Getting Hired as a Sales Development Representative

So you’re thinking about getting a job in sales.

Maybe you have a relative who always talks about their job in sales, or you want to get some experience in business, or you’re not sure what to try after graduating. Whatever the reason, you’re searching for jobs on LinkedIn called “Sales Development Representative” to break into a sales career. And honestly, you couldn’t pick a better time - SDRs are in high demand in today’s job market.

The tricky thing about the SDR job is that it's not about getting the first job, but about getting the right one to launch into your career. I've found there are two different paths you could take to get there - each with unique benefits.

You could go to a really established, great-brand company. Your Googles and Salesforces are like the Harvard and Stanfords of the career world. Getting your foot in the door means you have a clearly marked path, if you can standout amongst a crowd of people who are also used to being the best.

And make no mistake, there are usually incredible benefits. You’ll be inundated with opportunities to attend interesting network events, your annual sales kick off (SKO) will include speakers you studied in school, and your loved ones will mention your company before even mentioning your career. “Oh, my daughter? She works at Facebook. Yeah, she’s in sales there.”

On the opposite side, you take a job with a startup. Here, you're joining the future Tesla or Snowflake before they become brand names, and you get to help build the company from the ground up. You cold call and you run email campaigns, but you also pilot a new sales tool that you discovered or create a project that has a tangible impact on the company.

In a great startup, you personally know and trust your leaders at all levels, you’re surrounded by people who listen to your ideas regardless of seniority, and you cram years of experiences into a short span of time. Each year, the company will mature into a new phase with new opportunities and challenges like a toddler growing up into a teenager. And in the midst of it all, you get promoted because you’re solving too many problems for the company to stay in your original role.

It’s two different journeys, and they can both start from that job search for “Sales Development Representative.” Regardless of your end goal, you want to find the best role and company for yourself. And that’s tough because when you’re starting your career, it’s hard to get noticed by any recruiter and know the right team to join, which brings us to this article.

Getting Hired as a Sales Development Representative

In the last year, I’ve led over 100 interviews and coached a few friends in their job hunt. I realised I kept going back to a couple of key points in those conversations, which are universal enough to help you. If you’re looking for a sales job, here's the topics I'm going to cover over the next few posts:

• How to get found by a recruiter - If you've submitted a dozen applications without ever hearing back from a real person, this one is for you. It's a bit of a controversial opinion, but I believe submitting an application on the company's website has very little to do with getting hired, and I'll explain why in this post. If you understand how companies source candidates, you'll hear from amazing opportunities you didn't even know existed.
• How to prepare for an interview - You don't need to spend hours of research on a company to have a great interview - you just need to be efficient with the right research. I once got a call from an overseas recruiter I was working with - "The hiring manager wants to meet you ... could you be free in 7 minutes?" It was 10:23pm in my part of the world, I was in my PJs, and I'd never met the company or hiring manager. I got dressed, skimmed the notes on my phone, and hopped on the Zoom link just in time. It turned out to be one of my favourite interviews, and less than an hour later, I was expedited to their global head of talent.
• How to succeed in your sales interview - Were you ever asked to give a five minute presentation on a topic in school, and then realised it's incredibly difficult to narrow down everything you want to say to fit in the parameters? In interviewing, you know the answers to all the questions you'll be asked, but the challenge is sharing your experiences in a way that doesn't leave you thinking afterwards, "Oh no! I knew the answer to that! I should have told them about the other time I did..." I once asked a candidate what he believed were the important things to know about him. It's an opening question that mimics the sales process (can you pitch yourself or your company?) and helps me understand what matters to that person. The candidate struggled for a few moments and ultimately couldn't collect his thoughts to share one thing about himself. It wasn't that he didn't know himself, it was that he was overwhelmed. Similarly, someone once asked me to explain the internet. I knew the answer - I even knew they were going to ask me that question. But my brain misfired and I started to explain how I thought about the question itself. Ugh.
• How to ask great questions - Remember, you're interviewing the company, as much as they're interviewing you. Even if it's your dream company, the questions you ask will help you decide if you want to work on this team, with these people, in this role. When we interview SDR candidates, I have a whole section in my interview notes to track what questions the candidate asked me or others on my team. If I hear an SDR candidate say, "I have no questions" or ask me a generic question I know they asked another person earlier in the interview process, it's a negative signal. Your questions indicate your level of interest to your interviewer, which can change the outcome of their recommendation.
• How to close it out - You’ve found a team you believe in - or at least think is a good next step for you -?and you're now at the offer stage. After the weeks of interviewing with companies, the offer stage feels like it moves at warp speed. You're anxious, excited, and not sure if the offer is a good one or needs to be negotiated. I've made a lot of mistakes in this area and gathered lots of great advice, so this post will include plenty of hard-earned lessons to ensure you know how to ask for the best offer.

