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[Music] hello hello hello everybody Welcome to another edition of the sales development podcast I am joined today by a legend in our space someone I met many years ago at the sales development P um podcast sales development conference um out in I believe it was San Francisco and um we've been in touch ever since Ingo thank you for joining David thank you so much the pleasure is all mine uh you stole the word from me I was going to call you a Legend um instead you call me a legend so thank you so much David I appreciate that oh man I mean what we do is so difficult and and uh you know it's it's uh it's an expertise that people really really don't understand a lot of the times especially at a high level you know at the executive level and how hard it is to do what you do so first and foremost how did did you get into sales development and then start to build out the program that you're running right now sure David I'm going to give out my age if I told you but it's been it's been a long 21 years right so 21 years ago is when I met uh when I kind of had my first 4A into the world of sales development which really back in the day that I'm talking early 2000s was more telemarketing Business Development the word sales development hadn't actually even come about and it was purely by by accident right I didn't have any long-standing design to get into the world of prospecting fresh out of my uh you know my MBA wented to go work for this tech company that um essentially sold compliance management software risk management software and I went in um you know to be able to do some marketing work for them kind of built out all of the uh SWAT analysis did all of the comparative analysis did the whole go to market uh plan and then uh the CEO brought me in one day and said hey you've come up with all of our top targets you've kind to come up with our ICP you've come up with all the different companies we should be talking to what didn't you call them and set up a meeting with our account execs and um I was like what do you mean call them and she was like no talk to them find out what you looking for and see if there might be a good fit for our Solutions and that way you can set up meetings for our Frontline account exx at the time I said you know what I should do it because the company didn't have that function the A's were doing all of the prospecting and I thought hey this would be such a wonderful way to be able to tie value proposition capabilities and talk to people that can make buying decisions or actually influence decisions and get them connected with account execs and kind of see that whole movement into you know top of the funnel mid funnel bottom of the funnel so I took it on purely as a challenge at the time David and the CEO said Hey listen you can make this function as large as you want it to be because you're the only one who's doing it right now right so first for about three or four years after that that team kind of grow into 105 people I was leading about two or three Frontline managers and I said hey this is something I really like doing I'm good at it and I'd already noticed that there was already a shift in the way that people were thinking about the function and I knew that if I stayed around long enough in the world of sales development it was going to be even more exciting in the years to come so since then that company was Pilgrim software since then I went on to go lead the global sales development team at uh centralink level three communications which is one of the largest telecom companies in the US so that was more of a global team with about 50 60 people five six Frontline managers dedicated inbound outbound functions then I made my way over to a company called compliance quest in the risk and compliance based again uh for companies um regulated by the FDA then I took a shift out into a company called Talk Walker that does social listening so completely different space and I've been at audit board for just over four months leading the global SDR function here so it's been it's been uh challenging it's been fun it's been fascinating and it's been super exciting it is so exciting and I can hear the passion that you have for this topic you look at it from a very strategic level so are you know you've been at different Industries um throughout your career how do you are there certain patterns that develop from that high level strategy of looking at sales development that you can kind of plug in in whatever industry you're in yes David there are a lot of commonalities in in general because the function essentially has to do the same thing no matter what the company sells right you want to be able to get high quality meetings and high quality opportunities over the sellers or account exacts as quickly as possible you want to be able to work with the marketing teams because your marketing teams are so critical in driving all of these warm leads and Demag gen activities that can make a solid difference in terms of what the SDS or BDS have in front of them to be able to work with I'd say the commonality is David across any function when it comes to this function is do you have a good onboarding training program number one super important number two are you hiring the right kinds of people that can be successful for your business so just like you've got an ideal customer profile in ICP do you have an ideal rep profile for what you're looking to hire that could be inbound outbound some companies have allbound teams you have to be able to make sure that you've got a really good um level of uh knowledge in terms of what kinds of people you want to add to your team third do you have a good playbook right you got to have multiple versions of a Playbook it's not a one siiz fits all you got to have a playbook for um a person who's never done sales development work before you got to have a different type of a playbook for someone who's more of a career rester David so someone who's done it maybe three years four years they come in with a different level of knowledge and a different level of expertise so you got to have a slightly different version of a playbook for them to be able to really build on and be successful at this company and this role um you want to have a very good clear-cut career pathing model so how do you how do you move to different roles within the SDR world right how do you go from an sdr1 to an SDR 2 how do you make