5 Learnings From Scaling Our SDR Team

Having one SDR is great.

They’re going to call, email and use Linkedin to book meetings… maybe 10-20 per month?

And that’s great. Most sales funnels will close 1 deal from those 20 meetings.

And then depending on your ACV (Annual Contract Value), that could be anywhere from £3-300k per month per SDR – which could work.

However, this SDR will only have a small impact on your business if you can’t replicate them.

This article shares what we learned from doing just that…

1. Include your CEO in the process

Your CEO owns the vision of the business, your SDR’s need to be the flag carriers of that vision… and to do that, they have to understand and resonate with it.

We only realized this after listening to an SDR pitch during their second week… we thought: “he doesn’t get it yet… why?”

The answer was obvious.

He hadn’t spent time with the person who “gets it” the most.

 

We now have regular “pitch training” sessions with the CEO where he takes us through the latest angles he is pitching and has the SDR’s pitch back to him.

(Note: this person does not have to be the CEO, it just needs to be the person that has the most passion for the vision of the business).

This keeps our SDR’s on the pulse of the business and installs our vision into their pitch.

2. Get your call script down… and evolve

First point: you need a script.

It is very hard to build a repeatable, scalable sales process without one. It needs to be a word for word, and contain suggest responses to common objections.

But it also needs to evolve over time as:

• Your product changes
• Your SDR’s change
• Your buyers change
• You find better ways of communicating your product

We spent days honing our script before it was tested in real life by our first SDR. And then we realized that actually, it would be changing on a daily basis anyway.

We have one shared Google Doc with our phone script that each SDR works from, and has the ability to propose changes to – that we review in our weekly SDR strategy meeting.

3. Get the playbook right before scaling

A typical SDR ramp time of a mid-market B2B SaaS business is 2 months.

A typical SDR ramp time of a mid-market B2B SaaS business with no defined, proven outbound process is… well potentially infinite.

Don’t bring in an SDR to define a process. Bring an SDR in to operate (and potentially tweak) a process.

Unless… you do what we did and brought in our first experienced SDR to help us define the process.

We had:

• Myself – Head of Demand Generation
• Elliott – Head of Sales Ops
• Greg – Experienced SDR

And our challenge, set by the VP Of Growth – was to make the outbound process work. Once we did, and it scaled… Greg would move on to become the manager of the SDR function.

The output of the initial project was the “Outbound Playbook” with 37 slides that outline everything from our customer personas to objection handling and qualification criteria. It’s this slide deck that forms the basis for each new SDR’s onboarding program.

4. Track numbers every day

We have a single board on the wall in our London and San Diego office (our SDR’s are split between the two) that tracks meeting booked and deals closed by the person.

At the end of the day in London (we will soon be getting a tool to digitize, don’t worry), an image of the board is sent to the San Diego office for theirs to be updated and the same happens at the end of their day.

This keeps progress transparent between offices and tickles the competitive tendencies that pretty much every SDR has.

On top of this, we also collect the following data from each SDR each day with comments on how the day went:

• Number of people added to an Ebsta Cadence
• Calls made
• Prospects spoke with
• Prospects pitched
• Meetings booked

When an SDR knows their numbers will be recorded and made public each day… understandably this boosts productivity.

5. Invest in the right tech stack

Everyone knows that being an SDR is a tough job. Let’s not make it harder by stifling their progress with substandard technology.

Here is what we are currently working with:

• Salesforce – CRM
• Ebsta Inbox – Cadences and productivity
• Ebsta Team – Relationship intelligence
• Cognism & ZoomInfo – Data
• Natterbox – Telephony
• Linkedin Sales Navigator – Prospecting
• Vidyard – Video 

We include our SDR’s in our tech stack discussions to ensure buy-in if we end upbringing in the tools discussed in those meetings. As we have learned through our guests on Sales Ops Demystified – always include stakeholders that would need to adopt the technology in the decision making the process.

If an SDR can save 1 hour per day not having to add or update contact data in Salesforce and they normally book 1 meeting every 8 hours… that $45 investment for the month of the SaaS product could end up producing multiple extra meetings per month.

And that concludes our learnings from growing the SDR team over the past few months. If you would like to learn more about how we used Ebsta Team to onboard faster, boost productivity and effectively forecast, you can request a demo here.