Empower BDRs to Close Deals with Saad Khan

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Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host, Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management, and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head over to patreon.com inside sales excellence. Now with that, grab a notepad, get ready, and let's dive into the good stuff. What up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host, Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd. And today we are going to be talking about a topic and a title that most of y' all know I'm incredibly passionate about. We're gonna really dive into some of the tactics and topics and theories around BDR leadership. I myself am a former bdr, sdr, adr, whatever you wanna call it. I have led multiple, multiple sales dev orgs, over 70 to 80 people. I love it. I will forever be passionate about the sales dev role, but a lot of people seem to be passionate about it, which causes a lot of advice to be given out there and a lot of different things that are preference not proven. There's no backing to it and you can tell. And that is why I'm so excited to have Saad Khan on the show with me today. He's a BDR manager over at Duly, just an up and coming org team and product. And we're going to be diving into what's really working out there, right? What's really working in the trenches, how to onboard, how to train, how to hire, how to fire, how to and also how to get your BDRs to close deals, which is something I'm super excited about. So. So, my man, welcome to the show. Let's dive in.

Yeah, let's do it. I'm very excited.

Very good. So when you. We were talking just before, you know, we hit record here and you said something really interesting that I want to just touch on real quick. You said a lot of people are talking about how to get out of the bdr Org, how to get out of BDR leadership, how to get out of this BDR track, and you said, I'm trying to stay in it. Man of my own heart there. I love this. Talk a little bit more about the why behind that.

I'll take a step back and share something that I didn't give you while we were talking. Previously, I worked at a company called clio. They were leader in the space for legal software. They didn't build their BDR team till they were a company of 12 years old and got their 2.5 billion valuation. They had three AE teams. One was a full cycle AE team, the other was round two of that full cycle AE team with a higher quota. Third was a full inbound AE team. What Clio decided to do, they started their BDR team. They gave those bdrs webinar leads and gave us training that hey, these people aren't ready to buy your product but they are ready to learn about your organization and your tech. So what they did was they moved six of those full cycle AES into the BDR team and they hired four BDRs from outside. Now those full cycle AES were, I would like to think they were not just selling the meeting, but they were selling qualified meetings. You know when people say BDRs, you should just sell the meeting. We had closing experience so we're doing things a little bit differently, but versus the other BDRs. This is on my LinkedIn. Anybody can go and see it. The entire company, the entire BDR team was converting at a 2.3% conversion. And me having been in AE and you know what, sometimes you gotta give yourself a pat on the back. I had my own process. I was converting double at 5.6% and in six months I broke the company's comp plan. Now anywhere you tell people that you went from an AE to bdr, you'd be like, that's a demotion. They paid us the exact same money. I had less stress, I had more money. I had. I learned the process better. Before 100% of me was getting split into cold calling, demoing, closing. Now that 100% is being split in one less bucket. So I was able to master that bucket. I would like to hope so. And then Dooley came calling after I went to another company as a manager. And then Michelle basically presented me this opportunity that hey, we have a lot of inbound. We are not one of those companies that are going to hire a lot of people and fire a lot of people. Would rather get few people in. Give them the right tool, right resources, enough opportunity to win at enough at bats and get them going. I was like, okay, interesting. And she said one other thing. She's like, I want our bdrs to close deal. I was like, oh, that's powerful. And asked her why and then what follows after is just some of the most real and eye opening conversations. Because it went against everything generic that the industry tells you to do. Every single thing generic the industry tells you to do.

Let's keep going. Why, right? Why did you, and especially her believe in that so much?

You know this better than I do, Kevin. Like, I don't mean to be cliche and cheesy about it, but BDRs are working really hard. But it's not hard work for the sake of hard work. There's a lot that goes into it and then there's always people are just like, oh, BDR Appreciation Week. This, that, etc, etc. I think that damages it way more than it's reinforcing that negative stereotype. I've gone on some negative next level rants and tirades about BDR Appreciation Week. So instead of BDR Appreciation Week, I'm giving my bdrs the opportunity to come start closing deals. I'm not promising them to become an AE in six months. I'm giving them the right tools and the right training and the opportunity to make things happen.

