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hello welcome to the sales development revolution video series in this episode we're going to discuss how the process behind sales development has changed over the last five to ten years and what organizations can do to modernize their SDR function yeah this is a big topic edge a you know the reps that you hire and the technologies that you use can really only take you so far as a manager and I think a lot of companies run under this challenge where they let the people and the technologies that they use define their entire process exactly and you know what really should be the other way around to generate consistent results managers need to clearly define processes that they put in place for their STRs and be mindful of how they impact the underlying sales math of the role yeah exactly so to share his thoughts on the topic we invited Ryan research co-founder and CEO of the sales developers and author of the book outbound sales no fluff to join us in the discussion yeah if there was only one thing I could take away from our conversation with Ryan it would be the importance of putting the right process in place before diving into the hiring and training processes well AJ good thing you're allowed to have more than one takeaway you're right Alex jump on in [Music] okay so to kind of to kind of keep us off you know when I really find funny about this process conversation is the fact that most companies would rather rely on new people or new technologies to improve their outcomes even though we all know that's not enough and when outcomes inevitably don't meet those expectations they just blame those same people those same solutions and then find new ones to fill the gap and this continues and continues until at some point these companies have to look at that process for their answers so in terms of sales development for the managers in the audience you know how has the process changed for you over the last five to ten years for us the ours yeah so great question I love that you're starting with the people technology process those three things come up all the time we talked about it over and over and over again it's how we launched our company here and to your point prevailing wisdom five ten years ago is you want to increase sales well you start by increasing your sales headcount right double sales double headcount find great people and then with the emergence of modern technologies go out and buy the tools CRM discover work zoom info whatever you wanna call it you know five six years ago maybe was like guess where now it's like the outreaches and the sales loss of the world and so you got the people they've got the technology go but the the process piece has always kind of been missing and in sales development outside of maybe you have the person you have the technology here's a phone here's a list go there hasn't been a formal process developed for you know who are the accounts we should be target in the first place do we all agree that if I engage with this account that that's somebody we want to be engaging with as an organization and within those accounts who should we be taking meetings with and why and that's where there's so much debate in sales development you know if you look back five to ten years I've liked the quality of the lead and one of the biggest challenges leads quality and quantity and everyone's always debating like hey that's not a good lead well because you have no process around account selection and who you want to talk to in the first place that debates going to continue to come up right so what I'm seeing and definitely what we preach is is to kind of read rigor that equation and start with process enable that process with modern technologies and then once you've nailed that find the right people and over here our little tagline is double you know sales without doubling headcount so when you put process first and you have technology enabled to give you the metrics and insights around what's working what's not working then you can find the right people to grow your business and that's kind of the change I'm seeing in the modern sales development environment and I think deep down that kind of makes sense for everybody when you really like think about it because we've been taught that foundation is obviously like it's a foundation because it's the thing you built first and you can't really build anything on top of a foundation if it's crumbling so it the analogy that I've heard a lot of people use is like alright you're building a house and when you want to build a house you want to make sure you have high quality materials you want to have good wood good brick whatever you're building it with like but if you don't think about the foundation first it doesn't matter how high-quality those materials are your house is gonna fall down so the same thing you can obviously knowledge as that to the sales development function of the sense that you can't just give some new college graduate a desk and a list and a phone and expect them to go get meetings for you anymore it's something that I guess kind of worked at some point in the past but now the environment has changed how we're targeting companies have changed and how people are researching and understanding products of change so with that you need to build out the process for sales development and I know that a lot of organizations are working on that and it's sort of akin to how we saw closing sales processes being built so a lot of sales reps have these whatever Sigma six technology or black belt I don't even know they exist for those reps but like we're seeing stuff like that develop for SDRs do you think that there's going to be some kind of like Sandler method or whatever for STRs at some point in the future are we building that now well I sure hope so you know Rex and I that was kind of our our purpose of putting the bucketing system in our book outbound so is no fluff there has been so much time energy and effort committed to the meeting so once we're across