Sales Jobs Guide: How to Get Into Sales and Build a High-Earning Career

Sales is one of the few career paths where your earning potential is genuinely uncapped from a relatively early stage, and where you can progress quickly on merit alone. It's also one of the most misunderstood professions, often underestimated by people who haven't done it, and deeply respected by those who have.

This guide covers the full picture: the main types of sales roles, how to get in, what separates good salespeople from great ones, and how to build a career that pays well and goes somewhere.

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The Sales Landscape: Understanding What You're Actually Choosing

Sales covers a huge range of roles and industries, and the differences between them matter enormously for your day-to-day experience, your earning potential, and your long-term trajectory.

B2B vs B2C. Business-to-business sales involves selling products or services to companies. B2C is selling directly to consumers. B2B roles tend to pay better, have longer sales cycles, and require more consultative skills. Most serious sales career paths are in B2B, and if you're reading this guide because you want to build something substantial, that's where to focus your attention.

Inside vs field sales. Inside sales is phone and video-based, and you rarely meet clients in person. Field sales involves travelling to client sites, often with a company car and an expense account. Both are legitimate career paths. Inside sales has grown significantly with the rise of SaaS and remote working, and many top-earning AEs in the UK have never once knocked on a client's door.

Transactional vs enterprise. Transactional sales involves shorter cycles, lower deal values, and higher volume. You might be closing five deals a week. Enterprise sales is the opposite, complex multi-stakeholder deals worth tens of thousands to millions of pounds, with cycles that can run six to eighteen months. Enterprise roles carry higher base salaries to compensate for that uncertainty.

The main role types you'll encounter in a typical B2B sales organisation:

• Sales Development Representative (SDR) / Business Development Representative (BDR) - the entry point for most people. Focus is outbound prospecting, cold calling, cold email, LinkedIn outreach, to book meetings for account executives. You're filling the pipeline, not closing it.
• Account Executive (AE) - runs the full sales cycle from demo to close. This is the core revenue-generating role and the one most SDRs are aiming for.
• Account Manager (AM) - manages and grows existing customer relationships. Less hunting, more farming. Often underestimated as a career path, but strong account managers who grow revenue within existing accounts are genuinely valuable.
• Sales Manager - manages a team of SDRs or AEs and is responsible for hitting team targets. Requires a completely different skill set from individual selling.
• Head of Sales / VP of Sales / Sales Director - leads the sales function, sets strategy, manages managers. At this level you're as much an operational leader as a salesperson.

Knowing which lane you're in, or which one you're aiming for, shapes every decision from where you apply to which skills you prioritise.

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Getting In: How to Break Into Sales Without Experience

The SDR role is the most accessible entry point into B2B sales and, for people, one of the best career investments they can make in their twenties. You don't need a specific degree. You don't need a sales qualification. What matters more is a demonstrable track record of hard work and results, even if those results come from somewhere completely unrelated.

Recruiters and sales managers hiring for SDR roles are looking for:

• Evidence you've worked towards targets and taken it seriously, whether that's a retail job with upsell metrics, a sport you competed in, or a side project with measurable results
• Clear, confident communication, both written and verbal
• Resilience, because SDR roles involve structured, daily rejection, and how you handle that emotionally is a legitimate performance factor
• Curiosity about the product and the people buying it

Where to find SDR roles. Tech companies and SaaS businesses are the biggest employers of SDRs in the UK. LinkedIn is the obvious starting point, but also check Workable job boards (many scale-ups use Workable to post roles before they hit LinkedIn), TechCrunch job pages, and companies' own careers pages directly. Look specifically for companies with a structured SDR programme. A company that has a defined SDR-to-AE pathway, weekly coaching, and proper onboarding will develop your skills far faster than one where you're handed a phone and a spreadsheet and left to figure it out.

What the interview process actually looks like. Sales interviews are a test of how you'd perform in the job. Expect a roleplay where you cold-call the interviewer, often sprung on you without much notice, so prepare for it in advance. Practise saying your name and reason for calling out loud until it sounds natural rather than scripted. Expect questions about how you'd handle objections, rejection, or a slow pipeline. Expect some version of the "sell me this pen" exercise, the point of which isn't to see if you can be theatrical, it's to see if you ask questions before pitching. If you launch straight into features, you've missed the point.

If you've never done sales before, the single most useful thing you can do this week is research the company's product, find three customer reviews or case studies, identify the business problem it solves, and practise talking about it as if you already work there. That preparation will stand out.

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What Separates Good Salespeople from Great Ones

Spend enough time around salespeople and a clear pattern emerges. The consistent performers aren't always the loudest in the room or the most naturally charming. They're good at a set of things that look deceptively simple and are genuinely difficult to do well under pressure.

Preparation. The best salespeople research every prospect before every call. They know the company's recent news, the prospect's likely priorities, and the specific problem their product solves for that type of buyer. Generic pitches don't win deals and they erode trust quickly. Buyers know when they're being treated as a name on a list.

Listening, properly. Counter-intuitively, the best salespeople talk less than average ones. They ask precise questions and then actually listen to the answers rather than waiting for their turn to pitch. Neil Rackham's SPIN Selling framework, published in 1988 but still the clearest model for consultative B2B selling, is built entirely on this principle. Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff. It's a questioning structure, not a talking structure.

Consistency in activity. Sales performance compounds over time through disciplined daily habits. Consistent outreach, consistent follow-up, consistent pipeline hygiene. The people who only work hard when they're behind on target don't build the kind of pipeline that delivers reliably month after month. Tuesday's cold calls become next month's booked meetings. If you only make calls when you're panicking, you'll always be panicking.

