Streamline Your Sales Development Automation for Management

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foreign so after 35 years of selling I have come to know that the hardest part of closing any deal is finding it said again the hardest part of closing any deal is finding it talking about prospecting if you consider that one SDR can fill the pipeline of up to three reps you can accelerate Revenue at a very quick rate and again we want our sellers selling negotiating and closing and we want this role the SDR to be in the trenches prospecting qualifying cold calling for those of us that started selling a long time ago we had to do our own prospecting and if you consider that every minute spent prospecting is not spent closing Revenue you're just not as efficient and the role of the SDR started in Earnest about 25 years ago and is being refined it's been refined ever since and I've started my career as an SDR in the last 25 years I've spent that time building SDR teams and in that time I've helped five venture-backed B2B SAS companies grow SDR teams in the same amount of time I spent 10 years working for a local seed stage Venture Capital firm helping their Founders understand whether or not they had a product and a business model that deserved an SDR motion or not and helping them build that out if it was I also spent six years as a consultant going into series A B and C companies uh basically doing turnarounds or where they had started SDR teams but where they were languishing um the investment that you have to make in this function is real you have to respect it to hire the right people to train them to do and say and act the way you need them to to promote you your brand and your company to enable them with the tools and technologies that can make them efficient and get the word out and begin that qualification process there is a lot of moving parts uh to to doing this right a lot of companies young companies will start and they'll Outsource understanding whether or not this is something that can work for them but I can tell you if you get this right and you bring it in-house and you develop this motion you will create pipeline for your sellers revenue for your company but there's another thing it's the talent pool and pipeline that you're building for your company today at snowflake we graduate on average 25 sdrs every quarter 80 percent of them go into AE roles the other 20 go into roles in marketing operations we even have a school for early sales engineers so if you do this right right you're taking prospecting out in the hands of your sellers and you want them you want your seller selling negotiating and closing that's what you want them doing every minute time spent prospecting is a minute that could be spent closing um so I started my career as an SDR and today I lead the sales development team at snowflake much of what I'm doing today at snowflake was guided and informed by my first job out of college as an SDR and I want to tell this story because it's the reason I'm standing up here today [Applause] 23 year old Lars this is his first day on the job my father Gunner was proud he came outside I was living in Manhattan Beach took a picture of me my first job was with Xerox corporation Xerox in the 70s and 80s was known for having the best onboarding the best training the best leadership the best Management training in the world it's a company that I really wanted to join I'd heard all about them and I knew that this company would invest in me this is my first day going into my territory my enablement and onboarding period lasted 11 months they sent me to classes all over the country to learn how to present to learn how to handle objections to learn how to negotiate they invested in me now 11 months is a long time uh we can't do that today and that program doesn't exist anymore but it gave me a base for what incredibly good looked like when I got home from a long day out in the streets pounding pavement as we used to call it I had a team to go back to that I could talk about what happened during the day I had a manager Bruce Roberts who was a professional he had been trained on how to lead he'd be it was a trained professional manager leader inspirational coaching developing all the people on his team he had a second line leader Diana Monroe who was a professional who had been at Xerox for 10 plus years again they created an environment where we were continuously developed and I stayed and I performed and I moved on and I got promoted and I stayed at that company what you see under my right arm is a Leather Pouch in that pouch were product slicks basically my website it's 1989 I was selling typewriters fax machines and copiers the state of modern inbound lead technology at the time and this happened you might not be able to see it but on the left hand side of my belt is a pager a pager is a liquid crystal display box that buzzes when someone calls you and what would happen is my manager Bruce Roberts he would get an inbound lead the form factor was someone who had ripped out in a magazine or a newspaper and written in their written in their information their title their phone number their address they would have to take that home drop in an envelope send it through the U.S Postal Service to our headquarters in Stamford Connecticut it would end up one or two months later on Bruce Robert's desk in the Long Beach District through interoffice mail and there it was a a hot inbound lead done two months earlier uh ending up on his desk in across my screen what did I have to do I had to go to the nearest Denny's because Denny's always had pay phones and they were reliable I had three of them in my patch I would take out two