Overview
You're prospecting into engineering leaders at tech companies with 100+ developers, trying to book meetings about how they're managing engineering operations and AI adoption. You'll spend most of your day cold calling CTOs and VPs of Engineering, sending LinkedIn messages, and running email sequences. The product is an internal developer portal that enforces reliability standards - it's a newer category, so you're doing a lot of market education.
Role Snapshot
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Role Type | Outbound BDR - book meetings for AEs |
| Sales Motion | Outbound-heavy (likely 80%+ outbound) |
| Deal Complexity | Enterprise - selling to senior engineering leaders |
| Sales Cycle | N/A - you hand off after qualified meeting |
| Deal Size | Unknown (likely $50K+ ACV based on target customer) |
| Quota (est.) | 15-20 qualified meetings/month |
Company Context
Stage: Likely Series A/B (100 employees, actively hiring sales)
Size: 100 employees
Growth: Hiring BDRs indicates scaling GTM motion
Market Position: Category creator/early mover in internal developer portals focused on engineering operations and AI governance
GTM Reality
Pipeline Sources:
- 80%+ Outbound - cold calling, LinkedIn, email sequences to engineering leaders
- 20% Inbound - likely some organic interest from engineering communities, but hiring BDRs suggests this isn't enough
- Minimal partner/referral motion at this stage
SDR/AE Structure: BDRs book meetings, hand off to AEs for demos/closing
SE Support: Unknown, but likely have technical resources for deeper demos given technical buyer
Competitive Landscape
Main Competitors: Other internal developer portals (Backstage by Spotify, Port, OpsLevel), service catalog tools, homegrown solutions
How They Differentiate: Focus on "Engineering Operations" angle + AI adoption confidence (newer positioning)
Common Objections: "We built our own", "We use Backstage", "What's the ROI?", "We're not ready for this"
Win Themes: Automated reliability enforcement, faster MTTR, increased deployment frequency, AI governance
What You'll Actually Do
Time Breakdown
Prospecting (70%) | Research/List Building (15%) | Internal Meetings (15%)
Key Activities
- Cold Calling: 50-70 dials per day to VPs of Engineering and CTOs. Most don't answer. You're interrupting their day to talk about developer portals and engineering operations - expect a lot of "not interested" and hang-ups.
- Email Sequences: Write and send personalized cold emails (10-15/day). You'll reference their tech stack, recent engineering blog posts, or funding news to get responses. Most get ignored.
- LinkedIn Outreach: Connect with engineering leaders and send messages. LinkedIn response rates are low for cold outreach, but you'll get some conversations going.
- List Building: Research companies that fit your ICP (mid-to-large tech companies, 100+ devs, likely using microservices). Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, BuiltWith, job postings to identify good targets.
- Meeting Handoffs: Brief AEs on the context before handing off booked meetings. You'll join some discovery calls to learn the sales process.
The Honest Reality
What's Hard
- Getting past gatekeepers to reach CTOs and VPs of Engineering is tough - they're busy and get a lot of sales calls
- Internal developer portals are a newer category - many engineering leaders haven't heard of them or think they can build their own
- Engineering leaders are skeptical of sales pitches and want to see technical depth immediately - you need to sound credible talking about CI/CD, microservices, MTTR
- Long research cycles - you can't just blast generic messages, you need to understand their tech stack and engineering challenges
- Rejection volume is high - most calls/emails go unanswered, and when they do respond, it's often "not a priority right now"
What Success Looks Like
- Booking 15-20 qualified meetings per month that show up and progress to next stage
- 1-2% connect rate on cold calls (50-70 dials = 1-2 conversations)
- 2-5% email response rate
- Understanding engineering operations well enough to have credible conversations with senior technical leaders
Who You're Selling To
Primary Buyers:
- VPs of Engineering (main target)
- CTOs at mid-size companies (50-500 engineers)
- Engineering Directors at larger orgs (1000+ engineers)
What They Care About:
- Developer productivity and velocity - are teams shipping fast enough?
- Reliability and uptime - are we meeting SLAs? How fast do we recover from incidents?
- AI adoption chaos - how do we let teams use AI tools without creating technical debt?
- Service sprawl - do we even know what services we have and who owns them?
- Engineering standards - how do we enforce best practices across 100+ developers?
Requirements
- Comfortable cold calling senior technical leaders who may be dismissive or skeptical
- Able to learn enough about engineering operations to sound credible (CI/CD, microservices, DevOps, MTTR, deployment frequency)
- Coachable and willing to iterate on messaging - this is a newer category so you'll be testing what resonates
- Resilient to high rejection volume and ghosting
- 1-2 years BDR/SDR experience preferred, especially selling to technical buyers
- Self-starter who can work independently in a remote environment