Preventing Burnout - SDR as a Career and a Sport

After writing an article explaining why I pay my top SDRs $200K/yr, way too many SDRs contacted me saying they would love to join my company because their current company is not properly set up for success! I've already written about how to avoid some mistakes when setting up your SDR organization, but today I want to focus solely on burnout, and career path. For every point I make, I share how I run my team. I practice what I preach, and I thought I should shed more light to all of those who take the time to read my articles. Let's dive in.

I am sick and tired of people asking me how soon they should promote their best SDR into an AE role. I am even more sick and tired of SDRs who "burn out" after just a few months on the job. This is a rant about how we need to start seeing the SDR role as a career and a sport. Let me explain.

The Burnout Myth

I know AEs with 20 years of experience and no one is concerned about them burning out. So why are we so concerned about SDR burn out? I think this is just what society has made us believe. The SDR role is repetitive, no doubt, but you now what else is repetitive, basketball, baseball, and golf.

No one would dare to argue that Stephen Curry wouldn't be who he is today if after 6 months on playing basketball, he would've said "I'm starting to burn out, when am I going to start playing soccer?"

If you want to win big at something and you want to make the big bucks, you have to suck it up, stick with it and train hard, every day. If you've made 80 calls today, 400 this week and 1800 this month, I have news for you. Stephen Curry has probably attempted 2500+ shots during training this month as well. Moreover, Stephen has been doing this for 20 years. How long have you been in your role?....

Preventing "Burnout" - Advice for Managers

If you want your SDRs to stop complaining about their job and asking for a promotion, it's really simple. Humans are motivated by just a few different things. I first recommend everyone read "Radical Candor" by Kim Scott, or at least watch this talk and understand her explanation of Rockstars and Superstars.

In short, Superstars get bored quickly from any job they take. They are in s a fast growth trajectory and love change and new challenges. Rockstars are the opposite, they like stability. They want to do a great job and work 4 days a week instead of 5. They want more family/free time. They're good at what they do, it pays them enough for a decent life and they want to optimize for time off, not career growth. So why is there burnout in the SDR role?

Because most organization have trapped their SDRs. SDRs can neither make a lot of money (despite getting to 150% of quota, many times they still get paid less than a recently promoted AE! This is TOTALLY UNFAIR!), or be SDR Rockstars and take it easy. I've seen AEs hit their yearly revenue targets and take 2-3 weeks off from work. I've never seen an SDR do that. Most companies ask for their SDRs to work long hours, do research at night to build their accounts, and usually the SDR manager doesn't lead by example. When a huge deal comes in for a company, usually the VP of Sales takes it. However, when there is a list of high value target accounts to prospect, I've not seen a VP of Sales Development get on the phone to call them. Being an SDR is then perceived as a shitty job, with bad pay, doing what no one wants to do... and it is not.

Being an SDRs is totally awesome. Companies are built on their efforts. Fire all your engineers and your company can still go for a few years, fire all your SDRs and you're dead very quickly. Let's stop treating the SDR role as a temporary job, let's pay high performers much more and create stability.

Here are the mistakes organizations make when it comes to their SDR teams:

1. Not setting the right expectations

I've seen too many organizations hire SDRs and explicitly tell them: "Within a year we can move you to an AE role, this is a temporary entry level position where you just send emails and make some calls." You are setting yourself and your employees for failure. Many times SDRs are led by a "manager" who has never been a great SDR himself and has no idea how to cold call.

What to do instead? During the interview I explicitly ask each employee "you'll be making a little over 100 calls a day, how many meetings do you think you need to book?" Most of the time they guess in the 5-15 range. Then I say "You actually just need 1-3. How does that sound, easy or hard?" They usually think it sounds easy. Then I say "Well, you're about to make the worst decision of your life if you think that sounds easy, because even if I get on the phone, I can't get 10 meetings a day. This means that you'll hear everything from 'no thanks' to "fuck off and stop calling me" about 100 times a day. Do you think you can do that?..... You get the point, I set realistic expectations for the job.

2. Paying too little and having a crappy accelerator above quota.

Most companies in the Bay Area pay a $40-50K base, $25K commission at quota, and don't have an accelerator beyond quota. Also, the majority of their SDRs don't achieve quota because the quotas set are arbitrarily high. Companies think that because only 60% of AEs hit quota, they should do the same with SDRs, right? Wrong! SDRs already have low base salaries and are severely underpaid, and under-appreciated. You need reasonable quotas and very strong accelerators. It's not possible to afford your own bedroom in San Francisco making $60K.

What to do instead? If you want to balance rockstars and superstars, you need to plan for a skilled SDR to be able to meet their weekly quota with 32 hours per week. The wages they make from hitting that quota should provide them with a decent life. If you're not able to do that, it's because you haven't built a solid SDR team with the appropriate daily tasks. You're probably using expensive labor for low-skill tasks and you haven't set up your SDR team right yet. Read this.

After an skilled SDR meets their goal (32 hours worth of work benchmark), they decide if they take the rest of the time off (rockstar), or work longer to learn new skills or make much more money (superstar).

We've calculated the following. If you take your whole SDR team investment (salaries, tools, office space, etc) and divide it by the number of SDRs you have, you're probably at around $160,000 per rep in the Bay Area. Therefore, if an SDR can 2x his peers, it would be totally reasonable to pay him an extra $100,000 per year. Do the math in your company and leave me a comment below.

