Streamline your HR processes with the b2b saas sales model for HR

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saster fans welcome back to another episode of the cro confidential podcast I'm your host Sam blonde delighted to be back here with just an incredible guest and what I know is about to be an incredible episode today's guest is Ashley Kelly better known as AK I've had the pleasure of being both close friends and colleagues with Ashley now for a decade plus and let's see Ashley started as an SDR at zenefits when I was the VP of sales out of 50 plus sdrs she was number one in the company we wanted to keep her in the S SDR organization so we promoted her to an Sr manager she was the number one SDR manager out of dozens we promoted her again to SDR director she's gone on to work with me again at brex where she came in as I think senior director of SDR we're going to talk a lot about that today where she was able to scale the business from about 2 million in ARR is where Ashley joined and left at like 300 million plus in ARR and now Ashley is the VP of SDR at ripling so delighted to have you Ashley and excited to jump in thank you I'm so excited to be here looking forward to the conversation today all right let's do it this is going to be one of my favorite episodes because it's all about a topic I love and I imagine Ashley does too that topic is outbound sales for context um about 80% of Breck's Revenue came from sales outbound um and that's not necessarily something that I would be prescriptive or set as a goal for other companies it's more just whatever works for your business you double and triple down on in for brex sales outbound worked and so we doubled and tripled down on it I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about the things that we did in the very early days at brex to get outbound off the ground and then Ashley's going to talk a lot about really scaling what we had started um which was an effective outbound process and then Ashley really owned it beyond that so I'll talk here for just a couple minutes and then Ashley we we'll turn it over to you for much of the rest of the the conversation what we hope to do here is whatever stage of company you are we can map to where you are without bound and give you a bunch of tactical ideas on things to do to be more effective and continue progressing so on day one the way that I approached it at brex and I suggest others approach it is you do not want to start with purchasing uh a sequencing tool purchasing a system that gives you contact information and Blasting your ICP I've talked about this before but you really want to start with who you are targeting being in your own network and so for brex what that meant was we started with things like first deegree LinkedIn connections that were in our ICP so those are founders and people in finance at early stage startups we also leveraged our investor Network that included YC which was hugely beneficial because YC companies were squarely in our target market but it also included the other nonc investors where we were asking for introductions to their portfolio companies we then when we moved Beyond people where there were like warm introductions and connections that we can leverage by saying we were a YC company those sorts of things we moved on to more creative outbound programs I've talked a little bit or a lot about a champagne campaign where that we ran where we picked a few hundred uh companies that were in the Bay Area sent them a bottle of champagne and a handwritten note um that is outbound it's very targeted outbound and it has a much greater probability of working than this sort of like blasting of the universe in sequences the next thing that we did was we put up a bunch of billboards throughout San Francisco and we targeted the people that were in the areas that we put those Billboards up and again the probability of people replying to an email after they had seen our Billboards and knew what we did was significantly higher than the probability of somebody who has no idea who we are or what we do replying to an email that they received there are a bunch of other things that you can do that are separate from Billboards these can be people that have some connection to the company where Maybe uh downloaded a white paper or visited a website just some engagement with the business that you're really focused on Beyond just blasting emails Into The Ether so with that Ashley you join brex when we are about $2 million in ARR and I would say for a lot of businesses if you're a software business that maps to less ARR because zenitz made money on interchange our gross margins were less than software gross margins and so we think about it from a pure gross profit standpoint we're still pretty early and AKA we had some systems in place we had some effective outbound in place and your mandate was to take what existed and really scale it so let's start there we hired you as a senior director which is a little bit unconventional but you're an in network hire so that made a lot of sense one of the first things you were tasked with doing was hiring sdrs so let's start there and maybe I'll preface and and finally I'll shut up but maybe I'll preface this with for me SDR has always been the most challenging role for me to hire within the sales organization because people that are in AE roles people that are in manager roles and more senior you're really leaning on their historical performance back Channel references to help guide you in making those hires SD s are are oftentimes fresh out of college or moving from a different career path and so th these are hard hirers to make with a greater risk or greater probability of failure yet somehow you have been extremely successful and I think your failure rate was near zero so let's talk about that let's start with sourcing how do you identify the right profile to recruit from given the limited uh experience Real World Experience first you mentioned that hiring me at at the director level first I think that really is very rare I think hiring if you can hire someone that you trust first absolutely do that but I'm I came in as a director and I