Been looking for a new spot since I got fired in October. I’ve had a handful of interviews, but very few of them ever got in front of a hiring manager (and obviously no offers yet). I think (though have not been able to confirm) that the sticking point seems to be the sales cycle/sales motion, market segmentation, and deal size at my last spot (the job that fired me) was quite different than my other jobs, and quite different from the jobs I’ve been applying for. I kind of suspected this would happen, but I needed a job after a layoff, and took it thinking I would find something else and not even have to put it on my resume.
Essentially, at my last job I was an AE whose job was to call free trial accounts and leads generated by the SDR team and try to get them to convert to paying customers. Often this was simply closing them over that first phone call (walking them through the process of adding their credit card for payment), but sometimes it would require a demo or a face-to-face Zoom meeting. At least 90% of the deals I closed were done in 7-10 days (if that long). We’re talking quick, transactional sales, measured in MRR, with sizes ranging from $25-300 (the average was around $50), and our quota was $1500 MRR per month. The types of people we sold to were often the actual business owner, who was often a solopreneur or running his own consultancy or something similar. Occasionally I’d close a deal for a construction company, or someone in the trades, but again very small business (usually under 3 employees). There was zero cold outbound prospecting, and we didn’t even have access to tools like Sales Nav or Zoominfo. It sounded “easy” when I was going through the interview process, but it was much harder in reality. Easily the most difficult job I ever had. The pay wasn’t that good either ($50k base/$75k OTE).
The role prior I was an AE with a more typical job function. About 80% of my deals were self-sourced via my outbound prospecting efforts. Deal sizes around $50k ARR (but some well into the six figures), with a 45-60 day sales cycle, no set market segmentation so I sold to everyone from SMB to Enterprise. But even the SMBs we dealt with were 50-100 employees.
During interviews I try to steer the conversation more towards the more conventional AE role, but eventually my last role comes up and I can feel the energy being sucked out of the interview. I can’t leave the job off my resume because then I’ll have nothing for 2023 on there, but lying doesn’t seem right either. And talking about my non-SaaS B2B sales experience (6 years in banking) doesn’t seem to help either. Any advice? Do I just start over at SDR again and hope for the best?
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