

Average income of an iSeries salesperson

What would the average salary (fixed and commissions) be for a salesperson with approximately 10 years of experience in selling technical products in the iSeries market?

There is a bit of a variance in the base salary offered to sales people in the iSeries market.

I will address two categories in this answer:

1. Working for an IBM Business Partner such as Sirius Computer Solutions or Mainline System, to name a few.

Base salaries range between $40k and $60k per year. Commission structures vary widely and are generally computed as a percentage of the gross margin for any 'deal'. The gross margin is the difference between the IBM reseller cost and the discounted purchase price that the customer pays. An average 'margin' in today's market hovers between 6 and 8% of the sales price. If a deal garners over 10%, then that is considered a good deal indeed. In this environment the sales executive would be selling everything from extended service packages to DASD expansion up to a full new or migrated (upgraded) system. His commission would then be (generally) 8-10 of the gross margin.

For example:

Migrated 730 to 830 sells for say $500,000. The business partner's cost would then be say $460,000 (8% margin) -- gross margin = $40,000 -- commission would then be between $3,200 and $4,000.

If you averaged one a month for the year and had a base of $45,000, then your annual income would be somewhere around $93,000.

2. On the software side (Lakeview Technologies, Vision Solutions, JDEdwards, and myriad others.)

Much like the above but the commission structures are based upon sales price rather than margin.

To sum it up: A typical account executive in either environment (if he is at his/her numbers) should make around $90K. Really good ones will make more; bad ones will be looking for a new job every six months or so.


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