dimes I would call Bruce Roberts jot down the information another two dimes call Jenny or Johnny who was uh running an office set up an appointment get in my car Toyota Corolla sr2 get out there and begin qualification and try to sell what I had in my bag so that was legit I got a gas card so I could get out into my patch and I learned very quickly that uh penny loafers from Buster Brown did not cut it I got told by some of my pals on my team Lars go get Alan Edmonds you can resole them for free so why that's interesting and important today is the experience that I want my reps having coming into snowflake is I want to develop them I want to train them how to become great at their jobs most of them have never done this before I take people out of college I take people who are changing careers I bring them in I have to train them I have to teach them I have to develop them and we've built What's called the snowflake sales development Academy it is built for the SDR so we're not throwing our sdrs in and onboarding and enablement that's filled with sales engineers and marketers and credit card sales people it's purpose built for the SDR it's 30 days long so a full month of onboarding and understanding how to use these tools uh you know take all the playbooks that we've built learn how to cold call learn how to write a really good personalized with context Outreach sales engagement sequence that touches on email voicemail maybe a sentoso send maybe a touch point um through Twitter or LinkedIn to gain familiarity this is what they learn from there I'm actually going to get to that part so today having spent 25 years building these teams these teams I've made every mistake in the book and I've had some successes the last 25 years were spent building teams at five different Venture back B2B SAS companies and um I'm just going to go through a list of eight takeaways for the early stage Founders in the room I just want to let you know about a year ago I wrote an article for Jason and saster that helps the early stage founder understand what are the five first revenue-facing roles I believe they should hire and again this comes from my 10 years of uh advising for True Ventures and talking to early stage Founders which is typically one two or three founders with an early engineering or development team but they have not yet gone to revenue um and in my opinion the very first front Revenue facing higher should be someone who can develop produce content and messaging you have to have a story that your marketer your seller your SDR can talk through um hopefully your startup understands the problems that your potential prospects are facing and you can Surface those in content that people can read people can listen to and people can watch uh customer testimonials case studies recorded webinars Vision blogs written by the founder whatever you can do content is King when it comes to generating demand and educating and inspiring potential prospects to want to learn more and take a meeting once that happens and you start to get this content out into the world what happens is people read people bump people share these are all signals and become inbound uh leads potentially and this is the fodder and this is the fuel that sdrs love give me a qualified marketing lead where someone has downloaded a piece of content that they have interacted with and engaged with um a few times and so the second role that I advocate for a very early stage founder after that content person is two sdrs there is no head of Revenue there's no head of marketing it's a Content person and two sdrs and those sdrs should be booking meetings for the founder and the early stage team I'm a big fan of early stage Founders learning how to sell their own product they will forever be the best sales rep that company has and they have to learn what it looks like to go down a sales path and lose they have to learn what it looks like to go down the sales path and when for a deal to go sideways up and down they have to do that in my opinion and close deals um as these sdrs start generating meetings and pipeline starts to build then yes higher two sales reps never hire one always higher in pairs so again um if you want to take a look at that and there's others but uh for the early stage Founders in the room so what do you hire for um sdrs are not Junior s DRS are they want to start their careers or they want to change their careers we hire people that are coming back from the military we hire teachers we hire people that have been at home for 20 years that want to restart their careers and do something different we also hire young adults coming out of University we also hire people that never went to college but they've got what I have up here which is fire in the belly and that is something that I have never been able to teach I can teach anyone how to qualify I can teach anyone how to present these are all skills that I learned going through formal but what I've never been able to teach is how to get up in the morning with a great attitude and get after it that is what we hire for at snowflake and there are many ways uh to screen for that in my opinion and ask questions around that but that is what we're looking for with that attitude I can do anything so the other thing that I think is very important for earlier stage companies and that needs to be refined over and over again if not every year often is have an understanding of the target addressable Market that you believe in your heart of hearts you're gonna solve and it's not the whole world um all the companies I've joined are B2B SAS Enterprise uh not necessarily plg motions where you're selling uh something in days or weeks for thousands or