How to Land a SaaS Sales Job in 60 Days
Resource to help folks who are either looking to break into tech sales or recently laid off
Put this resource together to help folks who are either looking to break into tech sales or recently laid off. I’m going through the latter, since I was let go as well. Hope this helps and feel free to chime in with things that you think can be improved to help others. For quick reference this was written 2 months before my second post (and soon to be third post on the subject) so once you get through this feel free to check out Part II with updated numbers/tactics/strategy.
Here’s a quick snapshot on results so far:
Since 1/23 I’ve been tracking my results on reaching out to companies and so far here are the results:
45 applications
17 first round interviews
4 second round interviews (this number is lower than the total amount above and a combination of rejections from applications or was not feeling the team/opportunity/company and just passed, trying to vet out as best I can)
Now going into later stages with 3 companies
My goal is to land a new gig by mid - late March at this pace. I’ll note that I ended up getting interviews beforehand via warm intros or recruiters reaching out. I’ve added that into the mix but the first month I wasn’t doing much except for just trying to relax and think about my next move. I’ve labeled those passive interviews below.
Main framework
What does my next move look like?
What are the characteristics of the company I’m looking for (size, sub segment, stage, people) and tiering
How can I quickly vet companies I’m interested in and disqualify or continue to explore?
Tactics to start reaching out
I’ll break down each to be as brief as possible, happy to go more in depth.
What does my next move look like?
My background is in SaaS sales (shocker) with a recent focus on DevOps tooling, pivoting from martech. I used the following resources to help me nail down where I wanted to land next:
Matt Turck’s MADD landscape - great overview of the AI, ML, and Data landscape (along with companies that provide applications to specific industries)
CB insights - Google “CB insights top (insert AI, or ML, Blockchain, or healthtech, etc.) companies. You can also sign up for a free trial for 7 days to continue accessing more reports and more in depth information on a specific company. I did those searches to get a sense of where the top companies fall in each respective ecosystem.
Builtin NYC - same as above (google “top (insert AI, ML, blockchain) companies”. I’m in NYC but you can obviously use for your respective location or remote.
Corporate Bro - Still Hiring Today
The goal here isn’t to just find any job, but one that would fit my (or yours) background, or one that I'm interested in (or you're interested in) to explore and connect with.
What are the characteristics of the company that I’m looking for?
I’ve mostly been in startups. I tiered out companies that would be my ideal pick, along with stage and number of employees:
Tier 1 - series A/B, anywhere from 50 - 200 people (this is a good indicator that the team is on to something but there is still probably risk, need to understand that and see what has been done so far from a sales perspective in the org in order to “de-risk” as best I can)
Tier 2 - growth, anywhere from 250 - 500 people (most likely have established something repeatable and are hiring to execute on playbooks but there are still a lot of learnings
Tier 3 - enterprise/established (your Databricks, Snowflakes). Interested just because it might be more stable.
You can apply this type of tiering however you’d like, just outlining what I’ve done to give folks a sense of how to be more targeted and efficient in their approach. Also directly relates to sales prospecting. You'll notice that there is a lot more upfront work, and I've been tailoring the "pitch on me" based on successes/failures in each convo.
Researching these companies
I use the following resources to vet out companies that might look interesting but maybe don’t have a great rating on Repvue or maybe low quota attainment. Easy way to disqualify.
Repvue - I think that this is solid but all in all, your best bet is to talk to people there or former employees to get the inside scoop. I think tools like this and Glassdoor are good indicators but reality comes from connecting with people who actually work there.
Blind - I use this for more backchannel gossip on a company - again take this with a grain of salt since there can be haters just like any other company.
r/sales - duh
Tactics on Reaching out
Network
This got me 4 interviews, between just setting up a call and asking people for help and intros. This was via 2nd degree connections or direct. Those people are awesome. Always ask for help and always respond in kind. Karma.
Inbound
Besides cleaning up my LI profile, there are other channels that have proved successful. The goal here being minimal effort to get conversations.
I've listed those resources below, I'm sure there's a lot more. I don’t have to put in much effort other than setting up my profile:
Wellfound (or angel.co)
Recruiters (either ones that I’ve worked with or have chatted with before). I’ve also been able to get lists of VC portfolios where there companies are hiring for said function.
This has netted me 1 interview.
From a recruiter perspective, I ended up landing 2 interviews. There is more volume however I declined if it wasn’t something I wasn’t interested in.
Outbound on Tier 1 and 2 companies
First thing I’ve been looking for is either direct, or 2nd connections to people who are hiring managers (not HR or people) and AE’s who have been at xyz company for 2 years plus.
If you don’t have those, look for an alma mater from your school, ie I went to Rutgers so that’s a nice way to break the ice on a “cold” email.
The AE route I haven’t been super successful with, despite my thinking that the referral fee for them would be advantageous for an intro to a hiring manager. I prefer reaching out to people on a team since they’re not motivated to hire me and won’t “sell” me on the job. I could be wrong.
Taking the route of hiring manager has yielded much better results.
I’ve been taking this route for companies that are in my tier 1 to tier 2 buckets. I’ve mostly been applying to companies in my tier 3. Note that I have not put together a resume for reaching out direct, I’ve found that it’s not worth it until you have a convo.
This has gotten me 5 interviews.
Outbound on Tier 3 companies
When applying to companies in tier 3, I’ve been using resymatch.io to match up my resume with a job description. This is heavy volume so I’ve bucketed out different resumes for dev ops tools, or blockchain, broadly speaking so I have a template to just edit and shoot over.
I’ll refine based on the job description and then send out. This has gotten me two interviews.
Also worth checking out Austin Belchak who has great resources on cleaning up your profile and tactics to reach out. His offering is $37/mo and you can cancel anytime, feel like it’s worth it since the ROI would net me a job in (hopefully) less than two months.
This netted me 5 interviews.
Conclusion
Hope this helps and happy to answer questions. Also happy to take feedback on the approach. This framework should apply to folks who are in the market from recently being laid off or who are trying to break into tech sales. All this has been done in the past few weeks. There’s a shitload of opportunity out there.