You got it wrong

Good morning and welcome back to First Meeting Set, the official newsletter of TopSDRs.

As always, congratulations to the members of the TopSDRs network who have landed roles since our last installment!!

Now let’s get into it!

Today I want to talk about something that comes up on a lot of calls that I have:

The stigma attached to sales.

What is the stigma attached to sales?

Obviously, this is pretty subjective, but in my experience, a lot of people coming from elite backgrounds (top schools, banking, consulting etc.) see sales as beneath them. They think “I have an elite degree, I should be doing something more intellectually rigorous”.

I was in that boat myself. Coming out of Harvard, I wanted to tell people that I was working on something that sounded impressive, complex, and befitting of my flashy degree. And sales? Definitely wasn’t that.

What’s behind the stigma?

Four core things come to mind when I think about what’s behind the “sales stigma”

1. It’s a blanket term that is used too broadly

2. We only really notice bad salespeople

3. A lack of education around how much money the best salespeople make

4. People assume getting into sales = a career in sales

To the first point, it’s a blanket term that is used too broadly. I think a lot of people hear “I work in sales” and immediately think of telemarketers, overly eager car salesmen, and/or the one guy you know from college who couldn’t get any other job, so is pedaling some kind of strange insurance. (By the way, no hate on any of those, I’m just trying to be honest about what people think of).

What most people don’t think of on the other hand, are MDs at banks, General Partners at elite venture funds, founders of the world’s best startups, and partners at tier-1 law firms. I talked about this on Instagram earlier this week, but Bill Gurley, the legendary investor who turned $11 million into $8 billion with an early investment in Uber, had a great tweet about how anyone considering a job in VC needs to realize that it is 80% sales.

And I think that’s the key point here: sales is a blanket term applied to so many different industries and roles. Yes, there are a lot of bad salespeople out there, but on the flip side, many of the most successful people YOU KNOW (both personally, and just in general) are phenomenal salespeople. You just don’t think of them as such.

That brings me to the second point —> We only really notice bad salespeople. We all have a story of a bad salesperson. The telemarketer who won’t stop calling, the rep who keeps sending us generic AI-generated emails despite us saying we aren’t interested, the tour guide in a foreign city who follows us for blocks trying to get us to buy something. Unfortunately, these stories tend to trigger the most visceral emotional reactions, so they are the ones that stick with us. However, similar to the above point, what we don’t realize are the people who are great at selling because, in many cases, we probably aren’t even mentally bucketing what they do into “selling”. We’re just thinking of it as a conversation with someone who is helping us solve a problem or achieve some goal.

The third core reason that I think people have an aversion to sales is that they don’t understand just how much money one can make selling.

I’ll stick to the startup world for a moment since that’s what we know best, but the best SDRs and account executives are making the same if not more, than many of their banking/PE peers. At an early stage, startup SDRs can make 80k-90k base salary 120-140 OTE. However, if your commission is uncapped, which it pretty much always is, you open yourself up to accelerators after hitting 100% of quota, which makes it very feasible to hit closer to $200k if you’re at the right company. That’s in year one of being an SDR (1-3 years out of school). You sit in the SDR role for ~12 months and then get into an AE seat, and that’s where the upside really grows.

A quick disclaimer —> Chris and I do not place AEs, so these numbers are based on conversations with people in our network, not actual negotiations we’ve been a part of, like with SDRs.

Okay, that out of the way, when you get to the AE level at a tier-1 startup, it is not inconceivable that you could be taking home 7 figures. In fact, just yesterday I was talking with a friend at a series B/C startup, and he was telling me one of the reps on his team is going to get paid $300k in commission…off of one deal.

Of course, I’m not saying that’s the norm, but the point is that when you work at a business that is growing like crazy, and you start getting a piece of every deal that closes (~10%), things start to add up fast.

Finally, and this is one I hear a LOT —> many people assume that getting into sales (i.e becoming an SDR) means committing to a career in sales.

This is NOT TRUE, and I’ll tell you why.

In middle and high school, I dedicated a lot of my time to swimming. I went to practice every day, did weights, core, and miles upon miles of laps, building up my cardio base.

When college rolled around, though, I decided to pivot.

I left swimming to pursue rowing. On the surface, it seems like a dramatic shift, but in reality, it was pretty seamless. The years that I had spent swimming had helped me build a rock-solid foundation that I was then able to apply to rowing.

I knew how to train, I had a strong cardio base, and I was good at taking feedback and making changes.

In my mind, sales is the same way.

Spending time in sales doesn’t mean you’re going to be in a quota-holding role forever. It just means that you will develop a toolkit that can be applied to whatever career you choose down the line.

Hopefully, this has been helpful in dispelling some of the notions that contribute to the “sales stigma”.

As always, if you have other thoughts/ideas, we’d love to hear them. AND if you or someone you know is looking to break into sales at a Series A/B startup in NYC please reach out. We have lots of open SDR roles across the fastest-growing companies in the city!

-Andrew and Chris