r/salesdevelopment

I am at Tetr college and got my first real cold call last week. b2b saas product. lead was a coo at a mid-size logistics company.

i prepared for 4 hours. wrote a script. rehearsed in front of the mirror like an idiot.

call starts. i open with "hi sir hope you're doing well, am i catching you at a good time?" he says no. i panic and keep going with the script. start listing features. he goes "Bro, I just said no". i say "yes sir just one minute". he hangs up.

sat there staring at my laptop for 10 mins.

what i learned:

1/ "is this a good time" is a trap question. either skip it or respect the answer

2/ features pitch in the first 30 seconds is death

3/ the script is a crutch. listening is the actual job

if you're starting in sales, please don't be me. what's everyone else's worst first call

I’m starting as an SDR in June and I don’t have any prior sales experience. My mock call and interviews went really well, which helped me land the job, but now I also want to make sure I perform well once I start.
Any tips for someone completely new to sales?

I’m completely new to sales and come from a developer background. Recently I started realizing that good sales/discovery calls are actually very structured and psychological rather than just “pitching a product.”

Things like:

• how to identify the real pain
• how to guide a discovery call
• how to drill deeper into problems layer by layer
• what kind of questions to ask
• how to avoid pitching too early

all seem like skills people learn over time.

I want to properly learn the fundamentals of this. Can anyone suggest a roadmap on where to start, what videos/books/frameworks helped you most, or how you learned this in real-world scenarios?

Also, is there any practical way to get real-time experience without joining a full-time sales job/company switch?

Yesterday had my first interview with a company and it was pretty rough. Looking for honest feedback and advice on how to improve quickly.

What went wrong:

Audio was bad so deep/cracking voice, very hard to understand on recording (most probably my voice is the issue)

Video looked terrible (orangey face despite ring light, dark background)

Phone fell during the call

Sudden power cut so WiFi dropped, had to switch to mobile data

Couldn't answer metrics questions well (open rates, reply rates, bounce rates)

Didn't close the meeting properly (interviewer ended it.)

His main feedback: "Learn to communicate properly"

Questions:

How important are these technical/setup issues vs actual sales skills in early interviews?

Best ways to practice communication, metrics, and roleplays on a phone?

Any other quick tips for someone in their first few SDR interviews?

Appreciate any advice especially from people who had terrible first interviews but still broke in. Thanks in advance!

Hi all,

Don’t know if this is the right place for this post but I’m an SDR and feeling very bummed out. It was tough for me to get out of bed this morning.

I’m 29 y/o working remote for a tech company. I’ve been a SDR for close to 3 years now and I’ve been pretty successful at it - almost always hitting quota and always near the top of the SDR leaderboard for my team. The pay is pretty good, 70k base with good commission.

However, I’m feeling depressed that I’m 29 and still an SDR. I feel like I should’ve been promoted by now. I see loads of SDR’s get promoted in their early 20’s and I’m still one close to 30 years old.

I feel stuck. If I don’t get promoted then does that mean I have to be a SDR for good?? It is a grueling job and I don’t know if I can work a job like this for much longer. I feel pathetic and feeling like the future is bleak. Like I said, I could barely get myself out of bed and I’m having dark thoughts about the future.

Hello all! I’m about a year into college right now and Im starting to look for a sales job and I am completely lost and I have no clue where to start or where to go to even BEGIN trying to get a job in sales. Any advice?

The older I get, the more I realise a huge percentage of professional networking is basically:

• finding people online
• studying their life for 20 minutes
• pretending the message is casual
• hoping they reply

Half of LinkedIn feels like:
“Hey man, loved your recent post”
followed immediately by:
“Would love 15 minutes of your time.”

Honestly respect people who admit they’re networking instead of pretending every interaction happened naturally.

Genuinely asking because I have no good answer, other than checking LinkedIn but thats not doable consistently.

I found out today that someone I've been chasing for months left their company in March. Just been emailing a dead inbox.

Is there an actual system for this or is everyone just finding out when the email bounces?

