Career paths: where this actually goes

The main ladder

SDR → AE (SMB) → AE (mid-market) → enterprise or strategic AE → sales manager → head of sales → VP Sales / CRO.

Realistic timings. SDR to AE commonly takes twelve to twenty-four months where a path exists — a rule of thumb, not a measured statistic. Moving up the segments takes two to three years per step, because each rewards a different skill: SMB rewards velocity, mid-market rewards process, enterprise rewards patience and stakeholder politics.

The bar for entering as an AE has risen sharply. The Bridge Group's 2026 research found companies hiring AEs with a median of 3.7 years of experience, up from 2.7 years in 2022. That is one of the most useful facts here for a career-changer: the realistic entry point today is usually SDR, inside sales, or a specialist role adjacent to sales — not an AE seat straight off.

Voice from the field

"The moral of the story: promote only those you would hire. Put your SDRs through the same hiring and evaluation process you would for external candidates."
— Trish Bertuzzi, The Sales Development Playbook (2016)

The sideways moves

• Presales / solutions consultant / sales engineer — you own technical fit and the demonstration; the AE owns the commercial relationship. UK base commonly £45k–£75k with a modest bonus rather than a 50/50 plan. The most natural landing spot for scientists.
• Customer success / account management — retention, adoption and expansion after the sale, measured on churn and revenue retention. UK base commonly £35k–£60k. Demands patience and unglamorous follow-through.
• RevOps (revenue operations) — CRM design, forecasting, territory and quota modelling, commission plans. Usually salaried with a small bonus: commercial impact without carrying a number.
• Partnerships, enablement and product marketing — selling through resellers; coaching the team; positioning and competitive intelligence. All common destinations, the last especially for reps who write well.
• Sales leadership — worth stating plainly, management is a different job, not a senior version of the same one. You hire, coach, forecast and handle underperformance; your number is other people's output, and many outstanding reps are miserable in it. UK sales manager pay commonly £55k–£85k base, £85k–£145k OTE.

Life-sciences and health-tech routes

• Pharma: medical representative → key account manager → market access or NHS partnership manager. Note the regulatory requirement: under the ABPI Code of Practice, representatives promoting prescription medicines in the UK must take an appropriate examination within their first year of employment and pass it within two years.
• Medtech: field sales or clinical specialist → territory manager → regional or national account manager, often with theatre attendance and unsociable hours.
• Life-science tools and reagents: inside sales → field application scientist → account manager — a well-worn route for science graduates and one of the sector's most accessible commercial entry points.
• Health-technology software: SDR or inside sales → AE → enterprise AE selling into trusts and integrated care boards, with cycles that make software colleagues wince.

The honest part: most people leave

The data is unambiguous. The Bridge Group's 2025 SDR research reports average SDR tenure of 1.9 years — the highest since the early 2010s — and 40% annual attrition, with the middle half of companies between 21% and 57%. Even the good news is that people last under two years.

Why they leave, roughly in order: it was never the job they thought it was, which is the reason this module exists; income volatility, which wears people down, particularly with a mortgage; mistaking a company problem for a personal failure, because a bad territory or an uncompetitive product feels like a character flaw from the inside; preferring an adjacent role, since a large share of presales, customer success, RevOps and product-marketing professionals started in sales; and redundancy, because sales is typically the first team cut in a downturn and the first rebuilt in a recovery.

The reframe that is actually true. Two to four years in sales is not a wasted career even if you leave. You come out with commercial literacy, stakeholder mapping, negotiation, forecasting discipline, persuasive writing and the ability to ask a stranger for something — portable to founding a company, consulting, product, marketing, medical affairs, market access and any role where a budget must be won internally.

One warning on the phrase "I'll give it a year." With AE ramp now averaging over six months and healthcare cycles running nine to eighteen, a single year gives you roughly one real selling half-year and almost no evidence about yourself. Commit for eighteen months to two years instead, and write down in advance the conditions under which you would leave.

7. Is this for you? A decision framework

The wrong question is "am I a salesperson?" Nobody is, at the start. The right questions are specific, mostly about circumstances rather than personality, and answerable with evidence rather than aspiration.

Eight questions to answer honestly

1. The money question. Could you live on the base alone for twelve months without it damaging your life? If not, don't take a 50/50 plan — take presales, customer success or RevOps, or a pharma-style bonus scheme, where 80–90% of the money is guaranteed. This is the most common avoidable mistake.

2. The measurement question. How did you feel the last time your performance was ranked publicly against peers? Not how you think you'd feel — what actually happened.

3. The rejection question. Everyone answers "I handle rejection well", so ask a better version: what did you actually do the last time you were rejected, and how quickly? The behaviour is the answer.

4. The admin question. Will you keep records current when nobody is watching? Half the job is preparation, documentation and follow-through, and no amount of enjoying conversations compensates.

5. The curiosity question. Do you actually want to know how a pathology lab is funded or why a procurement framework exists? If not, enterprise health-tech selling will be a grind, because that curiosity is the product.

6. The autonomy question. At 10:00 on a Wednesday in week three, nobody will tell you what to do. Some find that the best thing about the job; others find it paralysing.

7. The ethics question. Can you tell a customer not to buy? If not, you'll be miserable in a consultative market where disqualification is a core skill, and a liability in a regulated one where over-promising has clinical consequences.

8. The identity question. Is there a part of you that thinks sales is beneath your qualifications? That belief doesn't stay hidden; it comes through in your voice, your emails and your reluctance to ask for things.

If the answer is "maybe" — run cheap experiments

The point is evidence, not reassurance. Each takes days, not years, and every one produces material you can use in an interview.

• Talk to five people who do the job — twenty minutes each, asking what Tuesday looks like, what percentage of their team hit quota, and what was hardest in year one.
• Listen to ten real recorded sales calls. Public call libraries and tactical sales podcasts have plenty. The diagnostic question: interesting, or excruciating?
• Run your own outreach project — thirty personalised emails to strangers asking for a twenty-minute conversation about their work, tracking reply rate and meetings booked. This is the SDR job in miniature, it costs nothing, and it is the closest thing to a free trial that exists.
• Volunteer for the commercial end of something — fundraising, membership, sponsorship, exhibiting at a stand: all cold outreach with a target attached.
• Take the adjacent role first — inside sales, technical support, field application scientist, customer success, clinical specialist.
• Diligence the company, not just the job — team attainment for the last two years, average tenure, and whether the last three hires into this seat are still there.

The decision rule

Commit for a bounded period with written exit criteria — eighteen months to two years, not "a year". Write down before you start what would make you stay, what would make you leave, and which of those is about the company rather than about you. Then review on a date you set in advance, not on a bad Thursday.

And if the answer is no, say so early. The commercial literacy in this course transfers regardless: presales, product marketing, market access, medical science liaison, customer success and RevOps are all real careers built on understanding how buying decisions get made — without the quota clock at full volume.

Field note

"Maybe" is a completely respectable answer to this module, and a much better one than a confident yes arrived at in an afternoon. The people who do worst in sales are not the doubters; they're the ones who never examined the question and discover the answer in month eight, halfway through a bad quarter, with no savings. If this module has made you less certain, it has worked.