| HN Mirror

Er, that distinction isn’t quite right. In any B2B enterprise company, there are SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) and AEs (Account Executives).

AEs are the sales people. They’re the ones who close the deals.

SDRs pretty much do nothing but qualify. If they close a deal, great, but sometimes that’s not even a good thing because it possibly could have been a bigger deal, if they had the AE script/training. But if they do well at qualifying as an SDR, they can often move up to AE, and so on.

But yes, SDRs are generally folks straight out of college or switching careers. It requires no prior knowledge, just the audacity and ability to cold call someone and be charismatic and personable enough to get them past the qualifying questions and hopefully schedule a follow up call.

You may be thinking of ISRs (Inside Sales Representatives) which are effectively SDRs who are authorized (and trained) to close very small deals, as compared to the AEs.

This actually requires a different set of skills, as AEs are often speaking to people in a “board room,” literally or figuratively, and sales cycles are long, meaning the contracts have to be huge to make it worth it (plus good AEs are expensive).

ISR sales can’t be long, as volume matters more than absolute price for inside sales, since that absolute price is orders of magnitude lower than an enterprise sale. As a result, the amount of time spent on each candidate customer has to be an order of magnitude lower as well, so qualifying a customer out of the top of the funnel is more important than almost anything else. The biggest waste of time is spending hours or weeks with a customer who was never going to buy in the first place, and novice sales people make that mistake all the time.

So yeah, I’m not sure what distinction you were trying to make between “telesales” and “telemarketing,” but that distinction really doesn’t exist.

Aside: literally every single startup hires bad sales people early on. Every single one. I have never seen one that doesn’t. It is, in my estimation, impossible to know what to look for in the right sales person until you’ve made a bunch of sales, which is why it’s so important for founders to make the first bunch of sales. But founders are a wholly different breed from sales people, and reading sales people is exceptionally hard.

For ISRs and SDRs, the solution is easy: hire them, train them, see if they perform, and fire them if they don’t and reward them if they do. Because SDRs and ISRs are so cheap, relatively speaking, as it’s an entry-level role, it’s a fairly low risk as long as you’re actually willing to put in the effort to train them and cut your losses when they’re not working out.

AEs are harder because their base is generally much higher, but they should come with a prepped “Rolodex”, ready to close deals quickly. If you don’t have a pipeline, solve that problem first.

Sorry for the rant, but seemed important.

Source: I’m a serial founder, have run sales teams, some successful and others not. I’m an engineer who happens to be good at sales, but finding good sales people is still a dark art.