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- There's stages in that process where the ratios are abnormal, that if they fix 3% here, 5% there, 10% there, you can get a result where most of my clients I work with, we're growing at least a hundred percent in a 12 month period. (upbeat music) Hey there, I'm Dan Martell. Serial entrepreneur, investor and creator of SaaS Academy. In this episode, I'm gonna share with you what is the difference? Let's define these things around an SDR, a BDR, an AE or a CSM, so that you can get clear on what the pipeline flow should look like so you can increase what's called your sales velocity. And be sure to stay till the end where I'm gonna tell you how to get access to an exclusive resource called the Rocket Demo Builder, where you can close deals twice as fast, twice as big. I know it's a big promise, but we're gonna get into it. Let's do this. So if your new into my stuff, I have been in the SaaS space for almost 25 years, okay? Building technology companies, scaling organisation, raising venture capital, exiting companies. And one of my favourite things is to build the revenue engine, right? I always look at business through two different funnels, the revenue engine and the people engine. But the revenue engine's the funnest because that's where a lot of the velocity and throughput to build a really exciting company comes from, right? And if you've never done that, I mean, there's challenges like comp plans and managing sales coaching and making sure that people are saying the right thing to potential buyers. And, you know, that marketing sends over leads that are, that the sales people like, and there's always a conflict between marketing and sales and then customer success because sometimes you sell stuff to people you shouldn't have sold to and then the onboarding team is dealing with all the down downfall of that and it just becomes crazy. But here's what I've discovered. I was recently working with one of my clients and part of my private coaching that I do, is we map out the whole, almost buyer journey, okay? All the way from awareness to consideration to purchase, to activation, engagement and upsell, right? It's the whole bow tie funnel. And what you discover when you map it all out, is there is so much waste typically amongst organisation because they don't see the opportunities just dropping. They just look at their revenue numbers and they're like, oh, well we added an extra 15K of monthly reoccurring revenue this month. Or a lot of my clients are in the kind of the hundreds of thousand dollars of new revenue every month. And they don't see that there's stages in that process where the ratios are abnormal, that if they fix, 3% here, 5% there, 10% there, and 10% of the current number, if you stack all those things together, you can get a result where most of my clients I work with, were growing at least a hundred percent and in a 12 month period, because it's math, we just focus on the right things, right? To two extra pipeline, by understanding what is the audit process? What's the mapping out, what I call the flow process? The reports that you need to be able to manage this and then tweak the different stages of that funnel to get your results. But to do that, you need to understand these four roles. I'm gonna define them because they often get mixed up. People don't understand them. And we're gonna make sure we get some clarity today. First one is sales development rep, SDR. Sometimes you hear this called an MDR, a qualifier, a setter, there's all these different terminologies. But I wanna normalise it and just say, a sales development rep is responsible for finding opportunity and usually it's inbound or it's in your CRM or it's, you know, you can get super nerdy on this stuff, but it's really just qualifying the potential buyer. And to me, I just think that that's the way to think about it. You have prospects that are potential buyers. And the job of a sales development rep is to develop this sales opportunity. They wake up every day and they should be chatting with customers that come through the online forums, they should be chatting with customers that are chatting. They should be following up on email. They should be, you know, somebody downloads a lead magnet, they should reach out to them. They should call them, they should see if there's opportunities to upsell within organisations like there's, the sales development rep's job is to execute the playbook, to identify and qualify opportunities. And then, so once they qualify them, then they move them up to the next stage. But that is what a sales development rep is. So, you know, setters and a bunch of other things people are like, well, we call them this, you can call them whatever you want. I'm just saying in the software world, in my world, it's an SDR. And that's what they do. Number two, business development rep. So a BDR, a business development rep, in my language, it's outbound. Outbound means cold. So I don't even consider if you have somebody that's engaging in chat, that's not even outbound. Outbound is they have ideally targeted accounts using what we call an account based marketing process. And they're reaching out to the market and they're trying to find opportunities to create pipeline. So they're talking to the market. They're opening up chats, they're offering assessments, but a BDR is somebody that's dialling for dollars. They're emailing for dollars. They're literally sending out messages, obviously, value add, personalised, all these things have to be true to get people to respond, to then qualify them and then kick them back up to your sales team to the next stage. But that is, when people are like, what does a BDR do? A BDR is not an SDR. A business development rep does outbound. They make sure that the person has a need. They qualify them, they try to add value through