We are a b2b company with large ticket items. We have had 5 reps each making a min 100k a year. Straight commission, good stream of leads from paid ads. As we expanded the company a few of us are now into other roles and we have too many leads to handle. Only 1 full time caller and 2 of us doing it when we can.

We also don't have a set in stone script. Our sales are mostly informational/conversational. Not hard closing. Everyone here has been in the industry along time and knows our product front to back. Unsure how that will go as we hire people.

However, everyone we've hired is family/friends (*kind of). Until now we haven't tried hiring outside of that. Making this post because I don't know what all goes into that. Where do I find good sales reps? Is it possible to hire good reps in commission only role? Should I be looking for people with a lot of experience in phone sales? And what exactly goes into training these people?

We are very stretched thin at the moment until we get another solid person on the phone. I really cant afford to waste time hiring people and doing it the wrong way.

Kinda - I say that because prior to covid our structure was a bit different and we had hired a good 10 or so d2d sales reps. They were paid commission only and most of them did very very well for themselves. However in person it was a much easier sell. Also we had an easier time training as the system was perfected and again just simpler. I also wasn't involved in this process much and have never directly hired/trained someone until now so I'm basically starting from square one.

Anyways if anyone has any tips on where to start and what to do I'd really appreciate it.

I’ve noticed something weird lately.

On LinkedIn, conversations go great:

• prospects respond fast
• good engagement
• solid rapport
• they seem genuinely interested

But the second I move the conversation to email or send a calendar link from my domain… everything slows down.

Replies drop off.
People ghost.
Momentum disappears almost instantly.

It honestly feels like my credibility stays on LinkedIn and doesn’t transfer to the inbox.

What’s confusing is the leads are already warm.
They already know who I am.
So I’m starting to wonder if the issue is more technical than conversational.

Like maybe:

• my emails look less trustworthy
• inbox placement is weaker than I think
• branding feels disconnected
• tracking/headers trigger spam filters
• Workspace/domain reputation isn’t aligned properly

Basically some invisible “trust gap” between LinkedIn and email.

Has anyone else dealt with this?

Curious what actually improved your DM → call conversion rate:
better infrastructure?
domain setup?
calendar branding?
deliverability fixes?
different mailboxes?

Feels like I’m losing way too many warm leads during the transition.

Any recommendations on dialers to use?

I've used Nooks in the past but I'm running a one man sales and marketing agency so I won't meet the minimum seat requirement for most enterprise solutions.

I just need something I can use to call through a few hundred prospects a day for myself and my clients as warm leads flow through.

Any help would be appreciated!

Yeah you read that right. 5 call cycle, big enterprise logo, the kind you spend a quarter chasing. they brought up wanting net 60 instead of net 45 in the second discovery call, kind of in passing, i said "ok we can probably work it out" and moved on. it never made it into salesforce. never made it into the order form. on call 5 when legal got involved they thought we were trying to slip something past them and the whole thing collapsed in 48 hours.

48 hours from "excited to move forward" to "we have to step back and reassess". my manager was pretty cool about it, hes been around long enough to know. the part that actually stung was the SDR who sourced the lead. she did her job. i blew the handoff. nothing to do about it now except buy her lunch and shut up.

Ten years in this game and i still cant tell you the best way to track client follow ups across a 5 call cycle. tools have multiplied, signal hasnt.

Gong is great for the call itself and transcripts are searchable, but it doesnt watch the slack DM where the champion drops the procurement window, or the email where the prospect floats net 60. the gap between whats said and whats captured anywhere is where deals quietly die.

My current laughably manual workaround is a post call ritual. five minutes after every discovery call, before i pick up my coffee, i open the gong transcript and the meeting notes side by side and force myself to write down every "ask" the prospect floated, even the throwaway lines. ive been doing this for six weeks. its caught two soft asks i would have forgotten. its not a system, its a habit.

Ive also been trying out airjelly on my laptop for the last few weeks. nothing fancy, it sits in the background and pulls together what was said across gong, slack, and email so each prospect ends up with one running page of what they asked for and what ive told them id do. a couple times this month it pinged me about a deliverable i promised a prospect by a specific date that i wouldve otherwise let slip past. not a silver bullet, half the time it flags stuff that wasnt actually a commitment and i ignore it. will see if i keep it past q2.