the table from each other right you and I we sit down Sandler Miller Heiman I've got medic medic you know whatever you enforced management all these you know billion-dollar sales training industry but and and you go into organization that's really growing a modern sales team you'll get that training right they're gonna teach you hey what's the qualification criteria how does ask every meeting work what stage definition - exit criteria and you get hammered on that but there's nothing really before that right it's just like well lead leads will come in you know it's just go call or you know you got the inbound and and so that's where we're we're hoping more and more of this comes up there are some folks that have you know Marketo and engage EO with the whole account based marketing concept and the flippin the funnel you know that all idea is kind of helping us get closer towards a process because you know you kind of hinted this already you're building a house if the foundation is poor the results are gonna be poor like your house is gonna crumble in sales development if you choose the wrong accounts and wrong contacts nothing else matters right if I can't help the organization I'm selling to and the person within that organization I'm trying to sell to doesn't care I will not have a close one deal and so when you think about the process of sales development the the the need for clear definitions of stages and exit criteria from account selection the messaging to them why they should care and not features and functionality but what's the benefit of them from joining and learning and taking that journey to get them across the table that's where the the real opportunity is I think in sales development and and I'm hoping we see more and more of that come up from from other folks in the in the future here that is awesome and I wanted to I wanted to get into this this bucketing methodology that you have mentioned in the book so you know some of those in the audience might not have read it so could you just go through and maybe summarize kind of that at that cap selection process before before they begin talking about messaging before they can start researching you know how do you go through this this bucketing process yeah absolutely so without getting too detailed here it's it's it's a it's simple but complex but the the bucketing system starts with its four buckets so the names of those buckets uncontacted working priority meeting schedule you can call them whatever you want cold warm hot you know whatever you want but you've got you've got uncontacted leads these in the very very beginning of a process should be accounts your target accounts you sell the people so it counts and what we call your swim lane or what others might call your idyllic count profile or your ICP you know ideal customer profile whatever it is right companies that you know you can help because they meet some sort of researchable or trigger-based criteria right size geography you know technocratic they're using certain systems that you integrate with other triggers they're hiring certain number of people they just took funding they you know there's a merger acquisition whatever it might be right so there's signals and information about the account itself that should meet the criteria in bucket one and only when you move forward in this process you should only engage accounts that meet that criteria based on research before you even start any activities towards it if it doesn't means those criterias just get them out and I don't care if that's inbound outbound whatever that should be bucket one only accounts that meet that criteria and then within those accounts the person at the organization ve person or the role within the organization who owns the decision on that product or service that you offer right so the problem you solve or the innovation that you're bringing who within that organization now there's a lot of debate around that right especially when people say in the enterprise like you could start and all these Ingles I think that's actually not true I believe that there is one person who really does care in that organization now that could be the champion or whatever but start with the one from a hypothesis that is either gonna get promoted or it's gonna get fired if you don't you know help them solve or you know or educate them on the innovation there right so you know target accounts and only move through the buckets with that criteria that's bucket one okay bucket two is once you've had those folks research is you're starting to validate the information associated with them so they only move forward into bucket two when you've made an outbound attempt in a channel so you're validating channels over the phone over the email over social whatever you know new channel you might want to use text chat in-person events whatever it's a validated channel if it's the phone which we're phone heavy you've actually made an attempt to the person you've documented the path towards that attempt and if that number gets to them it is now in bucket two if it doesn't it doesn't move into bucket two right so a working lead is only channel validated if you sent an email and it bounced it's not working yet you don't have a channel validated lead and and then bucket three is I've actually engaged with them on a channel so I've had a conversation over the phone it didn't move forward to a meeting yet they asked for information or whatever it somebody who came in bound and they requested some information and we started a conversation over email I've sent an email they responded we did a chat bot or whatever that's bucket three priority and you have a channel validated where you can engage with them and then finally bucket 4 is those folks that have actually calendered an event with you now when you start your day as an SDR you work these buckets backwards so you go in and you confirm our meetings and then you go in and you reengage everybody that you've already engaged with in the channels that you know that's validated in order