The Tech Sales Playbook
Everything I have learned working in tech sales, how to break in, and how to excel at the job.
This piece is devoted to everything I’ve learned in tech sales over the course of my early career. I want to go over the skills you can learn in this role, what the day-to-day looks like, the important qualities and traits needed for the job, paths going forward, and some of the harder parts of the role.
This is entirely from my personal perspective. If you also work in tech sales, I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions. The goal here is for me to provide a self-reflection, to inspire others to consider the role and help them prepare, and to help people who work with sales reps better understand how we actually do our jobs.
I’ll start with a general overview of what I actually do day-to-day and the overarching reason for my position. As a Sales Development Representative, the overall goal of my job is to acquire new customers for the company, thus increasing revenue.
You acquire customers through a combination of cold outreach through different means, whether that be making calls, sending emails, or creating connections on LinkedIn.
Here’s what a typical day looks like for me: I start my morning making cold calls, usually 150–200 per day. The tool I use to get through my calls is Nooks. I then use tools like Clay and ZoomInfo to find new prospects to call based on our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), usually toward the end of the day. In between all of that are GTM strategy meetings, expansion strategy and planning, and experimenting with new tools that can either boost prospect quality or improve personal outreach skills.
The bread and butter of this job are two things: being a good prospector, which basically means understanding your ICP and using tech tools to find that ICP, and being a great outreach communicator. Those two things are the inputs and outputs required every single day to be good at the job.
With that out of the way, we can move on to the skills required and the backgrounds people often come from that help them succeed. In terms of skills, the most important ones are
Ability to communicate clearly, concisely, and timely
Clear, meaning the prospect understands why you’re reaching out. Concise, because the prospect is usually busy and you want to respect their time.
Timely, meaning you’re calling them at the right time of day and at a time when they might be looking to buy.
Entrepreneurial and independent
Working in tech sales inherently requires being independent and entrepreneurial. Why? Because, like founders, sales reps need to always know what is most important to them at this exact moment. They need to know how to build something from 0 to 1, meaning they need the ability to develop lists of prospects and contacts, as well as full talk tracks, by themselves. They also have to be good at experimenting and thinking like a scientist. If a talk track doesn’t work, look at the data and change it. If a sequence doesn’t work, look at the data and change it.
Operator and people person
What separates good from great sales reps, aside from developing better value propositions and objection-handling skills, is having some level of technical GTM skills. Do you know how to use Clay? Can you make API or Zapier connections? Are you good at understanding data and taking action on it? Can you establish an ICP? Can you develop scalable AI prompts for optimizing talk tracks, emails, and objection handling?
That’s the gist of being a sales rep, but what are the opportunities moving forward? What careers are available past this role? Essentially the reason why you start as a rep is because you learn the product extremely well. This matters because if you get promoted to account executive, you are a cheaper option compared to training a brand-new AE, you’re already ramped up on the product from day one.
What backgrounds do people have coming into sales?
There isn’t one particular background that guarantees success. My background is philosophy, and I think it helped me a lot, especially with communication and understanding the more logical GTM side. But I’ve seen engineers, teachers, business majors, poli-sci majors, and more do great. For solid advice: enter the job interview prepared to show clear communication and entrepreneurial drive. Those are probably the two biggest traits to focus on.
Here are all the skills I learned:
Clear, concise, timely communication
Being entrepreneurial and independent
Growth and operations mindset
Here’s how I structure my day:
Highest-energy tasks are done in the morning. For me, that’s cold calling, emails, and follow-ups while I’m caffeinated.
Late afternoon is for prospecting and reviewing calls from myself and others.
If I have extra time, I’ll optimize operational structures around scripts and sequences or learn to get better with AI tools like Clay.
Here’s what’s most important to prioritize:
All you really need to understand to be good at the role is how to prospect and how to call on the phone. That’s it.
Prospecting is the operational side, the inputs. And it’s getting harder because the internet is getting so big that signal-to-noise ratios keep getting smaller. There’s more information than ever, but finding the right information is getting harder.
Then there are the outputs, the calls. But the inputs matter more, especially because so much time and energy gets wasted calling the wrong people.
Here’s how to know you’re doing well:
Everything is tied entirely to the number of leads you book demos with. Booking more demos = more commission, and quota is tied directly to the number of calls you make.
You can make 3 calls per week if you’re booking 3 demos per week. Until then, you’ll still need to make 1,000 calls per week to be good at your job.
Here are the career paths going forward:
Account executives move deals forward, close them, and send out MSAs.
Account managers manage accounts currently on the books.
Customer operations, customer experience, and general ops roles are all common pathways as well.
More technically leaning reps can also move into more product-heavy roles.
How to handle rejection:
The most brutal part of the job is that you have to handle constant rejection and have the confidence to call someone out of the blue.
But the upside is that it teaches you a lot: how to tolerate rejection, how to be quick on your feet with communication, and how to develop a deeper understanding of growth, GTM, and business operations.
I hope this helps. The SDR role has taught me a lot so far, and I’m excited to learn way more in the future. Always reach out if you want to chat!
Agreed on these points! Knowing the ICP is huge. The best sales reps I've come across were amazing at prospecting, because top of pipe is so important to your number.
I'll add one more thing - in my opinion, the top 1% sales reps have an incredible ability to focus ONLY on what truly matters. Everyone can say that, but the reps that really blow quota out of the water know exactly what's worth their time and what isn't, and spend their limited work time on the most important things.