The lesson i keep relearning is that deals dont die in negotiation, they die because some small thing got said in week 2 that nobody captured and then someone in legal sees the gap on week 6 and the whole thing collapses. theres no single tool that fixes it. its mostly discipline and paranoia.

Anyway. lost the 47k. ate it. moving on. q2 still salvageable if i close the two deals i actually didnt mess up.

Me and my team we’ve doing all possible techniques in cold outreach. But it turns out that it doesn’t matter what you write. More importantly if they trust you and see a real person behind that. You can chat about everything except work and then brings few sentences of what you’re doing and leads would agree to meet with you. Is that only my observation or not?

Curious what the process looks like for people here. I used to spend 30–45 minutes digging through LinkedIn, news, Crunchbase, G2 reviews trying to piece together a picture before a call. Felt like half my prep time was just finding the stuff, not actually thinking about it.

Recently started pulling it all into one place automatically — leadership, news, financials, competitors, red flags, even likely objections for that specific company. Cut my prep down to about 60 seconds.

What's everyone else doing? Still doing it manually? Using a tool? Would love to know what's working.

I believe the most difficult problem a new sales manager faces is transitioning from a sales person to a sales manager. The skills required for a manager are quite different than those required by a sales person. As a sales person, you have independence, in that you have control of your time, your effort, and your results, to some degree. The sales manager doesn't have that control. They can influence, motivate, educate, train, and they can coach. But at the end of the day, they only survive and thrive, if their salespersons get results. Giving up control is difficult if you have previously had it. That is why many sales managers micro-mange their team members. Their real job is to create an environment where success happens.

so they asked me to do 3, 60 second videos and asked me to answer some questions. I think i did alright but im not too sure on why i got rejected? (Send me a message and ill send you the video so you can see it if your curious please and thank you) so i think my tone and energy was on point, i did say a couple “um” “and” a bit but it wasnt too bad, in the first video they asked why tech sales and i mentioned how my whole life i wanted to be a lawyer and i wanted to see other careers and tech sales caught my eye and how it fits all my skills ive gained. i did try be a bit jokey by saying “its a funny story actually” and i think i got rejected from that. I also am applying to entry level roles because i have no prior sales experience but i do have experience that gave me skills to do tech sales.

Hello everyone,

I want to include cold calling on my outreach stack. I want to use a dialer that has local presence dialing built-in so for every call I make, the area code matches my prospects. Any recommendation on good, affordable dialer options? I will be calling from Europe to the USA.

Hi everyone!

I just got promoted to an account manager role along with three other coworkers. We're the first traditional AMs in the company. Another four reps got promoted to AE roles. The one thing all 8 of us had in common is we crushed our numbers.

In this new role, I'm calling current customers. KPI and commission is structured so I just call a high volume. No specific upselling or cross selling. I don't do any cold calling.

Before that, I did 15 months of full sales cycle cold calling for SMB. I prospect, call, book meetings, pitch, and close on the phone.

I want to move into a AE role in the future, either at my current company or any other org.

My question is, I'm just overthinking it and leverage this or should I jump ship for an AE role? If I should stay, what should I do to set myself up for a SMB AE role?

To better understand the role as a Sales Manager/Leader, consider this!

There are four core systems that the salesperson must master, which are: business management, market development, activity management, and sales process.

For the manager there are six additional core systems which they must master; recruiting, selection, onboarding, coaching, training, and leadership.

The sales manager/leader’s job is to effectively master salesperson's core systems and then learn the leaders core systems. Then be able to transfer the salesperson's core systems to new members of the sales team.

The sales manager is the primary trainer of the company’s systems, processes, and tools.

As a new sales leader you're walking a very difficult path, but if you understand the importance of filling your toolbox with knowledge skills and abilities about these ten systems, you'll be OK.

Of, your primary job is to create an environment where success happens, through your thoughts, words, and your behaviours.