was actually making the cold calls sending the sequences things like that so I do think it's really important to make sure that the level that you're bringing in because if you just start with someone that's very Junior they're not going to know how to do those things if you don't have the process in place yet so like context of like wherever your business is at like that's very important when I think about the interview process of of what you're saying as far as what is the profile that you look for and how do you make sure that someone is going to be the right the right person to bring on board in the very early days yeah there a lot of the times they're Junior they're they're fresh out of school and what's different is that you're not able to like in an AE role or any other experience role you can't go back to their previous work experience and ask them were you hitting quota were you doing these different milestones and were you top at the board or anything like that so a lot of what we focused on in the very beginning was what are the key characteristics of what makes an SDR successful and some of those things for for me are are they coachable do they have the ability to navigate change and failure because that's that's the name of the game in a startup how organized are they strr work is like very structured and and rigid day in and day out and so if they don't have those types of skills to stay on top of their workload like they're going to fail and then like probably one of the most important is like the hunger and the motivation and so like why do they want to be in sales and so those are the buckets that I've always thought through as far as what are the what are the things that we look for in a successful last year makes sense and then to to take a step back the first at least three and maybe more hires that you made at the individual contributor SDR level were all in network hires that you had worked with at your previous company that you brought over so I think maybe the the first takeaway is and this is true in SDR this is true in AE this is true uh in virtually ining role if you can make in network hires um the probability of success there is significantly higher with SDR in particular that doesn't really scale because there are so many people that this is their first role out of school and so then you talked about some characteristics that you look for when you're when we think about sourcing candidates when you work with the recruiting team or when you're reaching out to folks on LinkedIn how does that map to any characteristics you're looking for are are you basically saying Target anyone with a 4-year degree what are the things that you use at the very top of what I'll call the sourcing funnel to help identify um potentially people that will be successful before you even get to the conversation stage yeah so when we're thinking about like the actual profile which again is tough because you can't go plug in different logos that they've worked at we look at a lot of schools that they've gone to so I've had a lot of success over the years with honestly I'll call it like the Work Hard Play Hard schools like the Santa barbaras Chica the Chic states of the world but but schools that have reputation of people that have the work hard play hard because that's how startup mentality is too a lot of athletes I've seen be very successful so I think people that have joined sports teams that they understand what hard work looks like they understand what being part of a team looks like but that they're also have that coachable factor and also being a I was not a college athlete but I would imagine being one would require quite a bit of time management and so we've seen a lot of them be successful in the role too sority fraternity backgrounds definitely people that have done internships so people that were working and balancing both their school workload with having to make money on the side have all been like areas that we look at in on like their LinkedIn and stuff really smart Okay so I went to University of Missouri shout out to the Tigers I think what you're saying is from an SDR recruiting standpoint that's like the Stanford of the Midwest and so you look for like big state social universities you look for people who were Collegiate athletes number of those folks are coming to mind that have been top performers in organizations that I've worked with you look for extra curricular activities that can be things like fraternity sororities and worked their way through college and those are some signals that you can lean on from a sourcing standpoint and then I would say also if you're not just hiring directly from from college if you're actually getting people that have some work experience which I highly recommend especially for firsttime hires if you don't have systems and process in place I've had a ton of success with hiring recruiters because recruiting and Sorcerers have very transferable skills with having to manage a pipeline having to call people out of the blue sell them on a roll things like that yeah those are probably my favorite to hire that have had experience important point and very tactical takeaway which is most people do not hire a senior director of SDR as their first SDR hire they they hire sdrs and when you're hiring for that profile rather than hiring fresh out of school tool which may make sense when the business is much larger you actually do want to hire someone with real world experience and a recruiting background or maybe even like a selling background that wasn't in Tech sales for somebody that's looking to break into Tech sales those are interesting profiles for very early hires is that the um right way of thinking about it yeah I was an account manager at a staffing firm for a year and a half doing outside sales before I became an SDR it's a weird rule of thumb that we have in Tech sales for some reason is that you have to start as an SDR but I'm so grateful that I did and I think there's a lot of other people that would say the same thing because you really just start from the ground up learning the systems the tools the company and and you're able to grow from there