A strategic shift is transforming the tech sales landscape as companies increasingly target enterprise-sized clients to secure more stable revenue streams. Enterprise sales have increasingly become the number one priority for SaaS orgs, AI vendors, and other technology firms at all levels. This pivot represents more than merely changing sales targets – it is fundamentally reshaping how organizations build their go-to-market (GTM) teams, what skills they prioritize in candidates, and how they compete for specialized talent in an increasingly competitive market.
Building upon our findings in our brand new Enterprise Compensation Guide, this blog explores how this shift is changing the sales recruiting landscape and what hiring managers need to navigate these new trends:
What’s Different About Enterprise Sales in Tech?
Economic pressures, the maturation of SaaS, and lessons from the early post-COVID years are accelerating the pivot to enterprise sales within the tech sector. These accounts not only offer greater value than SMB clients, but also have historically brought more stability during periods of market volatility – which makes it easier to forecast for annual recurring revenue (ARR), which is the North Star technology startups must follow to scale their business successfully.
Enterprise selling, however, is a different beast from SMB or even midmarket sales in tech, often demanding a more refined set of skills and experiences. Deal cycles that will extend for months (or years), multiple levels of stakeholders, intricate procurement processes and more contribute to a more dynamic and challenging environment that can easily burn out your team if you are not careful.
Key Trends Shaping Enterprise Sales Recruitment
As technology companies pivot toward enterprise clients, several distinct trends are reshaping how organizations approach sales talent acquisition:
Enterprise Sales Specialists
Selling to larger accounts involves many more layers than simply increasing the deal sizes, significantly expanding the scope of what makes a top performer in enterprise sales. Many tech companies are even creating brand new senior-level titles to lead enterprise-sized deals alongside Enterprise Account Executives (EAEs) due to their complexity as well as their importance to organizational revenue generation. The core job requirements for all of these roles are also becoming more complex than counting years of experience, with increasing demands for specific competencies, skills and knowledge.
Deal Size by Seniority
Enterprise sales roles are increasingly defined by deal size thresholds, which is prompting clearer segmentation over who is running which deals at what level. While “smaller” accounts are still being delegated to experienced EAEs, sales over $1,000,000+ are being taken over more often by Enterprise executive-level titles.
Here are the four most common levels we have found within our network:
- Enterprise Account Executive: Manages deals from $250K+
- Strategic EAE: Handles transactions between $500K-$1M
- Director of Enterprise: Oversees larger deals from $1M-$2M
- VP of Enterprise: Leads more complex deals from $2M-$10M
This approach also allows orgs to establish a clearer upwards career path for enterprise sales talent, with a direct line of advancement by securing experience with larger deals and clients.
Persona-Based Selling
GTM recruitment in SaaS had previously shifted to prioritizing candidates who had experience selling into specific industry markets, like Fintech, Cybersecurity or Edtech. However, with the pivot to targeting enterprise-sized clients, hiring for each company’s unicorn seller is evolving again to better source for those with more experience in engaging with particular titles – especially among the C-suite. This represents a fundamental shift in talent acquisition strategy, recognizing that the interpersonal skills and sales motion needed to navigate C-level conversations often translate effectively across different sectors and solutions.
This transition toward persona-based hiring is reshaping evaluation processes throughout the recruitment journey. Many leading tech firms have redesigned their interview approaches to specifically evaluate how candidates develop strategic alignment, build advocacy within customer organizations, and create compelling vision alignment with prospective clients.
The Full-Stack Technical Seller
The price tags involved with enterprise accounts create a higher expectation for sales leads that have done their homework and can “talk shop” on their solutions when it comes to the functionality details. Technical knowledge has evolved into a baseline requirement for EAEs in many industries, particularly in the cloud security and advanced infrastructure sectors, where sourcing is increasingly centered on finding candidates with experience engaging with developer-level titles.
AI startups are at the forefront of this trend, with many positions that would traditionally be considered general sales roles now featuring strict technical requirements in this industry. Even for less senior-level titles like Account Executive and SDR, job listings increasingly demand a baseline of technical knowledge as a prerequisite for consideration. Some companies have gone further and removed generalist sales positions altogether, only relying on specialized and hybrid technical roles to fill their GTM teams.
Solution Consultant vs. Seller
While necessary, technical expertise is still insufficient on its own and many companies are seeking professionals who can simultaneously navigate both business and technology value conversations with various stakeholders. This dual competency has become increasingly valuable as solutions grow more complex and engagements are increasingly becoming more consultative in nature.
This latter point is its own foretelling trend, reflecting how the pivot towards the enterprise market is accelerating the growing role of tech sales representatives as advisors, particularly for account-based selling motions. These deals represent a significant investment on the buyer side, which propels a greater demand for honesty and accuracy as well as competency for the sales reps involved.
Multi-Layered Sales and Retention Management
Enterprise sales are often complex, multi-stage projects that require coordinated effort across the different teams involved, from sales and customer success to product and engineering. Successful deals require a seller with strong collaborative capabilities, communication skills and project management expertise, and who is able to act as the lynchpin for a sophisticated process involving multiple specialists.
This team-based approach to enterprise selling manifests in numerous touchpoints, such as regular strategy and coordination sessions between sales, customer success and engineering representatives to refine technical points. These collaborative practices allow your GTM teams to better ensure alignment between customer expectations and solution capabilities throughout the sales process.
An enterprise sales motion typically unfolds across three distinct phases, each requiring specialized expertise and cross-functional coordination:
- Pre-Sales: Enterprise AEs partner with Sales Engineers to provide technical validation and build credibility with technical decision-makers
- Implementation: Solutions Architects scope projects and address technical challenges to set deals up for success
- Post-Sales: Enterprise Customer Success Managers and Customer Success Engineers ensure adoption, retention and expansion
Enterprise Sales Compensation
The specialist nature of enterprise sales roles has significant implications for average compensation among candidates. As professionals advance to handling larger strategic accounts, their earnings potential scales proportionally with the increased deal complexity and revenue responsibility they assume. A notable premium exists for those in more technical sectors like AI and cloud security, where Enterprise AEs with significant solution knowledge can command a 10-20% higher salary rate.
Our research shows that average compensation for enterprise sales roles varies significantly based on:
- Deal size and quota expectations
- Industry focus
- Funding stage for startups
- Specific technical experience
Finding Your Enterprise A-Team
The highly specialized nature of enterprise sales roles creates unique recruitment challenges that traditional hiring approaches struggle to address. The limited pool of candidates with the right combination of technical knowledge, persona-based selling expertise, and experience with complex deals has intensified competition for top enterprise talent.
Traditional recruitment models often fall short in identifying and attracting these specialized professionals. The standard job board strategy yields overwhelming volumes of unqualified applicants, while RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) firms frequently lack the specialized knowledge to effectively evaluate enterprise sales candidates. Meanwhile, internal talent acquisition teams, particularly at growth-stage companies, may not have the bandwidth or specialized networks to efficiently source qualified enterprise talent at scale.
Connect with Betts for Enterprise Sales Talent
Our RaaS (Recruitment as a Service) model offers tech companies a more efficient approach to securing sales talent at scale. Unlike traditional recruiters charging per placement, RaaS provides unlimited hiring at predictable costs, with access to pre-vetted candidates and dedicated support from enterprise sales recruitment specialists.
Contact Betts here to learn how our specialized recruitment approach can help you build the enterprise sales team you need to scale your revenue in an increasingly competitive market.