The Standout Report: what 1,998 sales job postings actually ask for
Original research by Chris Baldwin, founder of Baldwin Blueprint. Edition 01, July 2026. We pulled 1,998 live sales job postings from 161 B2B software companies' own hiring pages (via the official public Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby job-board APIs) and counted what they say with deterministic, re-runnable rules. No estimates. The full aggregate dataset is published at /standout-report/data.json.
The AI line
- 82.4% of sales job postings mention AI (1,646 of 1,998).
- 17.8% ask the candidate for AI fluency or daily AI use, across 67 companies. SDR and BDR postings are asked most (23.4%).
- 5.5% disclose, in the posting itself, that AI screens applications (11 companies).
The seat
- 53% of account executive postings name the quota in the posting.
- 63.6% of AE postings expect outbound or self-sourced pipeline; 88.7% of SDR postings do.
- 38.3% of AE postings say full cycle outright.
- Median years of experience asked: AE 5, sales engineer 5, customer success 5, SDR 2.
The silence
- Only 36 of 1,998 postings (1.8%) describe their interview stages; 9 of 161 companies publish them.
- 24 postings warn about a work-sample round (mock call, role play, take-home).
- 18 postings mention the candidate's first 90 days at all; 7 expect a plan for them.
The fine print
- 44% of postings publish a real dollar figure; 31.6% name OTE or variable comp.
- 60.7% mention equity. 47.4% carry a pace warning (fast-paced, wear many hats, ambiguity).
- 36.9% say remote, 33% hybrid, 12% state a travel percentage.
The stack
- Salesforce appears in 34.7% of postings.
- MEDDIC / MEDDPICC appears in 18.6% of postings.
- ZoomInfo appears in 5.5% of postings.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator appears in 5.3% of postings.
- Gong appears in 3.7% of postings.
Method: official public job-board APIs only; the same role posted in many cities counts once; no company contributes more than 40 postings; every figure is a deterministic rule whose matches were precision-audited in context before publication. Citing a figure? Credit "Baldwin Blueprint, The Standout Report, edition 01" and link this page.
Read the evidence sheet (sales hiring statistics with 22 primary sources), see the example blueprint, or back to Baldwin Blueprint.