How many reps does a sales manager have now?

At software and IT companies, a sales manager title now comes with about five sales reps: 4.99 sales individual contributors per manager-level sales title in the first quarter of 2026, across 9,524 sales teams. The median team had 4.0.

The 2023 cuts nudged that number up rather than reset it. From the end of 2022 to the end of 2024, manager titles in these teams fell 5.3% and reps fell 1.7%, so each manager title covered 2.8% more reps (95% interval 1.5% to 4.0%).

What we measured

We rebuilt every company's sales team at each quarter end from 2016 to the first quarter of 2026, using the job start and end dates in the work histories in Ken internal data, and read each person's level from their title. Reps are sales individual contributors below manager level: SDRs, account executives, account managers, sales engineers, business development reps and general sales staff. Customer success, RevOps and marketing are not counted.

The sample is sales teams of five or more people at software and IT companies: 14,320 companies and 553,498 people in early 2026, all in six countries: the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand.

A slow widening, not a 2023 break

The number has drifted up for a decade. Software and IT sales teams had 4.16 reps per manager title at the end of 2016 and 4.65 at the end of 2022, 11.7% more. It dipped briefly in 2023 and then kept rising, to 4.78 at the end of 2024 and 4.99 in early 2026, as reps came back faster than managers: from the end of 2024, reps grew 6.2% and manager titles 1.0%.

Across all industries the ratio barely moved, from 3.30 at the end of 2016 to 3.39 now. The widening is a software and IT story.

The manager layer is thinning in other ways too. One in three software and IT sales teams of five or more people (33.5%) has nobody with a manager-level sales title, up from 27.8% at the end of 2016. And each sales director title sits over fewer manager titles: 1.20 now, against 1.46 at the end of 2016.

Where companies shrank, managers lost their edge

We followed everyone in a sales role at the end of 2022 at software and IT companies with at least 50 people, 493,276 people at 7,302 companies, and checked who was still at the same company two years later.

In companies whose headcount fell 10% or more, 48.6% of managers and 49.1% of reps had left. In companies that did not shrink, managers were the stickier group: 24.7% left, against 27.6% of reps. In normal times, then, a manager is 2.9 points less likely to leave than a rep. Where companies shrank, that edge disappeared. The difference between the two gaps, 2.4 points (95% interval 0.5 to 4.0), is how much more managers left than normal turnover would predict.

The most exposed people were more senior still. In shrinking companies, 53.2% of sales directors and 57.4% of sales VPs and above were gone by the end of 2024. In companies that did not shrink, the four groups left at rates between 24.7% and 30.1%.

What a "manager" title means

These numbers come from job titles, not org charts. The most common manager-level sales title at software and IT companies is business development manager, held by 14.2% of everyone with such a title, and it usually names a seller. Regional and territory sales managers are often individual sellers too.

So we also counted only titles that leave little doubt the person leads people, such as sales manager, sales team lead or sales development manager. Only 39.6% of the manager titles in these sales teams pass that test. Counting only them, the pooled span is 11.54 reps per manager and the median team has 7.2, and the widening from 2022 to 2024 is a little larger, 4.1%. The real span probably lies between the two definitions. The direction of change is the same in both.

Spans grow with size, then narrow at the top

The median sales team has 3.0 reps per manager title at companies with up to 50 people, 5.0 at 51 to 200, 6.0 at 201 to 1,000 and 6.3 at 1,001 to 5,000, but 4.9 at 5,001 or more, where titles such as regional sales manager are common. Between the end of 2022 and the end of 2024, spans widened at every size, by 2.6% to 4.9% within the same companies.

For a benchmark: half of all software and IT sales teams with a manager title have between 2.0 and 7.2 reps per manager title. With clear manager titles only, half sit between 4.0 and 13.0.

What we expected

We wrote down five predictions before pulling any data. Two held: spans by title are narrow (a median of 4.0, inside the 2 to 5 we expected), and managers left more than normal turnover predicts where companies shrank, but not more than reps. Three did not. We expected spans to narrow through the growth years; they widened 11.7%. We expected the cuts to widen them by at least 5%; they widened 2.8%. And we expected the widest spans at the largest companies and the most widening in the middle; spans peak at 1,001 to 5,000 people and widened most at the smallest companies.

What it means for sales leaders

• Four or five reps per manager title is normal on paper. If your team has a dozen reps per first-line manager, you are at the wide end. Before you compare, count only the managers who actually manage.
• The great flattening was real but small in sales. Manager titles fell more than reps in 2023 and 2024, but the change was a few percent, not a redesign, and it continued a trend that started years earlier.
• When a company shrinks, managers are as exposed as reps. The usual retention edge of a manager disappeared in the companies that cut, and directors and VPs left at even higher rates.

What this data cannot show

• Titles, not org charts. A manager title does not prove anyone reports to that person, hence the strict definition.
• Edited titles. Some people promoted inside a company edit their old title instead of adding a new one, which makes the past look more managerial than it was. The 2022 to 2024 widening holds unless about half of all such promotions were recorded that way.
• Six countries, late updates. Staff elsewhere are missing, and people add new jobs months late, so the series stops in early 2026.
• Leaving is not only layoffs. "Left the company" includes resignations. The comparison with companies that did not shrink nets out normal turnover, not every difference between them.
• Association, not cause. These are comparisons over time and between companies, not proof that the cuts caused the changes.