This is how we do IT sales recruitment
How Journey recruits experienced IT salespeople for UK software, technology and IT services companies
This is a long page. Deliberately.
We’ve spent 26 years recruiting IT salespeople.
We could simply tell you we’re specialists. We’d rather show you what that actually means.
So we’ve written down how we do it.
How we take a brief. How we decide who to approach. How we assess a salesperson’s track record. What we ask them about their deals. How we work out whether someone who succeeded somewhere else is likely to succeed with you. And how we help clients hire the person they want.
If you’re going to trust someone to recruit a salesperson who could generate £1m+ for your business, you should probably know how they do it.
So here it is.
26 years
specialising in IT sales
500+
IT sales hires
200+
LinkedIn recommendations
£70k–£120k
Typical basic salaries
IT sales recruitment starts with the brief.
Getting the brief right is the most important part of hiring.
We won’t start recruiting until we understand what you actually need, whether the role is fillable, whether people will want it and whether there is a large enough candidate cohort to give us a realistic chance of finding the right person.
Person
What kind of salesperson do you need? New business, account management, channel, alliances, sales leadership, pre-sales?
Tech
How important is the technology match? ERP, CRM, Microsoft, data, analytics, automation, low code, specialist software, SaaS or technology services?
Vertical
Does the salesperson genuinely need experience selling into your particular industry?
The narrower you make each circle, the smaller the overlap becomes.
That’s important.
Because every additional “must have” reduces the number of people you can hire. Eventually you either have to pay more, compromise somewhere else or choose from such a small candidate pool that your chances of making a good hire fall.
We normally aim for an addressable cohort of around 150 candidates for a search.
Backgrounds are important but not at the expense of the person.
One of the biggest mistakes in IT sales recruitment is assuming that someone who has succeeded in one sales role will succeed in another because the products or job titles look similar.
They won’t necessarily.
We want to understand the environment in which somebody has succeeded.
Where did their leads come from? Who did they sell to? How large were their deals? How long was the sales cycle? How established was their employer? How strong was the brand? Were they creating demand or responding to an existing need? Were they selling a product, a service or something somewhere between the two? Were they selling directly, through partners, into existing accounts or creating entirely new business?
The answers tell us far more than “five years’ SaaS sales experience.”
Track record matters
Sales has an advantage over many professions. There are numbers. So we look at them.
But “105% of target” means very little without context.
Was the target ARR, MRR, TCV, margin or total contract value? Did they hit a £1m target through ten £100k deals or one £1m deal? How much pipeline did they inherit? How much did they create? How long was the sales cycle? Was their performance consistent or dependent on one exceptional order?
We want to understand the performance behind the percentage.
The most important thing we ask an IT salesperson
Talk us through a deal.
After 26 years of interviewing IT salespeople, we think this is the most useful place to start.
A properly explored deal tells us an enormous amount about how somebody actually sells.
How did you get into the deal?
New business? Existing account? Inbound lead? Partner? Vendor introduction? Self-generated?
This matters because not all new-business sales roles are the same.
If your salesperson needs to create their own opportunities, hiring somebody whose previous success depended on a mature inbound engine creates an obvious risk.
We’re interested in whether someone can generate opportunities in the environment you’re actually going to give them.
Who was involved?
CEO? CFO? CIO? Procurement? Operations? Departmental buyer?
Companies often ask us for somebody with a “black book”.
We’re more interested in whether somebody knows how to sell to the kind of people who buy your solution.
Data is ubiquitous. Contacts can be found. The exact industry can sometimes matter less than the structure of the buying audience.
How complex was the sale?
Complex isn’t automatically better.
Ten £200k deals can be commercially preferable to two £1m deals.
They’re different sales environments. Neither salesperson is automatically better.
The question is which one fits yours
How did they differentiate?
Most technology companies believe their proposition is different.
From the buyer’s perspective, the differences are often considerably smaller.
So we want to know how the salesperson established value when the prospect had alternatives.
The people who understand their prospect’s needs in greatest detail can normally explain this most clearly.
Do you need a need finder or a need creator?
There’s a spectrum.
At one end, the prospect knows the problem, knows the category of technology they need and is already looking for a supplier. They’re buying.
At the other, the prospect has a problem but hasn’t yet worked out how to solve it. The salesperson has to help create the need.
Most IT sales roles sit somewhere between those two points. Where does yours sit?
Do you need a need finder or a need creator?
Hiring someone from the wrong end of that spectrum can give you an excellent salesperson who is completely wrong for your role.
Software sales and services sales aren’t the same
We recruit across software, business applications and technology services, but we don’t pretend they’re interchangeable.