to try to drive them forward once once you've completed all of those paths then you move into your working tasks so you can pull up a list of 80 validated numbers and blast through that I don't care if you have automated tools or not you can do 80 a pound validated that attempts in an hour people think that's crazy no you can do that easily if it's if it's channel validated then you move up to net new research and bringing them through and if you're consistently filling these buckets there's some conversion ratios associated with out to connect and success metrics that will give you this replenish formula and over a period of time 3 6 12 months you'll know exactly how many leads you need in each bucket at any given time to drive what you call your Mathis sales Mathis ills is how many conversations do I need to have a next conversation how many next conversations do I need to get a meeting in how many meetings striving to pipeline once you solve that formula you'll know exactly you know how to how to operationalize sales development and that that's the whole concept of bucketing yeah and I think that that's something that it might be difficult for a lot of companies to sort of wrap their heads around at first but it really does make a lot of sense when you talk about enabling processes like this and sort of having that in place before you staff a team and before you really action anything like understanding that these buckets and this process needs to be set before acting on it is important because things will change but I also know a lot of organizations use their STRs and sort of the anecdotal and metric based information that they're getting on a daily basis to influence what industries are reaching out to and maybe that shifts up the buckets how do you sort of take that approach when you have STRs who are sort of changing up how your process is in place is it a work in progress with the process or you like a staunch this needs to be in place beforehand and you can't change it kind of person well so the process is a process but the hypotheses that you run within that process that that's that's the whole point of sales development right you're always testing you're always trying new you know the bucket one what is the definition but for this particular campaign as I run the series of buckets that's gonna fill my funnel it needs to be clear defined and consistent and when you have that clear defined consistent swimlane then you have clear defined messaging and an offer and you're gonna run it all the way through and this way that list of leads that are going through the buckets your math assails doesn't lie right when we go after this particular segment with this particular message it takes you know this many activities in a conversation and it takes this many conversations to get to next conversations and here's our conversion rates is that a viable chant like a segment or not is that a viable industry is it a file is it a viable Department right you can test different industries or you can test different departments within an organization using that process but the process is the process follow the buckets measure the conversion ratios within the the buckets and use your math the sales to then determine if that's something to go deep with or not and that's where a lot of organizations fail because they say hey am i we don't know yet my stos are figuring out but you're gonna let somebody who's really early a lot of the times this is like their first job go and select who your next best customer is and tell you if it's working or not that blows my mind right that that's the problem there because yes you have to test and try new things and new opportunity will come in front of them but follow the process you stick it to the process right that's that's the point yeah and I think it's important to give SDR some level of autonomy in situations like that because I alluded to it before but like they're the ones who are you know executing all of your activities so the anecdotal information that they're getting could in directly sort of influence sort of how your bucketing stuff and it's important for them to sort of get that opportunity but like you said at the same time I've got some 22 year old kid who doesn't know anything about my business I'm gonna not gonna let them pick target accounts like that's that is ridiculous to think about but sort of in the same line when you do have these STRs who are ramping up for lack of a better phrase and maybe testing out different channels different buckets how long do you think you would give them to sort of figure that out because I know a lot of organizations kind of give up a little bit too early in testing out new target markets and then you're also wasting time and resources with your SDR team and that all comes back to like you have to retrain rehire if you do give up too early so do you have like an idea of how long you might let somebody a specific set of variables for a bucket or any insight into that yeah and I think that's a great question because that's the that's the I mean that's the million dollar a billion dollar that's the Unicorn question right because because if you can get it right and you can quickly backfill and scale then you're gonna have a successful business if you get it wrong you can go bankrupt you know if you're a startup right and so that's why it's so important that the executive team at least within the hypotheses that are being run have the debye off right yep those are the accounts yep that's the target and yes that's the message once we've nailed that let them go let them have some freedom and flexibility on recommending new tests within that but follow the process hey here's here's something I'm learning right we're trying to target sales but we're getting redirected to marketing you know let's have a conversation about that don't let them go and do that let's have a conversation about it why is there enough data one conversations two conversations is not enough and by the way three months six months is not long