you know thousands of dollars is there Enterprise class a little bit more complex and you have to give your marketing team a break and not tell them to go create demand in every geography in the world and every vertical and across all these personas you've got to start with a focus in my opinion and I think that is anywhere from one thousand to five thousand accounts uh to start out I think the reason that's important is because as you find success in your early sales campaigns you're going to understand the personas the titles of the people that care that care about your solution the people that care about your solution that you grab their attention of in the beginning of a sales cycle is different from the person that ends up coming in in the middle of the sales cycle is very different from the people at the end of the sales cycle but as you go down the path take a look at your CRM and do and win and loss reviews and begin to understand the personas that actual titles because the most beautiful thing today in the world we live in is we have services like Zoom info and Lucia and Lincoln sales Navigator and all an SDR needs to get going is a set of accounts and a set of personas and they can get going and they're not going to wait for these people to trip over one of our marketing assets and come to us we're going to go out to them and it's important you need to have an inbound motion and you need to have an outbound Motion in my opinion so the importance of an inbound motion if your content developer producer is doing their job and they're creating all this great content and messaging and it's going out in various form factors and you're creating all this inbound do yourself a favor and Implement a lead to account matching technology we use a company called lean data what that does is because we have our tan introduced and seated into our CRM database any inbound lead that comes outside of that Tam does not get prioritized that is not an SDR relevant lead our Tam was agreed to by sales and marketing coming together and in the same room and so if something were to come outside of that while that may be a signal and maybe interesting it's not something that we want to let's say burn a bunch of time on because odds are it could be and might be a false positive when sdrs are used to just manage inbounds um you might overtake them and burn them out because at the end of a long day of going through a bunch of inbound leads from a trade show now like saster um and they get 99 out of 100 blanks and they've left 99 voice messages and they've followed up with 99 emails and they go off uh it's it's a burnout so again inbound lead to account matching the other thing that happens quite a bit is right your partners are reading your materials your competitors are reading they're students Engineers right if you're producing a lot of content and pushing messaging out and having programs uh and events you will get a lot of inbound do yourself a favor and automate this part of it you will create more time for your sdrs to go outbound to the people that you've already identified because you have a tam importance of outbound so it we live like I like to say in a modern account based world today um and again the accounts that are out there have ever more ubiquitous access to people that have their roles and other companies and they can ask hey what are you using they can go to meetups like this and and and and learn what other people are doing they can read they have access to near perfect information on every single vendor that they may be looking at um but you can't get to all those people there are a lot of people that don't go to events that don't read but you can find them in LinkedIn sales Navigator you can find them in these services and go outbound and so what a lot of us have been doing the last five to ten years is we we have been building these account based marketing motions and delivering two target personas very personalized very specific uh you know to the role to the geography to the vertical so it's not it's not whitewashed it's not um watered down it's very specific because if you in your heart of hearts believe that this Persona can gain value to it you should be very confident in sending them that message your open rates your reply rates will go up if you have nailed this part in my opinion what we do at snowflake is we um at the beginning of every month sales and marketing we get together we decide on a series of accounts that we want to put into an account based marketing motion we then use a series of Technologies um like Sixth Sense and bombora to understand whom in that set of accounts might be surging on um things that they're reading words that they may be searching on and we see these surge reports that come that say Visa is doing a lot of research on cloud data storage and we'll hone in on that and we'll create this list knowing that perhaps right now is a very good time to send out the account based marketing content which is a series of ads um and other pokes and prods what happens then after three weeks that stops and the sdrs are sitting there ready with their Outreach sequences touch patterns that are all automated hoping that someone is going to open their email reply to it and engage and we see all those for those of you that don't understand sales engagement technology it is one of the must-haves if you're going to build out a sales development organization it's where they spend 98 of their time 90 of their time they are not spending it in marketing automation or in CRM leads me to the tech stack again sales engagement is a must-have if I was an early stage founder and I was just starting to get to revenue after I had