MANAGING SDR TEAMS #1 - GETTING STARTED
This is the first in a series of Revcelerate posts exploring how to get the best out of your Sales Development Representatives (SDRs). In this article, Revcelerate’s SDR Director, Katherine Simches, looks at the importance of those first few weeks when a new SDR is onboarded, and becomes both a representative of your brand, and a critical component of your revenue engine.
1) TOOLS AND RESOURCES: THE ESSENTIAL SDR PLAYBOOK
When you hire an SDR, you can’t just give them a few assets to read through and a list of contacts, and head off back to your office thinking, ‘That’s my top-of-funnel problem fixed!’ You need to plan out their first few weeks in detail, and equip them with the proper tools.
For starters, you need to provide them with a list of people to reach out to and guidance on how to reach them: how to make a cold call, how to overturn objections, how to write an outreach email. Then there’s the sales engagement tech, which is critical these days. Along with access to, and education on, the tech stack, the SDR needs details of the ideal customer profile (ICP), and the right content to share with prospects. These resources all form the backbone of a sales strategy, and it shouldn’t fall to a very junior salesperson to have to source or create them.
All these tools can be gathered or linked from a central playbook, which provides the learning hub for the SDR. The playbook can be part-paper or part-digital, it might be nicely designed or something more rough and ready in appearance. It doesn’t really matter: the key thing is that it gives the new SDR access to all the things they need to learn or understand in order to do their job effectively: customer profiles, call scripts, email writing tips and templates, messaging sequences, resources on how to use the tech stack. (If they’re using Outreach, for example, there will be links to their Outreach University.)
And let’s not forget the CRM: if an SDR doesn't have access to a sales engagement tool like Outreach or Salesloft, they will probably be operating off a system like Salesforce or HubSpot. This is a little bit more manual, but still doable for an SDR, so long as they have the guidance to keep on top of accurate record-keeping.
2) ONBOARDING SDRS
Too many sales managers seem to think that having the tools and playbook in place is all it takes for an SDR induction, but in fact that’s just the beginning.
SDRs - the first few weeks
When onboarding an SDR, you have to have their whole day mapped out every day for the first few weeks, almost to the minute. You have to be present and available to them to give them the support they need, as and when they need it. We’d recommend giving new SDRs an hour and a half at the end of the day for them to review what’s happened and plug any gaps. But even if that time is relatively free, it’s still a slot that’s scheduled in.
The first week needs to be all about “How to be an SDR”. This might sound obvious, but too many companies begin their onboarding process by launching into a detailed history of the organisation, intensive product demos, learning all the tech features, shadowing the account executives. None of that is of any use to an SDR, least of all in their early days.
Instead, you need to be training your SDRs on how to make a cold call, how to write emails, how to build their brand on LinkedIn. They need to learn the value of the product, not the features and the spec. We like to have someone from the Customer Success team come in and share customer success calls, so the SDRs can hear why people want the product, how and why they use it, how it changed their life, why they love it.
Remember that the SDR is not an account executive. They are there to find people with a problem – and to try and educate them on what life would be like without that problem. It’s the role of the AE to walk prospects through the features and help put together a business case. But the SDR’s message is more direct and benefit-led: You have a pain, imagine your life without it. No one cares about features at the top of the funnel.
The whole first month of onboarding should really be focused on making cold calls.
Begin by giving the SDR a list of quality leads to work with - we wouldn’t have them doing their own prospecting till after about a month.
Katherine explains our approach:
Typically, I like to see them on the phones by Day 3. On several occasions I’ve come in to a company where the SDRs have spent three weeks without doing a single cold call! Instead they’ve sat through days of in-depth product training that they will never use.
With cold-call training, we offer hands-on guidance, we listen in on calls, we give immediate feedback. We write email approaches together too. The coaching is super hands-on, so that by week three or four, the SDRs can start to do a little bit of their own prospecting. But above all we want that first month to be focused on making calls, doing emails, talking to customers – getting all that core stuff nailed before they doing anything that isn’t a selling activity.
All of this is of course a big commitment of time and resource for an SDL (sales development leader) – but fail to do this and you will pay dearly later on.
SDRs - best in threes
One way to make the onboarding process more efficient is to train people together. We recommend hiring and training SDRs in a batch of at least three, because that way they help each to learn and you can start to identify trends and patterns – both in the effectiveness of your resources and tech, and in the way prospects and markets respond to your messages.
If you can’t afford a team of three SDRs, that could well be a sign that you need to push more on to your account executives. Less than three is unlikely to be efficient, because it will be hard to benchmark performance or optimize your operation: You won’t know, for example, if a lack of leads is down to the individual’s performance or a flaw in your sales strategy. Hiring them together also helps you to build team spirit and culture – the SDRs will bond as they go through the process together.
The first three months
The full ramp-up period for an SDR should last three months. The first two weeks of the first month are onboarding bootcamp, where you’re with the SDRs pretty much the whole day, every day. By the second fortnight of the first month, they should be able to make calls independently, write emails and handle their LinkedIn – but still their manager should be listening in frequently to calls and giving constant feedback. SDRs should be getting at least three hours of hands-on training every week.
Gradually this training will move from the foundational to the more niche – so, for example, you’d go from cold-calling essentials to more specific topics such as how to handle gatekeepers, or how to write an email opener. These multiple training sessions carry on every week over the first three months. Every week you need to review what’s being covered – identifying any gaps – and the SDRs’ levels of activity.
As the new SDRs reach the final days of month three, they should be hitting their quota. By then, they should be able to work quite independently. They should know their numbers, which ones are important and why, and start to figure out where they still need to grow.
Next in the series: Managing SDR teams #2 - Development
