Your Questions Answered About our SDR Practice

My article 10 SDR Red Flags prompted many to ask questions about creating a rockstar SDR practice. Some of these answers may surprise you, and some may or may not align with your desired approach. It is an opportunity to start a dialog about what the ultimate SDR practice should look like, what works, what doesn’t, what are the best practices and how we can scale and grow. Let's get started!

1. Cold Calling is Dead, why are you doing it?

Cold calling is dead. Let me clarify. Dialling for dollars, interrupting someone’s day and expecting them to buy from you using high-pressure tactics is ridiculously outdated. That practice should die a quick and painful death right now. Researching a company, industry, and contact to verify they are a good fit for the business and your business is a good fit for them, calling to introduce yourself and your company, leading with value, understanding their use cases, discovering their pain points, asking thoughtful questions and having meaningful conversations is how people do business. The latter method when used by SDR’s just works and works very well.

2. How do you get results when you give your SDR’s so much freedom?

I love this question. We have a team of adults. Just like every single team out there in business. There is a trust factor that the people we hire can do their jobs, and we give them the flexibility to do so. Make no mistake, we are incredibly data-driven and there are targets individuals and team members must hit for the SDR team itself to be viable. Trusting your employees, giving them the freedom and flexibility to manage their workload, not hovering over their every move and encouraging them to have meaningful conversations to reach their goals is the way that works best, for us.

3. Your SDR’s aren’t aggressive enough.

Ugh. No our SDR’s are not overly aggressive, and we are ok with that. They don’t need to be. In fact, the people that we engage to do business with us enjoy that as well. We know some of our competitors are calling people a zillion times a day, sending massive amount of emails and essentially harassing a person who has a job to do (hint: it’s not listening to SDR pitches all day.) It just pisses people off, and nobody has time for that. Our approach is to lead with value, give people the time and space they need to make a decision and not be afraid to make the ask when the time is right. I can’t count how many times people have come back to us because they were turned off by hyper-aggressive sales tactics by our competitors and complimented our team on the way we engage a potential customer.

4. You aren’t using those typical SDR email templates, why not?

Oh you mean like this one:

Hi, Bob.

I know you are busy and don’t want to keep interrupting your day. I haven’t heard from you, and I’m getting a little worried. Are you:

1. tied to your chair and being kept hostage by the powers that be?
2. not answering the phone because it caught on fire?
3. hiding under a rock or sunning yourself on a beach?
4. still alive (thank goodness) and interested in improving your business life with our amazing Wizbang products!

Just pick one answer and send me the letter to let me know you are still out there and your heart is still beating.

I personally think templates like these are a joke and make the sender look foolish. Some people respond to them, it may get a chuckle the first time, but they get old really fast. It gets even worse when every single communication from a company is in this style. I don’t know about you, but I immediately mark it as spam.

Yes, we have templates. Yes they are short and sweet and yes our SDR’s have the flexibility to tailor the message to the client, to the use case and to infuse their personality. Our SDR’s are permitted and encouraged to be human, not bad comedians.

5. Why don’t you use calling scripts? How do you keep your SDR’s on message?

We will never use scripts. Ever.

We will use talking points but never will our SDR’s read a script on a call. How is one expected to develop communication skills and have a human conversation if they are so worried about delivering a script. If you want to deliver lines from a script, join the theater! If you want to have meaningful business conversations with other human beings this is what I recommend:

• Allow your personality to shine through.
• Focus on Human to Human (H2H) interactions, not script to ear transactions.
• Listen, listen and listen some more.
• Be confident and convey value in your own words.
• Tailor the conversation. Develop a relationship.
• Provide humans at the other end of the conversation with the resources they need to make a decision.
• Make the ask when the time is right, whether it be for an email address or appointment.
• If the answer is no, it’s no. Respect this and focus on on the people who are responding positively.
• Don’t try to get every single bit of information you want to convey OUT in a single conversation.

