Search Outcome: Filling a Sales Development Representative Role for a B2B SaaS Company
Location:
Portland, OR
Industry:
SaaS
Position Title:
Sales Development Representative
Client Testimonial
“We would not be where we are today without our early partnership with Adam and the SalesFirst team. So many of our current leaders were young professionals that SalesFirst found for us years ago.”
Challenge:
A rapidly growing SaaS company needed to build a large SDR team capable of supporting aggressive growth targets.
The role required high outbound activity, strong coachability, and the ability to eventually grow into Account Executive positions. The challenge was that many candidates were attracted to SaaS without fully understanding the pace, structure, and consistency required in a high-volume pipeline generation environment.
The client needed people who could handle repetition, maintain activity standards, and still communicate professionally with mid-market business leaders every day.
Solution:
The search focused far less on background and much more on personality, motivation, and long-term growth potential.
The client already had a strong training environment. They did not need finished Account Executives. They needed early-career professionals eager to prove themselves and capable of handling the pace and structure of a high-activity outbound role.
Every candidate completed structured personality assessments as part of the process. The assessments helped identify competitiveness, resilience, consistency, and comfort operating in repetitive, performance-driven environments.
From there, interviews focused heavily on motivation. We dug into why candidates wanted to work in sales, what they were trying to achieve professionally, and whether they genuinely wanted to grow into closing roles over time.
Backgrounds varied widely. Some candidates came from hospitality, staffing, retail leadership, fitness sales, and other customer-facing environments. What mattered was energy, coachability, communication style, and the willingness to work hard inside a structured system.
That approach allowed the client to consistently hire people with long-term upside rather than overvaluing previous SaaS experience alone.
Outcome
- ▸ Over 5 years of a robust partnership, we have interviewed hundreds of candidates and essentially operated as the company’s internal sales talent acquisition team.
- ▸ They have hired multiple SDRs, AEs, and leaders from us over a long period of time
