium when hiring to reflect the higher expertise required for these complex selling environments.
Scaling Enterprise Sales Recruitment
The specialized nature of enterprise sales presents unique obstacles that traditional hiring approaches struggle to address effectively. Finding qualified candidates with the right combination of technical knowledge, relationship-building expertise, soft skills, and experience with larger deals has intensified competition for top GTM talent. However, Betts Recruiting has a solution for this scalability challenge:
Grow Your Enterprise Sales Team with RaaS
The recruiting challenges involved in building enterprise sales teams require a specialized approach that traditional methods cannot match. At Betts, we understand that finding the right enterprise sales talent is critical to your growth strategy, which is why we developed our Recruitment as a Service (RaaS) model specifically for tech companies scaling their go-to-market teams.
Our RaaS approach offers several key advantages for organizations building enterprise sales teams:
- Access to pre-vetted enterprise talent: Our Betts Connect platform features one of the largest networks of specialized GTM talent in tech
- Subscription-based scalability: Unlike traditional agency contracts that charge per placement, our subscription model allows unlimited hires at predictable costs
- Expert guidance on GTM hiring: Our recruiters specialize in GTM recruitment for tech and understand the nuanced requirements for technical sales candidate hiring
- Faster time-to-hire: Our streamlined process and specialized networks reduce the time spent finding qualified candidates
Whether you need to hire your first EAE or scale an entire enterprise sales team, RaaS delivers the expertise and resources you need to secure the top talent your growth strategy demands.
Position Your Enterprise Sales Motion for Growth
Building effective GTM teams for an enterprise-focused sales motion requires strategic planning and access to both top performers and specialized talent, which is hard to scale when working with traditional recruiting methods like job boards and referral networks. The RaaS model with Betts lets you source and hire as many candidates as you need at the same price, unlocking unlimited scalability for your hiring managers and giving you better control of your talent acquisition budgeting.
Contact Betts here to learn how our Recruitment as a Service model can help you build the enterprise sales team you need to scale your revenue and achieve your next stage of growth.