How to make $200K/yr as an outbound SDR Part I. (Hint: it only works if your manager is amazing)

In a previous blog post, I wrote a rant about how the best outbound SDRs can 10x their colleagues when it comes to performance and why these individuals are underpaid and under-appreciated. I also shared that during an experiment we were able to 7x the performance of another team. In this article I'll reveal the most common mistakes SDR teams make and how SDRs can 3-10x their output.

Sales Development is hard, it's much harder than closing transactional sales, and that's why most people don't want to be SDRs in the long term. However there are some techniques and methods that can help SDR teams and SDRs themselves to be much more effective and efficient and allow them to 10x the performance of their competitors, or their peers. Here's a list of common mistakes that SDR teams make, and what to do instead.

First, let me give Managers some advice regarding their entry level SDRs:

1. Stop letting SDRs select what Accounts/Contacts to reach out to

Letting SDRs dig through a list of 5,000 companies in their territory (because I know 99.9% of you are still not using Alphabet based distribution yet) is a terrible idea because too much choice creates paralysis, procrastination and dissatisfaction.

What to do instead? Have the manager or VP select the accounts to target for the next 1-3 months and distribute those equally among your team. Load them directly into Outreach or SalesLoft or whatever tool you use. Do lead distribution at random, or alphabetically, but make it fair. Most of the time (but not always) your AEs should be working your Named Accounts and your SDRs should just be hunting all over the market.

2. Don't have your SDRs do "Research"

Having to spend 1-3 hours a day on Linkedin and Data.com or ZoomInfo or DiscoverOrg, just to find the phone and email of the people you're trying to reach is a huge waste of time. SDRs cost $100K/yr to an organization in the Bay Area (want to see the math, message me), which is about $50/hr. Organizations are throwing money away by having their SDRs work as data entry employees.

What to do instead? Use labor arbitrage. Have a team in Philippines, India, or Bolivia do all that research for your target accounts using those same software tools (ZoomInfo, Data.com, etc.). Tell them who the Buyer personas are and they'll find you the data for $3.00 to $5.00 per hour and import it to your CRM. Moreover they can search for obscure things such as # of engineering employees, companies that offer massages as perks, common connections, or other data that can make your outreach more relevant. This takes time to learn how to do, and you'll fail at first, no doubt. If you become good at outsourcing, it's a huge competitive advantage.

3. Get your SDRs off of Social Selling

Social selling, as I define it, is the act of trying to sell via organic social media interactions. When someone asks their network "what car should I buy?" and a Ford salesman replies "Ford!!!" it is obvious that he is biased, and therefore the recommendation is not accounted for.

Your entry level SDRs don't have enough credibility, or knowledge to bring insights to your target market and they work for your company, which makes their opinion biased. Entry level SDRs can't write blogs to educate their prospects because they are new to selling this product. Social Selling in these cases is a waste of time for SDRs (Your VPs or C-Level Execs are more appropriate for social selling because they can teach the market something and through that leads will come inbound).

What to do instead? Use the SDR time for something else, like making phone calls. I'm not saying social selling doesn't work. It's just a matter of opportunity cost. Knocking on doors to get meetings works, but the opportunity cost of driving around is too big. The phone should be the primary tool for an SDR, see #4 to understand why.

4. Don't let entry level SDRs craft their own emails

The key part here is "entry level"... you should totally teach them to write emails and allow them to do so in a few months after they have booked ~50 demos, but SDRs in general are not great writers. They do not have degrees in psychology, or marketing, or communication. 90% of your SDRs should not be writing emails on day 1. They should still send them, but allowing your entry level SDRs write emails causes more harm than good. If they are researching prospects and hyper-personalizing emails, then you are not doing a good job with your outsourced data research team on #1. Emails should be very personalized and 100% automated. What takes time is finding the data... the phrasing of the email should be standard.

What to do instead? Have either their manager, or someone from marketing who is good at writing emails, write all the email campaigns for your SDR outreach, or just copy the best templates that you've sent in the past. You must have one person responsible for looking at the aggregate email metrics on a weekly basis and brainstorm ideas on how to improve those emails. You should also use the outsourcing data research team to be able to personalize at scale. Use custom fields on your CRM to record things such as "# of engineers at the company" or "current open positions". If you do that your emails can say things like "I see that you have 72 engineers in Tampa, and you're hiring a Data Scientist and a Python developer". This is personalization at scale with zero SDR involvement and at a cost of $5/hr for labor rather than $50.

5. Don't teach SDRs too much about the product yet.

SDRs are not supposed to sell the product. They are selling a meeting. When SDRs learn too much about the product they start barfing features. I've heard a ton of them tell their potential clients that their product has SSL encryption and up to 100 GB of storage for free. The SDR has no idea how TLS or SSL are different or similar, and their potential clients might not know either. SDRs need to keep it simple!

What to do instead? It's better to sell the benefits. "Our product is the fastest, most secure, easiest to use, most easily configurable, most user friendly, most cost-effective, most powerful, etc." The best thing you can do is to have your SDRs read books about human persuasion. I recommend they start with Influence by Robert Cialdini

6. Eliminate their fear of Cold Calling

There is a chance that you as a manager have no idea how to cold call effectively. I believe that 80-95% of SDR managers don't consider themselves as cold-calling experts. If that's the case your reps will be afraid to do it too. Perhaps the tips in the conclusion can help you too

What to do instead? Get on the phone yourself. Book a few demos doing outbound cold calling and show your reps how it's done. You think I'm full of BS? I practive what I preach... keep reading

Conclusion

If you are an SDR reading this, you need to understand that before you can make the big money, you need to work for an organization that makes it as easy as possible for you to book a lot of meetings. If you find yourself doing endless research on accounts and contacts, or writing different emails every day without looking at the data and the statistical significance of the effectiveness of those emails, you're doomed for failure and a low salary.

I practice what I preach. Here's a snapshot of one of the number of calls on Outreach from one of my SDRs.

She averages 120 calls a day, and he can do that because there's no time wasted social selling, researching or writing emails. Moreover, this person only spends 6 hours on the phone each day and 3 hours on the beach. The best part, she makes 2-3x the salary that her peers make in a similar role at other companies in the same city. She loves her job.

If your company is properly set up, you can build a killer outbound team that makes everyone a lot of money. If not, go find a new company, and if you want to get started learning more tips about how to be great at cold-calling, here you go:

Practical tips for becoming a killer SDR organization:

1. Cold Calling and Social Selling - Here's what works and what doesn't
2. Your Buyer Persona ultimately determines your prospecting strategy
3. If you're measuring calls, like you measure emails, you're dead to me
4. How to increase email open rates to cold prospects
5. How to Fly Under the Receptionist's Radar and get to the Decision Maker
6. A Killer Start to a Cold Call

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