How to Manage 100+ SDRs Across 4 Continents | Snowflake VP, Global Sales Development Lars Nilsson

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 3 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 it's 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 5 venture-backed B2B SaaS 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 6 years as a consultant going into Series A, B, and C companies basically doing turnarounds, or where they had started SDR teams, but where they were languishing. 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 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% 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 of the hands of your sellers and you want them— you want your sellers 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. 23-year-old Lars. This is his first day on the job. My father Gunnar was proud. He came outside, 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 been— he 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+ 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 it in an envelope, send it through the US Postal Service to our headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut. It would end up 1 or 2 months later on Bruce Roberts' desk in the Long Beach district through interoffice mail. And there it was, a hot inbound lead done 2 months earlier ending up on his desk and across my screen, what did I have to do? I had to go to the nearest Denny's, because Denny's always had payphones, and they were reliable. I had 3 of them in my patch. I would take out 2 dimes, I would call Bruce Roberts, jot down the information, another 2 dimes, call Jenny or Johnny, who was 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 penny loafers from Buster Brown did not cut it. I got told by some of my pals on my team, Lars, go get Allen 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 quota-carrying salespeople. 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. 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 Sendoso send, maybe a touchpoint through Twitter or LinkedIn to gain familiarity. This is what they learn. From there— I'm actually gonna 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 5 different venture-backed B2B SaaS companies. And I'm just going to go through a list of 8 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 5 first revenue-facing roles I believe they should hire. And again, this comes from my 10 years of advising for True Ventures and talking to early-stage founders, which is typically 1, 2, or 3 founders with an early engineering or development team, but they have not yet gone to revenue. And in my opinion, the very first front revenue-facing hire 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. 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. 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 People read, people bump, people share. These are all signals and become inbound 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. Um, and so the second role that I advocate for a very early-stage founder after that content, uh, 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 a sales path and win. 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, hire 2 sales reps. Never hire 1, always hire 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? SDRs are not junior. SDRs 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 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 going to solve. And it's not the whole world. All the companies I've joined are B2B SaaS enterprise, not necessarily PLG motions where you're selling something in days or weeks for thousands or, you know, thousands of dollars. These are 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 1,000 to 5,000 accounts to start out. I think the reason that's important is because as you find success in your early sales campaigns, you're gonna 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 win and loss reviews and begin to understand the personas, the actual titles. Because the most beautiful thing today in the world we live in is we have services like ZoomInfo and Lucia and LinkedIn 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 gonna wait for these people to trip over one of our marketing assets and come to us. We're gonna go out to them. And it's important. You need to have an inbound motion and you need to have 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 LeanData. What that does is because we have our TAM introduced and seeded 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 may be 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, 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, not like Saastr, 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. It's, 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, their students, engineers, right? If you're producing a a lot of content and pushing messaging out and having programs 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, We live, like I like to say, in a modern account-based world today. And again, the accounts that are out there have ever more ubiquitous access to people that have their roles in other companies, and they can ask, "Hey, what are you using?" They can go to meetups like this 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. 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 5 to 10 years is we, we have been building these account-based marketing motions. And delivering to target personas very personalized, very specific, you know, to the role, to the geography, to the vertical. So it's not, it's not whitewashed, it's not 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, 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 like Sixense and Bombora to understand whom in that set of accounts might be surging on 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 and other pokes and prods. What happens then after 3 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 7 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 2 years ago, there was only 2 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— as you go from those 2 SDRs that don't have a manager or their manager is the founder, and as that team grows, give them the frontline leadership that they deserve. A developed professional SDR leader that knows how to coach, that knows how to inspire, and that knows how to mentor and develop. And then as the team grows, hire a, you know, give that person a 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 20, 21 frontline SDR managers who report to 4 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 in 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, You have tools and technologies that can help your SDRs punch way above their weight. We have AEs now that are seeing the copy and the sequences, and they're going, "That's way better than I can do, man. Can I take that?" So really cool stuff.

Hey Lars.

Yeah.

Brian Rooney with Intap. So we're a little bit more mature, $300 million, about 35 SDRs. So question 2 questions relative to that context. How tightly do you align with field sales coverage-wise, strategy-wise, um, 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 8 years ago, our coverage was 1 to 8. Doesn't even work. I don't ever do that. Very quickly we got it down to 1 to 4. So one SDR was overlaid to 4 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 1 to 3.5, heading to 1 to 3. And so each SDR is overlaid. So if, if you take the 1 to 3, 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 3 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 2, 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 3, 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 SDRs sit in sales or marketing, I have some comments about that— but what I do care about is that the field respects the 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 3 reps. I don't have the mic, so someone's got it.

Oh, hello.

Hi.

Um, thank you. 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 1 to 3. 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, we're at 1 to 3.5, so we just follow the headcount 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, um, what percentage growth, we will take that and divide that 1 to 3.5, um, 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 5, $450 million, and we got about 35 SDRs as well. We're looking to scale that. We want to figure out how to scale it globally. But I was just— we have 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 to 35 SDR teams, you guys should talk. This is a very, very important point. 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 TAM. And literally 40% of them came from partners because we didn't have— so as soon as we 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 reps. 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. Our SDRs jump for joy when it's a greenfield account on a list they've been given by their AE, and the AE 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 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 belly 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 5 closest friends, if you will.

