Hi savages,
Just wanted to unload something off my chest and also ask for advice.
TL;DR version: Started as an SDR, being pushed over to marketing/community management by the higher-ups. I find it frustrating because I was supposed to move to AE role and I find this other stuff pretty boring.
How it started
I genuinely love the adrenalin rush when making a sale. I was doing exactly that in my previous job selling CAD software, and I was crushing it.
Problem is, that job was based in my home country in Eastern Europe and I was supposed to be SDR, Customer Success, Sales Manager and an AE at the same time for a pretty bad base pay compared to other European countries, and an ad-hoc bonus pay which i constantly had to fight over every year/quarter. The people there were great though, I had a chance to pick my teammates and they were real salt-of-the-earth salespeople with grit, hustle and integrity, so I loved that.
But I left, and got a job at a full-remote SaaS startup, and even after being 5 years in sales, I settled for an SDR position. The pay was 3-4x better than the last job, and since it was my first time selling only in english and on an international market, i said what the hell, starting from the bottom and working my way to AE will make me a better salesperson, and I'm still 25 so I don't care about taking the "low power" position.
How it went south
So I did the grind, email sequences, twitter/LI outreach and after an on ramp period from Oct-Dec 2020 I started hitting my marks, regularly overachieving the target (120%+) from January to April. Problem was, even though their incentive structure awarded points for scheduled meetings as well as opened and closed opptys, the ACV of the customers that I was bringing in was too low and they decided outbound is not going to work for them. The other SDR got canned early in the process but they've assured me they like what I'm doing but just that they don't think outreach is a good go-to-market strategy for them.
I thought to myself, okay, I did what I was told, my performance was good but outcomes are not what they expected - I've learned enough to do a demo call and lead a sales cycle by myself so it should be just a matter of time when they give me the mantle and say, go on, do the AE shit you wanted to do in the first place.
In the meantime they started to pass over some weird tasks by our CEO which were based on social engagement and promoting some other aspects of the business. The tasks were basically marketing through social media with no clear goals or plan - they wanted to promote their free plan of the software and basically thought it was a good idea to hand it over to me to do low-key since I was already using social for my outreach. I didn't think much of it since there was no clear goals involved, I just continued doing what I'm doing.
After killing the outbound programme, my sales manager asked me if I'm interested in more of a "community management" role which I respectfully declined saying I love sales and I'd want to move on that track. After a brief discussion, I got an impression they still don't have the leads to put me in an outright AE role but are ramping up marketing so that should come in time. In the meantime, I was to reach out to churned customers and other already known customers to ours to fill in the gap.
How I started drinking kombucha
But then the CEO launched a community (which i cannot speak in detail of) and sent a slack message saying "i want you to be the community moderator" - only days before the public launch on PH. I was surprised but said "ok i guess", I can admit people in and ban the shitposters but then I started getting messages from the CEO about "how should we encourage people to talk more about this or that" and realized I was basically being tasked to be a Community manager and I had to figure out what to do with his idea to make it successful enough.
So i bought a f***** book about community management, read every blog article there is online on it and started dishing out ideas. But every time I'd suggest something he basically didn't respond or would respond with "do whatever you think is right".
Long story short - I'm doing my best but I'm a low power individual who is supposed to lead a community and basically give work to our creative department and marketing to promote and create assets to community all the while I'm supposed to be progressing to an AE role.
The thing itself is just super confusing and cumbersome, without clear goals and honestly I'd be much rather arguing over 100€ discount with an architect in the bum-fuck nowhereland than do this crap anymore and that's depressing because I got into SaaS to get into top brass sales.
Are ya guys hiring??
Savages, I want to progress and I want to get into the top tier but god I'm tired of starting over and this whole experience is leaving a sour taste of SaaS in my mind. Do I try to fight this bullshit marketing work or do I just move on and start over? I'm just a little bit tired of starting over from scratch and I want to do purposeful and exciting sales work.
Sheesh this was a long one, if you made it through the end - thank you.
Members only
4 comments