Overview
You prospect into enterprise marketing teams to book qualified demos for Account Executives. You're targeting Marketing Ops Directors, Demand Gen leads, and Campaign Managers at companies already using marketing automation platforms like Marketo, Eloqua, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Your pitch: Knak makes campaign creation faster without breaking their existing workflow.
Role Snapshot
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Role Type | Outbound SDR with some inbound lead follow-up |
| Sales Motion | Outbound-heavy - targeted account prospecting |
| Deal Complexity | Qualification-focused - identifying pain and stakeholders |
| Sales Cycle | Your job is booking the meeting, not closing deals |
| Deal Size | N/A - you hand off to AEs |
| Quota (est.) | 15-20 qualified meetings/month |
Company Context
Stage: Growth stage (167 employees, established product with notable customers)
Size: 167 employees
Growth: Hiring across roles, emphasizing AI features in marketing
Market Position: Niche player in marketing campaign creation - selling into an established category
GTM Reality
Pipeline Sources:
- 70% Outbound - you're building lists of companies using Marketo/Eloqua/SFMC (tech stack data from tools like ZoomInfo or BuiltWith), then reaching out cold via email, LinkedIn, and calls
- 30% Inbound - following up on demo requests, content downloads, or website visitors; some of these are higher intent but many are tire-kickers
SDR/AE Structure: You're booking meetings for a team of AEs; probably supporting 2-3 AEs each
Territory: Likely carved by company size, industry, or MAP platform (e.g., "you own Marketo accounts in tech")
Competitive Landscape
Main Competitors: You're not selling against competitors directly, but prospects will mention native email builders in their MAP, or tools like Litmus/Stensul
How They Differentiate: Speed + AI features + works across multiple MAPs
Common Objections: "We already have an email builder", "Not a priority right now", "Send me information" (translation: no)
Your Job: Get them curious enough about faster campaign creation to take a 30-min demo
What You'll Actually Do
Time Breakdown
Prospecting/Outreach (60%) | Follow-up/Nurture (25%) | Admin/Meetings (15%)
Key Activities
- List building and research: Using tools like LinkedIn Sales Nav, ZoomInfo, or Apollo to find Marketing Ops Directors and Demand Gen leads at companies with 500+ employees. You're filtering for companies using Marketo, Eloqua, or SFMC because Knak integrates with those platforms.
- Cold outreach: Sending 60-80 emails per day and making 40-50 calls per day. Most emails don't get responses. Most calls go to voicemail. You're testing different subject lines and messages to see what resonates.
- Qualifying inbound leads: When someone fills out a demo form or downloads a resource, you're calling them within 5 minutes to qualify intent. Some are genuinely interested; many were just browsing and aren't ready to talk.
- Follow-up sequences: Prospects who show interest but aren't ready get put into multi-touch sequences. You're sending articles about campaign creation bottlenecks, checking in every 2-3 weeks, trying to stay top of mind without being annoying.
The Honest Reality
What's Hard
- Low response rates - marketing people are busy and ignore most cold outreach. You'll send 300 emails to get 10 replies.
- Gatekeeping - Marketing Ops Directors often have assistants or don't list their direct numbers. You're leaving a lot of voicemails.
- Fuzzy pain - "Faster campaign creation" isn't always an urgent problem. You're often planting seeds for conversations 3-6 months down the road.
- Lots of "not interested" - rejection is constant. Some days you'll make 50 calls and book zero meetings.
- Inbound leads can be low quality - someone downloading a whitepaper doesn't mean they're ready to buy; you're still doing a lot of qualification work.
What Success Looks Like
- Booking 15-20 qualified meetings per month that AEs actually want to take
- Building a pipeline of warm prospects who aren't ready now but might be in Q3 or Q4
- Getting better at pattern-matching: which titles respond, which companies have the pain, what messages work
Who You're Selling To
Primary Targets:
- Marketing Operations Managers/Directors (own the MAP, care about workflow efficiency)
- Demand Gen / Campaign Managers (hands-on users, feel the pain of slow campaign creation)
- Occasionally VP Marketing or CMO (if you can get through)
What They Care About:
- Do you understand their current process and pain points, or are you just pitching?
- Is this worth 30 minutes of their time, or can they figure it out from your website?
- How disruptive is this to implement - are you asking them to rip out their current setup?
Requirements
- 0-2 years of sales experience; many SDR roles are entry-level and train you
- Comfortable with high-volume outreach (lots of calls and emails daily)
- Resilience - you'll hear "no" or get ignored far more than you'll book meetings
- Curiosity about marketing tech - you don't need to be an expert, but you should learn what Marketo/Eloqua/SFMC do and why campaign creation is slow
- Coachable - you'll get feedback on your messaging, call recordings, email copy; take it and iterate