play a coach how do you become a team lead how do you become a manager director so on and so forth how do you start pivoting into different roles within the company be an a role enablement marketing uh customer success you got to have your career pathing plan nailed down and you have to be able to communicate that to your team clearly you got to have a very good comp plan that's incentivizing the right behaviors because if you don't tie your comp plan back to your right behaviors you may have the best behaviors in the world but if it doesn't tie back to money you're not going to see those end results uh do you need a you need a solid Frontline leadership team that can really be in the trenches do a lot of the coaching do a lot of the role plays game tape session looking at sequences and Outreach and sales Loft I'd say all of those are your commonalities along with clearly understanding what does your company do what problems and challenges do you solve who do you need to be talking to when you get them on the phone or you email them what do you say to them and how do you get those over to an account exec as quickly as possible okay so piece of cake right it's so easy that's a lot of moving Cs and I hope everybody was taking notes there because that that's kind of a master class in running this department um you touched on so many of the key elements of of running a successful SDR team and it's it's interesting because I thought that because of your background and how you got into this that you would start right at the beginning with do you understand your your ideal uh customer profile and then the people at the company and you mentioned that but um you know it seems that that a lot of sales development programs they don't really think about that they think it's sort of a a marketing uh function to come up with the the right accounts and the right people but you touched on it it it's it seems like it's it's where we should spend a lot of time 100% David I think uh the starting point of who we need to go after clearly will come from marketing a demand gen right you've got teams that specialize in in defining your personas and all your value propositions your battle cards but really being able to refine it David you have to be able to test it out right you got to do a whole bunch of AB testing you have to be able to play with the messaging you have to play with the subject lines you have to do so many role plays internally to make sure that you've got that pitch nailed down you have to be able to listen to every gong recording right you want to be able to get through every objection but most importantly David right because this function like you said is so critical and you're at the trenches having those early conversations right for most people your first impression of a company is the sales development team right you fill out a demo form you fill out a contact us form you're talking to an SDR you're on the website chatting with someone you're talking to an SDR right so you want to be able to make sure that this team pays extra attention to personas extra attention to problem solving extra attention to understanding in today's world what are your challenges what are all the different companies that play in this Arena and in this case I'm just going to say what does audit board do that our top competitors do not right we have to have that nail down because when we have a good solid business-to business conversation people are going to say well what do you guys do differently than what I already have so you got to be able to nail that down and be able to be Crystal clear on those differentiat or silver bullets yes and and that's a a lot of a lot of uh training coaching working with the team if you were if you were talking to a new sales development leader who was establishing the program and and looking at where they can make the most impact what where should they start in order to to get to someday where you are I'd see be laser focused on um breaking out everything that's in front of you into bite-sized nuggets so to speak David because if you get overwhelmed with I've got to go fix 45 things you're going to get nothing fixed you're better off figuring out working with your managers working with your leaders what are those immediate gamechanging initiatives that you have to kind of double down on and make an immediate impact to the business it could be hey your Tech stack is not where it needs to be maybe you're not providing your team the enablement or the tech that they need in order to do their jobs effectively that could be where you start because in today's world Tech can be your biggest friend it can also be your worst enemy because we've got too much of it and now with the Advent of AI you've got even more AI based technologies that you now have to be able to look at in order to make your teams more productive so I'd say prioritization super important make sure you got a list of your top priorities medium priorities and low priorities second is ensure that the early hires you bring on onto the team are exactly the kinds of people you're looking for David because they can make or break your organization when you're building something for the long term right so you got to have a list of non-negotiable traits or qualities you're looking for and then you got to have things that are considered nice to have so on your non-negotiables do not compromise on your non-negotiables and make sure that you take all the time that's needed to go through deep interview processes go through role plays go through whatever due diligence you need to be able to go through in order to be able to hire the right people on your team because they're going to be your Future Leaders within your organization or they're going to be people that move to other parts with within your company but that's going to be the way that you validate the success of your organization early third you want to build a lot of different partners within your company these can be sales leaders demand G leaders marketing leaders revops is such a big important function and has been over the last three or four years understanding what are all the key metrics or kpis that the team is going to be measured against is going to be important because you want to make sure that you move your team in the direction that is critical for the business you never want to be in a position where you're measuring your team on three or four kpis but