>Wouldn’t the second lever you can pull be your relationships? E.g. a close friend of mine works as a VP of Sales for EdTech startups. He knows every person to

>Wouldn’t the second lever you can pull be your relationships? E.g. a close friend of mine works as a VP of Sales for EdTech startups. He knows every person to talk to at every school board. As long as the product is good he can (and does) bring in millions of dollars in deals with some phone calls and plane trips. If you can pull this type of lever you should be a sales rep making sales based commissions. IME, the relationships you can build from Pre/Post-Sales are more around being an expert advisor/consultant. For example, a few jobs ago I built up a really good relationship with a few customers who trusted that I was motivated for them to be successful. I could have translated that into becoming an independent contractor by basically saying that I'd do the same job for 50% of the rate they were paying to the company I worked for. But I was horribly bored with the product I was supporting, and doing more of that just wasn't appealing. But the above is maybe 5% of the customers you work with. For the other 95%, the relationships are temporary and purely functional.