enough to see the long term impact of of you know building pipeline yeah you know that that's why you know if you look at sales people that stick and stick around at companies for two three four years they don't leave once they're past like three or four years because it's like their jobs it's like really easy when they leave it's like in the first year because they're either failing or or they're having a really success but if they just stuck through that kind of period of waiting and that's a combination of the sales cycle and some of these things all of a sudden your job gets easier because the blue birds the blue birds come in from someone you talked to six months ago 12 months ago jimplin talks about the rule of thirty year things called the rule thirty what you do to that and in this 30-day window is going to impact the next 90 days mm for sums that might be in the next six months could be the next 12 months based on your sales cycle and so giving it time to let it play out is one of the biggest challenges especially startups have because they want they want to see ROI right away and for outbound outbound sales development like you're not going to see ROI right away especially in a market that's getting hammered right you have to look at you have to look at this and look at those ratios and have a model that helps you understand are we converting at a rate that's acceptable based on whatever historical data we had if you don't have the data make up something that's acceptable and see if it's in those rains and it could be way off and you can see it over and over again but if your model doesn't work your business model doesn't work well do have bigger problems but having those ratios ahead of time to really understand hey I need leads to go through I'm expecting that for every hundred accounts we talked to in this market ten are closing well what's happened in between and how do you get there you should have some sort of model in place to test against otherwise otherwise you're no you shouldn't be in business but so that's that that's the thing that's hard because time is usually the death of outbound because people don't give it long enough yeah but if you follow the process you have the ratios you'll know where you're at along the way and if you have a solid model we have something we call your math of sales and for anyone listening to this if you want a copy of this we share it all the time which goes through it like what's your revenue target what's your average selling price that'll tell you how many deals you need per month and based on how many deals you need per month you know will actually reverse engineer how many calls you need to make how large your listenings to be based on conversion ratios from dial to connect email response success rate show rate accepted rate and close close rate if you don't have those numbers yet you at least have a model based on some averages and then you start inputting them and give you a model over time I really love the discussion about testing and I wish more people implemented this in sales development you know I've seen it without it being organized or structured you know testing can can get out of hand and becoming really time-consuming or it could be just you know the golden tickets to the growth and so what I want to backup to is is specifically one challenge of testing and that's communication between that manager and that group of reps who you know there's going to be knowledge gaps there's going to be communication gaps and and it's the managers responsibility to bridge the to understand that and then to translate that into actionable improvements with team and so with that in mind you how do you think through structuring and communicating this testing process that you know should be ongoing but let's say someone's just getting started you know how would you get started on communicating this to reps to ensure you know optimal improvements yeah it's it's challenging I mean with the amounts that we talked about the technology right the amount of technology that's coming into market you have tools like outreach and sells off and and others out there that will allow you to like a B C multivariate test the crap out of a sequence and the reality is like there's too much testing for the volume of signals that you're getting from that so there's they're like split testing for different subject lines and two different call to actions and the exact same sequence for a hundred people and then they're saying oh I've got a better open rate on you know the difference between a twenty five it split test between twenty five you know it's like that's not statistically relevant and you know what the difference between one reply and another is the is the winner here and if you just followed up one more time or picked up the phone you might get two times that just based on your targeting it has nothing to do what you just said on that email right so all that to say it's it's hard because people want to be objective and they want to use the data to drive their their reasoning but the reality is we're all subjective and we're using our guts to make decisions when we don't have information and so I think it's a hard it's a hard thing for a start-up especially and even even more you know proven organizations to understand how like what you should test and what's a valid outcome from that test and so that's why we harp buckets so much because you got it you've got a run-through and the most important thing is are we turning the right people are we seeing the right thing and it's about it's so important to keep that consistent on a campaign basis with large enough audience to have real informed objective outcomes and we're not using our gut to make decisions through the process so if you're if you're selling in a market that has a long sales cycle it's really hard to sit back and and let the data play out because your guts telling you all these different things and if you're listening to your reps where it's hard right it's gonna be hard right our job