Hey SDR! Watch out for that Meat Grinder!

When asked for his advice to aspiring entertainers, Steve Martin famously replied, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” Though this advice was given to entertainers, he could just as easily have been speaking to SDRs aspiring to be Account Executives.

SDRs are ambitious. They want to be recognized by their organizations and move up quickly. They want to become account executives, and from their perspective, it often can’t happen fast enough.

Companies sometimes respond by promoting SDRs too quickly for fear of losing a top performer with big potential. So they trade a top performing SDR for an underperforming AE. Not exactly a great trade for the organization. It doesn’t work out much better for the SDR either. According to research from Trish Bertuzzi at The Bridge Group, roughly 65% of SDRs that are promoted to AEs miss their quotas in the first year.

The SDR may get a pay raise in the short term, probably a substantial one, but what good is a 30K pay raise if you only hang onto that job for six months?

One of the beautiful things about the SDR role is that it allows fresh sales people to really focus on developing strong prospecting and discovery skills. Skills that are hugely important to being a killer account executive.

Once you become an AE, you have so many other things to worry about, like running great demos, closing, forecasting, etc. If you don’t have a strong base in prospecting and discovery, it’s easy to fall behind on your number.

At that point, what often happens is the former rock star SDR that had so much potential loses their confidence and either gets put on a PIP, quits or gets pushed out. At this point, they are in quite a jam. It’s going to be pretty clear from their LinkedIn profile that things didn’t work out.

Why would an AE hiring manager at a great organization take a chance on someone that couldn’t succeed in the organization that promoted them? At that company, they already knew the product and were familiar with the buyer personas they would be dealing with.

On the flipside, It’s going to be tough for that new AE to eat some humble pie and accept another SDR position at an organization that provides more structured training and coaching. So the floundering AE goes and gets an AE job at a lower quality organization than they were at previously because that’s what’s available to them now. Then they flame out there too because they have never mastered the fundamentals.

This is a huge part of why so many people end up leaving careers in sales that at one point looked so promising. They got promoted before mastering the fundamentals and then they end up in the account executive meat grinder spending six months to a year at every company and never really hitting their stride.

So if you’re an SDR what can you do to avoid this meat grinder? Instead of focusing on getting promoted, focus on developing the skills you’ll need to be successful when you do. Be so good they can’t ignore you!

• Read sales books, check out sales blogs (Sales Hacker and HubSpot are great places to start), read the Spin Selling Fieldbook and actually do all of the exercises
• Go to sales events and learn from people within other organizations
• Find a mentor
• Record your calls and review as many of them as possible. It’s amazing how much you can hear and learn when you’re not under pressure to think of what to say next
• Listen to your colleague's calls
• Get ahead of your number so that you can afford to spend time sitting in on demos of your company’s top performing AEs. Pick their brains after
• Ask if you can start running some supervised calls so that you can get coaching on the parts of the sales cycle that are outside of your regular SDR purview
• Perform mock demos and roleplays with your peers and manager. Make sure you work on negotiating and closing

If you have a manager that’s not providing you with the support and coaching that you feel you need, ask for their help. Identify the areas that you feel you need to work on and build a development plan together. Managers love to see that kind of initiative.

Ultimately, you need to take responsibility for your own development. Of course, you want to be at an organization that is supportive of you and provides you with resources, but don’t rely on them. There’s so much you can do on your own.

I'll leave you with this: If you're an SDR, you're probably still in your 20s and have 40+ years of career ahead of you. How you approach this role and what you learn will form the foundation of a strong career in selling. The goal should not be to be an account executive; you want to be a successful account executive that hits her number and moves up to bigger roles at better companies. The best way to do that is to focus on skill development and personal growth. If you do that and put 100% into it, the rest will take care of itself.

As usual, any comments, likes, shares or private messages are greatly appreciated.

Find me on Twitter: @waylonmcgill