My time as an SDR and what I learnt!??

As Benify are launching our first UK based SDR (Sales Development Representative) team it got me thinking back to when I started my sales career as an SDR in November 2016 and just how much I enjoyed it! I've also always wanted to attempt writing a blog post (someone might read it), so I thought this would be a great time to share some of my experiences that may help someone new entering the world of being an SDR or someone involved with SDRs! (If my grammar isn't perfect, just to confess, I got a D in English language and didn't turn up to my literature exam. My teachers would probably say "He thought he knew it all" and they'd also be damn right...)

Anyway, a bit more about how I got into sales from achieving a D in English in 2011 to becoming an AE (Account Executive, I prefer Sales Person) from September 2018 onwards! It might come as no surprise given my introduction that I decided to leave school at 16 and didn't go onto college or university. My family ran a small carpet business and I just wanted to earn money as soon as I could, so I spent the next 2 and a half years doing an apprenticeship and learning a trade that has ended up coming in handy at times!

I then randomly moved into a pensions and benefits administration role with one of the worlds largest consulting firms, really not easy to get into when your CV is just 'Carpet Fitting' and 'some GCSE's' but with some proactive use of the phone and getting myself into one of their recruitment days, I managed to get on the ladder! After 2 years there, that weren't particularly exciting either, I took on an SDR role at a benefits technology company. If you're not a graduate then use your other skills to try and stand out, you can become an SDR from any background with the right attitude and determination, typically they're the types of skills that would make you a good SDR anyway. I've worked with about 10 in total and they all had very different education, experience and work backgrounds!

Now we begin...

Looking back to my first 2 months as an SDR, I really was cr@p to be honest! I was a blank canvas as far as sales, I knew bits and pieces about pensions and benefits and always loved the idea of sales but knew absolutely nothing about booking meetings for senior sales people! From day 1, it was clear that I would need a lot of help from my manager who really knew the art of 'telesales' and gave me loads of brilliant COACHING, a lot of which has always stuck with me. Be a sponge - learn as much as you can from as many people as you can.

The basics of a simple script, what to listen out for, how to handle objections and simple A4 sheets with key phrases and stories to reference was gold dust for me at the time and even though I would make 167 dials (probably 5-8 conversations) per meeting booked I was hitting targets early on by purely just smashing as many calls as I could. I also think you know if being an SDR is for you purely because of the buzz it gives you after your first few meetings booked or first meeting booked with a company you've heard of! (The only down side was my 4 hour round door to door commute)

The TEAM, this is something I was very fortunate with and that I think is critical to being a successful SDR team, there was 4 of us that all got on really well and that created friendly competition between us, nobody was ever bitter if someone else booked a meeting and we always drove each other to hit targets. Another part of that great team environment I'll always remember was our get togethers to listen back to each others calls, something that helped not only with advice on how better to have managed the call but it took the seriousness away from having to call senior stakeholders, don't get too down about a call where someone on the other end decides they're in a bad mood and wants to ruin your day, most of the time it's just bad timing and they'll be absolutely fine the next conversation you have with them. We were also lucky that we could all take the savage banter that came with the inevitable 'really really bad' calls that were played out loud in the meeting rooms to the rest of the team... We had an environment where your manager said on a Friday out of the blue, book me a meeting and you can go home! It's safe to say I would more often than not book a meeting by lunch whenever that happened!

MENTORS, another key for success I think is having other people in the business available for you to learn from, a fair few SDR's want to become AE's and having those close relationships with your AE's is hugely beneficial for an SDR and will be hugely beneficial for the AE! I worked closely with an AE as an SDR and was taken for monthly burgers, given lots of his time and was always kept in the loop on how a deal was going from a meeting I had booked. It's also worth mentioning there's lots of other people outside of sales at businesses that have helped me a lot who were in all sorts of different roles that inspired me throughout or gave me great advice for life as well as work so branch out internally if you can!

KNOWLEDGE is great for an SDR but I would say to anyone starting out on day 1, don't get too bogged down on the detail, that's something that will come over time and will be an endless process. Being a great SDR to me should have much more focus on the skillset of booking a meeting, that skill should be transferable to almost any other industry once you've got a high level understanding of the company and product! The team I sat in would see a much more knowledgeable AE on the phone trying to book a meeting thinking 'AHHH the AE who had never been an SDR is on the phone absolutely killing that lead, I would have booked a meeting with them' - two very separate, specialist skills. Despite still doing a bit of my own lead gen as an AE, it's probably at 10% of the time spent to what it was and in truth, I probably absolutely suck at it now compared to 2017!

I've missed out plenty more great things I'm sure but all of the above played huge factors in me achieving 148% of my target over the 8 and a half months I was in the role (from 167 dials to a meeting booked to 42 dials when I left). To wrap up, in short, I then moved into an 'Enterprise SDR' role which was essentially just a more targeted approach with larger companies where my targets halved whilst allowing me to start to see the other aspects of a sales cycle before making the step to AE - which is a BIG step! I would advise anyone with aspirations to go from SDR to AE not to rush it! I'll save some of that chapter for when I next wake up at 4am and decide 'I'm going to write a blog'! Spoiler though, it involves going to your first meeting alone in a big London office, sweating buckets in the reception thinking 'wow this is harder than I thought it would be!'

I even kept my little white book where I tracked my numbers! Great handwriting...