Student Athlete to $90k+ SDR

I was a senior at the College of New Jersey and a basketball player my whole life, so I wanted a career that scratched that competitive itch after graduation. I started the job search doing LinkedIn Easy Apply and applying on Indeed, and it simply was not working. Even when I did get first round interviews, I felt lost on questions around prospecting and handling rejection. I had stories I thought sounded good, but I was not tying them back to sales, so I was not gaining momentum. I realized I needed a real plan, and I also took the idea seriously that you have to do the job to get the job.

The biggest shift was learning to be intentional and actually treat the process like the SDR job. I started reaching out to people on LinkedIn to ask about their career journey, built real relationships, and those conversations led to referrals and help throughout the interview process. The frameworks also helped me prepare for the simple questions that were tripping me up early like “Why sales?”, “Tell me about yourself,” and “Why would you be a good SDR?” I practiced those answers on my drives until they felt like muscle memory. I also improved a lot in mock cold calls by going from being rigid and scripted to having an actual conversation, listening, and then applying feedback in the rerun, which is what interviewers cared about most.

Talk to as many people as possible and engulf yourself in the tech sales SDR world. Have conversations every day, even when you are not asking for anything, because people genuinely like talking about their jobs and helping someone earlier in their career. Also, do not get overly attached to any one company or outcome. I did 17 or 18 interviews total, and once I detached from the result, I interviewed more freely and performed better. If you are not getting traction right now, stop winging it, get a real process, and keep moving forward until you get over the line.