I'll be writing these articles over the next couple of weeks, so watch this space and let me know what questions you have! Also, did I mention I'm hiring? :)

Wait... what actually is an SDR?

Lastly, it’s probably worth quickly describing what the role of Sales Development Representative entails, so you know what you’re pursuing. I’ll also include the keywords that you’ll likely hear a hiring manager mention, but there are a variety of terms for how sales leaders describe their process.

At its core, SDRs are the front-line teams that try to get the attention of buyers at other companies (prospects). It’s a job that lives somewhere between marketing, which builds brand and product awareness in the world, and sales, which works with potential buyers on their specific use cases. In the midst of those two functions, the SDR team reaches out to companies who have expressed interest (inbound / hand raisers) and/or people who may or may not have heard of you (outbound / cold outreach).?

How much your role focuses on inbound and/or outbound will vary based on the team. Check the job title and description specifically to know what this job will entail. The inbound vs outbound focus can change the job title - you may need to expand your search to jobs listed as business development representative, account development representative, or marketing development representative. And often, a purely outbound role will be seen as a promotion from a role that’s purely inbound, so the hiring manager will ask for more upfront sales experience.

In their day-to-day, most SDRs reach out to prospects via email, calls, and social channels by personalising their brand’s message to a relevant trigger, persona, industry, or use case. The role balances sheer volume of activity (i.e. how many people do you need to contact to get a response, how many responses do you need to get a meeting, how many meetings you need to get a qualified opportunity) and personalised research (who is this person, what problems are they facing, what’s unique to their industry or company, etc). Like playing sports, you’ll train and prepare for several hours to have that one successful goal that re-energises you to keep pushing forward.?

One email or call is never enough to get a prospect’s attention - if it was, life would be too easy. You’ll end up leveraging a series of messages (campaigns / sequences) and calls where you’ve thought through your message in advance (script). You’ll use sales cadence tools (i.e. Outreach, Salesloft) to scale that outreach to a specific group of prospects who you found using research (i.e. ZoomInfo, Cognism, Lusha, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or good old fashioned Google searches). Depending on your team, you may have creative control in the messages and formats, or you’ll be required to use specific pre-written templates to stay on-brand.

Lastly, once you’ve found a potential buyer, you’ll ask the prospect a series of questions (qualification). You're trying to uncover their problems and validate their willingness to go to the effort of solving those problems (different teams use BANT or MEDDIC for these qualifying questions). Once you know this is a qualified opportunity, you’ll usually bring in an experienced sales person (account executive, account manager) to guide the prospect through the buying journey. In the best case scenario, your account executive(s) will also become a bit of a mentor, as they give you feedback on the opportunities you created, collaborate on strategies to approach your territory, and demonstrate how to close deals.

The stage that your account executive enters the conversation varies based on the company strategy, and that’s usually where your success is measured. Most companies will determine your success by measuring your performance against a quota. The quota could be based on meetings (completed meetings, qualified meetings), against pipeline (how many opportunities advance or total value of your opportunities), or against revenue.

There are plenty of other factors that go into the SDR role, but in the end, the SDR role means you’re the face of the company to the world. As the first person a prospective buyer meets in their buying journey, you set the tone for their perception of your team’s ability to solve their challenges. It’s a job that’s often taken for granted, requires resilience in the face of rejection, and is ultimately a cornerstone for the growth strategies of established and startup companies alike.

One last thought -

A friend reminded me once that it’s exciting to pursue a career in sales, but make sure to check along the way - is this really the mountain I want to climb?

This job is the starting point for lots of different careers - solution engineering, sales operations, account management, customer success, marketing to name a few - so make sure to use this job to help you define what you might want to do next.

Next article in series: How to Get Found by a Recruiter