You’ve probably already made more than one life-long commitment. Maybe you’re married or locked into a 30-year mortgage. And let’s face it: Even long after your kids have grown up, they’ll still come to you looking for help and advice.
So when Uvaro says to “start a new career in tech sales,” it’s natural to hesitate. A career is what you do for the rest of your life, right? You already have lots of commitments.
But your first sales job will not be your job for the rest of your life. Careers in tech are faster and more fluid than that. Needs change, markets change, and opportunities come and go.
The trick to getting where you want to go in the tech industry is to start with a base of transferable skills. Sales offers that base. Once you have it, there are plenty of paths forward, both in sales and in other functional roles. And unlink other industries — you’ll find promotions in tech sales to be much more achievable.
Can You Really Grow and How Long Will That Take?
Promotions in tech sales roles are not only possible, they’re realistic! And with Uvaro, we like to think promotions in tech sales are inevitable for all of our graduates. Where you go and when you do it will depend on your skills, interests, effort, and the doors you’re able to open.
Promotion timelines can vary dramatically. Often, larger companies will have more clearly established pathways or promotions into your next role—but they also tend to move slower. Generally, you’re looking at anywhere from 6 months to 3 years per promotion, with an average of about 18 months.
If you can prove that you’re successful in your role, it pays to start having conversations about your future promotion. You should understand what your options are.
you’ll want to know that your company’s sales leadership isn’t supportive of your growth, as soon as possible. You can still take your success and leverage it to get the role you want: At another company.
There are plenty of different avenues you can take. Your career path will depend on which one you choose. Sales is both a launchpad and a proving ground. You can grow in sales, but you can also bloom and get promoted into other departments. When you’re successful, you can decide whether you want to earn tons of money, take on more responsibility, or try your hand at a new set of tasks. Here are just a few of your options:
- BDR to AE
- BDR to BDR Manager
- AE to Sales Leadership
- BDR/AE to Technical Sales
- Sales to Customer Success
- Sales to Marketing
- Sales to Support/Product
BDR to AE
The first—and most common—path/promotion you can take is from a Business Development Rep (BDR) to an Account Executive (AE). In a typical sales organization, BDRs generate new leads through cold calling, cold emailing, and social selling. Working through lists, automations, and hustle, they find and build interest for their product.
Typically, the BDR will then hand off to an AE. The AE will solidify the value offer, negotiate a contract, and help to transition the lead into a customer. This task specialization is sometimes broken down as “hunters” and “closers.”
Skills to Focus On for Your Promotion
1 – Closing
Because an AE’s primary focus is on closing sales, you’ll need to prove that you can do it, too. Ask to shadow AEs on calls, help strategize ways to move deals forwards and look for opportunities to flex your skills by closing small accounts, or even by asking leadership to commit to your success.
2 – Consistency
Mistakes lose accounts. As a BDR, the investment so far into each individual account is small, so mistakes aren’t a big deal. But as the prospect moves along in the buying process, the internal investment in them grows too. Mistakes become expensive.
Do you nail your pitches every time? Do you catch leads in waves, or are you able to produce a steady flow? Consistency is key.
3 – Pipeline management
At an individual level, ticking all the right boxes in the CRM can feel like a waste of time. But this data informs institutional financial forecasts, which get reported to investors and directors. Good data is good information. Bad data is a problem.
Cross your Ts, dot your Is, and nail your forecasts. This proves that you understand your pipeline and have the ability to influence it. But it also shows that you can make the people above you look good—and managers are always looking for more ways to look good.
How to Make The Jump
1 – Smash Your Numbers
Hitting your numbers shows that you’re good at your job. Smashing your numbers shows that you’re too good for your job.
2 – Find Time to Shadow AEs
Plenty of salespeople are happy in their jobs. There’s nothing wrong with doing one thing really well. You don’t have to add stress to your life.
But if you are looking for something else, you need to show it. Demonstrate interest in other roles. Look for mentorship. Develop yourself professionally.
3 – Push your Deals Further into the Sales Cycle
It’s not uncommon for BDRs to stumble into AE roles by accident. As you build trust, at busy times you’ll be encouraged to push deals further and further through the sales cycle.
When you show that you can perform well without your AE, you’re well on your way to becoming an AE.
BDR to BDR Manager
An alternate pathway away from being a front-line BDR is to get promoted to become a BDR Manager.
As a BDR Manager, many of your direct reports will have “dotted line” accountability directly to a specific sales team. So whereas a typical sales manager might have 4 to 7 direct reports, it’s not uncommon for a BDR Manager to have 20 or more.