the person that's generating content and messaging I would I would get sales engagement tool and I would get two data providers that is all an SDR needs to get going now you can go crazy with automating the mundane and I'm a big fan of that there are so many services and Technologies and tools that you can hand over to an SDR team that makes their job more efficient they can do it more quickly calendaring and there's all manner of cool out there so the other thing that I want Founders and revenue leaders in the audience to take away is I want you to understand the role because I want you to walk away with respect for it because these early in their career professionals right that you're training you want them to develop in your company and you want them to want to stay there and what we've done is we've dedicated an Ops training and enablement team so we have a director that has seven direct reports they report up to me the global leader not into enablement not into so we choose all our own technology we orchestrate it we customize it we develop playbooks all for the SDR so they're not thrown into the deep end so to speak so the other thing and I might be the oldest or the longest SDR leader it's just because I started doing this 25 years ago SDR was not necessarily A career 10 years ago today there are SDR leaders that have been doing it for 10 years when I joined snowflake two years ago there was only two VPS of global sales development today there's about 20 and that's only going to grow if you look at many of the companies in the valley that have grown to prominence they've done it on the back of an SDR team but that SDR team has been enabled it's been trained it's been focused on and it's been given the respect of the executive leadership team and for those of you that have SDR teams today or you're thinking about building it as you get those as you go from those two sdrs that don't have a manager or their manager is the founder and as that team grows give them the front line leadership that they deserve a developed professional SDR leader that knows how to coach that knows how to inspire and then knows how to mentor and develop and then as the team go grows hire a you know give that person the title and a seat at the table if not full-time part-time the signals that an SDR team can inform Marketing sales right at the end of every day so we have 223 sdrs at snowflake they report to 2021 front line Str managers who report to four second line directors at the end of every given day we have over 10 000 dials probably have sent 25 000 emails this is on a daily basis the signals the noise the beauty everything that comes from that informs Us and how we just get a little bit better the next day we've implemented a conversational intelligence tool called gong unbelievable what you get from this kind right the coaching now is real we have this thing called the Hall of Fame in the Hall of Fame in our internal Wiki if you will are the best email sequence that have the best open rates based on persona or based on subject line we also have the very best first cold calls we have done this thing where uh sdrs that don't mind who realize they messed up on a cold call Will input that into the Hall of shame or Hall of Fame that is the not so Hall of Fame as a way to show incoming new sdrs what good looks like and what not so good looks like that as a training platform is just unbelievable so again not something that I might Implement right out of the gate but as you begin to grow this team um you have tools and technologies that can help your sdrs punch way above their weight we have the AES now that are seeing the copy and the sequences and they're going that's the way there and I can do man uh can I uh can you can I take that so really cool stuff hey Lars yeah Ryan Rooney uh within tap uh so we're a little bit more mature about 300 million about 35 sdrs so questions relative to that context how tightly do you align with field sales coverage wise strategy wise outcome wise and what do you think the role of the account exec is in uh ongoing success of the SDR I love this question so when I came to snowflake eight years ago our coverage was one to eight doesn't even work I don't ever do that very quickly we got it down to one to four so one SDR was overlaid to four account executives still pretty light in my opinion again we're a company at scale we're public we now have gotten it down to one to three point five heading to one to three and so each SDR is overlaid so if if you take the one to three which is what I advocate for those sdrs should be managed and guided in their everyday every week every month you know business by the account execs it's one of the most important relationships that needs to be in place in order for this to work there are three types of sales reps there's a sales rep that understands maybe they were an SDR but they understand the role and they understand how hard it is and they're willing to put in the time to help develop that is what you want but what you end up also getting is AE number two that AE that is busy out and while they can't do it all the time they're willing to help when they can watch out for rep number three they could care less and they think that their SDR is just getting in the way and if they do anything they'll give them a hey take the contract to uh to finance for me um and it's it's a burn um and so you want to make sure and I don't necessarily care where if SDR sit in sales or marketing I have some comments about that but what I do care about is that the field respects the role they understand it and they help them get up to speed because like I said in the in the talk if you do this right one SDR