Article · 14 min read

Tech Sales Career Path Explained: SDR, AE, and Beyond

Cole Feldman · Break Into Tech Sales Free Beginner

A career switcher's biggest problem is not knowing what the ladder even looks like, and this lays out the whole thing from SDR to CRO plus the sideways exits into sales ops, customer success and product marketing. Knowing those exits exist changes which first role you should take.

  • More than half of the author's 40 to 50 person training class quit before the one year mark.
  • Expect 1 to 2 years of consistently hitting quota as an SDR before promotion talk starts.
  • The author made sales manager after 10 months as an AE, regretted it, and went back to enterprise AE.
  • Accounts are segmented SMB, mid-market and enterprise, with the biggest going to experienced reps.
Open on breakintotechsales.com ↗

The question it answers

  1. I am an engineer, a consultant, or fresh out of an MBA. How do I actually switch into GTM?

Read with it

  1. Built from a masterclass with Mohit Garg, former CRO at MindTickle, and written for cross-border companies selling from India,... SeedToScale by Accel Article · long read SaaS Playbook: Sales Rachit Parekh
  2. Written by someone who went from Java developer to AppDynamics to Solutions Architect at AWS with no prior sales experience, so... Sales Engineers of New York Article · 8 min read Transitioning from a Software Engineer to a Sales Engineer Akshat Srivastava
  3. Six of the ten roles most in demand at AI companies are technical (sales engineer, forward deployed engineer, solutions... Betts Recruiting Article · 8 min read Top 10 GTM Roles in AI for 2026 The Betts Team
  4. Video · 14 min What is Sales Engineering? (EVERYTHING you need to know) Tech Sales With Higher Levels
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →