Table of Contents
- What is the software sales cycle?
- What do SDRs actually do?
- Frequently asked questions about the SDR role
- How you can land your first SDR role
Software sales is one of the least understood career paths in the Australian technology landscape.
Yet it’s also one of the top 3 in-demand roles by tech employers, with some of the highest compensation levels of any entry-level tech role.
So what exactly does an entry-level software sales representative do day-to-day?
The most common industry title for an entry level software sales role is called a Sales Development Representative (SDR).
You may also see the titles Business Development Representative (BDR) or Inside Sales Representative (ISR) used interchangeably with SDR, though sometimes, there may be slight differences in seniority or the types of customers you focus on.
Typically, the job duties of an SDR are split into three key areas:
- Prospecting: Understanding your ICP, developing customer personas and conducting research
- Cold Outreach: Personalising outreach to your leads via calls, emails and Linkedin
- Admin: Logging calls, following up with leads
For most entry-level software sales positions, your main objective will be to book discovery calls or product demo calls for the Account Executive you work with (a more experienced sales team member).
Account Executives are responsible for ultimately closing the sale, though in some cases, an entry-level salesperson will still be involved in the discovery call.
This article dives deeper into what these three key areas of responsibility look like👇
Introduction to our guests
To pull together this article, I interviewed two high performing SDRs for LastPass and MongoDB to better understand their day-to-day.
A huge shout-out to Manav Jain and Lawrence Ly for volunteering their time 🧡🧡🧡
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The software sales cycle
An important concept to understand in software sales is the software sales cycle.
These 7 steps are the usual “buying process” that larger customers go through when purchasing software in a business-to-business context.
Why 7 steps? To purchase a new software product, companies need to build trust with business customers to receive the required approval and ensure they stay on in the long run.
Here’s a hypothetical example from an Earlywork Academy partner company, Ofload. Ofload is a software platform that makes tracking freight and logistics for businesses easier.
To bring on a business customer it’ll often require more than just a phone call and a contract being signed as the internal implementation processes are complex.
A potential sales cycle could look like:
- Prospecting: identifying and researching potential freight and logistics companies that would benefit from the Ofload platform.
- Outreach: contacting the right person from that company to let them know about Ofload.
- Qualification: running a Discovery Call to see if they will actually benefit from the Ofload platform.
- Pitch & Negotiation: coordinating a product demo to the company use case and settling on terms. The demo is often personalised using information found in Prospecting and Qualification.
- Closing: finalising important documentation.
- Account Management: ensuring that the freight and logistic company is onboarded to the Ofload platform correctly. Based on information gathered in the Pitch and Negotiation steps.
But how does this map to roles in the sales organisation?
At any given time, there can be 100s of companies moving through each of these steps.
Making it impossible for one person to manage all of their leads through each sales cycle step.
Hence, to perform each of the steps well, companies have allocated different stages of the sales cycle to three common roles:
- Sales Development Representative (SDR): focused on prospecting, moving and qualifying leads through the sales pipeline. This role will focus on generating new business opportunities.
- Account Executive (AE): if you’re meeting SDR quotas, you will be promoted to the closing role of an AE. You will own the pitch, negotiation and closing aspects of the cycle.
- Account Management/Customer Success: if being promoted to the closing AE role isn’t for you, then this role is all about building relationships with existing customers.
From day one, you will be in the new business development role of an SDR. As you progress and better understand the business, you can quickly be promoted to an Account Executive role within 12-24 months.
What do SDRs actually do?
Now that we understand that the key responsibilities of an SDR are to find new business opportunities for AEs to close - the three key buckets of responsibilities for an SDR begin to make sense (see image below 👇)
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An important caveat, the amount of time spent on say prospecting vs outreach will differ from company to company.
Job Description 1: Prospecting
Prospecting is the process of identifying and researching high quality leads that could potentially turn into new business for your company. It’s made up of two tasks:
Understand your ICP
An ICP is your Ideal Customer Persona. In B2B SaaS these are the set of characteristics (eg: employee number, company age…) that define the type of company you should target with your outreach.
Manav comments that he likes spending a high percentage of his time identifying the correct ICP. Often re-visiting his ICP daily and funnelling it down by the 3Ps - pain, person & product.
Identifying customer personaes and conducting research
After compiling a list of companies that match your ICP, an SDR would often dive deeper into the company employees on a tool such as Linkedin.
Doing so allows the SDR to understand who they should reach out to initially.
Job Description 2: Outreach
After identifying and researching the relevant economic buyer or decision maker, it’s time for the SDR to make contact.
As your role consists of finding and qualifying new business opportunities, initial contact will often come in the form of cold outreach - reaching out to someone who has never heard of your company before.
Here are some channels that an SDR would use to contact a lead:
- Cold emails
- Cold calls
- Cold Linkedin outreach
- Referral or introduction from a mutual contact
Both Lawrence and Manav mentioned that they spend between 50%-60% of their time in a week reaching out to new leads.
Manav notes that outreach can also come in the form of engaging with potential leads on social media or creating social media content on your own accounts.
Job Description 3: Admin and follow ups
As an SDR, your quota will often be a certain amount of discovery calls booked in a month or quarter (depending on the company). Meaning that you’ll often be identifying, researching and contacting 100s of leads in a week.
Lawrence comments that in order to keep on top of lead activity it’s important to log all outreach with specific notes and follow up tasks.
He personally dedicates around 10% of his time every week to revisit these notes in his Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and cites it as a key practice to consistently follow up. As most leads won’t book a discovery call from just one point of contact.
FAQs On Software Sales Roles
Are you making in person sales or via the phone?
Unless you apply for a field sales role, SDR jobs are all done over the phone and via email.
Choose to work from home or in an office, you’ll be provided with the right equipment and software to excel in your role.
Can you work remotely in software sales?
Absolutely (but clarify with the company you’re interviewing for). Working in any role at a tech company allows for hybrid working conditions.
We’ve spoken to SDRs in the past who live in the Gold Coast and work at companies based in Sydney.
Is it hourly or commission based pay?
An SDR’s compensation package is usually made up of two components; base salary and commission.
Regarding commission, this varies from company to company, however, the north star metric will be meetings booked and the deal value of those meetings.
How you can land your first SDR role
Want to land your first job in software sales? Then look no further than Earlywork Academy - our 3 week software sales bootcamp with a job guarantee.
Only pay the full program fee after you land a tech job.
We'll provide you with 1:1 personalised job search coaching, personalised introductions to company partners and train you in industry-backed software sales such as prospecting and cold outreach.
Easy apply today 👉 https://www.earlywork.co/academy
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