Founding Enterprise SDR

Overview

You're prospecting into hospital systems and health clinics to book demos for AI agents that automate administrative work for clinicians. Your targets are doctors, hospital administrators, CMIOs (Chief Medical Information Officers), and health system operations leaders. You're educating a market that's conservative, heavily regulated, and skeptical of new technology—especially AI.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Series A (YC S21, raised funding ~2-3 years ago)

Size: 71 employees

Growth: Hiring 3 founding SDRs now - this means they're just building out the sales org

Market Position: Category creator - "autonomous AI agents for hospital operations" is bleeding edge. You're not just selling against competitors, you're selling against manual processes and the status quo.

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 80%+ Outbound - You're building lists and cold calling. Inbound is minimal at this stage.
• 10% Inbound - Maybe some word-of-mouth from early customers, conference leads
• 10% Warm intros - Medical network connections if you have them

SDR/AE Structure: You're one of the first SDRs. You hand off qualified meetings to AEs (likely founders or early sales hires who close).

SE Support: Likely minimal or shared - this is a 71-person company. You might be on demos helping with discovery.

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Other AI medical scribe/automation tools (Abridge, Nuance DAX, DeepScribe for scribing; legacy workflow software for operations). But mostly you're competing against "we'll just hire more staff" or "our current EMR vendor."

How They Differentiate: Full autonomous agent approach vs point solutions. They're positioning as replacing entire workflows, not just one task.

Common Objections:

• "We can't risk patient data with AI"
• "Our IT/compliance team will never approve this"
• "We already use [Epic/Cerner] for this"
• "Doctors won't trust it"
• "We need to see FDA approval or clinical validation"

Win Themes: Proven time savings for overworked clinicians, ROI on labor costs (healthcare labor is expensive and scarce), clinical burnout reduction.

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Prospecting (60%) | Research/List Building (25%) | Internal/Training (15%)

Key Activities

• Cold calling hospital administrators and physicians: 50-70 calls per day. Most go to voicemail. You're trying to get past gatekeepers at hospital systems, which is notoriously hard. You'll hear "send me an email" a lot.
• Email sequences: Writing and sending personalized emails to doctors and health IT leaders. Open rates are probably 15-20%, response rates under 2%. Healthcare inboxes are swamped.
• LinkedIn outreach: Connecting with CMIOs, COOs, and physician leaders. Acceptance rates are low - these people get spammed constantly.
• List building and research: Finding the right contacts at health systems (not easy - org charts are opaque, people have multiple titles, decision-makers aren't obvious). You'll spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, hospital websites, and maybe ZoomInfo/Apollo.
• Qualifying calls: When someone actually responds, you're doing 15-20 minute discovery calls to figure out if they have budget, authority, need, and timeline (BANT). Many "opportunities" will be tire-kickers or too early stage.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Healthcare is slow and risk-averse: You'll book a meeting, they'll say they're interested, then you won't hear from them for 3 months because they need to "run it by compliance" or "wait until next budget cycle." Deals that feel hot go cold constantly.
• Getting to the right person is a maze: Hospitals have complex hierarchies. The person you're talking to often can't make decisions. You'll get passed around between IT, operations, clinical leadership, and finance.
• High rejection volume: You're cold calling into a market that doesn't know they need this yet. Most calls end in "not interested" or "we're all set." If you can't handle rejection, this will break you.
• You're educating, not just selling: AI in healthcare is scary to people. You'll spend a lot of energy explaining what it even does before you can talk about value.
• Medical jargon and credibility: If you don't have a medical background, you'll be learning a ton of healthcare terminology and workflows just to have credible conversations. Doctors can smell bullshit from a mile away.

What Success Looks Like

• Booking 10-15 qualified meetings per month (meetings where the AE actually takes the call and the prospect has real buying authority)
• Building a pipeline of 30-50 active prospects you're nurturing over multiple quarters
• Converting 15-20% of initial conversations to qualified handoffs

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• Chief Medical Information Officers (CMIOs) - doctors who manage health IT
• COOs / VPs of Operations at hospital systems
• Physician group leaders / Department heads
• Health system administrators

What They Care About:

• Reducing clinical burnout (doctors are leaving medicine in droves)
• Saving labor costs (hiring nurses and admins is expensive and they can't find enough staff)
• Compliance and patient safety (they need proof this won't cause harm)
• ROI and payback period (healthcare margins are thin)
• Integration with existing EMR systems (Epic, Cerner, etc.)

Requirements

• 1+ year of SDR experience at a high-growth B2B startup (ideally AI or SaaS)
• Proven track record of hitting or exceeding quota
• Strong preference for medical background or health tech experience (this is real - you need to speak their language)
• Comfortable with long, complex sales cycles and high rejection rates
• Self-starter who can build process from scratch (you're founding SDR #1, 2, or 3)
• Remote work discipline (no office, no one looking over your shoulder)