can fill the pipeline of up to three reps uh I don't have the mic so something's got up yes hi um thank you uh that answered a bit of my question I was going to ask what metrics you do use in order to determine when you add your next you know SDR to a team it sounds like you're narrowing in on one to three is that based on any cost of you know meeting or opportunity metric or is that based on Pipeline they're building or how did you come to that and I did have one quick follow-up after that too yeah so it comes from um we're at 1 to 3.5 so we just follow the head count augmentation and planning of field sales we're going through headcount planning for next year right now when they decide what uh to give sales what percentage growth we will take that and divide that one to three point five and make sure that we have that amount of coverage okay and then um your sdrs do both inbound and outbound I think we have a challenge at our company and I'm similar size but we're 500 450 million and we got about 35 sdrs as well and we're looking to scale that we want to figure out how to scale it globally um but um I was just we have a sdrs primarily doing inbound and then we have a smaller group doing outbound and I really like the points in your talk about you got to optimize that inbound time yeah so they can do more outbound how do you balance so two people with 30 30 to 35 SDR teams you guys should talk um this is a very very important Point um the amount of time an SDR burns on false positives or leads that aren't in your Tam is a real thing the company I worked for before snowflake was a company called Cloudera and we had a marketing organization that wanted me to have my team go through every single inbound and it was it just it didn't work and we ended up implementing lean data as an inbound lead to account matching and I was able to show marketing that 90 of their inbound leads fell completely out of our town and literally 40 of them came from partners because we didn't have so as soon as we put accounts into our CRM we put all of our partner accounts into our CRM the other thing that happens a lot is you get inbounds from active in-flight Prospect opportunities and you get a ton of inbound from active customers you don't want your sdrs following up on a lead from an active in-flight Prospect you want your sales rep so if you do this right an inbound lead operation should make sure that leads are getting dispensed and dispersed to the right people and you have this notion of what an SDR relevant lead is rsdrs jump for joy when it's a green field account on a list they've been given by their AE and the AAE says go to town on this list I've never talked to them I've never had time you get me meeting there and I will and they get inspired of course that's what they want to do they want to help their AE get to where they don't have time or haven't gotten to before yeah so in your session you just said that you can train about sales you can coach them on methodologies but the fire in the belly thing it's actually um the hardest part that you can get so what is your personal suggestion or trick that you actually do to identify this and secondly to make this fire in the valley to spread inside the department that's a really good question so how do I find people with fire in the belly this attitude of self-starter self-motivator because I've never been able to teach that I believe it comes from your upbringing and your peer group when you were younger you are the average of your five closest friends if you will what I do yes people would you know people with high gpas and athletes right they've been competing with others and themselves their entire lives they've been practicing they've been focusing all of that so those are easy the ones that aren't so easy might be the people that have come at a university or they're changing jobs but if you look at their resume or their profile you can see that they haven't just been sitting down by the river doing whatever they've been trying and if they have a narrative and a story that helps explain some things that maybe didn't go right for them but they have that I'm going to pull myself from from my bootstraps I'm gonna I've been doing this and I've been doing that and I've been reading you can tell when someone I can tell when someone's in front of me whether or not I want to take a chance because I see potential I don't need to see a track record of success in anyone in fact I'm not looking I don't want any bad habits uh that people for sdrs that come from other operations I want to take someone raw and I want to kind of teach them the way I was taught when I got my first job at Xerox Corporation but they had a formal onboarding program I know that's hard for startups to do I was just talking to a Founder over here and again if you don't have formal onboarding there you can hire sdrs today from people like memory blue is a company that trains sdrs uh for free and then places them uh SV Academy is another one vendition is another one there are more and more companies that are training sdrs on all the technology on all the process and so instead of taking a chance on someone that has no background in cold calling or cold emailing using all these Technologies you can get them pre-vetted by companies and pay a little extra and so you know you're getting someone that actually wants the job knows the job and has had some success uh you know in in mock calls and and writing mock emails and things like that hey Lars just quick question talking about the profile of HDR how much technical do they need to be or is their job is just to qualify because the products that we sell is quite Technical and very complicated