outside of you and your team nobody cares about those kpis so you want to get very very clear synergies in terms of what you should be measuring success against and driving improvements on those pieces and I'd say lastly um document everything you're doing so even if you're only six months into the job you always have to be thinking about succession planning succession planning is probably the most important piece um David for every company I've been at right and it's been five or six so far you always want to leave thinking that the person who's going to be taking your role is taking on something that you've built which is very special it's very high functioning but they have to be able to build on that platform and take it to the next level so that's going of you know your documentation your playbooks your best practices um your uh battle cards document all of it it cannot be in somebody said it's got to be down in a document somewhere that everybody has access to okay I'm furiously taking notes and I think anybody who is is somewhat interested in the topic especially newer managers this is golden advice and I've been in the trenches for a long time and and um everything you're say saying is just spoton maybe can I just add one more to it please yeah so we live by this book in uh our world and I'm sure you recognize this right so hey he's holding up the sales development framework which everybody on the audio you got to go get exactly so um H great great book for any new leader to read any new SD B to read the the the amount of support network on LinkedIn today right being part of groups being part of podcasts reaching out to people if you just put a post out saying hey I'm struggling with fig figuring out what the right sequence needs to be how many steps it needs to be what's the mix between email phone and social you're going to be flooded with so many responses but this was in the world we lived in 10 or 15 or 20 years ago were struggling to get support now we might have too much of it but you want to be able to build expertise within your network reach out to them as much as you can because you'd be surprised people are willing to give up time if they can impact another sales development leader we're a very tight-knit community and I think everybody is willing to spend time with each other to move the function forward completely agree and and you bring the context of the problem that you're trying to solve there's a lot of advice out there but really if you're in that Community they understand more the context of the problem that you're trying to solve so it's so valuable to be able to reach out and it is it's a great opportunity that we didn't have you know just a few years ago when we started and and and um one thing that came to mind that I see a lot with sales development programs is um misalignment across the go to market team and um you know it really it's something sort of outside of the control a lot with sales development leaders in that they may come into a company where there's great alignment across Market marketing SDR and sales others might maybe not so much so how do you how do you think about uh really aligning the goto Market strategy and tactics to maximize the the investment David that is such a good question because that is such a make or break you want to all be in tandem with all of your different uh teams right because if each team is misaligned the amount of um know the amount of distraction that the company is going to have in not being able to meet its Revenue objectives is going to be critical if you're lucky enough or fortunate enough to move into a model where there's already a good sense of alignment then consider yourself to be fortunate and build on it but I'm going to walk you through a scenario where there is not that alignment and what are some of the things you can do in order to be able to build that right so I'd say number one be very transparent in terms of so making sure that you share with your um critical stakeholders internally how are you and your team being measured all the goals all the metrics um you know go into comp go into um you know all the different behaviors all of that should be openly discussed with your key stakeholders you want to be able to seek similar information from them as well so you can figure out commonalities where both teams are going to be acting and behaving in the same way because that is going to be a tieback to the way that comp plans are designed I'd say that's number one number two is you want to be able to share all feedback good bad and ugly in a way that is very very respectful and very collaborative for instance you launch a campaign the messaging is all over the place um you start reaching out to people customers and prospects have no clue what you're saying but there was so much time that marketing spent in coming up with the content with the targets with the personas how do you actually go back to marketing and say this is just not resonating right so you have to be able to it's not personal because you're all working towards Revenue goals but you have to have a seat at the table and in today's world senior SDR leaders and Frontline leaders do have a seat at the table to be able to have those discussions and their feedback is considered very very welcome so don't be personal right uh just lay down the feedback in a very very objective manner be very very data oriented so anytime you say something make sure you have the data to be able to back it up so you can say hey normally I would send out 1,500 emails I'd see a 4% reply rate I'd have you know uh three emails go out and I'd be able to book six meetings with this campaign what I'm seeing is about half the amount of email responses I'm only able to book about half the meetings but look at the number of objections if I had a 3% on objections before I've got 9% now right so now you've taken the BIOS out of the discussion and it's purely data right so just be transparent share your concerns with the sales teams um you've got to do about two or three different things right one is you got to have relationships at different levels you want to make sure you're always talking to the VPS of sales um you you want to make sure that you're tightly aligned to their goals from a strategic standpoint because even if the SD team does not report into the sales team SDS and BDS that support them have to be an extension of their team um on a day-to-day basis right they