Sales Development Representative

Overview

You're doing outbound prospecting for DOSS's ERP platform, targeting operations leaders at mid-market companies ($50M-500M revenue) in CPG, food & beverage, manufacturing, and distribution. Your job is to book qualified discovery calls for Account Executives. You spend most of your day cold calling, sending emails, and researching companies showing signs they need a new operations system.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Series B/C (scaling from 40 to 200 employees)

Size: ~114 employees currently

Growth: Aggressively hiring across all functions - moving to 5x larger office

Market Position: Challenger ERP startup competing against NetSuite, SAP, and legacy systems

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 70% Cold Outbound - You're building lists of target companies and reaching out cold to operations leaders
• 20% Inbound Follow-Up - Website demo requests, content downloads, event leads that need qualification
• 10% Re-engagement - Old opportunities that went cold, reaching back out after 3-6 months

SDR/AE Structure: You're paired with 1-2 Account Executives. You book the meetings, they run the sales process. You sit in on some early calls to learn, but you're not managing deals.

Tools: Salesforce, Outreach/SalesLoft for sequences, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo or similar for contact data.

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: NetSuite, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, plus inertia (prospects sticking with current system)

How You Position It: You lead with pain points - "Most operations leaders I talk to are frustrated their system can't handle multiple sales channels" or "Companies growing fast usually hit a wall with their current ERP around $100M revenue." You're not pitching features, you're getting them curious about whether DOSS solves problems they have.

Common Brush-Offs:

• "We just implemented NetSuite" (timing objection)
• "Send me some information" (polite blow-off)
• "We're not looking right now" (no active pain)
• "Call me in 6 months" (kicking the can)

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Calling (40%) | Email/LinkedIn (25%) | Research (20%) | Meetings/Admin (15%)

Key Activities

• Cold Calling: You make 60-80 calls per day to operations leaders. You're using a script but trying to sound human. Most go to voicemail. When you get someone, you have about 15 seconds to explain why you're calling before they tell you they're busy. You're trying to uncover pain points ("How are you managing inventory across multiple warehouses right now?") and book a 30-minute call with your AE.

• Prospecting Research: You spend 1-2 hours daily building target lists. You're looking for companies in the right verticals (CPG, food & beverage, manufacturing) with signs of complexity: multiple sales channels (wholesale + D2C + Amazon), recent funding, job postings for operations roles, news about expansion. You're finding people on LinkedIn and tracking down their email/phone.

• Email Sequences: You write personalized emails (not fully custom, but referencing something specific about their company) and enroll prospects in multi-touch sequences. You're testing subject lines, following up 4-6 times over 2-3 weeks. Open rates are 20-30%, reply rates are 2-5%.

• LinkedIn Outreach: You connect with prospects on LinkedIn, engage with their posts, and send InMails. This is warmer than email but still mostly ignored. You're building relationships over weeks.

• Qualification Calls: When someone responds with interest, you jump on a quick 10-15 minute call to make sure they're actually a fit (right company size, have budget authority, experiencing relevant pain) before booking them with your AE. You disqualify 30-40% of interested prospects.

• Meeting Prep and Handoff: Before each meeting you booked, you brief your AE on what you learned, send them your notes, and sometimes join the first 5 minutes of the call. You follow up afterward to get feedback on whether it was actually qualified.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Rejection is constant: 95% of your outreach gets ignored. On calls, people are often annoyed you're interrupting them. You get hung up on, told to never call again, sent straight to voicemail. Your first few months, this feels personal. Eventually you get numb to it, but it's still draining.

• Hard to reach decision-makers: VPs of Operations don't answer unknown numbers. Their emails are buried. Getting past gatekeepers (assistants, general inboxes) is a skill. You'll spend weeks trying to reach one person.

• Tough product to pitch quickly: ERP is not sexy. It's hard to create urgency in a cold call. Most companies aren't actively shopping for a new system. You're cold prospecting into latent pain, which means lots of "not interested right now" responses.

• AEs will reject your meetings: You book what you think is a qualified meeting, your AE takes the call, and afterward they tell you the company was too small or the person wasn't senior enough or they're not actually in-market. This is frustrating but normal - you're learning what "qualified" really means.

What Success Looks Like

• You consistently hit 15-20 qualified meetings per month (means you're calling consistently and getting better at messaging)
• 60-70% of your meetings are "accepted" by AEs as actually qualified (not tire-kickers)
• 20-30% of your booked meetings eventually turn into pipeline for your AE (you won't see most close, but some do)

Who You're Selling To

Primary Targets:

• VP of Operations / Director of Supply Chain (day-to-day pain owners)
• CFO (budget holder for finance systems)
• COO (strategic operations leader)

What They Care About:

• Is this worth 30 minutes of my time? (You need to surface pain quickly)
• Are you calling about something relevant to my actual problems? (Generic pitches get shut down)
• Have you done your homework on my company? (Referencing their specific situation helps)

Requirements

• 0-2 years experience (this is often a first sales job, but B2B sales internship or SDR experience helps)
• Comfortable making 60-80 calls per day and hearing "no" constantly
• Curious about operations/supply chain - you'll need to learn enough to have credible conversations
• Coachable and resilient - you'll get feedback on your messaging, and you need to iterate quickly
• Goal is to move into an AE role in 12-18 months if you perform well