in some sense actually so what is the expectation that you expect in terms of like oh they should be able to talk as much details as possible or should they just qualify the opportunity go on the banker thing and let's say a budget all those things are there and that's enough for them to to to get the job done so when I'm hiring a new hire I'm looking for absolutely nothing I want fire in the belly because if you're a self-motivator and self-starter and you start succeeding and you start performing you are going to pick up the technology and again rsdrs graduate from onboarding into the role and then as they begin to perform and succeed they can become a senior SDR and then from there when they get to 15 months and they're at a certain performance level they can put their name in the Hat for a corporate account executive job and then we continue the training and the onboarding in what it looks like to carry a bag how to negotiate a snowflake consumption pricing optimization deals uh which is not something they necessarily learned as an SDR but you'd be surprised those scrs that are enterprising they will they will do their own research and Bone up on this technology and the smart thing also to do is make sure that your sdrs are on the call that they help set up for their AES they should be on every call um they'll learn the language they'll learn uh what it is the product can do they'll hear all the use cases and the stories you definitely want that but right out of the gate coming in I don't really want them to have anything um because I want to get them raw what I will do is I will give them a very professional front line sales development leader um my team is built up of younger in their career people earlier in their career people um and while I enable train them they still need ongoing development they need a manager to care about them and want them to you know if Performance Management if they're you know dials and and and emails are down and they're starting but all kinds of things happen active Frontline leadership of sdrs is really important after you hire your first two or three once you get to three or four sdrs I would invest in someone who has done the the role before um hi uh I had a couple questions just to the you said always two at a time why um and then as far as the process from content to sdrs to sales that you highlighted in your presentation um does that work at every Market segment so as the ticket sizes get let's say above a million a year two million a year does that break down is is the SDR qualifying and being at the front lines still hold when you're selling say you know of 10 million a year contract okay um the first question was why two at a time two at a time if you hire one SDR and you put them on the front lines you will not know if they work out for three to six months um and if you're a Founder that's never done this before it might take you even longer when you figure out that you've made that mistake now you got to figure out how to manage it out or get rid of it or take care of it that may take a quarter or two and then you have to replace it and then that may take a quarter or two you're looking at anywhere from a one year at the minimum to a two-year mistake if you hire two hopefully what happens is you hire the the right two people and they are just right there's coopetition that happens on SDR teams there's friendly competition they want to push each other but they also want to be number one it is we have a performance-based culture among other things on our team at Snowflake and the best thing that can happen is those two sdrs give you twice as much as you ever could expect it but what typically happens is one starts to Surge and another one doesn't and then you can decide whether or not that person is someone you have to rip and replace but what you have not done is you have not affected your pipeline because that is the air that we all breathe we that is the only air we breathe if you don't have at least two to three if not four times the pipeline coverage for any given month or quarter you ain't gonna make it and the second question um we don't have any sdrs right now we're quite a bit smaller than the other companies we're about 35 million ARs and we're going down market and we just don't know like what we've sold traditionally to large Enterprise we've been very hesitant to put Junior people in front of that but now as we start to scale it's we're trying to figure out what where which market segments to put the sdrs into we're not sure if it's appropriate for everybody so great question so if you're and and I I have a resource that is a decision tree that'll help you understand if you are a candidate for an SDR Motion in my opinion if you are selling a product or a service for less than twenty five thousand that should take you know that should take right if you're selling something for a thousand or three thousand or ten thousand you got to do that in days if not one or two weeks you do not want to have an SDR qualifying and hang that that just takes that's too expensive it's too disruptive you need to build a high velocity inside sales team so you can go demo to close and you just go along on that um if you have a 25 000 average selling price but your lifetime value it's a land and expand and that 25 000 customer can become a 50 or 100 000 customer within the year and that's your strategy SDR all the way because you want your sellers selling and your sdr's prospecting that separation of duties right first of all AES they get paid to sell and close that's what they want to do anytime a sales rep is prospecting is time away from selling and that's just downtime so if you think you have an