Managing a Suddenly Remote SDR Team: as we enter Week 2 and beyond

To say SDRs and SDR leadership are scrambling right now would be an understatement.

Over the past week, I’ve seen a lot of amazing content from the Sales community. I particularly want to call out GitLabs Guide to All-Remote, this post from Laura Guerra (ringDNA Sales Director), Brian Geiger on 7 years as a remote rep, and Matt Heinz’s how to work from home (when your kids are there too).

I wanted to share a few thoughts targeted to SDR leadership. My team shared 12 near term steps over on The Bridge Group blog and I want to call out a few that have seemed to resonate.

Step 1b- pause all automated emails.

You have emails that are sending automatically. I'm sure they were written with the best of intentions. You cannot predict how they are being received today. Pause them all. Manual, human, respectful, emails only for the foreseeable future. 

Step 3- offer a small home office stipend.

A bad office setup can have a massive impact on productivity. Do your reps have roommates? Is there even a kitchen table to claim? Make sure your reps have a decent headset, maybe an external keyboard + mouse, and a laptop riser (posture care is health care!). An hour slouching over a laptop on a bed is fine for checking email at night. It isn’t fine for getting anything meaningful done. And it won’t work if days stretch into weeks.

Step 5- spend the majority of your day listening to calls and reading email replies

I’ve seen a lot of great content about increasing call coaching during this period. And I love it. But you need to hear what prospects are saying first hand. And you need to hear it now. Add in your Execs too. What are prospects bringing up? What specifically are they saying? This is the intel your entire org needs.

Many SDR teams are down 30-50%. For some, it’s business as usual (down ~10%). And for a few, they’ve suspended prospecting completely.

Think about your prospects and who they sell to. What is their exposure to Massively Affected Industries (MAI)? The closer to the epicenter, the more sensitive you need to be right now.

Step 6- be ready to make a partial pivot.

Depending on what you hear as you complete step 5, you might want to consider pivoting the SDR role. Depending on how close your target market is to the MAI epicenter, consider re-focusing 10-30% of their time on account profiling, building target lists, Salesforce data append, generating ideas for A/B tests in your sequences, having a book club for a book that’s meaningful to your market, and so on.

Step 9- get local with SPIFs.

SPIFs can be a great way to break up the monotony of work from home prospecting. Get reps excited about something other than themselves. Launch a SPIF that benefits a local org (food bank, shelter, healthcare, etc). Or gift cards to a local restaurant who is certainly hurting right now. We’re all in this together.

Step 11- support your managers.

Much of what I’ve written above applies equally to reps and first-line managers. They need executive support and direction. And they need it now.

For many, this will be their first recession. For all of us, this is our first social distancing + childcare issues + eldercare concerns + global demand shock. Be there for them now more than ever.

What you do over the next 20 days will have a huge impact on your company, your culture, and most importantly your people. Be safe, be smart, and be kind out there.