What I do—

yes, 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 out of 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 my bootstraps, I'm going to— 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 formal onboarding program. I know that's hard for startups to do. I was just talking to a founder over here, um, 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 for free and then places them. SV Academy is another 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, uh, 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 SDR, how much technical do they need to be, or is their job is just to qualify? Because the product 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 banter thing and let's say 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, our SDRs 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 Snowflake consumption pricing optimization deals, which is not something they necessarily learn as an SDR. But you'd be surprised, those SDRs 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, 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 draw. What I will do is I will give them a very professional frontline sales development leader. Um, my team is built up of younger in their career people, earlier in their career people, 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 their dials and emails are down and they're starting— all kinds of things happen. Active frontline leadership of SDRs is really important after you hire your first 2 or 3. Once you get to 3 or 4 SDRs, I would invest in someone who has done the role before.

Um, hi, uh, I had a couple questions, just two. 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, 2 million a year, Does that break down? Is the SDR qualifying and being at the front lines still hold when you're selling, say, you know, Capital One, a $10 million a year contract?

Okay.

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 3 to 6 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 1-year at the minimum to a 2-year mistake. If you hire 2, hopefully what happens is you hire the right 2 people and they are just right. There's co-opetition that happens on SDR teams. There's friendly competition. They want to push each other, but they also want to be number 1. It is a— we have a performance-based culture, among other things, on our team at Snowflake.

Like.

And the best thing that can happen is those two SDRs give you twice as much as you ever could expected. 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 2 to 3, if not 4 times the pipeline coverage for any given month or quarter, you ain't going to 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 ARR, so we're going downmarket, 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 for an SDR motion. In my opinion, if you are selling a product or a service for less than $25,000, that should take, you know, that should take, right? If you're selling something for $1,000 or $3,000 or $10,000, you got to do that in days, if not 1 or 2 weeks. You do not want to have an SDR qualifying and handing 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 long 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 $50,000 or $100,000 customer within in the year, and that's your strategy, SDR all the way, because you want your sellers selling and your SDRs prospecting. That separation of duties, right? First of all, AEs, they get paid to sell and close. That's what they want to do. Any time a sales rep is prospecting is time away from selling. And that's just downtime. So if you think you have an SDR in motion, 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, Tito of AltaSales. There are really, really good. They understand modern account-based motions. They have access and they have paid for ZoomInfo and Gong and Outreach and LinkedIn Sales Navigator to put a tech stack together to drive an outbound and 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. 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, that fit your segmentation. [SPEAKING SPANISH] Oh, there's many.

But AltaSales.

Happens to be one just because I'm looking at the founder right now and he's a good man. Uh, Sapper Consulting is another one.

Uh, there's so many, there's so many.

Um, if you want to reach out to me and ask me after you vetted a few, uh, I typically know all of them and I know, uh, I can tell you that 90% of them suck. Um, it's really, really hard 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've got to manage them daily, weekly, just like SDRs.

Hi, I'm Lily from Gradient Works. So I really believe that SDRs' account books really matter.

Because they're full-time.

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 SDR leaders taking less part in building out a territory plan for the SDRs for the coming year?

Yeah, so I've taken that off their plate at Snowflake because we're at scale and I have an operation team that does that. 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 outbound cold to any account that sales people haven't at least blessed. I would want to make sure that any account an SDR is going after sits within 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, let's see if we get engagement from 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 1,000 CISOs, that's an easy list to pull. Or you decide to do it to 5 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 home 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 sales engagement provides in the opens and replies and what happens with the links that you embed in these emails. Yeah.

We are a market vertical commerce platform for very conservative chemical industry where people hate receiving cold emails and cold calls. Do you think SDR model can work and how can we make it work?

Yeah. Again, we have— we're global. We have— I can tell you this, we have used 4 channels. We use the phone, we use the email, We use a sending platform, ReachDesk, and we use social touchpoints. 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 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 gotta be using all of them. If in your particular industry you don't— is it emails or phones that they don't? [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] So again, an email can be sent out to use as a branding, you know, your company, 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 SDRs spend a lot of time sending, uh, you know, coffee cards, or this— they'll send cupcakes. 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 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 speech you gave at the True Ventures True University 3 years ago.

And I was inspired by the story you told about 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. 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.io, we have ReachDesk. There's many of them because they work in certain instances, in certain geographies, in 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 Snowflake SDRs. That's the first one. So I'll let you answer that and then I'll ask the second one.

This is a very hotly debated topic in SDR land.

What do you pay your SDRs on? I can't— I, I hope I deliver this in a 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 5 or 10 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. What I often hear, 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 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 run through the qualification information, they got everything. They understood. But what happened at the end was that the company decided not to go forward because they had bought a competitor 3 months before that. That's massively— 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 the trial or the, you know, 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 the 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, um, what approaches have you taken that are innovative to keep your ADRs engaged, you know, when they were working at home and remote? 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, 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 5 to 10 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 2 SDRs. You can't figure out what's equitable, so you go round robin. As you get a little bit bigger, 3 to 4 to 5, you can set them up in regions. As you get beyond 5 and you have a really strong inbound motion but no outbound motion, you have to try it. 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 routed to the accompanying SDR. So if you're a Capital One and we're doing, you know, multimillion 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 SDR 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 3-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, uh, Data for 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, um, and so you need to orchestrate.