have to kind of act think and behave like they part of the sales organization even if they don't report into the sales team second is with the Frontline area directors or directors of sales you want to make sure that every Market every region every geom Market is getting the attention that they need because you may do you may be doing wonderfully David in one area where it's a completely different Geo Market but you may be struggling in another market for a completely different reason so making sure that you go in at the sales director level to make sure that every Market every region is getting enough support from the SD BD and then third bring in as many account execs as you can on team calls you could do it once a month you could do it you could break them up between person I mean verticals you could break it out between regions invite all their feedback in a forum that is very very non-threatening non-personal non-biased and say hey what's working for you in your engagement with sales development what was the best Discovery call you've had in the last few weeks uh um what are some of the things working for you because now you're hearing and getting feedback from the a directly all of the account execs are sharing that information so people are hearing from each other and you're building best practices from them so really ties down to transparency communication being data driven um ensuring that you're willing to change your goals as needed for the good of the business so you can be stuck to oh these are my goals these are my numbers these are my metrics and I'm going to lock it down for the entire year no you have to be able to Pivot change your goals and change your behaviors not too often but as often as the business needs you to do it in order to remain to be agile flexible and relevant did that answer your question much great advice oh yeah absolutely and and um I've lived on this this world for a long time and I'm just nodding longer than me yes I won't say how old I am but I've been doing this for a long time and I was just nodding my head because so many great nuggets of information and and just how you want to think about it from a strategic level and I'm wondering if if someone's sitting down and they're going Ingo I your spot on um how do I prioritize my three or four big goals when there's all these different things that I could potentially be working on and and potentially I don't have a great relationship with marketing I don't know them they're doing their own thing or my my manager is not understanding sales development so I really need to come up with these priorities myself what's the best way to to determine those great question David again so you you got to be able to build the list of priorities yourself you can lean into your own expertise you can lean in based on on previous um situations where you've had to do this you can reach out to the community you can get good ideas on what that list of priorities needs to be then you have to be able to evangelize it with your stakeholders and say hey here's what I'm thinking here's what I've heard regarding all of your challenges here's what I'm thinking in terms of all the priorities that I need to build out in order to be able to solve all the different challenges what do you think I'm not saying you have to talk to 10 20 30 people but pick about five or six of your most critical stakeholders to almost do um you know just test it out and see if you're getting commonalities you're getting common feedback in terms of what those priorities need to be work with your manager very closely as well to let them know what they thinking but David in Ideal World you want to be able to have this list of priorities mapped to business impact if I did this here's how it would impact the business it it impacted the business here's what it's going to do for tofu mofu and bofu if I didn't do it here's what we would have to be willing to compromise on and give up because by not having this laid down as a key priority we as a company have to be okay with this not being um an objective that we're going to be able to solve for this year I'll give you one example right so if we say the push is to be able to be more efficient as a bdr organization we're not going to be adding more headcount but we want to drive more productivity with the team we have going into 2024 your priority could be in order to do that I need to be able to really leverage AI because there are so many things I could be doing with AI today be it personalization at scale uh you've got tools that can do sales coaching on your emails uh you've actually got one that I saw margan INR promote on LinkedIn the other day where you can actually do uh AI based role plays through a company called second nature right incredible right and all of this David is to be able to drive productivity right by not replicating and adding more people but making your existing people more productive if you want to go down that path you got to start making investments in AI but if the company is not willing to make those Investments for example then you have to be willing to say the goal is to get to more productivity that's a key priority but if we're not going to be able to leverage AI it would take us twice as long in being able to get to the productivity numbers that we're looking for here's where we can get to without AI but if we had it here's where we could get to in about roughly the same amount of time right so you have to be able to have your list of priorities you have to be able to tie to business impacts you have to be able to show the business very quickly celebrate all your wins as you start building out those priorities and making changes even if you have a small tiny win within say a week or two you want to be able to broadcast that share that evangelize it you want to be able to make a big deal about your wins and your and your losses because if you if something hasn't worked quite well you want to be able to Pivot but if something is working well you want to be able to let the broader Community know so you can double down on those efforts I love it and but David yeah like anything else your priorities are going to change based on what the business needs so you got to have a list of two or three priorities that are non-negotiable because those are things you absolutely need in order to move your function forward but you also got to have a list of priorities that are super important