This is a great way to show your senior leadership potential!
Skills to Focus on for Promotion
1 – Leadership
Proving that you are a natural leader will go a long way towards securing promotion to a BDR Manager. This means taking initiative on new projects, providing guidance and answering questions for new hires or struggling coworkers, and stepping up as a role model.
2 – Organization
As a manager, you’ll need to be extremely organized to be able to help your team succeed. A sloppy manager is a bad manager. If you’re organized, show it. And if you’re not, get your affairs in order.
3 – Attitude
Your attitude says a lot about you. Natural leaders bring a positive attitude every day. This is especially important for a management position, because your mood will directly affect the employees under you.
If you can’t find a way to be happy as a BDR, you will never be happy as a BDR Manager. Don’t trick yourself into trying to land a job you won’t enjoy, and won’t succeed in.
How to Make The Jump
1 – Train New Reps
A lot of your job as a BDR manager will be training new reps. So start doing it now. Welcome new hires, schedule one-on-ones, organize workshops, build playbooks, and show that you have the necessary skills.
2 – Enable Your Team
As you build content and resources for your own use, share them. Provide your team with assets that highlight your expertise and demonstrate your leadership qualities.
AE to Sales Leadership
The path from an Account Executive role to a Sales Leadership role can be a long one, because sales organizations are often extremely stratified.
Aside from front-line reps, the chain of accountability and promotions can run through Managers, Senior Managers, Directors, Senior Directors, Vertical Vice Presidents, Regional Vice Presidents, Senior Vice Presidents, and more. (And that’s not to mention sales-adjacent leadership roles, like in Sales Enablement and Sales Operations.)
The good news is that good sales performances are very easily measured, and successful teams aren’t usually left to stagnate. When one sales leader accepts a promotion, they’ll often move quickly to bring their entire trusted team up with them. Just when it seems like nothing is happening, changes can come all at once.
Skills to Focus on for Promotion
1 – Repeatable Strategies
Being a good rep doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be a good manager. Because if you don’t understand why you’re good, you can’t pass your skills along. Work on building and documenting repeatable strategies and methodologies. This is what will prove that you can make a team successful.
2 – Leadership
Like BDR Managers, front-line sales managers and other sales leadership positions need to inspire people to perform better.
3 – Self Control, Self Motivation, Self Awareness
Emotional intelligence wins the day. The 3 selves not only help you maintain your composure, they also convince other people of your underlying competence.
How to Make The Jump
This one can be tricky. Fast-growing organizations often stock their sales leadership with talent from other companies. And slow-growing organizations don’t often have new management roles available.
Keep an eye out for over-burdened managers. It’s common to split teams: If one sales manager has 7 or more direct reports, there may be an opportunity to create a new manager position.
Whatever you do, don’t burn any bridges. A common pathway to a sales leadership promotion is to jump to a new company, maintain your contacts, and then come back a year or two later in a more senior leadership role.
Front-line Sales to Technical Sales
Transitioning from a BDR or AE to a technical sales position is not the right fit for everyone. Whereas front-line sales roles are often about building relationships and leveraging strategies to get commitments, technical sales roles are all about product knowledge.
Sometimes called a “sales engineer” or “solution consultant”, technical sales reps need to learn a product inside and out. You’ll need to have deep industry knowledge, be comfortable talking about detailed technical specs (like coding languages and security features), and be able to come up with clever solutions to fill functional gaps. A coding or engineering background isn’t strictly required, but doesn’t hurt.
Skills to Focus on for Promotion
1 – Product Expertise
Can you answer every product question? Do you know every menu and work-around? Can you tiptoe around bugs?
2 – Speaking “Non-Technical Technical”
Technical sales reps need to be able to communicate both with the buyer, and with their IT advisors. You’ll have to recognize when is the right time to “dumb things down,” and when is the right time to drop a knowledge bomb.
3 – Learn to Follow
The technical rep isn’t usually the quota-carrying deal-closer. This means that you’ll need to be able to accept cues from the primary rep and learn when to keep your mouth shut.
How to Make The Jump
1 – Work With the Help Desk
No one understands the product like the support team. Ask for (read-only) access to the ticketing system. Learn your product’s hiccups, intricacies, and dirty laundry. And master the help desk’s strategies for overcoming them.
2 – Win Technical Deals
You’ll recognize these accounts when you see them. They have very specific requirements and a very organized buying process. Build a track record of success to show that you can close them. Document everything!
