🌞 A new era of the Earlywork community
Opening up Earlywork Sales Club as Australia's first community for junior tech sales reps
Howdy folks!
Just 3 months ago, we launched Earlywork Sales Club, a private community to help Earlywork Academy alumni perform better & progress faster in their roles, alongside sales peers 🚀
Today, we’ve decided to open up Sales Club as Australia’s first dedicated community for early-career tech sales talent… for free.
It’s a full-circle moment for us to come back to the power of community in unlocking hidden career potential.
Here’s what we’re doing and the opportunity we see:
Lessons From Building Earlywork Village to 6K+ Members 📈
When we first launched the free Earlywork Village in April 2021 (now >3 years ago!) as ANZ’s first early-career tech community, we honestly didn’t know what sort of business we would end up building.
What was abundantly clear is that the traditional methods of job search, hiring & career development were deeply broken.
We were meeting so many early-career folks who were hungry to build careers in tech & startups but found the pathway murky and lonely.
So we took a bet on the following process to build a meaningful business in the career space:
Bring together ANZ’s most ambitious junior tech talent to help each other
Add a ton of free value across the 3 core career needs we identified (learning, social & job search)
Learn deeply about their career problems in doing so
Test different models to solve those problems
Sounds neat on paper…
…but it was a messy journey to find a sustainable answer to that objective.
It took us 1.5 years and a bunch of f*ckups to land on the pilot of Earlywork Academy, Australia’s first tech sales school, with a success-based model.
Today, nearly 20 career switchers are starting tech sales roles through our school every month at tech companies like Shippit, Eftsure & Yotpo.
Looking back, we never would have gotten here without the knowledge, feedback and trust we built through the Earlywork Village.
But there was a tough lesson that we took on as the community boomed:
That intimate magic of community doesn’t scale in one big, open town square.
Instead, deep communities scale by:
1. Creating smaller sub-spaces with a closer thread of connection
2. Gradually + selectively bringing new members into the fold
Building a New Community 🚀
When it came to supporting the alumni from our tech sales school after starting roles, we intentionally decided to break a new community, Earlywork Sales Club, away from the core Earlywork Village structure.
We wanted to foster an intimate community designed around the core craft of the role, something we wish we had when starting our careers in tech.
3 months in, our club has over 100+ members, with:
🎓 Learning events every fortnight from sales reps & leaders at companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, Deel, Workday & Zendesk
🤝 A network of 30+ industry mentors including experienced Sales Development Representatives (SDRs), Account Executives & Sales Managers
🫂 A private digital community where reps trade tips and questions
📚 A dedicated library of custom templates & guides to navigate the SDR role
But along the way, we kept on meeting folks outside our Academy who had started tech sales careers and struggled with the same core problems even more than our graduates…
A weak connection with sales peers going through similar challenges
Limited reference points for good sales technique and process outside their company
Murky progression pathways to Account Executive & other sales roles
Opening Sales Club to Existing Tech Sales Reps 👋
We realised there was a huge opportunity to help ambitious tech sales reps across Australia by bringing them together, regardless of how they got started.
So today, we’re launching membership applications for existing Aussie tech sales reps to join Australia’s first dedicated community for early-career tech sales talent, for free.
Rather than opening the floodgates, we want to be intentional about cultivating a group of sales reps who are ambitious, deeply curious & positive-sum.
If you’re a Sales Development Representative or Business Development Representative in tech who’s hungry to improve your performance & grow in your career, apply to be considered as one of our early club members.
Our first external cohort of club members will be kicking off later this month, and applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, so get in quick!
Got a mate, co-worker or employee who’s recently started in tech sales? Let ‘em know there’s a free community to help them by sending over the club page
What’s the bigger vision? 💡
Over time, we want to make Earlywork Sales Club the #1 support system for starting & progressing as an SDR.
If we start by giving value upfront for free and building a community of Australia’s most ambitious tech sales reps, we know that hiring & training opportunities will emerge to help these reps, in the same vein as the Earlywork Village journey.
Alongside this, we believe uplifting the skillset & mindset of top emerging sales reps will strengthen the reputation of tech sales as an incredible career in Australia & beyond.
This is just one community for now, but transcending role and industry, our ultimate vision is to build a career-first education system.
With projects like Sales Club, we want to create a world where learning and work aren’t different chapters of life, but intimately connected pieces in an ongoing journey. 🧩
And for Earlywork, it’s early days.
If you’re new here, welcome!
Hit that sub button to follow our journey in building a career-first education system:
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Join in the action at:
🧡 Earlywork Village
🤝 LinkedIn
📸 Instagram
Ciao for now,
Team Earlywork