The SDR Flywheel: how to build & scale a high-performing sales team

"Outbound is too difficult. I don't know how to hire SDRs. How do I train them with so few resources and no time ? How to motivate them and reach performance levels when SDRs want to become AEs after 6 months ?"

We've doubted ourselves or heard those comments as sales leaders.

But I believe there are 2 no-brainer reasons to have both specializing sales and an SDR team when we have an outbound acquisition model.?

• Create a predictable sales pipeline?
• Develop your pool of sales talent who will grow with your company - especially true if you are in the SMB & Mid-market segments -

To get it right to sustain performance AND deliver growth, it requires a solid foundation embedded in what I call the SDR flywheel.

The beauty of a flywheel is that if all its variables are properly aligned, you develop tremendous momentum and, eventually a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle for the organization.

The flywheel is based on 3 pillars:?

1. Hire

2. Train

3. Grow?

A strong culture and key contribution from other functions - Talent Acquisition, Operations & Enablement -? must be part of the flywheel and be fully aligned or it will create friction that will slow you down.

Pillar 1 - HIRE

Recruitment should be your top priority

I spend 30-50% of my time on hiring with an obsession to never lower the bar, although it means I could potentially miss my capacity plan and pipeline objective. But never hire a mediocre rep for the sake of a forecast.

Hire talent who show potential to be successful in the role and grow with your company. Bad hires impact the team negatively, so even if you are behind on a headcount plan, your existing team might be able to bridge the gap while a bad hire could slow everyone down.

Coachability is key to assess

We are all looking for the top sales talent, and they actually require different skills that you think.?

Resilience, competitive drive and eloquence are the top skills you are looking for when hiring sales

While they are necessary, they won’t be enough. You need to emphasize coachability – the capacity to take feedback and to apply it - and eagerness to learn. Top performers in my team were not the most performance-driven or showing a competitive mindset, they were the ones always challenging themselves to get better and learn new skills. And it took me years to see it.

How to start

1. Create an ideal candidate scorecard: with must-have criteria, compensation package and interview plan. Hiring is not based on a feeling.

Make it very clear which the skills you’re looking for and how to assess them, plus create a cohesive strategy with the different interviewers on the hiring panel.

I like as well including the USP - Unique Selling Points - of why this person should join your company: like with prospects preparing and pitching your value proposition according to your persona is key!

2.Treat your hiring process like your sales funnel: data-driven with interview scripts, stage criteria,? and documentation to save time later. You’ll be able to measure and pilot it on a weekly basis. You could anticipate low seasonality peaks for candidates, and take actions when conversion rates are not met.

Finally, would you imagine creating an opportunity in your CRM without call notes ? Of course not! It should be the same with every candidate for every interview, and for 2 reasons: to help give feedback to the candidates as part of a better candidate experience and to help the next interviewers to prepare.

For best practices on designing the hiring interviews, I highly recommend the Hubspot framework “The Sales Acceleration formula” that Tomasz Tunguz described well in his article

3. Include your Talent Acquisition partner in the review of the SDR ramp-up and create a post-mortem analysis. You’ll be able to adjust your hiring profile over time and improve your hiring process.

When I started those post-mortem, we were able to see why some skills or attitude didn’t work out for some SDRs and often they were actually flagged during the interviews. I remember a SDR who achieved 40% of his calling objectives and wouldn’t take feedback because he felt that was enough. Our post-mortem later showed 2 interviewers doubted ability to take feedback. Going forward after the post-mortem, we knew that if 2 interviews flagged the same risk, we would stop the process.

4. The war for SDR & sales talent always exists even during downturn, so your hiring process should:

• Aim for a 2-week period
• Involve positive or constructive feedbacks after every interview
• Agenda and expectations shared beforehand
• Give candidates time to ask their questions and analyze, a job offer is a 2-way decision

What a great outcome when most candidates still praise your company and the hiring process! Also think the hiring process is the representation of your company’s culture and how employees are treated once on-board.

Pillar 2 - TRAIN

Now you have the best talent, you have to train them. Don’t think because you hire more experienced SDRs they’ll need less training, especially for SMB. Learning your product, the value proposition, your sales process and methodology, handling objections will be new to them so invest in their success.?