awesome makes sense Okay so we've determined a little bit of the uh profile that we want to hire for dedicated outbound folks which are sdrs um you talked about some characteristics that you look for let's talk about the interview process itself and how you sus out uh the the characteristics or intangibles that you just described what what's the interview process yeah pretty simple interview process we do a hiring manager screen so a a phone screen at at first and then they go through an actual interview panel so those buckets that I talked about as far as coach ability to navigate change organization hunger and motivation like all of those have actual specific interview questions that roll up to that theme and so each whether it's a Sr manager or a peer or whoever you have on the panel each person is going to be responsible for drilling into to those themes and being able to at the end of the interview process like actually fill out the scorecard saying yes I think this person is coachable yes I think I think they're able to stay organized and be able to get the job done I will say I maybe because I've been doing this for so long I think I've HED over a thousand strs in my career but I can tell usually by the phone screen whether or not this person's going to be able to do the job and a lot of that is because they if they're driving the conversation and and driving more of the interview in such a junior role if they're able to do that like more times than not I I have a lot of faith that they'll be able to do that when talking to prospects on the film you have any favorite questions to ask or like conversation topics at this point you said you've hired over a thousand sdrs you're one of um very few if um none other that have maybe ever done that at this point your intuition is probably more sophisticated than most if not all and so then if you're founder if you're a first-time SDR manager what are the types of things that you would be asking about or topics to include in the interview yeah so this one's kind of cheesy but when I look back at all of the top performers I've ever had like I know how they answer this question and it's do you do you love to win or hate to lose more and if I look at anyone like everyone loves to win right but I think the people that hate to lose even more and are like so fearful of losing and will make sure that they do they stop at nothing to be successful are the people that I want to hire and so figuring out whether you actually specifically ask that question or not figuring out when we talk about the hunger and motivation it's not just I want to be in sales because my dad was in sales or I want to be I want to make money like it's really I don't want to fail I want to grow my career I want to take this company to the next level I think I found that in myself all the time too was like I want to be a VP and it was like I wasn't going to stop until that happened and so I think figuring out like what truly motivate someone is the key to it okay one thing that comes to mind for me as you were talking is like people that have a little bit of clarity of thought around where they see their career progressing I think sometimes sales can be a bit of a catchall for people that just don't really know what to do and sure I'll try this sales thing out but I think if someone is much more clear that this is what they want to do and can articulate why and how they want their career progress to progress what success looks like to them in the role those sorts of things um it it is I think better signal that they will be successful than um somebody who's less clear around how they expect their career unfolding over the course of the next several years yeah I think that's super fair and then also one like thing that always makes me nervous is when Junior people are asking what does the company look like in 5 years from now and you're like the company's only been around for one year so that's a little bit hard for me to answer for you but it's you can tell that's something they were taught in school to ask in an interview process and so really like avoiding the textbook things and and getting into like their their business acument too okay we've talked a little bit about hiring if you can hire in network that Dr risks one's success in a major way otherwise look for these qualities and characteristics as we said if it's your first SDR hires make sure that they have some work experience because they will just likely be more successful we talked about the different roles that maybe you look for if they do have that work experience now let's talk a little bit about about an environment that sets these folks up for Success sdrs are the most Junior employees in the company and you really want to create an environment where there's some direction I don't want to call this like micromanagement but I want to call it I do want to call it structure and so you have done a phenomenal job when you hire people just where they come in and they know exactly what to do and so let's talk a little bit about that how do you create an environment that sets up the most Junior employees in the company for Success yeah and I I do think there's a fine line between micromanagement and process and structure it's funny we spend like what 13 years of our lives in school more if when you go to college and you you start and you have a syllabus you have grades you have all these things and you're in such a structured environment and then they get out of school and it's go be successful in the work Workforce and so I think there's like a huge shift that happens when people start in their in their first careers and so I do think it's really important to have that stuff in place and I and you don't have to be at a point where you have revops and enablement and all these like different resources around you to actually create that structure but I think first and foremost it's like figure like what does a successful day look like for a rep and so giving them like almost like blocking off different calendar chunks of this is when you make your calls this is when you actually are scrubbing your accounts and Prospect and adding