Tech sales is selling software to businesses — most of it as SaaS, software as a service you pay for monthly or yearly instead of buying once. It is the biggest single market for SDR and BDR roles, because B2B software never stops needing pipeline: new accounts, new leads, new demos. A tech-sales SDR books qualified meetings and demos for account executives — that's it, that's the job — and the pay is a real OTE with uncapped commission on top. For most people, "tech sales" and "SDR job" are almost the same sentence.
What tech sales actually is
Tech sales means selling software, and in practice that means three things that make it different from selling widgets:
- It's recurring, not one-time. SaaS recurring revenue renews every month or year, so a customer is worth many times more over time than one purchase. That's why companies can pay commission aggressively.
- It's a funnel, not a pitch. The job is moving a lead through stages — outreach, discovery, demo, trial, close. The SDR owns the top of that funnel.
- It's inside sales. Almost all tech sales is inside sales — remote, phone, video, email — exactly the SDR/BDR model.
The tech-sales SDR day
A tech-sales SDR sits inside a CRM, works a prospecting list, and runs sequences: emails and calls that end in one ask — a demo or a 15-minute call. When someone bites, the SDR qualifies them and hands them to an AE. The whole craft is making that single ask specific and clean enough that a busy buyer says yes. That is what the rewrite challenge below trains.
The cold email template
Here's the asset — the version worth keeping, plus the weak one the challenge asks you to fix.
Subject: [One concrete thing — a trigger, stat, or recent change]
Hi [First name],
[Line 1: reference something real — their site, a hiring burst, a public problem, or a common trigger in their industry]
[Line 2: one sentence connecting that to what your product does — no feature dump, just the outcome]
[Line 3: the single ask — "open to a 15-min demo this week?"]
Best, [Your name]
The weak version the challenge gives you does the opposite: no trigger, no specificity, a vague ask ("see if you'd be open to talking"). Fixing it is the difference between an SDR who books demos and one who gets ignored.
Is tech sales a good career?
For most people, yes — it's the highest-paying, fastest-promoting corner of the entry-level sales market. The career path runs SDR → AE → enterprise AE → sales leadership, and tech comp scales with it. It is not easy and it is not guaranteed — your first-year comp is OTE built on hitting quota — but the ceiling and the demand are real.
Start here
You know what tech sales is and how to run a cold email at its core. The next lesson clears up the one confusion that trips people up in this exact world — the difference between a setter and a closer in high-ticket and tech sales, and which one the SDR actually is.