For one of our clients at AltiSales, our SDRs make $75 per meeting up to 14 meetings per month (quota), and $300 per meeting thereafter (accelerator). If they get 30 meetings per month, they make $70K in commission per year. If they get 40 meetings per month, they would make $105K in commissions. Yes, we walk the walk.

3. Not leading by example

I've seen too many companies where the managers don't know how to excel at the reps job. If that's the case, your SDR team is DEAD!

What to do instead? Lead by example. Read the intro of this blog again and get your managers and VPs of Sales Development on the phone once in a while. Show your reps that the job can be done and can be done well.

It's Sunday October 1st today. AltiSales has a new client starting tomorrow. I'm at the office, writing this blog, and the email sequence on Outreach for our new client. I just verified all the lead research work from our Philippines team, and I am ready to cold call tomorrow. Yes, me and one of our SDRs will be cold calling together. I like building trust with my team so that when I coach them on cold-calling they know that I've been there and done that. Any manager that wants to join AltiSales must first cold-call for a month for one of our clients. No one is "too senior" to do this job.

As a leader I'm establishing credibility. I'm also clearly a Superstar (per Radical Candor definition) who doesn't mind the long hours. I don't need to work long hours for money, I made my first $1 Million at the age of 24, but I don't think Stephen Curry, Cristiano Ronaldo, or Elon Musk take Sundays off either, so if I want to be like them and I want my team to be inspired, why would I take time off? Your organization needs to be led by a Superstar, who knows how to appreciate Rockstars.

4. Assigning SDRs unimportant tasks that can be outsourced

People are more likely to burn out when they are not being mentally stimulated and their pay is low. No AE "burns out" in 6 months, but SDRs do. Well if you have your SDRs working long hours doing data entry (read "research accounts and copy-paste data"), then after 6 months, they'll want to leave. Stop the madness. No one burns out from having conversations with potential clients. Have your SDRs on the phone.

What to do instead? Go on www.upwork.com and hire a few data researchers from Bolivia or Philippines. In those countries people making $12,000 per year are rich, so they'll be motivated to do a good job for $5/hr. Save yourself money and save your SDRs a lot of frustration. If you want your SDRs to have even more conversations daily, get ConnectAndSell and allow them to talk to 30-50 people a day.

If your SDRs still want to research and verify the data to have peace of mind, sure, they can totally do those after work hours or on weekends, but 9-5 is reserved for high value tasks.

5. Making SDRs Second Class Citizens!

Many organizations treat their SDRs like second-class citizens. AEs are given the power to tell SDRs what to do and who to contact, regardless of how senior the SDRs are. Many times AEs complain to SDRs if a demo doesn't show up, but SDRs can't complain if an AE messes up a deal and losses it. Organizations celebrate and congratulate the AE when a deal closes, but the SDR isn't even acknowledged for booking it in the first place. Many AEs see the SDRs as their assistants and feel senior to them due to the huge pay gap and promotion trajectory.

What to do instead? Celebrate SDRs as much as AEs. There's different ways to do this according to your products ACV and Sales Cycle. You can base it off of pipeline created, deals closed, or even meetings performed, but have a way to recognize SDR efforts. Also, once some SDRs make more than the bottom half of AEs, the dynamics change. Have SDRs and AEs at the same level where both can keep each other accountable for their numbers.

Don't forget to have your AEs do some prospecting too. I know that Manny Medina from Outreach.io has their AEs get 20% of their pipeline on their own. It's not about the revenue contribution, as much as it is about having AEs stay humble.

6. Pairing up SDRs with AEs

Organizations love this idea. Popularized by some other sales leaders, the 'pod system' of pairing up a certain ratio of SDRs and AEs has been implemented at many companies creating mini-teams. When the SDR to AE ratio is 1:1, you might have each SDR only sourcing deals for 1 AE. I've already written extensively about why this is a bad idea, but you want one more reason? Lots of complaining.

Your SDRs will complain that the AE isn't as good as others, the AE will complain that the SDRs is not qualifying deals properly. Everyone will point fingers at their counterpart when things aren't going well and since it's a 1:1 ratio, pointing fingers is easy. When you have 5 SDRs sourcing deals for you and other AEs, can you really argue that the deals coming to you are worse than those going to your colleagues?

What to do instead? A factory system where all demos are distributed at random. You need to make sure that during 1:1's with SDRs you review not only how many deals they've booked, but also that they have sent those evenly to the team. If you see an uneven distribution and your team is trying to manipulate the system, just block SDRs from booking demos for a certain AE to get them back to even.

This system creates more fairness and eliminates complaining as everyone has a mix of deals from all reps.

Conclusion

In short, make sure you tell your reps how hard the job is, and pay up for great performers. Never let a leader who isn't willing to do the job, lead the team, and make sure your Sales Enablement team has automated or delegated (preferably outsourced) all low skilled labor to a remote team that can copy-paste data so that your SDRs don't end up frustrated with so much admin work. Finally, value your SDRs highly. Celebrate their successes as much as you celebrate AEs, and don't treat them as second class citizens. Allow SDRs to hold AEs accountable for doing a good job.

Trust me, this is the only way to build a high performing SDR organization that isn't a revolving door of SDRs. The cost of doing that is too high.

PS. Interestingly enough, I just got this message from someone:

I wish his boss had read this post a few years ago.

----

If you liked this, and you believe your network would benefit from it, please share it!

Feel free to ask questions in the comments below and tag me. I will respond.

Click "follow" next to my name if you want to see more articles. I write blogs once a week.