the right contacts into sequences and so they know exactly where to spend their time outbound is like definitely what you put in today doesn't show up until tomorrow and so it can get really emotionally high and low for reps and so it's really important to make sure celebrating the small winds every day did you get enough activities in did you how many conversations did you have with prospects even if you're getting hung up on and not over able to overcome objections what are the takeaways and how can you improve your process like the next day with that kind of stuff but taking a step backwards I'll say if you tell a rep to make 70 dials guess what they're going to make 70 and have a very hard stop at 70 and so eliminating like the the what I'll call just like checking the box type of activities throughout the day and like truly getting to a point where you have what I'll call like an SDR sales equation and working backwards off of knowing what someone's quota is but basically like how many meetings do they need to schedule for that to happen how many accounts need to go into a sequence for that to happen and truly defining like what working account actually means and so all of those things if you can get the Reps to buy in them is going to allow you to continue to build out your structure and process too so what comes to mind is I'm hearing you to talk through some of these things I think there's this what I'll describe as a balance between structure and autonomy that you want to reach the right balance of and in the early days there's probably a bit more autonomy in that balance because what you want to do is you want to tell the new hires look like here is what exists today here is what has worked for us here is like how I would suggest spending your time at the same time we're still in learning mode so if you have ideas things you want to try with the ultimate goal in mind of in the early days probably generating more opportunities like the concept of generating demand um so you provide structure you provide education but you also allow for an environment where ideas are supported and promoted and over time Rippling today is several hundred million dollars in AR there's probably a lot more structure that exists for a new SDR than the very first Rippling SDR who came in and was trying to figure out what that process should look like does that sound right yeah absolutely I think it's even something new hirers ask me all the time they're like if you were in my shoes starting as an strr today what would you do and I say the same thing I go I say go find the top performer Shadow them replicate their process and then add your own like Special Sauce to it don't come in trying to reinvent the wheel yeah I definitely would say that and really you do have to iterate on it every six months every year so we started outbound about a year ago and there was no structure in place we now have some structure but still am I 100% confident that if I sat next to one rep compared to someone else that they're doing the exact same thing no and to me that's a big red flag and that's something that we're investing a lot of time in right now is to re Vamp our Playbook retrain the Reps make sure everyone is doing more consistent things that way we're able to scale because otherwise if it's if not it's messy and like your foundation just crumbles makes sense one slight tangent that came to mind as you were talking that we didn't touch on but you talked about one SDR doing something radically different from the other even today when you do hire your first SDR hire two because they will be able to share learnings with one another and really accelerate the time to Effectiveness because they're trying and failing they're trying and succeeding and then they can share both the failures and the successes with their peer yeah and that's a really great way to pressure test your structure and process because is it the person or is it the process that's broken too yep good segue you talked about what I'll call activity metrics which is like you don't want to say make 50 dials a day send X number of emails a day because they're going to they're going to focus on the activities themselves and not um the outcomes and so with that in mind let's talk about how we measure performance so how do you determine what to measure I think we we could take this two two different directions in terms of uh performance one is what is the right performance metric sales qualified opportunities pipeline activations closed Revenue like number of of different things that we could use and then the second thing which I think we actually shouldn't spend time on because it varies so greatly business by business which is what should the quota be and the quota is going to greatly depend on the segment that you're selling into the type of product that you're selling how expensive it is so let's let's stick specifically to something that I I think is more actionable which is what what should the quota be comprised of what should we incentivize the outcomes for and so you started at brex where did we start we started with sales qualified opportuni so more towards the top of the funnel I think this is a very traditional place to start for sdrs especially in the beginning there's a few different schools of thought around it first being well what are you solving for a lot of the times what you're solving for in the beginning is volume and getting more demos on the calendar for AES the other piece too is thinking about what can the SDR control and there's a lot of times that businesses will set them up for a revenue Target and that's really outside of an str's control I know we did move into that at brex and we should talk through that I'm glad that we did it obviously tripled the amount of Revenue that the or was bringing in but I really do think it's dependent on where you're at as a business and if AES have far too many demos on the calendar you start to look at the Quality threshold are we do we need to be doing more Discovery up front or is there something wrong with our ICP or whatever it is and like you're wanting to narrow in on specific Industries so I think it's