A SDR will be fully ramped-up on month 4th, therefore you should orchestrate a deep on-boarding program the first 3 months.??

70% of learning comes from doing and coaching

1.Share job & behaviors expectations ?plus ways of working together during the first days: I call it “to put the cards faceup on the table’ to build a trustworthy relationship from the start. We? know that dialing & activities is the fuel of the engine, and ideally should never be a topic for conversation. It will be so much more efficient to talk about skills and how to unlock situations with prospects during 1:1 rather than the number of dials done.

2. Structure your on-boarding and present the agenda from the start: of course smaller the organization, more difficult to formalize a comprehensive program. Don’t use it as an excuse. Show you have on-boarding process and you care to deliver a best-in class employee experience.?

The trick is to leverage your team expertise: 1 sales can do 1 workshop on his/her top skill and to mix theory and practice.?

To avoid call reluctance, new hires should call real prospects during their first week. They will tell you that they don’t know the product enough, the pitch, how to handle objections..and guess what: the best SDRs at cold calling - meaning with the outcome of a meeting booked - never lead the conversation with the product they sell. It’s all about active listening, rebounding, questioning and creating enough teasing on a ROI that the prospect will want to know more and be open to the next step

3. Create a senior peer role to mentor new hires: Any new SDR is paired with a senior SDR aka “senior peer”. They will have at least 2 formal weekly meetings for 6-8 weeks so the new hire is at ease to ask questions and can shadow.

This has 3 benefits:

• Empower and give recognition to your senior reps
• Reduce your managers' workload
• Create a bond and a team spirit culture.?

4. Regular feedbacks & coaching sessions: Truth is your top sales talents are motivated by continuous learning, not by money (well it doesn’t mean they won’t bother you with pay rises and claiming their bonus; after all you get what you deserve).

Their continuous drive is to get better and they are eager to receive critical feedback and master new skills.?

A manager who cares is a manager who is able to be radical candor (side note: the book is a must-read for any manager).?

Develop a sales academy to measure the impacts

As you grow you’ll formalize a “sales academy” with certifications to measure the impacts of your training and coaching efforts.

I advise to create a Sales Enablement manager role sooner than later (around 15 sales) or to hire an external sales coach (from 3-4 sales)

The concept of enablement is not solely providing on-boarding and formal training, it’s done through coaching. Iam shocked when SDRs/AEs tell me that their managers don’t listen to their calls, nor share feedback.

Regular coaching should be in the team leader’s top priority and long after the on-boarding period. I tell my team leaders to spend at least 2 x 2h per week listening to calls and sharing feedback, on top of live shadowing and role plays.

Pillar 3 - GROW

I believe if you get hiring & on-boarding right, you’ve done 80% of the work. Because you have the right talents with solid skills foundations, you’ll reach success overtime.

The most difficult is the remaining 20% because the honeymoon period usually stops after 7-9 months.

Moreover we tend to support less of our top SDRs. They get bored and can't see the reasons to remain SDR for another year, while the average tenure for a SDR should be 18 months.

How to motivate and project your SDR team

1.Maximize efficiency & reduce non-selling activities: Nearly 50% of a SDR’s time is spent on non-selling activities such as finding data, internal meetings, recap notes, filling up the CRM, etc..crazy right ?! So our responsibility as a leader is to take admin tasks off their plate.

Even the research time - that is crucial for relevant and personalized outreach messaging - must be automated. You should hire a Sales/Growth Operations manager early on, and invest in a sales tool stack: at least a CRM that includes an engagement platform. (And now with AI, the possibilities are opening up and it will make our sales teams much more efficient!)

I’ve been impressed by the automation engine built by of our Operations team such as flagging special events. We could flag a new appointed CFO in the company or when a finance position was open for the SDR team,? meaning it will be the best timing to reach out to a prospect. We called it “intents”. This was gold and our conversion rates skyrocketed all along the sales funnel. We could do it at scale versus each SDR spending 1-2 hours every day. I let you do the math on how much pipeline and revenue we would have missed..