Selling an established software product against a recognised requirement can be very different from selling consulting or transformation services where the client knows they have a problem but doesn’t yet know what the answer looks like.
But even that isn’t binary.
A Global Account Director with access to a huge technology portfolio may operate much more like a consultative services seller than someone selling a narrowly defined software application.
That’s why we assess how somebody sells rather than typecasting them from the logo on their CV.
We compare candidates with the job, not with each other
Before interviews start, everyone involved should agree what success looks like. Then score against it.
If Candidate A is better than Candidate B, that doesn’t mean Candidate A is right for the job.
They could both be wrong.
We use scorecard interviewing to keep the decision anchored to the brief rather than allowing the strongest personality in the interview process to become the benchmark.
What do IT salespeople earn in the UK?
There isn’t one market rate for an IT salesperson.
There are market rates for different IT sales jobs.
A salesperson selling Business Central to SMEs is operating in a different candidate market from an enterprise salesperson selling FSCM. Enterprise low-code is different again.
These are the typical basic salary levels we see when recruiting experienced UK IT salespeople.
Finding the right salesperson isn’t enough
The best candidates have choices.
Recruitment therefore becomes a two-way sales process.
Money matters. Position matters. The company matters. The performance of the existing sales team matters.
And for a new business salesperson, one of the first things we’ll want to understand is:
Where do the leads come from?
Good salespeople can self-generate.
But if they’re choosing between two otherwise comparable jobs and one gives them substantially better support, that company has an advantage.
Being able to explain honestly how your salespeople create pipeline, what the quality is and what converts makes the opportunity easier to sell.
UK IT sales salaries — 2026
IT sales market
Typical basic salary
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
£70k–£90k
Microsoft Dynamics 365 FSCM
£110k–£130k
Enterprise Low-Code Software
£110k-£140k
ERP tier one
£100k-£130k
ERP tier two
£70k-£95k
CRM & Business Applications
£70k-£90k*
Data, BI & Analytics
£90k-£120k
Automation
£90k-£120k
Technology Services & Consulting
£70k-£140k
Specialist & Vertical Software
Very broad and depends on order value and target vertical. £60k-£100k**
*Excluding IT sales in which there is a heavy bias to automation or AI.
** Very broad and depends on order value and target vertical.
These aren’t generic salary-survey averages. They’re based on the markets in which we recruit.
Within each market, salary moves according to target, deal value, new-business requirement, lead generation, sales complexity, company attractiveness and the size of the available candidate cohort
Two roles with the same job title can therefore have very different market values.
Last updated: August 2026.
The UK IT sales markets we recruit
Microsoft Business Applications
Dynamics 365, Business Central, Finance & Operations and the wider Microsoft business applications and partner ecosystem.
ERP, CRM & Business Applications
Software vendors, implementation partners, consultancies and systems integrators.
Data, BI & Analytics
Data platforms, analytics, business intelligence and associated consulting services.
Automation & Low Code
Automation, workflow, RPA, low-code and associated professional services.
Specialist & Vertical Software
Industry-specific and specialist application software where understanding the buyer and market can materially affect sales performance.
Technology Services & Consulting
Consulting, transformation and technology services where the salesperson may need to help shape the answer rather than simply sell an established product.
The IT sales roles we recruit
Account Executives · Enterprise Account Executives · Business Development Managers · Sales Executives · Account Managers · Account Directors · Client Directors · Channel Managers · Alliance Managers · Pre-Sales Consultants · Solutions Consultants · Sales Managers · Sales Directors · Heads of Sales · CROs and senior sales leaders.
Current UK IT sales roles
Sales Managers, Sales Directors, Heads of Growth, CROs and first go-to-market leaders
26 years of UK IT sales recruitment
We’ve been doing this since 2000.
More than 500 IT sales hires sit behind the way we recruit today.
The market has changed enormously during that time.
Technology has changed. Buying behaviour has changed. Routes to market have changed. The way salespeople prospect has changed.
But one thing hasn’t.
The right salesperson is the person whose capabilities fit the job you’re actually asking them to do.
Not necessarily the person with the most impressive CV.
Not necessarily someone from your closest competitor.
Not necessarily the person who interviews best.
Our job is to understand what success looks like in your environment and find people with evidence that they can deliver it.
Are you an experienced IT salesperson?
If you’re considering your next move, see our current UK IT sales opportunities or become a Journey candidate.
Looking for an IT sales recruitment agency?
If you’re hiring an experienced IT or software salesperson in the UK, we’ll start with the brief.
We’ll understand the person, technology and vertical requirements, establish the addressable candidate cohort and agree what we’re measuring before we start recruiting.
Talk to Journey about a brief.
For clients hiring £70k–£120k base IT sales professionals into complex technology markets.