The commercial org chart

"Commercial" is the umbrella word for everything revenue-facing. Here is the full cast, roughly in the order a deal meets them.

SDR / BDR — Sales / Business Development Representative

The top-of-funnel prospecting role. (The funnel is the standard model of sales: many potential customers enter at the top, fewer survive each stage, a few emerge as signed deals. Prospecting is searching for potential customers; a prospect is one you're pursuing.)

The job. SDRs spend their days on outbound work — cold calls, cold emails, LinkedIn outreach — and chasing inbound leads from marketing. Their job is not to close deals but to book qualified meetings for salespeople (qualifying = checking a prospect has the problem, budget, authority and timescale to be worth pursuing).

Titles and trajectory. The titles are near-interchangeable; where distinguished, SDRs work inbound and BDRs do cold outbound — though plenty of companies flip the two: read duties, not titles. Usually entry-level, 1–2 years, the proving ground before promotion to AE. Measured on meetings booked and pipeline generated.

Voice from the field

"There are three characteristics that are universal in the best sales development candidates: passion, competitiveness, and curiosity."
— Trish Bertuzzi, The Sales Development Playbook (2016)

Field note

SDR is sold as a 12–24-month stepping stone to AE, and often is — but the day-to-day is a high-volume grind of calls and emails measured against activity dashboards, and industry research (The Bridge Group's recurring SDR studies) has long put average tenure well under two years, not all of it ending in promotion. If you're starting with no commercial history at all, SDR is the standard and honourable door in. If you're a career-changer with years of adjacent professional experience — technical, scientific, client-facing — the practical implication is to weigh AE/AM/SC roles seriously first and treat an SDR-shaped job — whatever its title says — as a deliberate trade-off, not the default.

Decoding adverts: titles mislead here more than anywhere. A "Business Development Specialist" role at a large contract-services firm that generates and qualifies leads and then hands them to Business Development Managers is structurally an SDR/BDR role, whatever the label says. Read the duties, not the title.

AE — Account Executive

The closer. An AE takes qualified opportunities (an opportunity is a prospect with a live, qualified potential deal attached) and runs the cycle to signature: discovery, demos, proposals, stakeholder navigation, negotiation. AEs carry a quota — a personal revenue target (section 3) — with pay heavily tied to it. This is the seat most health-tech and life-science "AE" adverts describe, and the destination role much of this curriculum trains for.

Day-to-day:

• discovery calls, demos, proposals;
• updating the CRM (Customer Relationship Management system — the database of record for customers and deals; Salesforce and HubSpot dominate);
• forecasting (formally predicting which deals close this quarter and for how much);
• and chasing procurement.

The ladder runs SMB → mid-market → Enterprise AE, the best-paid individual-contributor seat.

AM / KAM — Account Manager / Key Account Manager

Where the AE hunts new customers, the AM farms existing ones — the hunter/farmer distinction is standard shorthand. An AM owns a portfolio of current customers: the renewal (re-signing at contract expiry), upsell (more of what they have) and cross-sell (a different product to the same customer) — together expansion revenue.

Variants and pay. A Key Account Manager runs a few strategically vital accounts rather than a broad book. AMs usually carry a quota on renewals plus expansion. In this market the seat appears as, say, a KAM owning NHS trust relationships for a virtual-wards provider, or a territory account manager for a biobanking and sample-management vendor.

Mapping prior experience: agency account management, client services and customer-facing project delivery are all AM stories in different words. If you owned a portfolio of client relationships as their main commercial contact and grew follow-on work, then in sales vocabulary you managed an account portfolio and generated expansion revenue. Use those words; they're on the hiring manager's checklist.

Sales Engineer / Solutions Consultant / Presales — the technical seat

Different titles, one job (also Solutions Engineer, Presales Consultant; in life-science instrument firms, Field Application Specialist/Scientist). This is the technical expert paired with the AE.

What presales covers. "Presales" means all technical work done before signature:

• deep technical discovery;
• tailored demos;
• security and integration answers;
• POC scoping and execution;
• RFI/RFP responses (Request for Information / Request for Proposal — the formal questionnaires large organisations and public bodies issue when buying; NHS procurement runs on them).

Who owns what. The AE owns the commercial relationship; presales owns the technical win — the customer's conclusion that the product genuinely works in their environment.

Pay and paths. Pay is a high base plus a bonus tied to team or company targets: high, but less volatile than an AE's. Presales → AE is a common move for quota upside; presales → product management or sales leadership are standard paths too.

