How to Break Into Tech Sales With No Sales Experience (and No CS Degree)

Most people trying to get into tech sales are solving the wrong problem. They think the barrier is the CV. It isn't. The barrier is that a hiring manager has to put you on the phone with a stranger who runs a department, and they have no evidence you won't fall apart.

That's it. That's the whole hiring decision. Everything else — the degree, the referral, the cover letter — is a proxy for that one question.

Once you understand that, the path gets much clearer. You stop trying to look qualified and start building evidence.

What the SDR job actually is

Before anything else, be honest with yourself about the work. An SDR or BDR sits at the top of the funnel. You find accounts, you find the right person inside them, and you interrupt that person's day to earn twenty minutes of their time for someone else — an AE who will run the deal.

You will be told no more times in a week than most people are told no in a year. You will be hung up on. You will get an email back that says "remove me" in lowercase with no punctuation. You will dial someone at 8:15am who picks up in a car park and gives you eleven seconds.

If that description makes you flinch, don't do it. Not because you can't handle it, but because the people who last are the ones who found the whole thing slightly funny. Rejection has to bounce off you at a rate of a hundred a day or the job eats you.

If that description makes you a bit curious — good. That curiosity is worth more than a degree.

What hiring managers actually screen for

I've hired people and I've been hired. In my experience, there are three things a good sales manager is looking for in an entry-level rep, and none of them appear on a CV in the way candidates think they do.

Coachability

This is first and it isn't close. A manager is buying a version of you that exists six months from now, not the one in the room. Everything they can teach — the product, the objection handling, the CRM hygiene — is teachable. What they can't teach is your response to being told you did it wrong.

They test this deliberately. They'll run a roleplay, give you feedback, and then run the same roleplay again. What they're measuring isn't whether you got better. It's whether you tried the thing they told you to try, immediately, without arguing or explaining why you did it the other way.

The candidates who fail this fail in a specific way. They hear feedback and their face closes. They say "yeah, so the reason I did that was..." That sentence, in an interview, is disqualifying. Not because defending yourself is wrong, but because it tells the manager exactly what every coaching session for the next year will feel like.

The correct response to feedback in an interview is short. "Got it. Let me run it again." Then run it again with the change actually in it.

Evidence of grind

Managers want to see that you have done something hard and repetitive for a long time, voluntarily, and got measurably better at it.

It does not have to be sales. It genuinely does not. Somebody who worked doubles in a busy restaurant for two years has proved more about their capacity for the SDR job than somebody with a business degree and no job. Somebody who taught a class of thirty teenagers who did not want to be there has proved they can hold a room under hostile conditions.

What kills candidates here is vagueness. "I'm hardworking" is noise. "I opened the site five mornings a week for two years and never missed a shift" is signal. Specificity is the whole trick.

A voice that doesn't shake

This one is unfair and it's real. The job is talking to senior people who did not ask to be called. If your voice goes thin and fast under pressure, a manager hears their pipeline dying.

Good news: this is the most trainable thing on the list, and you can train it before anyone hires you. More on that shortly.

Your CV if you came from hospitality, teaching, recruiting, or the trades

The mistake is writing your CV as a list of duties. "Responsible for customer service." Nobody reads that. Write it as a list of things that happened, with numbers, framed in the language of the job you want.

Hospitality. You worked in volume, under time pressure, with unhappy people, and you upsold. Say that. "Handled 40+ covers a section on Friday and Saturday service. Highest wine attach rate on the floor for six months running." That is a sales record. A restaurant is a sales floor with better food.

Teaching. You planned, you presented, you held attention against resistance, and you dealt with stakeholders who outranked you — parents, heads of department, inspectors. "Delivered 20+ presentations a week to a resistant audience. Ran parent meetings covering difficult performance conversations." A manager reads that and hears somebody who won't freeze on a call with a VP.

Recruiting. You're closest to the job already and you often undersell it. You cold called, you qualified, you managed a pipeline, you handled candidates dropping out at offer stage. Say the activity numbers. Recruiters usually have them. If you were making 60 dials a day, put 60 dials a day on the page.

Trades. You quoted work, you won some and lost some, you handled the customer who wanted the price down and the customer who changed the scope halfway through. "Quoted and won £X of domestic work in a year with no marketing spend" is a founder's CV. Also: you turned up at 7am in the rain for years. That's the grind evidence, right there.

Two more rules for the CV itself. Keep it to one page — nobody reading SDR applications is reading two. And put a two-line summary at the top that says explicitly what you're doing: moving into tech sales, why, and what you've already done to prepare. That last part is where most people have nothing. Let's fix that.

Build the proof before anyone hires you

This is the part that separates the people who get in from the people who send 200 applications and get four rejections and 196 silences. You are competing against candidates who are identically unqualified. The tiebreaker is who did something.

Cold call yourself on a recording

Get your phone. Open the voice recorder. Deliver a thirty-second cold call opener to nobody. Then listen back.

It will be horrible. Everyone's first one is horrible. You'll hear the upward inflection at the end of every sentence, the apologising, the speed. You'll hear yourself say "just" four times. "I'm just calling because I just wanted to just quickly check..."

Do it again. Do it thirty times over a week. Slow down by about a third from wherever you naturally are — new reps always talk too fast and it's the single biggest tell. Put a full stop where you want to put a comma. Get the shake out of your voice in your bedroom instead of on a live call with a CRO.

What should you actually say? Use a real script from the industry you want to sell into, not something you improvised. Our SaaS cold call script for reps dialling CROs, VPs of Sales and RevOps leaders is written for exactly the buyer most entry-level SaaS SDRs end up calling, and working through it teaches you the shape of a good call — the permission-based opener, the problem statement that earns the next ten seconds, the ask for a specific slot rather than a vague "time to chat".

