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Welcome back to First Meeting Set, the official newsletter of TopSDRs.

First and foremost, congratulations to the two TopSDR candidates who landed roles at tier-1 startups in NYC since last week’s letter.

Second, thank you to everyone who came out to our event at The Campbell in NYC last week. It was great to see so many of you again and to meet a lot of you for the first time.

Finally, big thank you to LocalMovers.com for sponsoring this edition of our newsletter. I used them for my recent NYC move and it was an incredible experience. More on them below.

Now into today’s topic.

A Series on All Things SDR

As our social media following has continued to grow we’ve had the opportunity to chat with a LOT of people coming from different professional backgrounds.

Throughout these conversations I’ve realized that we at TopSDRs could probably be doing a better job of putting out educational content on the SDR role.

So, today I’m writing the first installment in a short series on the basics off All Things SDR. Over the next few weeks, we’ll cover everything from what the SDR role actually is all the way to best practices for late stage technical interviews.

Today we’re kicking things off at the ground level with one of the most common questions we get asked: What is the SDR role?

SDR stands for Sales Development Representative and it describes a junior sales position where the person is responsible for booking meetings with prospective customers.

That’s a good one-liner, but what does that actually mean?

To understand it further, I like to use the analogy of a college coach recruiting for their team.

Imagine you’re the head coach of a college sports team. Every year you know that you are going to lose a group of graduating seniors, so to compensate for that, you need to find new kids to join the team.

But how do you actually do that while also coaching a team full-time?

The answer? You have an assistant coach whose full time job becomes identifying and getting in front of the RIGHT recruits for your program.

This person pounds the pavement going to meets/tournaments/regattas to see kids competing in person, they attend high school practices to watch athletes with their team/coaches, they reach out via mail, phone, email to the ones who pique their interest, and ultimately they get the best athletes on campus for a recruiting visit so the head coach can close them. THIS is the SDR role at a startup.

An SDRs job is centered around creating net new relationships with prospective customers.

To do this, they have to research the market, understand the companies + titles who could potentially be a good fit, and then they have to get in front of those people.

Where the assistant coach is going to practices and writing handwritten notes, the SDR is attending conferences, making cold calls, and sending LinkedIn messages. The objective is the same though: to setup meetings between high quality prospects and the startup’s equivalent of a head coach: the account executive (AE).

Okay, that’s it for today. Very quick and easy!

To preview topics ahead we will discuss:

• How success is measured as an SDR

• The other names for SDR (GTM, BDR, ADR etc.)

• A day in the life

• How compensation works (and how much you can make)

• What the interview process looks like

• What an AE is

• What the career path of an SDR looks like

• What tools you should be fluent in to land a role

• How to nail the technical interviews

And more!

Have a great day.

-Andrew