Overview
You'll spend your day prospecting into energy companies - developers building solar/wind farms, investors funding clean energy projects, and analysts tracking power markets. Your job is to book qualified demos for the AE team. You're selling a specialized data platform (think Bloomberg Terminal for the energy transition), so you need to find people who make investment or development decisions and convince them to take a 30-minute call.
Role Snapshot
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Role Type | Outbound BDR (dedicated prospecting, passing to AEs) |
| Sales Motion | Outbound-heavy (cold calling, email sequences, LinkedIn) |
| Deal Complexity | Consultative (complex product, technical buyers) |
| Sales Cycle | N/A (you hand off after booking the meeting) |
| Deal Size | N/A (BDR role - you don't close deals) |
| Quota (est.) | 15-25 qualified meetings per month |
Company Context
Stage: Series C (raised $25M in Series B July 2023, recently closed Series C with Decarbonization Partners)
Size: 160 employees
Growth: Actively hiring across BDR team, launched new AI platform (Ion_AI) in July 2024, expanding product suite
Market Position: Leading platform in energy transition analytics - competing against legacy data providers and newer startups. Not a household name, so you'll be doing education.
GTM Reality
Pipeline Sources:
- 95% Outbound - you're building lists, doing research, and initiating cold conversations
- 5% Inbound - occasional demo requests from website, but don't count on these to hit quota
SDR/AE Structure: Dedicated BDR team feeding AEs. You book it, they take it from there.
SE Support: AEs handle demos themselves initially, SEs come in for technical deep dives later in the sales cycle.
Competitive Landscape
Main Competitors: Legacy energy data providers (Wood Mackenzie, S&P Global Commodity Insights), newer analytics platforms, internal analyst teams at large companies
How They Differentiate: AI-powered platform with real-time data vs. static reports from competitors. Integrated view across power, clean fuels, and carbon capture.
Common Objections: "We already have Bloomberg/our own analysts", "Too expensive for what we need", "We're not making investment decisions right now"
Win Themes: Speed of insights, depth of coverage on renewable projects, forecasting accuracy for market trends
What You'll Actually Do
Time Breakdown
Research/List Building (20%) | Calling (40%) | Email/LinkedIn (25%) | Internal Meetings (15%)
Key Activities
- Cold Calling: 50-70 dials per day to directors, VPs, and analysts at energy companies. Most calls go to voicemail. You're trying to catch someone between meetings and explain why they should care about energy transition data in 30 seconds.
- List Building: Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator and company databases to identify who at a renewable energy developer or utility makes decisions about buying data/analytics tools. This is research-heavy - the energy sector is specialized.
- Email Sequences: Writing personalized emails referencing specific projects a company is working on ("saw you're developing a 500MW solar farm in Texas"). Multi-touch campaigns with 5-7 touches over 2-3 weeks.
- Qualification Calls: When someone responds, you hop on a 10-15 minute discovery call to understand their role, what decisions they make, and whether they're a fit. Then you pitch the demo and book it on the AE's calendar.
The Honest Reality
What's Hard
- Niche Market: You're not calling generic SaaS buyers. You need to learn about renewable energy projects, carbon capture, clean fuels markets. Steep learning curve in the first 2-3 months.
- Low Response Rates: Energy executives are busy and get a lot of vendor outreach. Expect 1-2% response rates on cold emails and lots of unreturned voicemails.
- Long Research Time: Can't just blast through calls. You need to understand what projects a company is working on, their growth stage, who the decision-makers are. Each account takes research.
- Gatekeepers: Many targets are senior people with assistants screening calls. Getting through is part of the job.
What Success Looks Like
- Booking 15-25 qualified meetings per month that AEs accept (not getting meetings rejected for being unqualified)
- 50%+ of your booked meetings show up and are genuinely interested
- Building pipeline that converts - AEs close deals from your meetings
Who You're Selling To
Primary Buyers:
- Directors/VPs of Strategy or Development at renewable energy companies
- Investment analysts at private equity firms, pension funds investing in energy
- Market analysts at utilities planning their generation mix
- Corporate development teams at oil & gas companies transitioning to renewables
What They Care About:
- Accurate forecasting for project economics (will this solar farm be profitable in 10 years?)
- Competitive intelligence (what are others building, where, at what cost?)
- Market timing (when's the right time to enter a new geography or technology?)
- Speed of getting answers vs. manual research
Requirements
- Comfortable making 50+ cold calls per day and hearing "no" constantly
- Willing to learn a technical/specialized industry (they mention "former college athletes" - they want competitive, coachable people who grind)
- Can write personalized outreach that doesn't sound like spam
- Self-motivated for a fully remote role - no one's watching you dial
- Okay with a pure prospecting role (you won't close deals or own accounts)