I've been at my company (SaaS) for a little over 2 years, started as a BDR and was promoted to AE in June. I did really well as a BDR, got my senior BDR title after 1 year (fastest possible based on eligibility requirements), and got promoted to AE the 2nd time I applied for it. The company is the leader in its field and is a fairly large, respected and well-known company, but the AE team I joined is a relatively small/experimental team. Without getting into the "why", our team specifically deals with a lot of prospects who are pissed off at our company for one reason or another. The majority of my conversations are unpleasant and spent trying to resolve prospects' issues with us, and then trying to close them after that. I spend less than half my time doing the normal AE things I wanted to be doing, things my AE did when I was a BDR on a "normal" team - stuff like discoveries, building the value of our product, etc. The majority of AE teams at our company are more conventional like that, mine is just a small weird one.
I want to find a new AE role somewhere else, but I don't know how feasible that is for me. I've only got 5 months of experience as an AE and I haven't hit quota once. Only around 20% of our AEs hit quota in a given month, I've talked to our top performers and they all put in insane hours which I don't really want to do. My performance is about average on my team, and it's hard to be driven to do better when I dread my prospect meetings because I know they'll probably yell at me or be pissed off at me about something I had nothing to do with.
Do I stand any chance of getting an AE role at another company, even though I've only got 5 months experience and haven't hit quota yet? As much as I dislike my current job I really, really don't want to go back to being a BDR. If I need more experience to be considered for other AE jobs, how long should I stay here for? I genuinely think I would do great in a more conventional AE role, this team just really isn't a fit for me. But I don't know how I could frame this situation to a prospective employer without sounding like I'm blaming everything except me.
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