Career Switchers · Primly Community

sales to operations career switch: what i did to make the pivot actually stick

sdr_sky · 3 replies

i was an SDR for two years and a junior AE for one. good at the job, didn't love it. the thing i actually liked was building the sequences, the tracking sheets, the handoff processes. basically the ops layer underneath the sales motion. decided to try and make the switch into revenue ops or sales ops and here's what it took.

first thing i did: stopped saying 'i want to get out of sales' and started saying 'i want to formalize what i've been doing informally.' those land very differently. the first sounds like you're quitting. the second sounds like you know what you're good at.

the actual work i did to build the credential

took over the CRM hygiene work on my team voluntarily. nobody else wanted it, it was genuinely useful, and i could now say 'i own HubSpot administration for a 20-person sales team.' that's a real ops credential.

build the Salesforce admin cert. not glamorous. fully worth it. it's a signal that you know how these systems work, and RevOps lives and dies on CRM.

mapped out one broken process at my company (the SDR-to-AE handoff specifically) and wrote up a proposed fix with success metrics. brought it to my manager. she approved it and let me run it. i have a before/after story now that involves actual numbers.

the interview side

revops and sales ops interviews are usually a mix of behavioral and case. they'll often ask you to walk through how you'd build a report, how you'd design a territory model, or how you'd fix a specific pipeline problem. coming from sales, the knowledge is real. you just need to translate it into the 'ops analyst' framing rather than the 'quota carrier' framing.

the bias you'll face: 'will this person miss the money and bounce back to sales in six months?' i addressed it directly in one interview, saying something like 'i've thought about this. i left AE work because the process side was where i was spending my energy anyway. this role pays less than my OTE target but my base will be higher and that matters more to me right now.' they appreciated the directness.

nine months in now. the work is genuinely better for me. slower pace, more systematic, i can see the whole machine instead of just my own number.

3 replies

ops_omar

the 'own the CRM hygiene voluntarily' move is exactly right. i've hired three people from sales backgrounds into ops roles and every one of them had some version of 'i was the person who fixed the data problem nobody else would touch.' that's the credentialing move.

recruiter_rita

the 'will they bounce back' concern is real and you're smart to address it proactively. what i'd add: if you have a concrete story about a moment where you chose the process work over the quota work, tell it. it demonstrates the preference is real and not just current frustration.

ae_andre

honest take from someone who stayed in sales: i've watched a few SDRs make this switch and the ones who thrive in ops are always the ones who were genuinely excited about the system, not the ones who were tired of cold calling. you can usually tell which one it is.