SDR emotion put it in try it and again I'm a little bit hesitant to say go and check out the outsourced SDR providers out there but there are more and more and they're getting better and better there's one in the back right here I see him do you know of Ulta sales there are really really good they understand modern account based motions they have access and they have paid for Zoom info and gong and Outreach and Linkedin sales Navigator to put a tech stack together to drive an outbound in an inbound SDR motion it's not for the faint of heart you have to have operations people enablement people they have to put together this Tech stack in a way and then create playbooks that people can follow right um and again I am an advocate for a young startup that wants to try this to go Outsource it just to see because what they will do is they will show you what really good looks like and hopefully they have clients in the past that fit your profile the fit your segmentation oh there's many there's uh but Alta sales happens to be one just because I'm looking at the founder right now and he's a good man sapper Consulting is another one there's so many there's so many um if you want to reach out to me and ask me after you've vetted a few uh I typically know all of them and I know I can tell you that ninety percent of them suck um it's really really hard uh and if you do it just make sure that you have someone managing them just like you would an SDR manager because if you just decide yep we're going to try Outsourcing and let them do you've got to be very very you got to manage them daily weekly just like sdrs hi I'm Lily from gradient Works um so I really believe that str's account books really matter account books like the accounts that they're outbounding to because that's their full-time job right prospecting um I'm curious at what point in a stage for a company do you see scr leaders taking less heart in building out a territory plan for the sdrs for the coming year yeah so I've taken that off their plated snowflake as we're at scale and I have an operation team that does that um I think in a smaller operation that falls on the SDR leader to make sure that they're aligned with their district manager or regional vice president or whatever they have on the sales side uh um an SDR in my opinion should not be outbounding cold to any account that sales people haven't at least blessed um I would want to make sure that any account on SDR is going after sits with them some target market unless you're really in the beginning and you haven't you might have just gotten a product Market fit but you're not exactly sure the Industries or the verticals or the personas then I think you can just let's get it out there let's see what happens uh let's see if we get engagement from this group or that group and I know a lot of outsourced providers are asked to do this because they want to see and you can tell you you send a sales engagement touch pattern sequence out to a thousand C isos that's an easy list to pull um or you decide to do it to five different personas at the same company just see what the engagement is see who's opening see who's clicking on the beauty of sales engagement is you embed a link to something that you have created whether it's a white paper or a link to your website someone opens that email clicks on that link you know exactly where they went how many seconds they spent on your own page where they navigated to these are all signals that inform an SDR when they let's say do get a hold of them on the phone or they do a follow-up email hi Jenny thank you for spending time on our website last week I saw that you spent 23 minutes I mean there's all this beautiful context that comes from the signals that uh that that sales engagement provides in the opens and replies and what happens with the links that you embed in these emails yeah yeah we we had a market vertical Commerce platform for very conservative chemical industry where people hate receiving cold emails and cold calls do you think svr model can work and how can we make it work yeah um again we have we're Global we have I can tell you this we have used four channels we use the phone we use the email we use ascending platform reach desk and we use social touch points and I will tell you that at any given time in an sdr's career sometimes in one month they'll be surprised at how many uh connects they get other times they don't get one and so our Mantra is you never know what's going to hit with someone and you got to be using all of them if in your particular industry you don't is it emails or phones that they don't so again an email can be sent out to use as a branding you know your company your your message your content the problem you're trying to solve and then a follow-up voicemail can bump that and then if it's a true high value Target I'll tell you what happened to me you can send them something uh our SDR spent a lot of time sending uh you know coffee cards or this they'll send cupcakes um I once got a full-size Louisville Slugger baseball bat and it came to my office I opened it up I didn't understand the next day I got a vidyard video uh representation of the SDR who said hey Lars hope you got the Louisville Slugger baseball bat I sent it to you because I listened to the I listened to the uh Speech you gave at the true Ventures true University three years ago and I was inspired by the story you told about uh uh uh coaching your daughter's little league baseball team I hope you can use this for baseball uh for batting practice next season I was blown away I looked at the title I looked at the company it was relevant SDR technology I was completely blown away uh I caught I didn't