Leesons Learned from a career as a sales Development Represenative (SDR) professional
Sales is tough. not saying anything new here really but sometimes you tend to forget to acknowledge that. As much as I had lived the boiler room (reference to the movie) experience of hustling and not taking no for an answer. Turns out, that will only take a toll on your health. I am genuinely madly in love with the sales profession, those wins you get, the commissions you make and the contact of prospects you engage with daily and build a relationship with (genuine linkedin cnnections and interactions with decison makers and non that will remeber you after the meeting is booked and delas either are won or lost). For anyone looking to grow within the sales profession progressing from a diffrent role onto tech sales SDR is your best path. For an SDR that already has a track record the next best thing is AE (account executive role) more responsabilities and money. something I can vouch for having done excelled in this role too, but here are some lessons that hopefully may help you excel as an Sales Development representative without compromising too much in the process:
- Be organized
- Be resilliant
- Be immune to the effect of a NO
- be consistant
- Invest in your cold calling and communication skills.
- Have a grasp of domain expertise and business acumen in the industry your company is operating in.
- Always test and iterate new things you have learned.
- Ask questions and be curious.
- speak concisely and limit your humms, ahhh etc..
- Do not stress out and accept things with the aim to do your best to fix things that are under your control. but do not over burden yourself with fear or stress.
- Do not be naive, be savvy but fair, integral and ethical.
These are some of the traits that i have learned to be incredibly important to the success that i have had as an SDR working for various Startups in different domains. Hope this helps and wish you the best of endeavours for this year!
