Leaving a $180K Sales Role Because the Number Wasn't the Problem
Brendan Cole
April 21, 2026
I was doing well. Enterprise software sales, based in Sydney, OTE around AUD 180K and I was hitting it. Good team. Good product. On paper, everything was sweet. I quit in February. People thought I was mad. My manager literally asked if I was having a breakdown. I wasn't. I was just done.
The thing about sales that burns you out
It's not the rejection. You get used to that. It's the cycle. Every quarter resets. Every January 1st you're back to zero. You close a massive deal in December and by the third of January someone's asking what's in your pipeline for Q1. After seven years of that, I was tired in a way that weekends couldn't fix. I didn't hate the job. I want to be clear about that. I just couldn't see myself doing another seven years of it. And staying purely because the money was good felt like a bad reason.
What I did instead
I took a role as Head of Partnerships at a smaller company. Healthier pay cut than I expected — I'm on about 140K now. But the work is different. More strategic. Less transactional. I'm building something rather than just feeding a number every quarter. The honest bit: I'm still adjusting. I miss the adrenaline sometimes. And the money difference is noticeable, especially with a mortgage in the eastern suburbs. My wife and I had to have a proper conversation about it.
Would I recommend it?
Depends what's driving you. If you're leaving sales because you had a bad quarter, don't. Wait until you've had a good quarter and still feel the same way. That's when you know it's real. If you're genuinely burnt out on the model — the quotas, the resets, the constant performance pressure — then yeah. There's other ways to use those skills. Partnerships, customer success, even ops roles if you're wired that way. Just don't expect anyone to understand why you left a 180K role. They won't. You have to be okay with that.
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