is to be told no nine out of ten nineteen out of twenty five to nine ninety nine twenty times like five to ten percent we are in the hall of fame success that means nine out of ten nineteen out of twenty times he were telling us a lot of shitty state things right like f5 get out of here not me not now whatever you want a few you feel like it's not working but it's a it's the hose those small numbers of successes that are actually what we're looking for and that's why the models so important the process is so important and trying to get back to those small conversion ratios and to know is just as good as a yes so long as it's within within reason so kind of skirting around how do you do that yes it's the managers responsibility but the reality is like most people in sales aren't you know they don't have a mathematics background right they're not statistician and they're not going to be able to provide real objective outcomes based in in the scientific method that most people want to say they know and so we tend to see too much subjective outcomes and not objective outcomes come to the surface because of these small quick silver bullet winds that come out of the tests versus the long-term sustainable commitment to the process that produces the long-term results so I don't know that answers it completely but that's that's the that's a big problem yeah really is and I think that it even goes back to something you mentioned earlier where a lot of times organizations that have an SDR team most of them are there either for like a year or four four and with the ones who are there for a year you're catching a lot of those like silver bullets like winds that you were talking about and it's really hard to get actionable inferences off of those whereas the smaller portion of your team is going to be those reps that are there for like three to four years and they are getting a lot of data that you can get a lot of inferences out of over a long period of time so it's like how do you get your team to stay which is a whole different topic and different video to take but how do you get it your team to stay long enough to then have enough data to form these objective opinions because while objective opinions are great if you're publishing some kind of like a statistician or paper or whatever trying to get information into the industry about rates that you want to portray subjectively internally for you to relate to your team and for your team to relay to management so that transparency between the two is so important - yeah make sure that that's there but yeah it's just hard to getting your whole team to sort of buy into that for a long period of time because that's really what you need yeah well an Athena today one of the bigger challenges you go from management all the way up to leadership right in the executive suite here's a big challenge of those development is they still think it's easy and all they care about is is the the the successful meetings they don't care about all of that work it goes to get there if they don't all of means 95% of the work is it was a no and we learn a bunch from that and there's a ton of value from that what not to do next what to do moving forward all of this stuff that will be future I don't care what you do for me today that's the problem that that that's the bigger problem in this and getting that buy-in from the top to understand that the the successful outcomes that we're having right now that's great let's celebrate them we're in sales we have to that's what's going to keep the lights on but you also have to understand all of that other work that's happening to get to that successful outcome and all the value there that's typically lost it happens in sales it happens on the other side of the fence as well so many organizations will look at the wins but they don't spend enough time looking at the losses and doing autopsies on the losses the best organizations do but most don't they certainly aren't doing that in sales development right they certainly are it's like Oh meeting scheduled yeah but what about like this other person who said you know you should be talking to this other department and that's happened now 10 20 30 times that's it that's a huge winning win for us so those are things that I think go way up all the way to the executive suite yeah and that's probably an industry ship that will happen at some point in the near future just because I feel like the the way that we're talking about this now is so modern in terms of having STRs like actually give operational data to management and leadership so eventually you know some bigshot CMO is going to have been an SDR at some point in the past like 10 years and they'll be the ones to be like no like I understand that we're taking all of the data and not just the 5% and that's like when this will really take off but crossing my fingers at it soon I think we're there I think we're getting closer to there anyway yeah there are some phenomenal demand generation leaders that are emerging who get it and and I'm really really excited to see you know what happens the next five years we have with our with our profession because of that yeah yeah it's sort of kind of jump in to that that's that I think that's a perfect hop into to the next question you know we've talked a lot about how companies and startups are scrambling to try to improve process and to really try to improve outcomes with sales development and and looking out in the next five years I think we we have several challenges along we we have this this trend of automation we have you know ever-growing technology both horizontally and vertically you know the the technology landscape never ends and so you don't need your eyes Ryan over the next five years you know for for a manager just starting or maybe an SDR just starting in their role today you know what do you expect it how do you expect this space to continue changing in the next five years yeah I think that the it hasn't been a better time to you know launch your career in sales development for a