There's a harder version of this exercise that I'd recommend if you're going for a sales-tech company. Practise the script for cold calling VPs of Sales and SDR managers who cold call for a living. Calling somebody who does your job for a living, and does it better, forces every weak line out of your delivery. If you can hold that call, an interview roleplay feels easy.

Learn one industry deeply

Don't learn "tech sales". Learn one vertical. Pick fintech, or logistics software, or cybersecurity, or HR tech. One.

Spend two weeks on it. Read the earnings call transcripts of the two biggest public companies in that space — they're free and they tell you exactly what those businesses worry about, in their own words. Follow fifteen people who work in it on LinkedIn. Learn the three vendors everyone complains about and why. Learn what a buyer in that space gets measured on.

Then when you interview at a company in that vertical, you're the candidate who says "I noticed you're going after mid-market ops teams — is that because enterprise is locked up by [incumbent], or is the mid-market pain genuinely different?" That question will get you the job. Not because it's clever, but because it proves you did unpaid homework, which is the entire behaviour they're hiring for.

Write a 30-60-90

Bring a one-page plan to the final interview. Not a generic template. A specific one, for that company, with their ICP and their product in it.

First 30 days: learn the product well enough to explain it to a stranger in a lift, sit in on 20 AE discovery calls, build a list of 200 target accounts in the segment I'd be assigned, and hit whatever the ramp activity number is. Days 30 to 60: hold my own opener without notes, book my first meetings, get to full activity, start A/B testing two versions of my opening line. Days 60 to 90: hit full quota, and be able to tell you which of my sequences works and which doesn't with actual data behind it.

The plan doesn't need to be right. It needs to exist. Most candidates for an entry-level seat bring nothing to the final round, so the physical act of sliding a page across the table changes the conversation. I have never seen a hiring manager react badly to it.

Learn what happens after the meeting is booked

One underrated move. Most SDR candidates only study the cold call, because that's the visible part of the job. The ones who stand out understand what the AE does with the meeting they booked, because it tells them what a good meeting looks like versus a warm body on a calendar.

Read through a proper discovery structure — the 25-minute diagnostic playbook of discovery call questions for SaaS covers the questions a CRO or RevOps buyer actually gets asked once they show up. Once you know what the AE needs to uncover, you understand why your qualification on the cold call matters and what a wasted meeting costs the business. Say that in an interview and you'll sound two years older than you are.

The roleplay that decides most SDR hires

Almost every SDR interview process I've seen has a roleplay in it, usually in round two or the final. It is the single highest-weighted part of the process. You can be charming in every other conversation and lose the job here.

The format is nearly always the same. The hiring manager plays a prospect. You have 60 seconds to a few minutes to run a cold call. They'll usually give you a one-paragraph brief in advance — their product, the persona, maybe a pain point. Sometimes they hand you the brief 24 hours ahead. Sometimes ten minutes ahead. Occasionally they'll do it live with no prep to see how you improvise.

What they're actually scoring

Not whether you "book the meeting". They're scoring five things.

Did you take control of the opening? A weak candidate says "is now a bad time?" and then dies when told yes. A strong one says "I know I've caught you cold — give me thirty seconds and if it's not relevant I'll get off the phone." Then delivers thirty seconds, not ninety.

Did you say something about the prospect's world, or only about your product? "We're an AI-powered platform that helps teams collaborate" is the death sentence. "Most heads of RevOps I speak to are stitching together three systems to get a single forecast number" is a reason to keep listening.

Did you handle the brush-off without folding? They will throw one. "Send me an email." "We already use a tool for that." "Not interested." They're not testing your objection script. They're testing whether your voice stays level and whether you ask one more question before you let go.

Did you ask for something specific? "Would you be open to a quick chat sometime?" loses. "Thursday at 2, or is Friday morning easier?" wins.

And did you take the feedback? Almost always they'll stop you, tell you one thing to change, and go again. This is the actual test. Change the thing.

How to prepare for it

Write your script out in full. Opener, one-sentence reason for the call, problem statement, one question, ask for the meeting. Roughly 45 to 60 seconds spoken.

Then memorise the beats, not the words. If you memorise the words you'll sound like a hostage video and the first interruption will derail you. If you know the five beats, you can be interrupted, answer, and get back on rails.

Then rehearse the three brush-offs out loud. Not in your head — out loud, in the car, in the kitchen, twenty times each. "Send me an email" gets: "Happy to. So I don't send you something useless — is [problem] actually on your list this quarter, or am I miles off?" You want that to come out of your mouth without a decision being made first.

Record the whole rehearsal and listen once. Cut every "just", every "kind of", every apology.

And on the day: stand up. Genuinely. Standing changes your breathing and your voice drops. Smile at the start of the first sentence. Both of those are old, slightly silly-sounding tricks and both of them work.

The last mile

Apply narrow, not wide. Twenty tailored applications to companies in the one vertical you learned beats 300 shotgunned ones. Message the SDR manager directly on LinkedIn — not HR — with three lines: who you are, what you did to prepare, and one specific observation about their market. That's a cold call in text form, which is fitting, because it's also the audition.

Expect to hear nothing from most of them. That's the job too.

If you want the reps before the interview, that's what I built DrillCall for — you run live roleplays against an AI prospect who pushes back like a real VP, in the vertical you're targeting, and you get the recording and the feedback afterwards. What I'd do in your position is pick one script, run it thirty times against real objections until the shake is gone, and walk into the roleplay having already had that conversation a hundred times.

Nobody is going to give you the seat because you deserve it. They'll give it to you because you turned up already able to do a rough version of the job. Go build that.