It started with a used car.

A few years after college, I was stuck. I'd tried a couple of things that hadn't worked out, and I kept hearing about tech sales: good money, real growth, and you don't need a specific degree to get in. The catch was that every job I looked at wanted experience I didn't have. I didn't know a single person in the industry.

Then I went to buy a car off Facebook Marketplace. The seller turned out to be an account executive at Sage Intacct.

We negotiated for a long time. The asking price was around $12,000 cash. At some point it came up that I was trying to break into tech sales. We ended up at $9,700, a couple of my nicer camera lenses, and one more thing that had nothing to do with the car: a referral for an SDR job, selling ERP software to CFOs.

That referral carried me through the first two rounds of interviews. The third round was a role play, a mock cold call, and that part was on me. I got the job. That's how my tech sales career started: not with a perfect résumé, but with one person on the inside willing to put my name forward.

Then it happened again

A few years later, my older sister wanted a career change. She was in her late twenties going on thirty, and her whole career had been in the culinary world. She had no idea how to get into tech, so she did what most people do: she applied. Hundreds of jobs, every day. Almost nothing came back.

I told her what I'd learned. Referrals are the best way into a sales job, and you don't need to already know someone to get one. Find people who are doing the job. Message them on LinkedIn. Don't ask for a referral. Just be genuinely curious about what their work is like, and politely ask for a few minutes of their time.

Honestly, I was surprised by what happened next. A lot of complete strangers said yes. She had real conversations, built relationships, kept going, and eventually landed her first tech sales job, in San Francisco. She's worked in tech sales at several companies since.

Why we built this

Neither of us had the “right” background. What we had was someone on the inside. Getting that took luck the first time and a lot of manual work the second time: finding the jobs, figuring out who worked there, writing messages that didn't sound desperate, and keeping track of who said what.

This site does that work for you. Every SDR, BDR and AE job we can find, straight from company career pages. The reps who work there now, starting with the ones near you. A message that asks the right way. And a tracker that tells you when to follow up, so nobody falls through the cracks.

You don't need to buy a used car. You just need one good conversation.