Agency recruitment into SaaS sales

Hi,

I’m an agency recruiter and I’m looking to move into SaaS sales and there’s a challenge that I have been facing - salary.

Well I have always wanted to do software sales but it was hard to break into the industry first with no prior experience. That’s why I decided to do agency recruitment in Tech first to gain some sale experience to prepare myself for a SaaS sales role.

So I’ve got a couple of years of experience selling people now and want to make the move into an SDR role in Tech.

What has happened a lot is that people use the fact that I’m transitioning from recruitment into SaaS sales to lower my price down. If anything, I think recruitment is somewhat more challenging as I have been doing 3-way selling:

• Selling my brand and my reputation into the client. There are hundreds of recruiters out there who recruit the same thing so I have to do a lot of stand out and get people to use my service
• Selling the opportunity into my candidates
• Selling the candidates into the clients and every candidate is different, every negotiation is different

With that said, I think it’s unfair when people say I need to take a pay cut to go from recruitment into software sales.

Keen to hear everyone’s opinion on my situation. What should I do next time companies use my situation (recruitment-> sales) to lower my salary ask?