Episode 11: How to evaluate market value for your salary

👋 Yo! Welcome to the next episode of How to Negotiate where you learn how to grow your career and income with better negotiation strategy in less than 5 minutes. 

When I was negotiating my first product marketing role, I had a hard time figuring out what the correct salary should be. I was transitioning from an SDR role where my compensation was variable, so I was trying to take the average earnings per year and then get that ‘guaranteed’ in my new role.

What I failed to realize was that my expenses in Austin would vary quite a bit from my expenses in D.C. I didn’t include fair market value for the new location.

Unfortunately, I learned this after I accepted my new role and had already moved D.C. I wouldn’t be able to rightsize my compensation until I left to my next role.

If I were to do this research today - for any role - here’s exactly how I would do it for a customer success manager based in Austin, TX using LinkedIn.

Step 1️⃣: Open job requirement and check for salary band and skills/background

Here’s a role for an onboarding customer success manager at Airtable:

On the job description there are 3 things to look for:

1. Can I speak to the responsibilities listed in the role? —> If not then know that simply applying with a referral will likely lead to a rejection and need to do a more unconventional approach.

2. Does the company list a salary band? —> This will give a reference point. For specific states this is a requirement so try filtering the location.

3. Does the job description list the hiring manager? —> You want to connect with this person but also vet their background for any red flags / validate they have experiences for you to learn from.

Note: I intentionally ignored the ‘required skills/experiences’ section; I’ve been on hiring panels where job descriptions were designed to find a candidate that everyone agreed (on paper) didn’t exist, but we should put it out there ‘just in case’. What those hiring panels didn’t realize is that women and minorities read those and talk themselves out of even applying.

Step 2️⃣: Check the manager / employees in that role. For employees, look at their background and see how closely they match the JD.

There is who they want to hire and who they actually hire. For mangers, you want to understand whether they have your specific domain expertise. 

You want to ensure future advice from them is based on their experiences doing your job.

For the Airtable role they list out the hiring manager’s background that shows she’s been at Airtable for 4 years and led multiple teams on both the pre-sales and post-sales side with medium / large customers. This is all great experience I can learn from (assuming I don’t already have similar experience).

When I look at the background of other employees in customer success, it’s a mix of folks who joined 2-3 years ago and this was their first customer success role in tech. So it’s clear they were willing to be flexible as they built the team out, but I need to validate that this is still true today. As companies begin to grow, the profile of candidate tends to become more specific as the business has more precise needs.

If you have a mutual connection with someone at the company (ideally in the customer success org) then this is the time to ask for an intro to specifically validate how the profile of candidate has evolved based on business needs. The more specific your ask, the more likely someone will say yes (vs. just asking to ‘chat about your experience’ or ‘coffee chat for 30 minutes’)

Step 3️⃣: See who you know with that title. Look at their backgrounds and note down trends you are seeing. If you know them well enough reach out and share your research to benchmark your salary.

In my network I see that folks have primarily come from sales / go-to-market backgrounds before joining customer success roles. The company size / industry is important to note here as salaries can vary — what I would get paid in cyber security is likely much higher than what I would get paid to work at Airtable.

I’ve found that if you share your own salary first, people are very willing to reciprocate in return. And if not, simply ask if the ranges you are looking at are reasonable for the profile of company you’re looking to join.

Here is an outreach template you can use:

Hey

< remind them how you know each other if it’s been awhile >

< share some helpful context about why you are reaching out / what you specifically need from them and why they uniquely can help you >

< make an ask >

Step 4️⃣: Create tracker for roles, salaries, location, and experience levels. Also add your data points from folks you know on what they are being paid

Repeat this process for at least 3-5 connections. 10 is an outstanding number if you can get it. Document all of this into a tracker for future use. This tracker is what will inform your negotiation strategy.

Here is a free tracker template you can use

Step 5️⃣: Pressure test with 3rd party sites

Now that you have some real data points from your network, validate them with those outside. There is often missing context with 3rd party sites so my recommendation is to use these to validate what you’ve learned so far vs. solely relying on them for info.

Here a a few to check out (note these are general - for role specific there are better resources):

• Salary.com

• Levels.fyi

• Blind

• BuiltIn

• Reddit

This is written from the perspective of a new role, but these same steps can be applied for someone in a role currently as well.

I recommend going through this exercise every 6 months to have a good sense of your market value. You should have a running note of benchmarks from your peers at larger and smaller companies.

Just like with the outreach talk to your coworkers about your numbers. If you share first people will often feel comfortable to reciprocate. We could all use a few more datapoints about our salaries.

As always, feedback is a gift and I welcome any/all feedback on this episode — good or bad. See ya next week 👋 

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✨ Special thank you to Gigi Marquez who suggested I start this newsletter 🙏