I've never participated in BDR SDR Appreciation Week. Either you're appreciating them weekly or you're not. You don't need a week to call them out. I don't even know who started that. I'm going to be careful because I don't know who started it. It might even be someone that I like and respect, but I don't know where BDR Appreciation Week came from as an idea. And so what I love there and that you mentioned this. So because training BDRs on how to be a closer is important, right? So for my BDR Org once you had like triggered, right? So like mine, like you were either a closer or you were not. I didn't, like I didn't call you a BDR if you were closing. If you were were closing, you're closing. You are an ae. Or an ae. One Junior ae, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, but when they qualified for the promotion, they went into a closing boot camp, right? Because just because you were a great SDR doesn't mean you'll be a great closer. So talk to me a little bit about how to help them with that transition because I think that's a very classic. And I can say this personally because I was an SDR too at one point where I'm going, oh, just give me that. I could have closed it.

Yeah.

Oh, I could have closed that instead. And there's always this idea that they could do it. A lot of times they do fail in that transition. So talk to me a little about the training. They're getting to be a good ae.

Thank you for asking me that. So something that I'm very passionate about, and I know you are too, is the. Is coaching and training your reps and not being a super rep, not being a super leader, not being, oh, I'll close this for you. I'll convert this for you. You can scale that. I also think that's what creates the hiring and firing model is. Hey, okay, let me just say this. This is probably all a lot of my friends, but not all great reps can be great coaches. Even in sports, you know, Jordan is not going to be the best coach. Now again, it's not an absolute, it's not black or white, it's nuanced. But a very basic example is the other. So I personally was not a great rep to start with. I had to build up to a certain level. I had to learn break process and stuff like that. The other day I was in a meeting with one of my reps. I'm a tab hoarder. I love tabs. I like, I treat them as tasks. I cut them off. We were on a call, he closed the page, opened the page again and then went back. I was in. It really just tweaked my. I was like, why would you do that? I was like, let's close. Open three tabs and close. Just, just close them one by one. That's a micro example. But now imagine leaders that don't understand their rep struggles that haven't been through that struggle. I don't know, sometimes something has to be there. I'm just going off of what I personally experience. So what I believe in is this. There's a difference between training and coaching. Training could be. And Steve Schmidt said this, he's a title and this is not my original thing but just clicked. Training could be just showing people how to use a tool, how to use salesforce, how to use dually, what to do on a day to day coaching is you're on the trenches, you're on the field with them. You're working on plays every single day. You're executing plays. I do call blitzes my team almost every day. So I'm using the same talk tracks they're using and we're optimizing on the call. We have a three. So I'm a firm believer in Sandler. So we do three layers of pain activity that a pain point is built off of three layers AKA the business. The technical layer which is hey, salesforce is messy. The business level they salesforce messy is impacting the team, closing deals and capturing data. And the personal level is that because that is happening personally the BDR manager is stressed out, the VP is stressed out, stuff like that. Because one of my reps asked me how do these pain points fall into one? I was like you need to understand this for yourself. So we do that activity. I don't do role plays. I give them scenarios. I'm like fill in these on a sheet. I'm like fill these in. Come up with your pain points yourself. So I've always been told that the way you become a great AE is by being very good at discovery is finding pain and you solve problems you don't solve for feature requests and stuff like that. So that a lot of, a lot of, a lot of call reviews, a lot of weekly training. Now kudos to Michelle. She treats the AES like A. She treats the BDRs like AES. So you know that psychological thing that she'll monthly when she's messaging people hey, what's on your pipe? She'll message BDRs as well. So she's making them feel like they're AES and not just BDRs. She's asking them hey, what are you committing? What's in your pipeline? Now somebody asked me how are the AES and BDRs not cannibalizing themselves? Well this way I am grateful that I work at a company like Duly where we have it's good demand and the AES don't have the time to manage all that demand. So the BDRs are not pressured to close any deals. They don't have a quota to close these deals so they're given a little less percentage on the acv. Now what this allows them to do is gets them some at bats. It also takes pressure away from the AES to just chase small organizations. So the bdrs, it's like training wheels for them and they're getting ready on the job. And the BDRs are also doing qualification discovery with the A's for the bigger account. So that training, that discovery training, that conversational training is going to. It's just always happening. I would like to think and the one last thing I want to add is I want them to talk a certain way. I want them to think a certain way. So I put them through an initiation in my initiation is I talk about three concepts. The first is give and get. People are always going to have objections. You can address an objection. Get something else in return. Very basic example, somebody says at the end of a call, hey, just send me something. Okay, hold on. What can I send you that's not going to get deleted? How can I stay top of mind without being annoying? Get something in return. Hey, if this makes sense, I'll share this with you, like, just to make sure this is appropriate to you. Whenever I share things, they create more questions than answers. So let's just put some time, tentatively, to make sure we address those things as well. This way, I've given you everything and anything you need to make an informed decision. So it's a step in the right direction, not a jump. First, give and get. Always think that way. Second, how to turn a I conversation into an R conversation. Mirroring Chris Voss. Labeling. Somebody is always on the other end of the mirror. Like, find a way to just, just, just, you know, even if you have to pretend to be a little dumb, like, get them to open up and, like, really be a part of this conversation and really address what they're talking about, what you're thinking about. I went on a bit of a ramble, but talking to the reps a lot, actually taking it, putting a lot of attention onto their coaching. And this is where I take responsibility. I'm not calmed on meetings booked, I'm calmed on close one revenue. So when they're acting as AES, I'm the sales manager. So it's, it's, it's the right. I would like to think it's the right behavior. And then I would hope the way it's helping our VP is when there's board meetings happening, there's additional logos and additional ACV that was unaccounted for.

