Advice for New SDRs

I get asked about this a lot and it is getting very difficult to respond to every individual request I get from an SDR. There is also a lot an SDR should know, but I thought it would be useful to jot down a few of the important pieces of advice for new SDRs that are counterintuitive or underestimated.

Here are a few of the things I share with brand new SDRs that start at Outreach or reach out to me personally on LinkedIn.

Doing awful your first couple weeks is ok

I have been in Outreach’s SDR org for a while and I have not seen anyone have a worse, more embarrassing start than me.

I came in last in the competitions during the onboarding bootcamp. The AE I was assigned to was concerned with my incompetence and asked that I be transferred to someone else. I was placed to sit next to the manager for extra help, I was not trusted with a good territory, and my first 7 meetings no-showed.

But it ended up working out ok.

You will probably make a lot of mistakes in the very early beginning. This is a normal part of the learning process, and your posted results during the first few weeks don't actually matter all that much in the long-term. There is surprisingly little correlation between results during the first few weeks and expected performance long-term.

At this point, focus all of your energy on improvement. This can be simplified to getting good at identifying where the bottlenecks in your performance are, why they are happening, and figuring out how to eliminate them asap. Rinse and repeat. You need to put all of your energy into finding ways to increase your rate of improvement because it matters so much more than anything else.

Don't worry if SDR work doesn't come natural or you have little relevant experience. Being a top performer in sales development has much more to do with how good you are at getting good at things than your pre-existing skillset.

Work like crazy, especially in the beginning

Recently, people have been calling discussion about the merits of hard work “hustle porn” as if endorsing the relationship between hard work and success promotes some unrealistic fantasy that people are anxious do delude themselves into.

It’s almost ironic.

While it is true that quality of work is a much more powerful lever than quantity of work, you probably don’t have a perfect intuition for what is quality yet. That intuition will come in large part by working hard and putting in the time.

Working hard in the beginning will allow you to accumulate experience faster and increase your odds at early success. As you excel in the beginning you will be be happier, more confident, and trusted with more and more opportunities. This ends up creating virtuous cycle of success.

If you start strong, you can take your foot off the gas later and still perform over-perform. Or if you choose, keep your foot on the gas and blow away records.

Work hard in the beginning and keep your options open.

Listen to your SDR Manager even when you disagree. But be open about disagreements.

I was very obedient to my SDR Manager. I was also extremely open about issues and strategies that I disagreed with during our 1:1s. Debating strategies with my manager rarely led to the manager changing his opinion, but that wasn't the point. The main value from arguing about strategies was that it forced my manager to explain the thinking behind the strategies and it helped give me valuable context quickly. Then afterward, if I felt that I had made my opinion clear and my manager still recommended that I follow his direction, I (almost always) did.

After I got more experience, I realized that I was right about some of the things disagreed with! But I was wrong about more :)

As a new SDR you will have blind spots about the job, your company, and the market. Since much of what works in sales development is counterintuitive, it is usually wise to follow recommended methods even when they make no sense to you. Following the process laid out for you is usually the most efficient way to free ride on all of the experience before you and avoid gaps that can give you a shaky foundation.

In the words of Pablo Picasso: “Learn the rules like a professional, so you can break them like an artist.”

Do $100 favors

Every time it is easy for you to do something that is worth at least $100 to someone else in your company, do it.

In sales you will notice a lot of opportunities to help a co-worker out and make them money through very little effort on your part. Some examples are sharing useful information, advice, or making an intro. Acting on these is a quick way to improve your happiness, the company culture, company value, and your own success.

If you can only convince yourself to do this out of self-interest, it is still wise for you to do.

Karma is real and there is actually a science to it. Karma works for generous individuals the same way seed investing works for early-stage venture capitalists. VC's invest small amounts of money into a huge number of small startups expecting that a small handful will provide massive returns that make it all worth it. Good karma doesn’t come as a direct payback for each good deed, karma comes back to you in a very big way a small percentage of the time.

The odds of this working out well for you increase significantly if you do it a lot.

Realize the value of the opportunity

This isn’t the kind of entry-level job where you do menial labor that isn’t relevant to what you really want to do long-term. You get to start off your career learning to master the most difficult part of the sales cycle: Creating an opportunity where there was previously nothing. Working full time to master this will give you a skillset that is intensely valuable and generally applicable. A lot of what makes businesses successful comes down to how well they solve this problem.

I find myself drawing upon learnings from my work as an SDR constantly and it has totally changed the way I look at every area of my life. If there were some magical way to trade my track record and the practical skillset I acquired as an SDR for a Harvard MBA, I would not take it.

Make the most of it this opportunity.

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(Recorded webinar on this topic: Advice for new SDRs Livestream)

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