Tech sales jobs: landing an SDR or Account Executive role
· 9 min read
Tech sales is one of the few career paths you can enter without a dedicated degree, where you progress quickly and where variable pay can double your base. It is also the one whose hiring process differs most from anything you know: you will not simply be asked to describe what you can do — you will be asked to do it, on the spot.
Three roles people keep confusing
- SDR or BDR: prospecting. Finding the right people, sparking the first conversation, qualifying. The classic way in.
- Account Executive: closing. Running the sales cycle from discovery to signature, against a personal number.
- Account Manager or Customer Success: what comes next. Growing and retaining accounts already signed.
Applying for an Account Executive role with no sales experience rarely works. The usual path runs through twelve to twenty-four months as an SDR — not a waiting room but a real apprenticeship: that is where you learn to absorb rejection without taking it personally.
The vocabulary expected of you
You do not need to be an expert, but using these terms correctly shows you know what you are walking into. Using them wrongly does the opposite.
- Pipeline: every deal in progress, at its various stages.
- Quota: the number assigned to you, usually quarterly or annual.
- MRR and ARR: monthly and annual recurring revenue — the defining metric in software.
- Sales cycle: the time from first contact to signature. Thirty days and nine months are not sold the same way.
- ICP: the ideal customer profile, the one the product genuinely fits.
- Discovery: the call where you look for the customer’s problem before talking about the product.
The role play: the stage that eliminates
Nearly every process includes a simulation. You are given a product, a target, a few minutes to prepare, and the recruiter plays the buyer. Two formats recur: the cold call, where you must earn a meeting in ninety seconds, and the discovery call, where you must understand a need without reciting a pitch.
The most common mistake is talking about the product. A strong candidate asks questions, listens to the answer and builds on it. An average candidate runs through what they prepared whatever the reply — and it is audible immediately.
Quantify your record, even without sales experience
Sales is a numbers job, and a candidate who quantifies nothing is a worry. If you come from elsewhere, look for the numbers you produced anyway.
- You ran a till or a section: average basket, conversion rate, growth over a period.
- You worked in customer service: volume handled, resolution rate, satisfaction.
- You waited tables, coached, or ran activities: number of customers, retention, add-on sales.
- You are coming out of studies: results from a society, a project, a student job — a modest true number beats an adjective.
In sales, a sentence without a number is an opinion. A sentence with a number is a fact — and facts can be checked, which is why they reassure. — JobView
The questions that keep coming back
- Sell me this pen — or any object on the table. What is tested is not your patter: it is whether you ask questions before you argue.
- Tell me about a rejection that stayed with you, and what you did with it.
- How do you organise a day where you have to make sixty calls?
- What motivates you about variable pay — and how do you react to a missed quarter?
- What do you know about our product, and who do you think it is for?
That last question is the simplest and most revealing filter. Twenty minutes on the company website and on two of its competitors is enough to answer it better than eighty percent of candidates.
What is really being assessed
A sales recruiter is looking for three things: the ability to absorb rejection, discipline in repetition, and genuine curiosity about the customer’s problem. The rest — product, market, tools — is learned in weeks. If you prepare only one thing, prepare a true story where you kept going through a run of failures.