?2. Career Path & skills development matrix: How do I retain my top SDR ?How do I keep the SDRs motivated ? Those are the top questions I am being asked and the answer is career & skills development.

As you scale, you can develop a pretty “sophisticated” career path working with your HR and Enablement business partners, plus it will be embedded in the company’s performance reviews.?

But when you join at an early stage, structure and processes are not in place, however my advice is not to wait and think your team is too small.

Sharing criteria will set the expectations and it will be the same for everyone. It’s important to document what good looks like with call examples and to create a call scorecard that managers and peers will use to review (example from WinningBydesign) each call in order to see progression.

Last but not least, we tend to associate performance with quota achievements only. Meaning a sales person who achieves 200% of her pipeline or revenue objectives will be promoted.?

My advice is to incorporate skills development and create a skill set matrix: the complexity of the required skills by level should rise with the seniority of the sales person. Example: a SDR level 1 should have empathy, active listening and ask open-ended questions. A SDR level 3 should have the same skills and on top should manage complex objections and get a detailed decision-making process.?

I believe culture and values should be embedded in the career path to reinforce the expected behaviors. At Spendesk I wanted to develop a strong team culture based on trust: to become level 3, a SDR would have to lead project/training or mentor other SDRs on top of having his quota attainment and the sales skills expected for a level 3.?

Grow SDRs outside of the core job and lead with context

3. Side projects: the honeymoon period stops after 7-9 months. And we overcome boredom by breaking the routine and learning new skills.

Early on, understand the drivers and the areas your SDR is more passionate about. If the person likes crafting compelling messaging, have her lead a project to (re) build your emailing sequences or to work on cold calling hooks.?

Every quarter we list all the priorities with both top-down and bottom-up feedback. We?ask SDRs which project they would like to be part of. Of course achieving quota attainment is a preliminary condition.?

I am amazed - actually it is obvious based on the profiles we hire - that some SDRs have even better performance by stretching them with projects, other responsibilities in the team compared to the time they “only” have their core pipeline objectives as a SDR.

4. Mission, vision & values: I am a big fan of always starting with the why and giving context.

I find it powerful when the CEO or an Executive value my team and explain why generating 1 more opportunity makes the difference and impact our company destiny. It has always given a boost in the moments of down. Knowing that I am part of a team and a company who has ambition to help thousands of SMBs organizations while developing fulfilled employees, has made me proud and filled with positive energy.

As you scale, the CEO will need other relays in the company: spend time to train managers on how to convey that purpose and vision across the teams overtime. I remember one of the companies off-site in my 4th year, 50% of the 500 employees had less than 1-year tenure, so it's worth repeating again and again.

Finally, you’ve laid down the foundations to have high performing and motivated SDRs, the flywheel can sustain itself:

• Employee Referral

Fulfilled SDRs will likely recommend their friends and former colleagues to join your team and your company. As we know employee referral is the best source for hiring successful talents.?

• Pool of talent

A SDR team is certainly your engine to build a sustainable pipeline of leads overtime. Developing a SDR to AE career path is also the way to have an efficient and scalable sales organization.

Indeed an external AE will take at least 6 months to ramp-up while a SDR will take 2-3 months. Plus promoted SDRs have proven the culture match and their integrity. (side note:I think it’s still beneficial to hire external AE to add up different skills & backgrounds to the team, but in minority)

Also, SDRs can move to other departments since their profiles will be valued. They understand customer’s pains & challenges, have developed key skills such as empathy, organization or assertiveness. I’ve seen great success stories from SDRs going to Product, Customer Success, Marketing, Operations/Enablement, Human Resources and Recruitment.

• Purpose, care and performance

I’ll finish on a SDR quote that reflects the outcome of the?SDR flywheel and the culture you've managed to build:

“We’ve always had a culture of performance with very high expectations, but without obsessing about numbers and a top-down micro-management. I don’t care to over-perform, I care about 2 things: first, keep learning and acquiring new skills and second, have an impact for the team and the company. So of course to reach those 2 objectives we all need to (over)-deliver.”

Conclusion: Yes outbound sales works and SDRs can achieve high-performance without rushing to an AE role.

Is your SDR flywheel into motion ?