What’s going on folks! I’m Armand Farrokh, Former VP of Sales at Pave and founder of the top sales media company, 30 Minutes to President’s Club.
Whenever I was making my next hire at Pave, I used 3 sources of data to triangulate how much any given role should be paid:
- The Pave dataset
- Comps from recruiters and my network
- The Betts Annual Sales Compensation report (that’s why we’re here!)
This year, the emergence of AI and death of “growth at all costs” has caused a massive change in what roles are “valued” more than others in a sales org.
The data in the 2025 Betts Compensation report proves that certain roles are becoming commoditized (fewer jobs and less pay) whereas other roles and skills are coming in at a premium.
So today, I’m going to breakdown 3 key shifts in the sales talent market:
- The decline of the Non-Technical SaaS Seller
- The rise of RevOps and Sales Engineers
1: The Decline of The Non-Technical SaaS Seller
In the traditional days of old garde, big box SaaS – a rep could get away with being a deal quarterback with no technical experience at all.
In fact, in my opinion, being technical was previously an impediment to some reps. By knowing too much about the technicalities of your product, highly technical sellers can fall into the trap of getting into the weeds of the product instead of focusing on business problems in discovery.
However, AI is massively changing that in two ways.
First, it pays to be technical in a world where companies are constantly weaving AI into the core of its product. If you’re forced to rely on sales engineers to talk about the fundamental functionality of AI and don’t understand the basics of AI, you’re going to have slower sales cycles and frankly be unable to navigate many of the modern day sales conversations with more technical buyers.
Second, it hurts to be a pure-play legacy workflow SaaS seller. Similar to how legacy workflow SaaS startups are finding it harder to raise capital than AI-based startups, there’s an abundance of legacy workflow SaaS sellers who haven’t learned to sell new age tech.
This is why Betts data shows that the market offers a ~10% premium on technical backgrounds and a ~10% downgrade on standard SaaS seller backgrounds.
2: The Commoditization of the SDR
Before AI, I always remember looking at my SDR’s workdays thinking…
Why is it okay that 80% of this job is manual data entry and grunt work?
Pulling contacts, looking for the same 8 research triggers on a book of 200 accounts, manually popping out personalization templates for the email you’ve written 1000 times before.
Before there wasn’t (good enough) tech to automate the SDR’s job. But now, it’s getting there. (note, it’s not fully there-there).
Entire parts of the SDR workflow are being handled by RevOps teams <or> there are tools that help 1 SDR do the work of many. A great RevOps team (see trend #3) can help SDRs prioritize leads by automating much of the manual research and surfacing high intent leads.
There’s also so much noise from AI-driven outreach that SDR productivity is massively down across the board. Email reply rates and connect rates are becoming lower and lower and companies are realizing that more SDRs sending more emails isn’t always the answer.
You’ll notice in the Betts data: On-target-earnings for SDRs has stayed flat or even slightly down in recent years. At a $75k OTE, you can win 85% of the candidate pool. There are fewer and fewer entry-level jobs, giving SDRs fewer options and less pay across the board.
3: The Rise of RevOps / Sales Engineers
Again, it pays to be technical – but not just in closing roles.
When AI consumes more and more manual prospecting grunt work, who do you think needs to setup all of that technical infrastructure? Revops. RevOps becomes a jackknife that allows 1 outbounder to produce the output of 3, by using the vastly improved data enrichment infrastructure to take the manual data scrubbing off the plates of SDRs, use intent data to surface the right leads, and even sometimes automate the first touchpoints.
And when products are becoming massively more technical, Sales Engineers are the heroes that help your non-technical AEs step into the unknown. The reality is that the models aren’t changing by the year, they’re changing by the week.
You need technical resources whose job is to be full-time focused on the changes that AI is creating in your product because there’s no way you’ll get every AE to that level of technical proficiency while they’re focused on quarterbacking deals (again, some technical AEs will invest in their skills, but not all).
That’s why Betts has shown a significant increase in RevOps and Sales Engineer compensation from 2024 to 2025.
Now that you know what to pay, here’s how you hire top 1% reps.
Now that you’ve got the data from the 2025 Betts Compensation Report, you’re probably gonna start interviewing reps.
I wrote a step-by-step breakdown on My 4-Step Account Executive Interview Process on our 30 Minutes to President’s Club Newsletter.
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