SaaS sales career paths no longer run in one line from SDR to AE to sales manager, and the alternative routes (solutions engineering, customer success, sales enablement, revenue operations, product-led hybrids) are where a lot of the interesting, well-paid work now sits. Each one has a different day, different tools and a different kind of pressure, and most candidates choose between them without ever seeing what the job looks like on a Wednesday afternoon.
So this is what they look like.
The traditional ladder, briefly
You know the shape. An SDR or BDR books meetings, an account executive runs the deal, a sales manager runs the people. The pace is relentless, the tools are Salesforce or HubSpot plus an outreach tool like Outreach or Salesloft, and the pay is built around quota. There are two earlier pieces on The Opportunity Hub that cover this ground, including sales career progression routes and salary data and options beyond management, so I won't repeat them. What follows is the stuff those don't cover: what the sideways moves actually involve.
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Solutions engineer or sales engineer: the technical partner
This is the role I know best, because I've sat on the other side of it as an engineer being demoed to.
A typical week goes like this. An AE books a discovery call. The solutions engineer (SE) joins, listens, and writes down the buyer's real problem, which is rarely the one in the email. Then comes the part nobody outside the job sees: building a demo environment tailored to that buyer, usually in a sandbox with fake data that looks plausible for their industry. Later in the cycle there's the security questionnaire, often a spreadsheet of a few hundred questions about encryption, data residency, SSO and uptime, which the SE answers with help from the security team. Then a proof of concept, where the buyer's engineers poke at the product for two or three weeks and the SE keeps them from getting stuck.
Why does this exist? Because AEs can't answer an engineer's hard question without bluffing, and engineers can smell bluffing from across a video call.
Tools: the CRM, a demo platform, Notion or Confluence for documentation, plus whatever the product itself runs on (API clients, a bit of scripting). You need to be able to read code and explain it. You don't need to write production code. Pay in the UK runs roughly £55,000 to £85,000 base for mid-level, with variable pay on top, and senior or principal SEs at scaling SaaS firms can clear £120,000 in total. Most people arrive from engineering, support engineering or technical consulting, and the move from developer to SE is one I've watched candidates make with surprise at how much they enjoy talking to customers.
Customer success: not the soft option
People treat customer success as sales without the pressure. They're wrong, and anyone who's carried a renewal number knows it.
A customer success manager (CSM) owns a book of accounts. Monday starts with the health dashboard in Gainsight, ChurnZero or a homegrown spreadsheet: which accounts have gone quiet, whose usage dropped, whose champion left the company. Midweek is usually onboarding calls and quarterly business reviews, where the CSM shows the customer what they've got out of the product and, quietly, builds the case for renewal or expansion. Every month there's a forecast conversation with the VP, because renewals are revenue and revenue gets forecast.
The pressure is different from new-business sales. It's slower, more relational, and a lost account usually means something went wrong six months earlier that you could have caught. Pay tends to sit around £40,000 to £65,000 base for a CSM, higher for enterprise accounts, with a smaller variable element than AEs but a more predictable one. The transition from AE into customer success happens, but the flow I see more often runs the other way: CSMs with strong expansion numbers moving into account management, where they already know the customer better than any outsider could.
Revenue operations and sales enablement: the people who build the machine
These two get ignored by candidates because neither has a quota. That's a mistake.
Revenue operations (RevOps) sits across sales, marketing and customer success and owns the data, the process and the tooling. The work is mostly Salesforce administration, lead routing rules, forecasting models and territory planning. Somebody has to decide that a lead from a company over 500 employees goes to the enterprise team, and that somebody is in RevOps. Enablement is the training side: onboarding new hires, running call reviews in Gong or Chorus, writing playbooks and battlecards so reps can answer "why you and not your competitor" without improvising.
Both suit people who like systems more than the chase. Pay is typically £45,000 to £80,000 depending on seniority, and RevOps leaders at larger SaaS companies earn considerably more. The routes in are usually via an ex-rep who got bored of cold calling and became the person colleagues asked for help with the CRM.
The hybrid roles nobody had five years ago
Product-led growth changed the shape of some sales jobs. At companies where users sign up for a free tier first, a product-led sales rep spends the day inside usage data, looking for accounts where several people from the same company have started using the product, then reaching out at the right moment. It's part analyst, part salesperson, and it needs more comfort with product analytics tools (Amplitude, Mixpanel, or the company's own data warehouse) than traditional AEs ever needed.
Then there's the growing set of titles like technical account manager and sales-focused product specialist, where the person is partly commercial and partly a product expert. The titles vary wildly between employers, which is annoying when you're searching. Read the job description, not the title.
Skills, and how to move
Across all of these, the common thread is the ability to explain a technical product to a non-technical buyer and a commercial argument to a sceptical engineer. Curiosity about how the product actually works. Comfort with the CRM as a working tool rather than a chore.
To move sideways, ask for work that overlaps. Shadow an SE on calls. Volunteer to help with a renewal. Offer to build a report your manager keeps asking for. Most scaling SaaS companies would rather promote someone who already understands the customers than hire a stranger, and plenty of the open roles on OHUB's job listings are posted without the word "sales" anywhere in the title.
Which of these would you want to be doing in five years? Worth knowing before you take the next promotion that comes along.