really important to think about like where your business is before you swing the pendulum all the way down to the revenue side for an SDR org makes sense I agree and so I think what we're both saying is in the early days the metric that s sdrs should be measured their performance should be measured off of is sales qualified opportunities some version of qualified opportunities and I remember at brex we were we had a clearly defined sales opportunity like rubric it was basically something like the level of seniority the type of company and type of company can mean both number of employees and which industry they were in and I think it was like they had to show up for the call and if you got a director Plus at a company that was over 50 employees in one of these two or three Industries to show up and receive a demo you received credit for a sales qualified opportunity and so there was like no subjectivity the one exception was maybe that if we reached out to a director which was the qualifying level of seniority and they passed it to maybe a manager like a finance manager accounting manager something like that we would still schedule that call and then I think it was at the rep's discretion whether not to give credit for the opportunity yeah and then it was is there plans to move forward with this is this is there a follow-up meeting is it something that is actually viable for the business and then and that's exact so that's what we did at bre yes I think there's like other flavors of that too where you hear about like bant which is budget Authority need and timeline we have a version of that at ripling it does get a little hairy between the sdrs and AES and so as you start to scale like it's something that you really have to pay attention to that's the age-old thing like the like conflict between the two orgs that ends up happening but in the early days I think you just you really got to keep it simple okay so good segue as we continue down this performance metric process the way that I think about this is the further up the funnel you go which sales qualified opportunity is towards the top what you're solving for is more quantity over quality and the further down the funnel you make the SDR performance measurement like what their quota is based off of you are shifting that balance from quantity to Quality and so in the early days there are two things that likely exist the first is you really are solving for quantity like the bottleneck for growing faster is getting more demos on calendars more opportunities in the pipeline and so it makes a lot of sense to incentivize more qualified opportunities and not necessarily further down the funnel the other thing that doesn't exist in the very early days is sophisticated data around things like which type of companies convert which type of personas convert which companies spend more money or generate more revenue on the product and so as the company progresses you these things change one you may actually start to have a bit of a quality problem you may be getting demos on calendars that reps are like this is bad why is it being scheduled I'm laughing because I like remember this day to a te where you told me the AE managers are complaining about the quality of your demos you should take that personally I was like Roger that I took I just took it personally and now we so you must have yeah yeah it's been years and I still remember it okay these things change you may start to want to solve for more quality not exclusively quality and then the other thing is you start to have more data and I remember one data point in particular that we used Ashley to help guide our decisioning around what the U measurement of performance is we started noticing that the opportunities that AES were scheduling from their outbound activity were much higher quality and higher quality both in terms of conversion rates and in terms of the revenue that the opportunities generated and I think the number was something like the average AE outbound opportunity generated three X the revenue of the average SDR opportunity and that makes sense right like AES are incentivized on closed Revenue they have a revenue quota and sdrs are incentivized on quality qualified opportunities and so they aren't incentivized to care how much revenue or the conversion rates that their opportunities are generating and so over time we made the decision to switch the incentive metric from sales qualified opportunities to revenue I don't know if you have any thoughts there I have lots but anything just in terms of the impact that had and how maybe others should be thinking about making that transition yeah I'll say we were in a unique position because to your point and I it was like e-commerce that we saw that was really successful and so that's where we started directing SCS within their books that we had assigned them accounts or where wherever they were prospecting they should focus on e-commerce but you have to give SRS enough direction of where to hunt in order for them to be successful and so that's where a lot of that the data pieces that you were talking about came into place and so we did we worked very closely with with sales Ops and we were able to come up with account scoring we were able to come up with um a few other like things that they could triangulate within the account one being the Alexa ranking which was huge for us um which showed us like how much traffic they had on the website which would indicate that they would be a big spender and so once we were able to give them like here are the three things that you should look at the account level and that will give us a good indication that this is going to be a good customer for BRS it was like floodgates were open at that point and and of course we did incentivize them then on the revenue piece there were some people that I don't want to like bring the numbers up but I mean like Millions monthly that they were bringing in from a revenue perspective which was really cool to see so yeah we we more than 3x what the strr org was sourcing um previously when they were on in S2 quota but again like you need those data points in order for an SDR to be