that process and once they feel like there's an opportunity there, then they move it out. Number three is account exec. So I call it an account exec inside my company, but these are the salespeople. These are people that are trained on how to, what we call it in our company is, we teach our customers how to buy. These are not, some people call them closers and I get it because it's a cool word in closers, you know, like get paid and all these things. There's all these chance in the sales mantra but I mean, call it what you want, I honestly don't care. Sales rep, person who does demo, closer but they are an account exec. Most of my clients that I coach, I tell them to call them product specialist, 'cause somebody wants to get on a call with a product specialist, they don't want to get on a call with a closer. So it's funny how like, language you use sometimes through the organisation gets propagated out to the customer. So you might call them setters and closers. And then somebody in support's like, hey, let me get you on a call with John he's one of our closers. Well, the buyer does not wanna get on a call with John who's gonna sell them. Like nobody's ever like, hey, get me on a call with a salesperson. I wanna be sold, no, they wanna be informed. So you wanna give your demo process a cool name and you want to give the title of your account executives, which account executive is a good term, obviously. And you want to teach them that your job is to teach them how to buy. It's to help them understand how to evaluate the opportunities in their business and how they should evaluate other vendors and solutions so that they can get the problem solved in a complete manner. But that is what an account executive is, that is a salesperson that is responsible for doing the sales call, the follow up call in an enterprise format, it's a complex sale, they're usually doing solution selling. They've gotta get all the different parties involved. But they're responsible from, you know, once it's qualified, they're taking the conversation all the way to paperwork, credit card, cheque, like money in the bank. And that's the responsibility of the account exec. Number four is customer success manager. CSM, it's a big word, it's kind of a new industry. Back in the day we used to call it customer retention. Then we call it revenue retention, then revenue expansion. But you know, some people call it onboarding but I like to call it customer success, 'cause it just like it's the right language, right? 'Cause the job of a CSM, a customer success manager, is once the the account exec has understood the pain, talked about the solution and showed them how the product can solve their problems. They take that buyer and they bring them into the world of becoming a consumer of your product or service. And their skillset is no longer selling, their skillset is really understanding how to connect your product to their pain and activate them. So a lot of companies don't think about it but there's different phases to this. If you actually want a great book on this, Joey Coleman wrote a book called, "Never Lose a Customer". I think there's seven different phases of customer journey. But the idea of mapping out the onboarding and getting everybody from this, you know, what's the entry criteria and what's the exit criteria for that stage? And then moving them to the next stage which might be the first three months of engagement and then ongoing and then renewals. That's usually the area the customer success manager spends time on and it depends on the volume of your business but you might have, you know, like a high touch or a high volume, low touch model. Or you can have a low volume, high touch model depending on the price point, you can have dedicated CSMs per each account or you might have a kind of a rotating per function or one group of customer success managers just do activation or onboarding. But that is what CSM stands for. It is a relatively new skillset, a new area for a lot of companies, it's been around in SaaS for a while, software as a service, but new in other industries, but it's catching on because it just makes sense. They are a revenue generating department, usually monitor their churn and their ability to activate and get people retained in upsell, that's another opportunity. But that is what CSM stands for. So quick recap. Sales development rep does inbound qualifying. Business development rep does outbound pipeline generation or opportunity generation. Number three, account exec, these are the "closers". And number four, customer success manager. These are the people who are responsible for onboarding and managing the customer experience. So as I mentioned in the beginning of this episode, I wanna share with you an exclusive resource, below click the link it's called the Rocket Demo Builder. It will help you double your win rates or increase your win rates in half the time. So click the link below to learn my nine box model for following a prospect or a buyer through sales process that's allowed me to generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Personally, as a salesperson, it's what I still use all the time. If I'm doing any call that kinda looks like a sales call, I pull out my Rocket Demo Builder and I follow the exact same model that I'm gonna give to you guys. So click the link below to download your copy. And if you like this video, please click the like button, subscribe to my channel and please, please let me know below in the comments what is the number one thing you took away? What did you like the most? What is gonna have the biggest impact on your life? That would be a real treat for you. Leave that below and as for usual, I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life, go even bigger and a bigger business, dream big, build an empire and I'll see you next Monday. (upbeat music)