I have 6 years of experience selling a technical hardware solution, but want to make the jump into the SaaS world. It has been tough so far because of my "lack" of experience selling a software vs hardware. Any advice on this and how to break the barrier without starting over as a BDR? Currently at an enterprise equivalent role at my current company.
Agreed - you already have the sales experience. Definitely naivety on the hiring side. SaaS is not really any different than an enterprise hardware purchase. You'd probably just be dealing more with business IT owners than infrastructure IT.
Great reply, thank you for the insight. Will keep narrowing in on this
Go for a Business Development Manager role (which is essentially an IC role combining SDR/BDR and AE - a full cycle role).
You can start shadowing sale calls - get a coach who can bring you into LIVE customer scenaiors for SaaS customers. Most important part is value proposition for a Software subscription vs seat license sales. OpEx vs CapEx having a technical background will help you into customer conversations and driving it towards a closure.
Brush those conversations off, they aren't true. It's a naive recruiter or a hiring manager not worth working for that's saying that. You need someone to see the transferrable skills that you have and those people will be worth working for. That said, there's a lot of things you can do to make those skills look transferrable. Highlight skills like: - account planning and territory planning - outreach (mult-channel) - running discovery calls; disqualifying and qualifying buyers - demos - multi-threading to engage multiple stakeholders to close a deal - team collaboration (how did you use pre-sales or did you act as your own pre-sales tech basically? how have you helped other reps on your team succeed?) - hard numbers around average deal size, sales cycle length, complexity of deals Having examples or stories here (S.T.A.R. method) is great. When conveying these things, focus on brevity and value. My friend went from medical device sales to tech and this is what she did. I don't know your financial situation but if you're doing these things, then it's just a matter of time before a solid org picks you up.