Being genuinely helpful. The shift from "always be closing" to "always be helping" has been one of the most significant in B2B sales over the past decade. Buyers have more information than ever before. They've often done significant research before they speak to a salesperson, and they can identify a pushy, self-interested pitch immediately. The salespeople who build long-term careers are the ones who earn trust by being useful, sharing insights the prospect didn't have, flagging when a product isn't the right fit, and treating buyers as intelligent adults.

Resilience without indifference. Rejection is structural in sales. Even top performers hear no far more than yes. The ability to take a rejection, stay curious about why it happened, extract the useful information from it, and move on quickly is a genuine competitive advantage. The trap is swinging between two bad habits: either taking every rejection personally (which kills your energy), or becoming so detached that you stop learning from it. The middle ground is professional curiosity. "Why did that happen, and what can I do differently?" is the right question.

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The SDR to AE Transition: Making It Happen

The typical timeline from SDR to Account Executive in the UK is 12 to 18 months, though this varies significantly by company and individual performance. At high-growth SaaS companies with strong SDR programmes, 12 months is realistic for a consistent performer. At others, it can stretch to two years.

To make the move, you need to be doing more than hitting your booking targets. Consistently exceed them, yes, but also shadow AE calls and demos whenever you can. Ask to be included in the later stages of deals that started with your outreach. This gives you real exposure to how the deal develops after the meeting you booked, which sharpens your prospecting instincts and demonstrates to your manager that you're thinking beyond your immediate remit.

Make your ambition explicit. Don't assume your manager knows you want to become an AE. Have that conversation directly, ask what they'd need to see from you, and ask to review AE performance criteria before you're formally considered. This kind of proactivity is itself a signal of readiness.

Some people skip the SDR stage entirely by joining smaller companies where the roles aren't segmented, taking a full-cycle junior sales role from day one. This gets you to closing experience faster, often at the cost of less structured coaching and a smaller brand name on your CV. Both paths work. The question is whether you learn better with structure or with autonomy.

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Progressing Into Sales Management

Moving into sales management is a bigger shift than most people expect. You go from being responsible for your own number to being responsible for other people's numbers, and the skills required are genuinely different.

Strong individual contributors don't automatically make strong managers, and many high-performing salespeople have been quietly derailed by premature promotion into management roles they weren't ready for. The qualities that help the most in management are a real enjoyment of coaching and developing other people, the ability to diagnose performance problems accurately (is someone struggling with mindset, skills, or process?), patience with people at different stages of development, and the ability to deliver honest feedback without making someone feel like a failure.

If management is your goal, start behaving like a manager before you have the title. Mentor junior SDRs. Offer to run a training session on a technique you've refined. Ask your manager explicitly what they'd need to see from you in the next six months. This kind of proactivity builds the evidence base for your promotion and, more practically, helps you find out whether you actually enjoy that kind of work before you commit to it.

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Writing a Sales CV That Gets Interviews

Sales CVs live and die on numbers. Every claim needs a metric behind it, because without metrics, you're just describing job duties, and job duties don't differentiate you from anyone else who held a similar role.

The transformation looks like this:

• Before: "Responsible for outbound prospecting and pipeline development"
• After: "Generated 45 qualified opportunities per month through outbound SDR activity (120% of target), contributing to £1.2m in pipeline"

Include your quota attainment percentage in each role, average deal size and sales cycle length where relevant, key accounts or industries you've worked in, and the CRM tools you use day to day. Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, and Salesloft are the most commonly expected.

If you're early in your career and don't have quota numbers yet, use activity metrics and results from competitive environments. Sport is genuinely useful here, particularly anything involving targets, rankings, or team performance. So are academic competitions, business challenges, or anything else where you competed against a measurable standard and can show the outcome.

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Salary and OTE: What to Expect and How to Evaluate Offers

Sales compensation combines a base salary with an on-target earnings (OTE) figure. OTE represents what you'd earn if you hit 100% of your quota. The split between base and commission varies by company, but a 50/50 split is common at the AE level.

Typical ranges in London (outside London is generally 15 to 25% lower):

• SDR: £25,000-£35,000 base, £40,000-£55,000 OTE
• Account Executive (mid-market): £40,000-£60,000 base, £70,000-£110,000 OTE
• Enterprise AE: £60,000-£80,000 base, £120,000-£180,000 OTE
• Sales Manager: £55,000-£75,000 base, £90,000-£130,000 OTE
• Head of Sales / VP: £80,000-£120,000 base, £150,000-£250,000+ OTE

These figures shift with the economic climate and with the specific sector, but they represent a reasonable benchmark for tech and SaaS sales roles in 2024.

Before you accept any offer, ask about quota attainment rates across the team. A £100,000 OTE at a company where average attainment is 60% is worth £60,000 in practice. A £70,000 OTE where average attainment is 90% is worth £63,000. Those numbers are almost equivalent, but the second company has a healthier culture and better-structured quotas. Also ask what percentage of the sales team hit quota last year. Companies with strong sales cultures will answer this confidently. Companies with poorly set quotas or broken processes will get evasive.

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Building Something Long-Term

Sales is one of the clearest meritocracies in professional life. Hit your number, get paid and promoted. Miss it, and the feedback is immediate and unambiguous. That directness suits some people very well and genuinely doesn't suit others at all.

If you like knowing exactly where you stand, competing against a clear target, and being rewarded directly for your effort, sales can be an exceptional career. The most transferable skills you'll build, deep customer understanding, the ability to communicate persuasively under pressure, pipeline discipline and commercial thinking, are useful in almost every senior business role. Many founders, CEOs, and commercial directors came through sales, because it teaches you faster than most environments how businesses actually work.

Go in with your eyes open about the pressure, the rejection, and the genuine need for daily discipline. Build those habits early and the upside is significant and measurable. That's a rare combination in any profession.