Overview
You're the first SDR at Infisical, a secrets management platform competing against HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, and other established players. You'll build the outbound prospecting motion from scratch, targeting DevOps Engineers, Security Architects, and Platform Engineering leads at companies with 200+ employees. Your job is to get technical buyers on the phone who currently manage secrets with homegrown scripts, scattered .env files, or legacy tools.
Role Snapshot
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Role Type | Outbound SDR (first hire in function) |
| Sales Motion | Outbound-heavy with some inbound from open source community |
| Deal Complexity | Technical, consultative - educating on security risk |
| Sales Cycle | 3-6 months (you're booking first calls, not closing) |
| Deal Size | $15K-100K+ ACV (enterprise focus) |
| Quota (est.) | 15-20 qualified meetings/month |
Company Context
Stage: Seed/Series A (28 employees suggests early funding)
Size: 28 employees total
Growth: Hiring their first sales team - AE posted this role
Market Position: Challenger in crowded secrets management space - competing against established enterprise tools and cloud-native options
GTM Reality
Pipeline Sources:
- 20% Inbound - Open source community users, docs traffic, some product-led interest from free tier
- 75% Outbound - Cold outreach you're building from scratch
- 5% Referrals - Limited at this stage
SDR/AE Structure: You're the only SDR working with 1-2 AEs (including Alex who posted this)
SE Support: Likely shared technical resources or AEs do their own demos initially
Competitive Landscape
Main Competitors: HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, CyberArk, 1Password for enterprise, Doppler
How They Differentiate: All-in-one platform (secrets + certificates + PAM), potentially easier to use than Vault, more features than cloud-native options
Common Objections: "We already use AWS Secrets Manager", "We built our own solution", "HashiCorp Vault works fine", "Not a priority right now"
Win Themes: Unified platform, compliance/audit features, developer experience, avoiding tool sprawl
What You'll Actually Do
Time Breakdown
Prospecting (60%) | Research/List Building (20%) | Internal Meetings (20%)
Key Activities
- Cold calling: 50-70 dials/day to DevOps and Security teams. Most calls go to voicemail. You're trying to catch someone between deploys who'll talk about how they currently handle secrets. Conversion rate will be low - maybe 1-2% of dials become conversations.
- Email sequences: Building and testing messaging to technical personas. You're A/B testing subject lines about secrets sprawl, compliance gaps, and security incidents. Most emails get ignored. Click rates around 2-3%.
- LinkedIn outreach: Connecting with Platform Engineering managers and Security leads. Writing personalized messages referencing their tech stack (gleaned from job posts, tech blogs, Stack Share). Response rate around 5-10% if you're good.
- List building: Researching companies that fit ICP (likely 200+ employees, engineering-heavy, using Kubernetes/microservices). Using LinkedIn Sales Nav, ZoomInfo, or similar to find the right contacts. Figuring out who actually owns secrets management decisions - sometimes DevOps, sometimes Security, sometimes both need to be involved.
The Honest Reality
What's Hard
- Getting past gatekeepers to reach technical buyers who don't expect sales calls. Many DevOps teams are anti-sales and will ghost you.
- Explaining a technical product you're learning on the fly. Prospects will ask detailed questions about Kubernetes integration or RBAC models on discovery calls.
- Long education cycles. Many companies don't realize they have a secrets management problem until there's an incident. You're often planting seeds, not harvesting demand.
- Figuring out what works from scratch. No playbook, no proven messaging, no historical data on what converts. You'll test a lot of approaches that fail.
- Working at a tiny company where you're building everything. No BDR team, no ops support initially, no established lead scoring. You're also probably in Slack channels helping debug prospects' open source issues.
What Success Looks Like
- Booking 15-20 qualified meetings per month that turn into legitimate opportunities for AEs
- Building a repeatable outbound motion - sequences, call scripts, qualification criteria that work
- Developing point of view on which buyer personas and company profiles convert best
Who You're Selling To
Primary Buyers:
- VP Engineering / Director of Platform Engineering (signs the contract)
- DevOps Engineers / SREs (users and influencers)
- Security Architects / CISOs (often involved in enterprise deals)
What They Care About:
- Security/compliance risk from secrets sprawl (credentials in repos, Slack, wikis)
- Developer productivity - easier secrets management vs manual processes
- Audit requirements - who accessed what, when, why
- Consolidation - replacing multiple tools (secrets, certs, SSH keys) with one platform
- Migration pain - they're worried about moving from current solution
Requirements
- 1-2 years in SDR/BDR role (or scrappy first sales job somewhere)
- Not intimidated by technical buyers - you need to learn enough about DevOps/Security to have credible conversations
- High tolerance for rejection and slow responses - technical buyers are hard to reach
- Self-starter mentality - you're defining the role, not following a playbook
- Comfortable with ambiguity and experimentation - most things you try won't work at first
- Genuine interest in developer tools or security - faking it won't work with this audience