wait for him to call me back I called them the next day and said great job I get it you got the meeting so how much time and energy you put into personalizing is really dependent on how high value the target is so if phone doesn't work try email if that doesn't work sending platforms and there's many today we have sendoso we have postal dot IO we have reach desk there's many of them because they work in certain instances and certain geographies and certain verticals with certain personas you got to try them all hi Lars Lori Harmon from cloudflare I have two questions one is what are the compensation elements like what are the metrics compensation yeah pay variable to um snowflake sdrs that's the first one so I'll let you answer that and then I'll skip the second one oh this is a very hotly debated Topic in SDR land what do you pay your sdrs on um God I can't I I hope I deliver this in the way because I want to use this so I and again 25 years of doing this the SDR can control the meetings that they set up they can control the quality of the qualification information what they cannot do is they cannot control whether or not that meeting that executes becomes an opportunity and goes on to close that is the job of a sales rep do not pay your sdrs to try to get anything beyond that first meeting again if that first meeting is a target company that you have asked them to get into into a list of five or ten personas that are legitimate that we want to get in front of and they do it pay them pay them on meetings delivered and executed that's the only metric we pay on it at uh what I often hear um and elt members will get together or you know some people above and they'll be like ah the SDR team's doing really well they're getting all these meetings but a lot of these opportunities aren't going forward in the sales process maybe we pay them a little bit more uh or we take part of their compensation away from the meeting and Tack it on to whether or not it progresses does not work in my opinion because you cannot force an AE and while I respect the heck out of an AE and I've been one before sometimes they decide when they want to show the company that they have an active deal that they're working on and sometimes they don't again not for me and I can tell you that in a lot of meetings that I have seen and and and run through the qualification information they got everything they understood but what what happened at the end was that uh the company decided not to go forward because they had bought a competitor three months before that that's massively that that's great information the SDR had the wherewithal to ask second level questions well God did you hear about us were we involved in the in in the trial or the you know uh they asked all these second level questions and we got more information out of that call that the SDR set up that's value pay them for that value if the meeting doesn't execute because it gets pushed or they don't show up we don't pay but if it executes and it's into an account that's in your Tam against a Target Persona you pay them all day long that was a long answer so this is part B actually not my second question so you don't pay them also on meetings that happen that were accepted by the AE like as yes like they agreed that they were qualified you just pay on the meeting that was executed that's right okay thank you second question is during this hybrid environment we're working on what Pro what approaches have you taken that are Innovative to keep your scrs engaged you know when they were working at home and remotes is there some of them are college graduates so most teams that start off small are hybrid they're doing inbound and they're doing outbound uh it doesn't really matter I mean some people call them adrs some people call them bdrs some people call them sdrs some people call them ldrs it's all the same for the most part um uh I lost track here um yeah so when you get to a certain size and I believe it's five to ten sdrs I think you need to go away from a hybrid approach and specialize and have an inbound and an outbound team um uh and I think that's important in the very beginning you probably have a round robin you have two sdrs you can't figure out what's Equitable so you go around Robin as you get a little bit bigger uh three to four to five you can set them up in in regions as you get Beyond five and you have a really strong inbound motion but no outbound motion you have to try it um we have 223 sdrs at snowflake there's only one dedicated to inbound and they monitor the driftbot everyone else because we have an account based a very sophisticated account based marketing and selling program every single inbound that we get can be very easily routed to the account owner but it's also uh routed to the accompanying SDR so if you're a and we're doing you know multi-million dollar deals if we get an inbound the SDR and the account executive are going to get the same inbound lead at the same time and what happens is the esteeall will reach out to the AE and say you know Jenny what would you like me to do here Jenny might say I'm out on a three-day Roadie I don't know this person do me a favor follow up with them or they might say you know what I was the one who invited Johnny to that date of her breakfast and uh I want to take that clear lines of communication process has been set up there's not a lot of people doing this and that there's a lot that can go wrong when you have inbound and outbound and you have marketing sending marketing Automation and you have sales reps using sales engagement you have customer success I mean there's a lot you can confuse your targets and so you need to orchestrate foreign [Music]