successful like today if I were to tell one of my reps they're going to go after Tech they're going to go after like the main industries you have to know enough about your business in order to point them in the right direction okay so here's maybe the takeaway it is when you have confidence around lead scoring around your ability to predict at the account and Persona level the likelihood of someone to convert and the amount of Revenue that company will generate for your business it's probably a good thought exercise to just go what would happen if we changed the quota from S2 sales qualified to further down the funnel like revenue and for brex the answer was we think we'll generate a lot more revenue and the way that we made this decision and I actually recommend folks make many decisions is you solve for one very specific thing when making big decisions like the one that we're discussing and that is which path do we believe generates the most revenue for the business and then there may be some push back and consequences for making that decision the things that come up frequently with this one are but the SDR doesn't have control over the opportunity once it goes to the AE and what if an SDR is paired with an AE that has a lower conversion rate than a different AE and that's outside of their control and those types of decisions what all call like second order impacts are things that you can solve for and design a process around separately but the overarching way that the decision should be made is this going to generate more revenue for the business and if the answer is yes you probably want to make that change and it certainly did for brex and and Ashley I remember when we made that change the perception of SDR Within the business um your the perception of Ashley like the perception of you these things like dramatically improved because SDR was having such a larger impact on the business the company generating Revenue because of this almost contrarian change because most people and companies are incentivizing sdrs on a top of the funnel metric and we went against the grain and tied folks to revenue and everybody won s you hired a bunch more sdrs sdrs were making a bunch more money the business was growing faster and that was impactful to the business and and certainly like a contrarian change that I applaud you for thank you yeah I think the only other thing I would say is a lot of it depends on on the deal cycle too we have we had a pretty short one that was like very transactional I think and when you're at a more Enterprise company and it takes six to nine months for a deal to close it's really hard to put sdrs on a revenue quota because they're really only in the role for N9 months to a year and a half and so you just don't get as much like per production out of them in that sense because they're having to they're not let me say that differently they typically when you have an SDR on a monthly quota you get more out of like performance and if you have someone on a revenue quota but they're only seeing that Revenue every six to nine months it makes it really difficult yeah that sounds right I think there's a lot of nuance with this specific decision one of which being what are the average cycle times I I think sub 30 days you do have this feedback loop that is um more immediate and so sub 30 days like you you can tie the go to revenue I think greater than 30 days you maybe in this gray area where you can measure both something like qualified opportunities and revenue so the there's a balance between the two but again different like we're not going to go through every Edge case on the call okay good segue let's talk about and maybe finish on scaling so how do you think about scaling the team in terms of when it's time to hire more sdrs and then we'll move on from there to how sdrs progress within the business but what do you have some sort of a rubric or something that you use to guide you in terms of how large the team should be when it's time to hire when it's time to pause talk us through your approach there yeah I I think it always goes back to per rep production so I think once you start seeing reps that are successful and they're hitting the numbers that you've set as quotas and hitting it consistently and you have confidence that we can bring more people on and still be able to do that I think that's like the first like gut check that that I've always had um obviously there's like the math component which is the CAC and the payback periods and does it financially make sense for the business to bring more on I think you also have the risk of what is your Tam and so making sure that you're not spreading it too thin and bringing on too many people I think both of us have seen over the years companies that have solved for scaling just by putting butts in seats and that's obviously not the right way of doing that so I think yeah making sure that your reps are are productive and hitting the numbers that they need to one of the ways that I outside of the rep attainment that I look at is really like our ability to penetrate our TM and so I look at metrics that are like account to stage one so the number of accounts that they're working that actually become demos account to how many of those become stage two so qualified opportunities and there's a percentage that we actually have to be able to maintain in order for outbound to scale and so those are like the top of funnel metrics that I pay like very close attention to daily and weekly and then as you do start to bring on more sdrs you start thinking about the ramp time how long does it actually take to ramp a rep and get them up to productivity and then how do you improve that and then the other piece I would say is the manager to SDR ratio I think is is super super important so as you start to scale your team I remember at zenitz at one point I think I had 35 sdrs reporting to me as a J and that was terrible so don't do that but I think one thing is like a blessing at Rippling is we actually are very conservative with the number of reps that report to managers and that really helps from like a day-to-day coaching perspective especially in this like