that you're willing to Pivot as the business needs got it so you've got two running list and and um it's it's interesting because um a lot of SDR managers come up through the ranks and they don't necessarily have business Acumen training and and I think you and I have been kind of through the School of Hard Knocks so we understand um how important it is to be able to build a business case and um you know any recommendations if if they don't have a lot of experience and they're not used to building those business cases where do they start in those minut that's a tough one right um I I'd say David um number of things right again um reach out to folks that have actually done this for a long time you'd be surprised by the amount of support that people are willing to give you they may not have the answer for you because every business is different every Persona is different acvs are different sales Cycles are different but you have to be able to be proactive take ownership reach out to people at this point in time just between your podcast you've probably brought in 30 40 50 60 SD leaders reach out to groups of people that are willing to support you and help you have mentors around you um online you can just search up any good template for building business cases McKenzie has a ton of them as well right so creating a framework for a business case honestly is not the hard part those Frameworks do exist it's about applying what you want to have on those priorities into a format that is one that people can consume and staying true to it right because sometimes I feel like building the uh the framework is the easy part but how do you stay accountable to it right how do you measure success how do you make sure that all the different things you said you were going to be doing you're actually doing and you're holding yourself accountable to making progress on that piece of it um if you've gone through an MBA program you've done a lot of different business cases during school tool all of those are good ways to be able to start thinking about what is the problem you're trying to solve right because every business case you're trying to build is to solve a problem so ask yourself what are you trying to solve what's the easiest one slide version for me to be able to show that and three what does it mean for the business to impact your top top line and your bottom line if you've got those three or four things answered David you have a really really good starting point clear crisp and then hold yourself accountable that's that's one thing because it's easy to go from Project to project to project and it's like well wait a minute what happened to that business case that you made three months ago now exactly we're starting something new so because there's so much to do um you know it's it's easy to fall into that trap exactly so so useful I think every everybody should have a whole page of notes here on on your advice um if there's one one question I wanted to ask you is as you look at your broader career and where like where people go after they've mastered sales development um are there any are there any avenues that you see um to take this to the next level for yourself in your career I'm yet to see the first official uh Chief sales development officer um but I think David that is going to be uh coming up pretty soon I think what has been a very good sign for um our work of you know our work stream in general right the sales development community in general is you're seeing a lot more VPS you're seeing large SDR teams right I mean teams like snowflake have an excess of 200 SDR and um you're seeing a lot more of that you're seeing a lot more companies make massive investments in huge SDR teams where where it's now possible to go into that VP level Rank and SVP level rank um owning kind of that broader Global sales development function um it opens up avenues for sure David within um you know looking at roles within demand genen because there's so much integration and Synergy between sales development and demandin um could you go on to become um you know could you go on to take on senior leadership roles within marketing go down the path of a CMO I don't see why not um also if you've been an SD leader for a long time and then you kind of go into Frontline sales could you potentially down the road be a future cro it's all very very possible so I'd say right now figure out what your domain is figure out what you're good at stick to it do it for a long time build expertise around what you're doing don't experiment and pivot too many times within a short period of time because you want to start building silos of expertise right so over time when you start looking back at your 30-y year 40y year 50e career you're kind of making sure that everything you're doing today is impacting that next career move down the road so it's no longer I've got to be in the function 18 to 24 months and then start looking at different things you now have the option if this is what you want to do for a long time to come in a leadership role I think the world of sales development has evolved at least over the last 10 years that you can truly make this a career in leadership if this is what you want to do I completely agree and I I want to play this back to my sons because that is great advice for anyone um you know not only sales development leaders but uh anyone looking at their career and Ingo I I just um again your wisdom is is so valuable to the community whether people are sdrs managers or running an entire Revenue organization um I really appreciate you coming on and and sharing with us if folks want to connect with you if they want to learn more join your community what's the best way to get in touch with you reach out to me on LinkedIn please there's only one person with my first name and last name so uh find me and connect with me and um I'm definitely happy to having conversations and um moving the function forward David let me just say David that um everything you've done everything 10 bound is done right if uh you've made a Monumental impact into uh this function um I I know I'm speaking for every SD leader that we are in we are eternally grateful for everything you've done for us so thank you well thank you I mean and and we're just getting started so I'm really excited to uh deepen our connection and uh and I just thank you for coming on and sharing your wisdom with the group thank you so much David talk to you soon