Dear SaaStr: Do SaaS Sales Reps Get to Work Their Own Hours?
Some of the best ones certainly do. Field reps often don’t even have much an office to work from, and every startup has a great few reps that set their own hours as part of it. Your first international offices will often set their own hours by definition — they won’t even sync up with the home office.
But … the reality is, the typical SaaS inside sales team:
- thrives on a low level of constant peer pressure; and
- learns in large part by osmosis (being around other reps), no matter how strong the onboarding and training programs are.
If you take away that environment, and don’t have the sales culture where everyone is in the office or on slack together every day, learning from each other (even if only passively), be challenged to do better (even if only from a leaderboard) … you’ll have to make up for it in other ways.
And most reps will struggle a bit without those reinforcements, in my experience at least.
Selling isn’t very collaborative, per se, but it’s still a team sport. Success does clearly feed on success in sales teams. Having everyone together, during reasonably consistent hours, facilitates that.
And the most successful sales teams do track that every rep is … putting in the reps and hours. You can hear it above and below in our convos with the revenue leaders at Brex and Rippling. They carefully track the number of calls, appointments, and more each rep is setting up.
