Career series - How I unstuck from SDRland?

In Asher Chua ’s recent episode with Shawn Goh , he mentioned that many times SDR/BDR stuck in the role and could not progress to AE roles. And guess what? I experienced that too in my earlier career.?

Time went back to May 2007. When I was hired as SR for salesforce.com doing inbound lead qualification, the career path for this role looked like this: most of the SR stayed for 1 year, then you will be promoted to AE because Marc Benioff was expanding the sales army drastically.? And when I look at the AE team in APAC then, most of them were promoted through this path, including the person who referred me to the SR role. So that was the expectation of the SR team.?

However, things changed quite quickly.?

In the external environment, the tidy has changed to favor salesforce.com as the black horse in the CRM arena. Because salesforce.com had been winning deals from Siebel/ Oracle CRM/SAP CRM. The name had quickly gained recognition among the sales people. Many experienced AEs from Siebel/Oracle/SAP started to apply for jobs at salesforce.com and our recruiters could even hire AEs with 1-3 years in other tech companies to join our SR team (that is a step back for those AEs). Nobody could foresee that.?

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When I was about 1 year into my SR role, the AE team had new headcounts released and management held an open-selection session. Most of the SRs who have been with the team for 1 year are invited and 2 were promoted. 1 of them was AE at Citrix and the other was someone with 2 years of medical sales experience and switching to Tech Sales.??

I was not invited to the session and I agree with management’s decision. After struggling in the first 6 months to hit 100%, I was just feeling OK with hitting my SR quota and definitely I could see my skill gaps with those that got promoted. I still need more time to learn and make the foundation strong.

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When I was about 1.5 years into my SR role, I started to feel I could do my SR job with eyes closed. Even after our monthly quota was increased, I had no difficulty to hit the monthly quota consistently. Work has become a little bit boring for someone that wants more challenges. But I also enjoyed the less stressful life compared to the first 1 year’s continuous steep learning curve. I spent time to learn salesforce.com administrator certification course which consists of a lot of product knowledge. And I also mentored many new SRs. (I didn’t know I was already accumulating experience for my later Trainer role.)

So I was not at all unhappy as a SR, until...

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The issue came from within salsforce.com itself. Some managers of the AE team felt that what SR did was not a real sales job, therefore SR was treated as a lower class citizen. Because of this attitude issue, it pushed me to really want to become an AE just to prove that I could do it. (Even looking back now, I cannot say if that was good or bad. Maybe everything happened for a reason.)?

However, the headcount freeze from HQ meant that SR’s fast promotion path within was blocked. So I have to look outside.

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At that time, Suntec City had most of the Tech companies in Singapore. My SR teammates started to go for interviews and then they started to leave. The ones that came from a sales role prior could secure a sales role a lot faster than those that only did SR role. I was in several interviews where I could sense the hiring manager’s hesitation due to my lack of experience doing end-to-end sales.?

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Salesforce.com must have also sensed it. Within the sales development team, management had created an outbound role (EBR) and they would promote the SR first to EBR as a temporary measure to retain the people. But the EBR to SR ratio in APAC was like 1:3, so still many of my teammates chose to leave. One day, my manager came to me and said they would like to promote me to be EBR because another EBR has resigned. By then, I had not secured any AE offer and our VP Lee Thompson advised me that I should take the EBR role to build up my prospecting skill, so I went.?

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It proved to be a good decision. Not only because prospecting muscles is so critical to my later AE roles, I could also see up-close the differences in enterprise deals vs the SME ones. Further, my Enterprise team was treating all the EBRs as equals. The Enterprise team manager Simon Davies invited us into their weekly meeting to give us visibility of their pipeline and brought me to my very first C-level face-to-face meeting.?

There was a period when the Enterprise AEs I supported left and the new AE was not yet hired. So the opportunities I created had no one to follow up. One of them was a top computer brand from Taiwan. They had a global CRM project that needed support both in Taiwan and Europe. So I acted as the Taiwan AE, worked with salesforce.com’s Taiwan local partner and the salesforce.com AE in Europe. In the end, when the new Taiwan AE came in, the opportunity was already at contract negotiation stage.?

That was my "very first" complex enterprise deal. After that experience, I thought "Oh, actually the sales cycle management is not as difficult as I thought. I could do this." So I started to take on interviews for AE roles again.

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Even after doing the EBR role, many headhunters and hiring managers still treated me much the same way as when I was SR. So the sweet spot is usually with smaller start up companies when they still had difficulties to attract qualified candidates, then they would be willing to give me a chance.?

And Pointpal is such a start-up. I met one of the founders once when he came to salesforce.com to do a presentation and he left me with a deep impression. Later, I came across his LinkedIn ads that he was hiring AEs. So I applied and straight away got the job.?