Sales to Customer Success
Customer Success and Account Management teams are more focused on retention than on sales. They build extremely long-term relationships and understand pain points in far more detail than front-line sales reps do.
But Success teams may still carry quotas for renewals and upsale targets—which means your prospecting and negotiating skills are a great asset.
Skills to Focus on for Promotion
1 – Relationship Management
Build rapport, identify champions, and win over opponents. That sounds like a sales job, doesn’t it? You can make yourself valuable to the Customer Success team now, by focusing on your hand-offs, and continuing to show your face during the implementation process.
2 – Solution Orientation
Stalling and avoiding can be useful sales tactics. But they create headaches for Customer Success. Show that you solve more problems than you create.
3 – CRM Wizardry
Pass along your customer stories. The contact and company records in your CRM are vital tools for the account management team, who need to maintain relationships with people they may only speak with once each year. Show that you’re in it for the long haul.
How to Make the Jump
1 – Join Post-Sales Calls
Don’t be the rep who disappears as soon as there’s a signature. Follow along in the implementation process and beyond, and help turn your customers into references.
2 – Obsess Over Customer Goals
Your prospects buy with a specific objective in mind. Follow-up on it, and keep coming back to it. Remind them of what you’re working towards, and what value your product brings.
Customer stories are not only useful in the sales and renewal processes, but also during your performance reviews, and especially at interviews for your transfer to the Customer Success team.
Sales to Marketing
Promotions in tech sales can actually take you out of the department. A good marketing team is informed by the needs of the sales team. Do you need more leads? More informed leads? Leads with bigger budgets? Leads that are closer to the decision point?
While marketing’s ultimate goal is the same as sales (win more customers), its strategies for success are very different. Marketing deals in volume, so prioritization, polish, budget management, and success metrics are critical.
Skills to Focus on for Promotion
1 – Flawless Creative Elements
Marketing tells stories and publishes them for the masses. Do you pay close attention to detail? Are your scripts perfectly executed? Do your sales videos pop?
2 – Data Focus
Can you visualize your sales cadences? Can you tie numbers to them and optimize them to improve those numbers? And how quickly can you do all that? Those are the skills marketing needs.
How to Make the Jump
Everyone thinks they can be a marketer. Job postings for marketing are flooded by inexperienced applicants. As a sales rep, your advantage is that you already know the buyer.
As an insider, you likely also have access to information about the marketing stack. Can you get a list of tools that they use? Are there free online tutorials for those tools? Study hard and bring value.
You can ingratiate yourself to the marketing team by polishing your scripts and videos, making them generic, and passing them along. Marketing always wants more, better, faster. Give them what they want, and when the time is right, ask for a transfer.
Sales to Support/Product
Many people are surprised to find that for them, the most rewarding aspect of sales is helping people. If this is you—more motivated by helping than by earning—you might like to transition to a Support role.
An effective support rep will start to prioritize bug fixes, identify critical gaps, and organize feature requests. Over time, and perhaps with some additional training, this can translate into an ever-more-important role on the product team too, where you’ll design user experiences or take on responsibility for specific feature functionality.
Skills to Focus on for Promotion
1 – Salvaging Relationships
Sometimes you have to say “no.” But there’s an art to it. Can you build rapport with customers, and offer acceptable alternatives for their problems? Patience and empathy go a long way.
2 – Technical Aptitude
No, you don’t need to learn to code. But sometimes a customer problem won’t be directly tied to your product, and you’ll still want to be able to help. For example, would you be able to recognize when a VPN or ad blocker is interfering, and help someone change their settings?
3 – Pace of Work
Support desks have ticket queues. And long queues frustrate customers. So whereas a sales rep can sometimes get away with focusing on one big contract, Support reps can’t neglect their clients. Anyone can solve a problem, but can you solve seven problems at the same time?
How to Make The Jump
1 – Empathy and Problem Solving
To show that you can be trusted in this role, practice the wording you use and your ability to be patient.
This isn’t only an external skill. The support team is your ally in the sales process—especially if your product offers a free trial. Empathize with Support’s needs, provide solutions to problems that your leads encounter, and work on process optimization.
At first glance, sales may seem like a one-size-fits-all career path. But the truth is that because of its high profile as a revenue generator, with the right strategies, the right amount of patience, and a little bit of luck, you’re promotions in tech sales can take you almost anywhere!
Interested in taking the first step towards a career in tech sales? Learn about the various courses that Uvaro offers, which have proven to help propel our grads through their first couple of promotions in tech sales.