6. Your SDR practice should be operating under the sales umbrella. Why did you put it under marketing?

This is a topic for a dedicated blog post. Our choice to put SDR’s under marketing is not the most popular one. Most SDR teams fall under sales and may work with marketing. As the primary demand and lead generators for the company, our marketing team is laser focused on attracting and bringing in our perfect fit customers. This is our raison d’être. We have all of the tools and resources in place to do exactly this and SDR’s are simply an extension of that mandate. Our marketing team knows how to nurture leads and has all of the resources in place to support our SDR’s. Our team is agile and can produce new materials that SDR’s need to do their jobs easily. This includes:

• top of the funnel objection handling
• buyer persona’s
• competitive intelligence
• latest marketing materials
• new product announcements
• company news
• time-sensitive offers
• event invitations

and so much more. Marketing is at the ready to support the SDR team with what they need to attract our perfect fit customers.

Our intersection point to our Sales team is to make sales appointments also known as Sales Accepted Leads (SAL) that match specific qualification criteria. There are feedback loops at every stage, so we know we are delivering quality leads. As a data-driven organization, we monitor KPI’s like Qualified/Unqualified SAL’s, no shows, SAL to Opportunity Conversion rates, Opportunity to Revenue conversion rates to name a few. These are shared KPI’s between Marketing and Sales so we work hand in hand every step of the way.

7. Each of your SDR’s are Subject Matter Experts in a specific industry. Why?

Our SDR’s come from such a wide variety of skill sets, backgrounds and with varying industry expertise. I view each member of the SDR team as an expert in their own right. All of them have work experience and industry knowledge that they can leverage which will be an asset to them regardless as to where they move in the company. We work with the individual SDR to research and quantify the opportunity, and customer fit in THEIR chosen industry. We evaluate the use cases and how our products and services will improve the way companies in that industry do business. If we can get that far, we create an end to end campaign which includes online advertising, custom cadence, marketing collateral, landing pages, custom swag packs and more. The effort in creating a culture of experts has paid off.

8. SDR’s should be inbound only or outbound only. Why do you combine the two?

There are definitely dramatically different schools of thought on this topic. Here is our take. Imagine you are an outbound SDR. You receive many more no’s than yes’s on any given day. It can be daunting. If you could break that up with people who are seeking what your company has to offer, who have a demonstrated need or want of your product or services. With that balance, the job can be much more pleasant. Plus we want all of our SDR’s to be inbound certified and know how to nurture an incoming lead from the second they hit our website right through to where the Sales Person meets with the customer. Having both inbound and outbound experience and skills balance out the workload and develop the types of skills we need in all areas of the company.

9. SDR’s are a dime a dozen, why do you spend so much time interviewing and onboarding?

First of all, good SDR’s are not a dime a dozen. Second, of all, GREAT SDR’s are hard to find. I suppose if an organization is looking to put bums in seats than anyone with a rear end will do just fine. If the company is serious about their SDR practice, they will put the time, effort and energy to find the right people. In the end, the investment in a solid interview process, onboarding strategy, and continued career growth works for us very well.

10. Why don’t you exclusively hire Sales people for your SDR roles?

Our SDR’ roles are entry level. It’s an opportunity to develop talent into many of the areas of the business. It is a great opportunity for new grads, people changing careers, people who are new to SaaS and technology and people returning to the workforce. Truth be told, many salespeople apply for the role but don’t actually want to do the job. There are tough days that are filled with no’s. It can sometimes be a grind and to the seasoned sales person, this role may be seen as a step back in their career. We are looking for people to have human conversations, to identify a need and a fit of our company with theirs and vice versa. Sales experience is not mandatory but being an effective communicator and relationship builder is! Some of our SDR’s do have sales experience, and some don’t. Funny enough, the ones that don’t have as much sales experience are sometimes more successful.

How do you structure your SDR team? What has been the most important resource, strategy or tool you have used to build your team? Let’s Talk!