How We Screwed Up Our SDR Program For Over A Decade
Hiring and growing sales talent is a necessity for any growing enterprise business.
There are endless opinions on the best way to build a Sales Development Representative (SDR) program and plenty of content to help us learn from those before us.
We've been building and working with SDRs (also known as "BDRs") for twenty plus years in building businesses. Here are the five ways we screwed up our SDR program in the hopes you won't make the same mistakes we did.
- Make room for them all to succeed- or don't hire them.
We've already cited our disdain for The Hunger Games.
Competition is a terrific motivator and should be embraced. But...business doesn't have a salary cap and built in parity through a draft. If you have a Superteam in business (or a superclass in hiring), you can bring in even more max players as long as they pay for themselves. There are no limits to your teams success. If you build a dynasty, you can keep adding parts!
Do not put your team in a position where only one or two can achieve their goals of promotion or advancement. Judge yourself by the entire class.
At AEG there was a future unicorn CEO and a super-agent in the same class of five cold-calling out of a converted closet to sell tennis and soccer tickets.
At StubHub we had six salespeople who have each had seven figure exits as entrepreneurs in a class of eight people at the same time.
At TicketManager we had our "superclass" of 2012 which changed our business (more on that below and in future three things)
Cut out the "we're going to promote the top two" crap and make sure your staff knows it. This isn't wall street in the 80s anymore.
An important point here: We never had a "Hunger Games" set up and were sensitive to it from day one. And we still screwed it up. How? By not making it very clear to the team there was plenty of room for everyone to be very successful. Simply not addressing the point led to assumptions and internal competition instead of co-opetition.
2. Stop the fight.
Most SDRs in the job market are lazy and need to be pushed.* Pushed to perform or pushed out.
We don't want "most," we want the best. To get to the best, we have to sort through "most" which leads many to create environments geared around pulling more performance from the bottom while overlooking the best environment for top performers.
The best will be "lights." The best will go all in and work 70 hour weeks to prove they're #1.
We cannot let them. Make them go home once sales hours are over. Cap their activities. The great ones will have plenty of five alarm fires in their careers in the form of huge company changing deals. Running themselves ragged early benefits nobody.
Ask any of our top producers over the past nine years (since we made a deliberate culture change) what the most common thing I say to them is. They'll all answer "Go Home."
The job of a fight trainer is to make the fighter believe they are prepared for anything in front of them. That they will win or die trying. That kind of relationship can only exist if the fighter knows their corner will protect them from themselves.
Your job is to find people who will push the limits, put them in a position to succeed and take care of their well being.
Capping output will also eliminate false positives. I mentioned last week I was the #1 SDR at two of my three SDR jobs. How did I finish second? It took me a long time to figure out....
Our job was to cold-call to sell tickets all week long. We would get one 2-hour window per day where we would get to answer the inbound calls. That's where 70% of the sales came from. So how did I lose? The #1 rep was coming in on the weekends, sitting there all day, and answering the inbound calls. None of us knew it.
As an employee: good for him. He won. Hat tip. "Pay that man his money!" We're friends to this day and he's very successful. But....was he really the best salesperson? Who knows. More damaging: Had we known what was happening, we all would have shown up on the weekends to sit and answer the phones as it wasn't against the rules. None of us want that environment for our teams.
3. First impressions DO NOT matter. And they need to know it.
In 2012 we hired our "superclass." Out of seven entry level hires we added two current executive team members, a longtime workhorse sales pro, a customer success leader and a three year #1 sales person in a two month period.
Guess who was in dead last with zero sales at the end of the first year? That's right, the future #1.
We knew what he was doing was right as a rep. We knew he was putting in the work. We sent him home at 4 or 5 over and over despite his pleas to stay and get on the board.
Then he broke through with his first sale, at month thirteen, and it was off to the races. He was number one until he was poached (more on that below).
SDRs are new, raw and often have little to no experience. The future stars do need direction, but they have plenty of drive and often put way too much pressure on themselves if they don't win the swim off.
It's a marathon, not a sprint. Empower the team to keep shooting their shot.
4. Zero turnover from day 120 to day 730.
For years we tried the old Wall St boiler room approach of hiring ten reps to keep five. That may work for those large companies. It doesn't for ours. It likely won't work for yours either in today's recruiting environment.
When you take the "let's see what happens when they get here" approach the bar drops. Not by intent, it just does. Talent professionals want to produce and put butts in seats and there's always pressure from investors to grow faster (hint: that never goes away. It's their job to push you.)
To combat the "let's see what happens" hire, we aim for zero turnover from day 120 to day 730 and the leader is responsible for that number. It will change your hiring approach. It did ours.
In the first 120 days neither side knows if a gig is a fit. It gives the team lead and the SDR the freedom, without pressure, to see if the relationship will be fruitful.
At day 730, the recruiters start calling and you'll get stars poached. It's a good thing. As we've pointed out, there are only three ways out of a job (quitting, termination or tragedy) and taking a huge pay raise and more responsibility elsewhere is a terrific result, as much as it hurts to lose the people you care so much about.
5. Kill the manager.
Okay that's a bit click-baity but hear us out....
Some of the best salespeople in the world are terrible managers. So why does the corporate world glamorize managing staff as the ultimate prestige role for so many sales people?
Most SDR shops offer a trade: do this crappy job for a little while then we'll promote you to manager and you can tell others to do the crappy job for you.
Ignoring the fact that anyone doing the job just to move out of actually selling as soon as possible shouldn't BE in sales.....
Great salespeople want to sell. They're also just as, if not more, valuable than great managers. And they need to be reassured and empowered to follow that path.
Three of our top sales execs have zero interest in managing a staff. They want to sell. And they know those who manage aren't held in higher regard. It's a different path. Not better, not worse.
Think Bill Belichick vs Tom Brady.
Summary
Building a successful SDR program involves experience, trade secrets and planning which we'll share in the future.
"Good judgement comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgement."
Trust me, the above advice comes with plenty of "experience."