SDR Horror Stories

It’s Friday the 13th. Do you know what your SDRs are up to?

This article was originally published on the demandDrive Medium Page on October 13th, 2017.

We’ve all had a bad experience with an SDR. It could be a ghastly email, a dreadful cold call, or (even worse) a horrible InMail pitch. And while it might be fun to poke and jab fun at these interactions (from an outside perspective), there is value to be gained from them. This Friday the 13th, turn that bad pitch fright into a learning experience for your SDR team.

The Information-Dump

Our CEO, Lindsay Frey, has plenty of horror stories to share — being in the space for as long as she has means she’s heard her fair share of bad pitches. She even wrote a blog about one a handful of years back. One of the more common (and painful) pitches she comes across is the dreaded “information dump.”

“I get a lot of calls from SDRs where I’ll pick up the phone and they immediately launch into a pitch. Sometimes I think it’s a robo-call because they aren’t stopping or giving me a chance to talk — sometimes they don’t even breathe.

When they get to the end — because it’s been 100% them talking so far — they don’t know what to do. Should they be asking me a question? Do they wait for me to say something in response? Usually, I can’t be bothered to give them the time of day.”

— Lindsay Frey, CEO @ demandDrive

For an SDR to be successful they need to have a conversation, not talk at someone. This means building rapport and maintaining a dialogue — it doesn’t mean blasting through your pitch like a robot and hoping for a positive outcome. If you dump all of your information in the first 30 seconds of the call or first paragraph of an email, you’re not adding anything to the conversation. The prospect will feel like a name on a list instead of someone you’re trying to help.

What should you do? Instead of making the call all about you, make it all about the prospect. A lot of SDRs go in with the “this is what we can do” approach when they should focus on “we understand that you have XYZ pains/needs, here’s how we can help.” Make it a dialogue— if you don’t know all of their pains and needs, listen to them and find out! Be more of a consultant than an appointment setter and prospects will warm up to you faster than the house giving away full-sized candy bars on Halloween.

The Essay Writer

Nothing makes a decision maker cringe more than seeing an email pop in their inbox from someone they don’t know that looks like a poorly written 5-page essay. Emails should be concise.

“I don’t get emailed often, but when I do it’s usually from an inexperienced SDR who wants to tell me *everything* about their company and product. It irks me to no end, mainly because I was recently in their shoes and I know people don’t have time for that.

You could offer the most life-altering solution, but because you buried it in an essay I’ll never read it. I can only imagine what someone who gets hundreds of emails must think.”

- AJ Alonzo, Director of Marketing @ demandDrive

The adage of “less is more” could not be truer when it comes to prospecting emails. So what can you do? Cull your message to its most important points — it will help shorten the overall length AND give your prospect the info they need without boring them to death. Divvy up the information you want to deliver to the prospect throughout multiple touches to facilitate this. Your first email should be asking for a referral, your second email gives them an idea of how you can help one aspect of their business, and subsequent messages release more information bit by bit. Dumping it all into one message will get your email deleted faster than you can say “Hocus Pocus.”

The “No Research” Method

Every day, decision makers receive hundreds of messages — either in their inbox or through voicemail. People are inundated with pitches. More often than not they don’t have time to get through them all, so if you do capture their attention you better make the most of it. The best way to squander that time? When you reach out to a prospect with a message that has no relevance to their role or company. You’re bound to ruffle a few feathers in that case.

“Time is one of the only resources you can’t make up or get back. To carelessly send an email that has no relevance to me or my job really grinds my gears, because reading it is time I’ll never get back.

Being someone who does their own cold outreach every day, it’s hard to not want to help those SDRs. But when you waste my time like that it’s also hard to want to help.”

- Meghan McNally, Account Executive @ demandDrive

People prefer to see a little effort in their inbox. When they get a message that has clearly been copied and pasted or is part of a generic mass email it screams “I don’t really care about your business, you’re just a name on a list.”

