The Agoge Playbook: A No-Huddle Offense for SDR Teams

Nothing comes up on my calls with high priority prospects and customers more often than The Agoge Playbook. Outreach and modern sales engagement has brought speed of ramp and output for individual SDRs into Ludicrous Speed. But you have to make sure your SDRs are moving in the right direction. The same technology that gets SDRs moving powerfully in the right direction can get them moving powerfully in the WRONG direction if they do not have a good sense for how to prioritize.

The good news is that when you package your ideal prospecting strategy into a sequence, prioritization can be simplified to an easy to follow process. Just make an Agoge Playbook. 

Part 1: The Agoge Matrix

The first part is a matrix that shows the prioritization of titles. When I made this as an SDR it quickly became the most popular document in our drive! Understanding the nuances of titles seems simple if you are familiar with the industry, but don't assume that is the case for new reps. Tiny mistakes here can cause huge problems.

Example: I didn't realize the major difference between a "Sales Director" (usually a rep) and a "Director of Sales" (usually over a team) or various other nuances related to title inflation or regional differences job titles when I was new. Just few days of sequencing "Sales Directors" can waste a lot of time.

Example Agoge Matrix

This matrix gives SDRs a general understanding of relative priority of different titles. Titles that are in green go into our call sequence (Outreach uses The Agoge Sequence format) Yellow titles will go into a more automated sequence that is designed to elicit referrals. Titles in red are ones we don’t reach out to at all. (We broke ours out into different functions within a company, but for some companies it may make sense to break columns out by industry.)

Relative Importance of Titles

For simplicity, make the titles rank from top to bottom, left to right like shown above. An understanding of the relative importance of titles will help gives reps an intuition for how to prioritize overall. Often, problems with call conversion, hold rates, show rates, and lead acceptance rates have their root in poor prioritization when putting prospects into sequence.

Part 2: The Agoge Pillars

The other page is color coordinated to the types of sequences each title should go into. It gives reps a general idea of how much of their time should be spent in each of the three strategies so they can have a sense of if they are spending too much or too little time on any one of them.

Your numbers will not be exactly the same, but I thought I would keep ours in just to give you a starting point.

• First row: This has the exact name of the sequence they should use for each one (don't use a nickname, use the name that is in Outreach so the sequence is easy to find).
• Second row: This row gives the SDR a general idea of how much time should be spent on each strategy, and a gut check so they know if they are misallocating their time.
• Third row: Here we give them an idea of how many SALs (Sales Accepted Leads, qualified meetings that are held and progress is the metric our SDRs are paid on) should be coming from each strategy. It's another gut check. The SDR may need coaching if they are not achieving the expected number of SALs from each strategy.
• Fourth Row: This is a range of how many prospects an SDR can reasonably manage in each strategy at a given time. This one will really depend on how time-intensive the corresponding sequence is. I've found that 80-120 is a good goal for The Agoge Sequence. The automated sequence we use is entirely automated unless an email is opened 2+ times, at which point it will queue up a call.
• Fifth Row: Explains the criteria for putting someone into this strategy. Green pillar correlates with the titles highlighted in green in the matrix, yellow pillar correlates with the titles highlighted in yellow, and the hit list is is just a qualified person that is will most likely take a meeting from a phone call

The No Huddle Offense

Now for the fun part! Once SDRs are using the Agoge playbook with corresponding sequences, you can adapt the team's overall SDR strategy in real time. Our success in the market depends largely on how quickly we adapt to changes, the Agoge Playbook makes adapting to new circumstances much easier. Simply adjust the inputs of the playbook for specific situations.

Versions of the playbooks can also be made for specific situations like booth hustling to ramping new reps. Here's how we currently have the playbook adjusted for ramping reps during the first three months in The Agoge.

Month #1 We focus exclusively on the sales persona. For our company, sales is the most important persona, so we completely master the conversation here before we add other personas to the mix.

Month #2 We add marketing to the mix. The conversation/strategy/sequence for marketing is slightly different and we focus hard on this for this month. We are still reaching out to sales leaders, but at this point they should have the strategy for them down so well that our SDRs will have mental bandwidth to introduce another persona. 

Month #3 Enter automation. Our automated sequence is designed to be sent to a high volume of non decision makers to elicit a referral. While the return for effort is high for this, we hold on reps using automation at the beginning because we don’t want reps to use this as their primary strategy. Automated sequences are a great supplement to an SDR strategy, but a poor foundation.

For all of these we just tweak the playbook.

First thing's First

Don't worry about advanced strategies right away. Simply putting together a rough draft of how titles should be prioritized and estimates for the pillar page will put them way ahead of most SDR teams when it comes to prioritization. Putting together an Agoge Playbook is an extremely easy way for any SDR manager or ambitious SDR to quickly make a big difference in their SDR org. (The Agoge Sequence is a close second though.)

The impact this had on our team was immediate and drastic. Be the hero of your SDR org and make one this afternoon.

Template and webinar to walk you through it is here

#HappyHunting