Mapping prior experience: if you have ever

• given technical demonstrations of a product,
• scoped or run pilots and trials,
• answered the technical sections of tenders, or
• been the expert a salesperson brought into meetings,

you have presales experience — whatever your title said. Count the demos, POCs and tender responses and put numbers on them; in life-science R&D software this seat is usually advertised as "Solutions Consultant". Asked "have you done presales?", a quantified record beats a matching job title.

CSM — Customer Success Manager

A product of subscription software (SaaS — software as a service): because the customer can leave at renewal, vendors employ CSMs to make sure they adopt the product and get the promised value — onboarding, training, usage reviews. The obsession metric is churn (customers or revenue lost at renewal) and its mirror, retention. Usually a light- or no-quota role: CSM is value-delivery-first, AM is revenue-first; small companies combine both in one person.

Sales Ops / RevOps

The internal machinery: no customers, no quota. Sales Ops administers the CRM, defines process stages, runs forecasting and reporting, calculates commission, designs territories and quotas. RevOps is the broader version unifying operations across marketing, sales and customer success. Few readers of this curriculum will apply for these, but you'll work with them constantly — and mentioning them fluently signals you've understood how a real commercial org runs.

BD — Business Development

The most abused title in the industry, with two distinct meanings.

1. In many companies — especially services businesses like CROs (Contract Research Organisations, which run studies and lab work for pharma) and CDMOs (Contract Development and Manufacturing Organisations, which develop and manufacture drugs for other companies) — "Business Development Manager" simply means a quota-carrying salesperson, used where "sales" sounds too pushy for a scientific audience.
2. Strictly, BD means growth through relationships that aren't direct sales: partnerships, licensing, distribution; in biotech it usually means the licensing/partnering function doing deals between companies.

Read every BD job description to work out which animal it is — one large CDMO's advertised "Business Development Specialist" role turned out, on inspection, to be lead generation.

Channel / Partnerships

Selling through other companies. A channel partner — reseller, distributor or systems integrator — sells your product to its customers for a margin; the channel manager recruits, trains and manages partners and the shared pipeline. Common where instrument vendors reach smaller markets via distributors, or a big EPR (electronic patient record; 'EHR' in US usage) vendor resells a smaller company's product. NHS-facing "Partnerships" roles often blend this with direct enterprise selling.

CRO / VP Sales — sales leadership

A VP Sales (UK-flavoured: Sales Director) hires, coaches, forecasts to the board, sets quotas with RevOps, and carries the sum of the team's quotas as their own number. A CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) sits above that, owning every revenue-touching function. (In this sector CRO also means Contract Research Organisation — disambiguate from context; interviewers enjoy it when you flag the collision.)

The ladder. Between rep and VP sit line Sales Managers running 6–10 reps. Path: AE → senior/enterprise AE → manager → VP — though many elite reps stay individual contributors, since a great enterprise AE can out-earn their manager.

How they hand off — one deal, end to end

A LIMS vendor sells to a UK biotech. Marketing runs a webinar on lab digitalisation; a lab director attends (lead). The SDR calls, confirms the lab is drowning in spreadsheets with budget approved (qualification), and books the AE.

The AE runs discovery, then brings in the Solutions Consultant for a tailored demo and a security review with IT. The SC runs a four-week POC; the AE negotiates with procurement and closes.

Implementation takes over at signature, the CSM drives adoption, and a year later the AM (or the same AE, in smaller firms) negotiates the renewal and sells two more modules — with RevOps recording every stage and the VP forecasting the deal to the board.

Every role you might interview for is a station on that line; show you know which station you're applying to and who stands either side of you.

Arriving from elsewhere — placing yourself on the map

Almost nobody plans a first career in sales, and commercial teams are full of arrivals from adjacent fields:

• engineers and developers who became sales engineers because they could explain the product better than the reps could;
• scientists who moved into field application or BD roles at instrument and services companies because customers trusted someone who had done the work;
• agency and consultancy people whose "client services" job was account management in different words;
• support and customer-service staff who became CSMs because they already spent every day keeping customers successful;
• teachers, clinicians and academics whose explaining skill turned out to be demo skill.

The practical exercise, whatever your background: place each past role on the org chart above. Ask of it —

• did I find new business or grow existing relationships?
• Did I own a commercial outcome or support one?
• Was I nearer the technical win or the relationship?

Then describe that role in the chart's vocabulary, with numbers: clients handled, projects grown, demonstrations or training sessions delivered, tenders answered, evaluations run.

Why it works. You are not claiming to have been an AE; you are showing a hiring manager exactly which seat you sat nearest — and that you know the difference. The rest of this curriculum builds the skills for the seat you're aiming at; this mapping is what makes your history legible on the way in.