How do you fix that? Before every phone call or email, your SDRs should be doing adequate research into the prospect they’re reaching out to. Not only will a personalized message better grab attention, but the conversation will be tailored to the most important pieces. Whether you’re cold calling or preparing for a themed costume contest, planning your attack and showing effort goes a long way.

The “One and Done”

Let’s say your SDR does all of the right things — they research their prospects, find a great value proposition to lead with, and they send a solid first touch email…but get no response. You can’t stop there. Too many SDRs stop after one or two touches and leave the prospect hanging. Decision makers’ inboxes are flooded with pitches every day, so if they don’t see yours it’s probably because it got lost in their sea of unread messages.

“As an SDR myself, one of the most important factors to my success is persistence. I know that the more times I try and contact a prospect (within certain limits), the more likely they are to respond.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve received a single prospecting email where the SDR simply never bothers to follow up. If I don’t respond it doesn’t mean I’m not interested — maybe I just didn’t see your email. Show a little determination when you reach out and I’ll notice you.”

— Alex Ellison, Sr. SDR + Social Media Coordinator @ demandDrive

Persistence is a key trait that your SDRs need to posses — without it, they’ll be getting leads based on luck more so than hard work. What can you do? Follow a call plan that includes 8–12 touches to get the maximum return for your efforts. This also gives them a chance to break up their messaging (like we mentioned before) and not send it all in one large chunk. Make sure to toe that line between persistence and harassment — nobody wants a trick-or-treater to come back to your house over and over again. It gets annoying.

The Technology Guru

It seems like more and more SDRs are relying less on their own individual capabilities and more so on machines to do work for them. Which is great in some cases — being able to reach more people in one click than you can in a whole day’s worth of work is definitely a plus, but it has to be used correctly. What these tools provide in increased efficiency and volume they lack in personalization.

“It’s frustrating when I pick up my phone to silence…and then hear the familiar *click* to tell me the auto-dialer kicks in. All of a sudden I’m speaking with someone who is obviously thrown off by the fact that I’ve actually answered. If you’re using an auto-dialer, you better be aware and ready to speak right when a prospect picks up the phone.

There’s so much technology out there that allows SDRs to just go through the motions, and that’s obvious to the person you’re calling. It’s not a good first impression.”

— Sarah Fotos, VP of Client Engagement @ demandDrive

How do you combat that? Adding a human touch to your prospecting will go a long way. This means not using an auto-dialer (we can tell when you are — it’s a turn off), personalizing each email you send (please get my name and company right), understanding time zones (it’s frustrating to get an email or localized phone call at 6pm EST from someone on the West Coast), doing research on the prospect’s LinkedIn profile, etc…the list goes on and on. In the end, there has to be a human to human interaction — you can’t hide behind technology the whole time, so you might as well come out of the shadows sooner rather than later.

This isn’t to say that using sales enablement technology is a bad thing, it means it has to be done right. Use Mail Merges to reach prospects en masse — if you’re trying to break into a new market and want to test the waters, then poignant mass emails are an appropriate tactic. Leaving out a bowl of candy on Halloween is a great way to distribute it all in mass quantities, just know that not everyone appreciates that approach.

Some takeaways:

1. Don’t dump information into a voicemail or email. It’s better to be concise and touch on the prospect’s pain points — sometimes the best costume is a simple one (bed sheet ghost anyone?). Focus on how you can help instead of listing what your product’s features are.
2. Research or bust. If your SDRs send hundreds of generic emails to their list they’ll all get the same treatment — moved right into the trash. Tailor the message to each individual prospect and you’ll be treated instead of tricked.
3. Be concise and break up your message over multiple touchpoints. Decision-makers want to read through your essay-sized email about as much as they want their house egged on Halloween.
4. And on that note, be persistent. Just because someone didn’t get back to you after your first message doesn’t mean they’re not interested. Just don’t go overboard and contact them 20 times in a week — nobody likes the kid who takes all of the candy from the “take one” bowl.
5. Don’t dress up like a robot and use an over-abundance of tools to aid your prospecting efforts. In the end, it’s a human to human interaction, so ditch the tools and put some elbow grease into your outreach.