SDR Career Paths, Ranked

Want to take the next step from sales development, but unsure where to go next? Here’s a full breakdown of all post-SDR tech jobs. ~enjoy!~

The most obvious answer: Closing Sales Role – Account Executive

Pros: 

Fast-paced, competitive, and incredibly lucrative. You control your money destiny better than any other corporate employee. The harder & smarter you work, the more you get paid. The sky's the limit. 

Cons:

Quotas are stressful.

Here are some stories of SDRs who became AEs on Transition Tales: Ian Sterns and Kayla Lucia

Hate Sales but still want to be Customer-Facing? – Customer Success 

Customer Success teams help customers see value from the product. You help them with implementation, enablement, trouble-shooting. There’s often a sales-like element of this role because customer success teams have targets for renewals/upsell/cross-sell. 

Pros:

You get to work with people & solve business problems with your product. The job is often seen as less stressful than sales.  

Cons:

Back-to-back calls can be repetitive. If your product sucks, you’re the one who has to break the news to the customer that the product sucks. 

Here are some stories of SDRs who became AEs on Transition Tales: Imran Kabir and Astrid Malone

Loved the email crafting part of the XDR job? – Content Marketing/Sales Copy Writing

Content Marketers create marketing content like emails, blogs, how-to guides, infographics, case studies, ad copy writing, and more. Sometimes they even write the emails you’re sending to prospects (this is called sales copywriting). 

Pros:

You get to be paid to learn about the company, prospects, product and write about it. It can be a very creative role.

Cons: 

Writing marketing materials can get repetitive. You often don’t have a lot of power to decide how your writing gets delivered.

Don’t quite want to write blogs/emails/etc but still like messaging? –  Product Marketing 

Product Marketing is the bridge between the product team and the rest of the world. They make sure that the messaging the marketing team is sending to the world is great, enable the sales team on product messaging, and collaborate with the product team to create marketing messaging for new products. 

Pros: 

Product marketing is often the best paid gig on B2B SaaS marketing teams. 

Cons:

Similar to copywriters, they often don’t often own the execution of how the messages they make are used in the market. Also training salespeople on personas, products, and new features is not easy. 

Like ensuring your booth at trade shows are successful? – Event/Field Marketing

Field marketers execute events to drive pipeline. This means planning and executing dinners, parties, conferences, booth presence at industry conferences, and more. 

Pros: 

You get to work with a lot of partners and different exciting people in/around the org. 

Cons:

Remember all the times you didn’t invite people to events or follow-up on event leads? Yeah. As a field marketer you’ll have to deal with that on the other side – No one helping with attendance and people dropping the ball on event followup. 

Here are some stories of SDRs who became AEs on Transition Tales: Angelica Rafter

Loved being a mentor to new SDRs? – SDR/BDR Leadership

Pros: 

It can be incredibly meaningful and fulfilling to grow early SDR talent. If you’re good at your job, your SDRs will love you. 

Cons: 

You’ll have to deal with weird requests from everywhere in the company. Managing SDRs can be like herding cats. 

Here are some stories of SDRs who became AEs on Transition Tales: Beth Millan

Loved Teaching/Mentoring SDRs but Don’t Want to Manage SDRs? – Sales Enablement

Sales Enablement professionals make and deliver content for enablement. 

Pros:

You get to teach XDRs and make educational content and mentor XDRs without the stress of having a quota like an XDR manager. 

Cons: 

Enablement, like teaching, is often undervalued. Sometimes you don’t have any say on what gets taught and you’re just the person that has to deliver training that comes from other teams. 

Here are some stories of SDRs who became AEs on Transition Tales: Liam Mercier

Thinking all the time about how XDR tools + processes can be improved? – Operations

Operations can be a few different things: 

• Tool management: managing CRMs, Sales tools like Outreach/Salesloft

• Sales territory, quota, and headcount planning

• Sales data collection & analytics around KPIs, activities, and quota

Pros: 

The way Go-to-Market is moving, data, tools, and operations are going to be more and more important and in-demand. 

Cons:

When things break for sales ops you better believe you will be working overtime :) 

Like being customer-facing and being super technical? – Sales Engineering

Pros: 

Being a sales engineer is the closest you can get to having the fun part of sales with less quota stress. You also get to constantly learn about the tech you are selling because your job depends on it!

Cons: 

Sometimes you might feel like you are doing the heavy lifting for an AE without getting paid sales $$. 

Here are some stories of SDRs who became AEs on Transition Tales: Verenia Gouhar