Forty cold emails. Eight replies. Three real interview loops. One offer the same week as the final round. The numbers are clean because I tracked them on a spreadsheet from email one. I was a recent graduate looking for my first sales role. No commercial experience, a degree that had nothing to do with sales, and a private suspicion that I'd be bad at the job for at least the first six months. I'd tried the job-board route for two weeks and gotten exactly one rejection back. The pivot was almost embarrassingly simple. I made a list of forty SaaS companies in Austin I'd seen hiring SDRs in the previous month. I wrote one cold email template, three sentences, asking for a fifteen-minute intro chat about the role, not asking for a job. The first sentence I rewrote for each company specifically. I sent the forty emails over four days. The first reply came back that afternoon. Eight people replied in total. Three of those turned into real interview loops. One was an Austin SaaS company. Their process was the fastest. The intro chat was thirty minutes with the SDR manager. He'd read my email, my LinkedIn, and the one Notion page I'd linked, a writeup of an outreach experiment I'd run for a friend's startup as a favour. We mostly ↓
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