remote environment when managers have a little bit more bandwidth to help coach their reps day in and day out you're going to see their production increase and so we we keep around like the eight sdrs to one manager ratio today really insightful the story that comes to mind that in H sight seems just like an obvious and silly mistake is and it and it reinforces your ham points at zenitz we had some historical data around SDR performance and Effectiveness in terms of their ability to add squo and it was on a spreadsheet it was like we haven't really seen diminishing returns at the SDR level for the first 20 sdrs and then the 30 SDR and then 40 SDR and one summer we decided we were going to hire like 300 and I think we I think we made some assumptions around out of these 300 only 200 of them are going to make it through training and through their first month and so we we Plugged In Like A churn assumption and some diminishing performance assumptions but the thing that we didn't really take into consideration and it reinforces something that is a bit contrarian on the sales side I've always said like more sales people does not equal more sales and the equivalent on the SDR side is more sdrs does not necessarily equal more opportunities um or more demand and the thing that we didn't take into consideration is when you add so many new sdrs you you have to go further and further away from the core Tam where you've had success and zenefits could serve any company in the United States in terms of our ability to onboard and serve them but there were Industries segments personas that had much lower conversion rates and like much lower probability for Success when we onboarded them and when we added all of these new sdrs into the mix not only were they less effective than the more tenured existing reps they actually made the existing reps far less successful because we had to tap into this Tam based that people were less likely to convert and so if you were an SDR previously it's inits you were going after mostly tech companies and like some companies On The Fringe or whatever and then all of a sudden you're going after companies that are not in San Francisco or New York where you have some brand recognition you're going after construction companies in Mobile Alabama and the um existing sdrs that had already been successful weren't able to continue being successful because of that decision around continuing to scale and so that's maybe just a story reinforcing The Tam consideration that you highlighted okay last thing let's talk about on like the theme of scaling how sdrs progress within the business you started as an SDR let's talk a little bit about what sdrs move on to within companies how you think about that and will'll end on that positive note yeah I'm obviously super bullish the SDR function spent my whole career focused on it and outside of all like the amazing Revenue things that that it drives there's also the career progression within the business I look back now and the top AES I've ever worked with all started as sdrs most of my managers I'd say 20 of my 30 today were sdrs at ripling same thing with all the previous companies I've worked at I think making sure that you have some sort of career path and leveling and something set up for them to move through the company is really important I think every business should think about sdrs as being like the Future Leaders of of their company and so that's one of the first things that I did when I came to ripling and was put that in place because I like you said I started as an SDR I know how how impactful it can be to continue to grow your career staying whether they stay in the SDR or if they move into account Executives we've moved people into marketing into recruiting into customer success obviously into management and so I think there's really the possibilities are endless I think what I always find as a compliment and a problem for me is that people are constantly wanting to pluck people off the SDR team because they have the the grit the experience that they've done from the ground up getting to know and and really like they've created a reputation for themselves as being successful too and so that's to your point in the very very beginning if you can hire someone that you trust that in network like why not promote from within because there's a lot less risk yeah I think one thing that is missed in the sort of spreadsheets and and something that came up periodically at bre um before we made the change that we highlighted around the incentive structure we had AES our top AES were generating more outbound Revenue um because we really focused on AE outbound um in in addition to SDR outbound and our top a oftentimes were able to generate more outbound Revenue than many of the sdrs and so there was this conversation internally that should be had which is like why aren't we just hiring more AES if they can both gener they can both Source the revenue that the sdrs are sourcing and close it and the answer wasn't in the spreadsheets but the answer was like but all of these people used to be sdrs at brecks and when we move the best SDR that's generating the most outbound Revenue to an AE of course they're going to continue generating much of the outbound Revenue that they were sourcing as an SDR because of that training that they realized and not only does SDR contribute the sourced Revenue R contributes many of the best AES best sales leaders and just like best people within the company because to your point over time it provides this recruiting ground where if you're an AE manager you I I remember and I can think of the people you are begging to hire quote unquote hire Ashley's best sdrs rather than what I'll describe as like people off the street that do not have the the sort of like brecks or outbound specific context so something to keep in mind um I'm obviously a huge proponent of both the SDR function and the concept of outbound that SDR provides so much of AKA with that I think we have exhausted much of outbound scaling SDR these things that you are world class at thank you for joining the Pod and see you soon thanks everybody for listening bye thanks y