So one thing you said that actually surprised me, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna poke at this a little bit, is you're not practicing with your people practicing. You said, I don't do role plays. And I was, like, surprised by that. Because if you think about all the things you're talking about here at training, messaging, fill in the blanks. Like, and you. Because you use the coach example, right, the coach is on the field. It's true. But the coach isn't on the field. Playing the coaches on the field, running practice, funny enough, the only time the coach is on the field.

Yeah.

Is practice. They're never on the field in the game. So talk to me a little bit more about that one. I was surprised to hear that.

Yeah. So can I. Does this capture a screenshot as Well.

I don't know, let's try it.

We can disregard that, but I'll go, I'll go into it further. So when I say we don't do role plays, you can call it a role play, but what it actually is going on is this. We have three, four Personas. One is rev ops, one is talking to AES, one is talking to sales leaders. I'm not going through like, hey, pretend like you're calling an ae. What we're actually doing is like, hey, think about the problems that the AES is going through. I'm not going to pretend like I'm an AE on the call. But how would you call an ae? What would you talk to them about the problems that do lead solves for? And how in that moment would this problem go from the business level like hey, salesforce is messy to an AE just being like, oh wow, my, my butt could be on the line right now. So instead of creating scenarios where you're calling somebody, I'll just start off with like, hey, you're about to talk to an AE right now. Why would an A want to talk to you? Why would an A want to take a meeting? And they go through the full pathway of. You know, when people say jargon terms like hey, my salesforce is messy, I just go like, okay, what does that mean? What does that mean? Keep, keep going. What does that mean? What does that mean? Like, make it so simple for me that a five year old can understand it. The reason why I say that is this. We're creating a new category for dually. There aren't budgets for dually in the industry, but there are budgets for salesforce optimization. There are budgets for moving your deals along, for note taking, for efficiencies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm not getting them to call people and talk about the pain duly solved for. I'm getting them to call and talk about the pain that's already there. For example, six hours back to back calls, man, like my manager tapped me on the shoulder, this happens, that happens, et cetera, et cetera. What is the impact of that? How is that actually affecting you? So the coaching and the training that we're doing, maybe it's pseudo role play, pseudo. It's not what I'm focusing on to get out of them is like when you talk about duly the actual problem, not its features, it just hits, it just resonates. We sell to sale leaders. So the way I think about it is if selling is a video game, then sale Leaders are the final boss battle. We can't master all tactics. There's so many out there. You have to master relevance. You have to master problems that already exist. How can you say this in one sentence or 2? 3 lines, and the other person goes, okay, you know what, there's something over here. And then you continue to drill on it. So maybe it's not perfect, but trying to build up to it, I guess.