couple reasons one there are so many other things you can do like we just said a sales of L rap today is probably gonna be a CMO of the future so the career path is very different today you know it used to be a stepping stone to only become an AE and people are starting to open their eyes around know this this is a stepping stone to a lot of things sales marketing product future entrepreneurship right more and more folks are stepping out the use of technology and and capital makes it easy for me to start a business overnight right slap up a website go do my own thing and so you're going to see that the industry evolved to people that are not getting into this job because it's their last dish like effort right god I gotta have school I didn't know what I was gonna do someone said get into sales right you know right you're gonna see people that want to be in sales development because of these other reasons its scientific you're using modern technologies you're you're learning how to you know face rejection you're learning how to bring a product to market you're learning how to you know convince people to for their most valuable thing it's in my opinion is still harder than getting a close one deal is taking someone's time right it's precious so all those skills are you know it's exciting right it's more exciting than ever to jump into this career from a management perspective I think it's also going to get more more more challenging to keep people interested and motivated about the job if if the automations continue to come in you're losing a lot of the creativity and the the things that drive folks to the role that are not just kind of that coin-operated process oriented individual if that that more creative individual who may have those other opportunities for growth and so so there's there's a challenge there because of you know what it is that we need them to do however there's also excitement there because you can move away from the tools taking your job into becoming a master of this and really starting to up level the conversations and the insights and the the success that you have right you no longer target the wrong person with the wrong message you say the exact scene at the right time and more success comes out of that so you're gonna see more and more of that with machine learning and an AI supporting and not taking over the role but like enhancing the experience with the buyer it's really hard to say five years man five years from now I've been in I've been in sales sales development you know tech for I think this is like my 11th year now when I started like the iPhone was just coming to market and now like you know like that's that's what I've seen technology do over the last that amount of time no burden exists and it just you know all these things that are crazy who knows what it's gonna look like but I would stay in the next year or two you know as a manager or and what to look out for it's like use technology to enable the process don't let the process you know don't let the technology define your process like that's the big thing and if you can nail that finding the right tools to make your process work you can find the right people and see just incredible success without all the headaches right reduce churn you know you could put one person make them as effective as ten everyone's excited they're around for a long period of time you're gonna see career sales develop in reps making a significant impact in the organizations they work for without the pressure of having to go somewhere else like this is my job I love doing it and here's all the value I bring to this organization that's what I get excited about that's exciting stuff I mean I'm just imagining like the the SDR today in like maybe not a CMO but in like five years there's like a whole sales sales development is like its own department because right now it's kind of rolled up under like sales or marketing however your organization handles it but like the specialization of the the skills that you develop as an SDR could very well be its own department in five years and impacting business in ways that we can't even imagine so it's exciting stuff I think you said it recently yeah absolutely I mean you think to think about like the sales development function in what you learn if you bring that skill set to customer success and I think maybe it's discovery outreach they have this like customer success development model like where they're using the same principles of sales development to improve the renewal and success rates of their businesses you can see the same thing in a lot of other departments where you know your job is to pleasantly drive people from wasn't aware there was something I need to do to I need to get something done that's Phil's development right and so how do you take how do you take that that skill set and put that into other areas of the organization so you know not even just in in the revenue side of the house where it comes to what we think of it today it's it's the skill set that can be deployed across market research to sales development to customer success to maybe even you know actual product development getting stuff done right how do you get stuff done so it's really exciting to think about that the possibilities are limitless if you start that's right that's right awesome I will hey thank you so much for joining us today this has been an incredible conversation about process development and so where can the audience find you if they want to learn more about the sales developers and maybe even check out that book outbound sales no fluff yeah anyone can connect with me on LinkedIn my LinkedIn is - sales development representative so I had took for a while but to Ryan tracer sales developers reach out my phone number my email is on there as well anyone interested in the book hit me up connect with me I'll send you a free copy and and you can also learn more about on our website this developers calm awesome great way thank you so much for joining us today Ryan thanks Ryan yeah thanks guys