Pushing Your SDR Team's Boundaries...

Over the past years, one of the questions that I most frequently hear from Sales and Sales Development leaders is "What is a fair goal for my SDRs to hit?"

In this article we'll explore how to set minimum benchmarks, and how to push past them.

Setting up Initial Benchmarks

According to The Bridge Group, the goals can lie between 2 and 60 meetings per month per SDR! Trust me, knowing that range isn't helpful to many of us. So, how do we determine what's possible and what's fair?

I still believe that at first you should set up your team's goals using some assumptions and making sure your financial KPIs would work... here's an article about that method, which will help you justify the SDR investment by calculating:

With X meetings set, and Y% closing at an average deal size of $Z, you're ROI positive.

But once you're past the minimum, how high can you push your goals?

Taking Your Team To The Next Level

As an example, imagine your team needed 3.5 meetings per SDR to get a reasonable ROI, and right now they are setting 4.6 meetings per SDR per month on average... how do you push the boundaries of what your team is doing? Could 6 meetings be achieved? How about 10, or 12? Is that possible? Maybe even 15? Who knows!?

The other thing to consider is that these meetings must be sustainable. If you're emailing 10,000 people to get 10 meetings, you can't really scale your SDR team. However, if you have found that you are being efficient with your leads, I'd like to suggest an idea that can change the future of your company.

• Benchmark yourself to someone else.

Imagine you have your 5 SDRs, setting on average 23 meetings per month. Now your CFO gives you headcount for 2 more SDRs. If you want to push the boundaries, don't hire two new SDRs in house, try to find the best quality outsourcing company you could ever find.

You're not paying for the meetings, you're paying for the knowledge and benchmarks they might be able to set.

Imagine if the outsourcing company provides 1 SDR and that one person gets 12 meetings per month for 4 months in a row. Wouldn't you want to know what they're doing? That alone could take your internal SDRs producing 23 meetings and elevate them to 60 meetings! That's a GIGANTIC improvement! You would've needed 13 SDRs to produce what you are achieving with 5!

"Wait a second, Tito"... you might be thinking, but what if it fails? What if the outsourcing company only produces 3 meetings. That would be a waste of money, right?

Not really. The fact that you've learned that your 4.6 meeting average is hard to beat is good! Perhaps after the 4-6 months of using this outsourcing company, you move to a new one. Someone doing different things like video, or Linkedin messaging or a different methodology, intent data perhaps! Find an outsourcing company that can teach you something.

The Value of Learning

Remember, this isn't a competition of who beats who. It's not the interval team vs. the outsourcing company. It's more of an exercise in setting benchmarks. Similar to running a marathon. If you were running it in 5 hours before, and not you do in 4.5, is that good? It's better, but once you learn that the world record is at around 2 hours, you feel like there's still a lot of room to grow.

Our problem is that selling your product to your market today is a race that no one else has run, and therefore perhaps an outsourcing company could help you figure out what those benchmarks might need to be....

The benchmarks are helpful not only for "meetings set", but what if this company lets you compare more things, you might be able to make other improvements!:

1. Their phone connect vs yours
2. Their conversation to demo ratio vs yours
3. Their email positive response ratio vs yours
4. Their show rate vs yours
5. Their dials per day vs yours
6. etc.

The more things you can get data for, the easier it is to figure out where your teams gaps are at... and even better if this outsourcing company is willing to share best practices.

Cost and Value of These Learnings

Let's go back to the numbers.

Cost of trying an outsourcing agency (try to limit to 4-6 months): $30-$100K.

Potential added value (8 SDRs, you produced with 5 what would've taken 13 SDRs): $800k/yr

Literally, if you plan to keep running your company for 5 years, even without growing the SDR team, this ~$100K investment could unlock $4M in value. That's one of the best investments you can make.

Also, keep in mind, this shouldn't be a one-off experiment. If you're smart about it, you would keep testing and testing and testing.... up until you're constantly beating each and every outsourcing agency in the world... perhaps after that you could even start an agency of your own. After you IPO your current company, of course!

To Close Off

I hope that the mindset of experimenting has opened up some ideas in your mind. Even if you'd never consider outsourcing, consider creating an "innovation" team in house. Separate 2-3 SDRs from the pack and allow them to experiment with new technologies, new messaging, and other "think outside the box" ideas. Sometimes they'll do better and sometimes worse, but you'll keep learning.

Your SDRs will thank you! If they're able to learn more and become more productive, it helps them in their career as they make progress through the ranks, regardless of if they become managers or AEs, the ability to learn best practices and execute properly in invaluable long term. Like in any marathon, when you have someone ahead of you, you can keep pushing yourself as you know that your limitation is not a human nature limit, but only a personal mindset limit.

The Shameless Plug

If this sounds appealing, feel free to ping me and put us to the test. We're happy to show you how we work and the metrics we collect, so you can compare yourselves to us and see if we can teach your team a thing or two.

If we can't help you increase your benchmarks, we'll even give you part of the money back, since "We either win, or we learn", we're happy to pay back money if you've taught us how you're doing better than us.

Cheers!

Tito

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Also, scroll down to find more blog posts below. Many of these are pretty good =)

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AltiSales is hiring experienced remote SDRs! You must be a top performer at your current company to qualify for an interview. Add me and message me on Linkedin.