Okay, cool. No, that's it. I just, I just heard that. I was like. Because practice is where you get good, right? Like practices where you, you take the things that you're teaching and bring them to life. And so, so it's interesting there. And so, okay, so if we think about then the SDR closing, I wonder if some people actually take it the other way and they're going, well, does that distract them from prospecting? So talk about that real quick, right? Like if I'm an SDR and I know I get to close now, I get to go some deals, does that take me away from the prospecting action that maybe the company or the AES are expecting?

Yeah, so they. I would hope not. So far. It's so good because they're not getting that many of those at bats. Those just, you know, SMB inbounds. They are. There's a decent amount. So that's also where kind of like one. The other thing that I also believe in is give them a structure, but leave it a little wishy washy where they can also use not wishy washy, but where they can also just, you know, flex their muscles a little bit. You know, if they're at 80%, then can they configure things out and get to 100%? Smooth seas, you hear this all the time. Smooth seas don't make great sailors. So to answer your question, the way their quotas are set up, it's not aggressive. I want to get, I want them to get quick wins so, you know, give sharks blood to, you know, all that stuff. So they're working. I guess the reason smooth seas, you hear this all the time. Smooth seas don't make great sailors. So to answer your question, the way their quotas are set up, it's not aggressive. I want to get, I want them to get quick wins so, you know, give sharks blood to, you know, all that stuff. So they're working. I guess the reason why this is helping is because Dooley's brand is enough. That the reason why I joined Dually. I was like, you know what? I'm actually excited to call people and say that I work at duly. So that's one part we have a decent bit of engagement on. On the socials. We have a lot of webinar leads coming in and what we're also doing is. So all these webinar content download leads that are coming in, we're not treating them as inbound. We're so, you know, the buyer's consideration journey. People say the buyer's concern and journey is made of three phases. Awareness, consideration, purchase. I disagree. I think there's one other phase which is the unaware phase. The standard model suggests that the awareness phase is where people are downloading blogs, webinars and articles. I disagree with that. If people are aware, awareness to me is that you're not just aware that my company exists, you're aware of the problem that it's solved for. If you were actually aware, you'd be NQL ing. So we're treating those unaware leads as basically ways into the door. Like hey, they're not ready to. It's the same thing that we did at kind of did at Clio. We're not ready to buy. This is not about the product, but this is about a topic. Hey, how to ramp new reps faster. Okay. Katie, why did you attend that webinar? How to help your manage your team's time? Katie, what prompted your interest? Why did you want to, why did you want to attend? And then in conversations you can just, you know, you can find things, pain points and, and hopefully move things along. So making those conversations easier for them by providing them those kind of leads is also helping us keep the activity going. They have target accounts that they collaborate with the AES and AES are actually giving them the right contacts to reach out to. While the BDRs are doing that as well. They have all their sequences going. So outbound is getting hit. They're not. They're tied to 40 dials a day which is not that much. But they're almost always. You can do good. I would hope if you have a good list ready then you can do a good 20 dials in an hour. Obviously accounting for just, you know, people not connecting. Yeah, they. And I'm also take. Obviously I have ownership for the pipeline so I'm making sure that at times I'm taking some stuff away from them, giving them more at bats to managing that function as well. So yeah, it's good. It's not getting impacted. We are optimizing every two weeks we're on. I like to say we work on two week build cycles. No Analysis paralysis. Let's put a version one out and let's build from there. It's pure startup 101. There's a lot of growing pains. It's something interesting we're hitting on, but it's probably one of the most fulfilling work I've ever done my entire life. It's not perfect, by no means, but it fills me with a lot of joy.

Yeah, I mean, that's. That's what it should be doing. Right. Like leadership sometimes can go the wrong direction where it's like, we do it because we want to be helping people, we want to grow, we want to scale and do all those things. They can just become a slog that's good for nobody. Right. To go through. And so. No, I love that because, I mean, I do. I agree. BDR should get to close a lot earlier than a lot of them do. I believe a lot of companies that don't have full cycle roles should create them. Because you just built this entire base of team that knows how to prospect and then you're just gonna let that talent stop is just foolish. Like, full cycle is more efficient. It keeps you close to the game. Right. You're gonna close those deals better. Which it sounds like you did when you moved into the BDR role for a little bit. Like once you have that closing experience and you know how to prospect, that's the holy grail. And I wish more teams would create those full cycle roles for SDRs to step into earlier. Yeah, maybe you sell enterprise. That's fine. You can sell some SMB deals just for shits and giggles. You can go sell some. Right. And let your SDRs BDRS work their way up a lot earlier.

