Over the last year, people have refused to settle for jobs that make them unhappy, and millions of Americans quit their jobs. This era has been coined the “Great Resignation,” but at the same time, the “Great Rehiring” is happening as companies seek to meet their aggressive growth goals and hire people on the market. However, the pandemic has changed what employees care about, and they’re now seeking higher compensation and flexible working arrangements. Companies have adapted to these changing workforce trends to attract and retain top talent. Thus, we’re seeing unprecedented increases in sales, customer success, and marketing compensation, and more companies are going all-in on remote work.

For the first time, entry into tech sales starts at $50k, a significant increase from the average of $40k in the past. Furthermore, tech is becoming more decentralized, and companies have embraced remote work. This has resulted in a flattening of compensation across the country, so there’s a more negligible difference between compensation in San Francisco and New York compared to other cities. In addition, remote hiring is still a way for companies to keep costs down, but remote compensation grows closer to San Francisco and New York compensation.

As companies are adapting to new trends, we’ve updated the structure of our compensation guide to reflect these recent changes. For example, we’ve added new data for the compensation of remote sales, customer success, and marketing roles in addition to supplying the average compensation for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Austin. Finally, we’ve broken up some roles, such as SDRs and CSMs, by experience level since people will secure different amounts of compensation based on their years of experience.

The talent competition is fierce, and if companies want to scale rapidly, they need to meet candidates' salary expectations. It's no longer enough to be within the average salary range when offering compensation for potential hires. We've added a data point for the target compensation within the sales, marketing, and customer success roles with that in mind.

Target compensation is the Market Rate. It's the benchmark that companies strive to be if they want to have an extensive candidate pool and hire rapidly to meet their growth goals. If companies offer compensation below this benchmark, hiring top talent will take much longer, and the candidate pool they work from is much smaller. But if they are way above it, they will yield a larger candidate pool but at diminishing returns. Below is an example of our new graphic demonstrating target compensation, which you'll see throughout this guide.