I have to, I have to say it's. It's still a lot of kudos to. I'm not just giving the shout out for the sake of giving a shout out, but to Michelle because she literally poked at me two weeks ago. I'll tell. So when I started, I asked, I was, I. I asked her the question. I was like, Michelle, how many BDRs do we want to hire? I was literally expecting her to say 20, 30. She said, Eight. I was like, huh, interesting. Then I asked her, I was like, when do we want. When do you want them by? She said, when you find the right model and the right people. I was like, okay, that's interesting. And then she was like, go play.

He's sharp. I was on a webinar with her last. Last week, two weeks ago. No, she's incredibly sharp. Like really really sharp and I love that. And so let's go now to the other side of the BDR spectrum, right? Because you're talking about BDRs. You know, they've been in the role for a little bit. They're starting to close. Let's talk about getting BDRs started. Right. What is that onboarding? What does that ramp process look like for a BDR at Dooley?

The first week they're not doing any work. It's light reading and I'm getting them to make friends. Nice. We have really good synergy in the company. People are always telling me we love Dooley's content. It's so sales oriented. Our marketers could be sellers. Like, think of this, who's writing? It's marketers who are writing for sellers. And they just get it. There has to be something happening in the back end. So I tell my team, I'm part of the marketing team. I have no, I have a BDR manager title. I would be very easily on the marketing team. So I get them to do that exact same thing. Go make friends, go talk to marketing, go talk to data. Because we're kind of like a PLG company. So we do need to track product usage data which we bring up to leadership and start convincing them. So long story short, I tell them in week one to build your roster, like build your internal roster, the marketers, the product team, engineer, just like also importantly, go just make friends. So just when you're stressed out, don't just call me all the time. I'm always going to be there. But like, actually the culture at Dooley is we feel like fourth year university kids who just got a brilliant idea. They all love working with one another and obviously we poke at one another out of respect. But what ties us together, respect and just, you know, cliche as it sound, fight for the cause. But then at the end of the first week, the expectations are. They know that they're about to go on a call on Monday, they're about to start calling leads on Mondays. So by this point in time, and it's designed to. And I tell them only in the first week, they always tell me like, this is a little chill or like, what's happening? Where's the discovery question? I'm like, this is. It's designed this way. On Friday, that Friday, I'm walking them through my initiation where I cover the concepts of give and get, I cover the concept of mirroring, labeling, and I walk them through my own cell discovery pathway that I've built out. Everybody calls it standalone three layers of pain. We've kind of optimized it for dually, which we were talking about earlier. And so that's week one. So now ultimately what I want to think of is this. It's as much as it's for the BDRs, it's for me to just get an idea about what their understanding could be by that week without them feeling like it's a final exam. It's pressured, it's stressed out. I want to give them the most, but the most that could be digestible for them. Then on Monday, wheels are off. We start a single Monday morning and we go through that three layers of pain activity where, hey, if you're talking to an ae, if you're talking to leader, why would they want to talk to you? Why would that. So you were asking about the practice side. So it's not role play, but it's like it's conversational play. I don't know exactly the word for it. Like why when you call somebody, what would hit? What are you going to say that's going to hit? What's going to resonate? I don't believe in it. I should be careful. I believe in personalization, but I think personalization could be done better. Personalization cannot scale. Relevance can scale. What if you can talk with mass relevance but problems that just resonate. So we do that in the morning, tell somebody what would hit. What are you going to say that's going to hit? What's going to resonate? I don't believe in it. I should be careful. I believe in personalization, but I think personalization could be done better. Personalization cannot scale. Relevance can scale. What if you can talk with mass relevance, but problems that just resonate? So we do that in the morning and then right then and there. The very next thing is the one hour call blitz and I'm dialing with them and we're on the zoom call together. Just go, just do it. Fail if you have to, it's fine.