Land the job you want then earn the promotion you deserve with Charlie Locke

Every company has breakdowns in their revenue process. Sure thing. Deals slip into next quarter, competitors creep in and swipe deals away at the last minute, and deals getting single threaded that don't get to power. These are just a few examples of revenue leak, but there are a ton more and they're preventing your team from reaching their sales targets. That's why I'm such a big fan of Clary's Revenue platform is the only tool that actually helps leaders take control of their revenue and thrive through any market conditions, especially when things get tough. You can't afford to miss a single detail, but you also can't be leading by gut. Clary combines the science and the art of sales and sales leadership. So go to clary.com if you want to answer the most important question in your business. Are you going to meet, beat or Miss on revenue? 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 on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff. But first, a quick shout out to today's sponsor, Vidyard. If you aren't using video in your sales process, I promise you you are leaving money on the table. I personally have been using Vidyard with my teams for years now and we use it everywhere. Top of funnel to book more meetings via email and LinkedIn, middle of funnel to improve show rates, to demos, post demos to do proposals and follow up and close deals faster. Using video allows you to connect better with your prospects, bring your personality, energy and enthusiasm across every single time and they have a much more impactful and memorable experience for your buyer. So again, if you're not using video, you need to be. And if you are using video, you should be using Vidyard. Check out vidyard@vidyard.com and with that, let's get back to the show. 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 talk about two of the most important subjects when it comes to the SDR Role first, how to land it. How do you land this role? How do you get into tech sales as an sdr, which can be the foundation for a phenomenal career in sales.

Right.

There's no one out there teaching how to interview, how to land it, but also how to ask the right questions to make sure you're setting yourself up for success in that role. But then you've got it. Then what? How do you succeed and then how do you get promoted? I know very few lifetime SDRs who do it by choice. You join that SDR role so you can then graduate into something else. And we're gonna talk about promotion today as well with someone who knows it and knows it well. Just Charlie Locke. So Charlie, if you don't know him, if you're an SDR or an aspiring sdr, you need to follow this dude. He's the co founder of SDR Nation. He's also worked for companies like Shutterstock and Salesforce. He's also co founded a couple companies as well. VP of Sales and Marketing. Like this dude gets it at all levels. But what I really love and respect about him is he is a self proclaimed love to teach. And I think that's probably why he's seen so much success already with SDR Nation. So he's going to share with us what he's learned from working with thousands of SDR in that community and so much more. Charlie, my man, welcome to the show.

Hey kd, thanks a lot for having me. Really appreciate it. Pumped to be here?

Hell yeah, my man. Like I'm pumped for this because like I am a former sdr, right? So there's always a very special place in my heart for this role. And so I'm so excited to talk about kind of this passion of yours and get into a little bit more here. And let's start with the interview, right? Because as a VP of sales and you were a VP as well, like you interview a lot of SDRs and, and it still is surprising to me how ill prepared a lot of them are coming into the interview. Right. So let's talk about prep first. How should an SDR prep for an interview to give themselves a better shot?

Yeah, for sure. And I think before we, you know, before we dive right in, I just want to back it up a little bit because this is a, it's a really tricky subject for a lot of folks, especially as an early SDR because you probably haven't been in a lot of interview cycles before and, and I think what's important for you to Understand is what the interviewer or what the hiring manager or the recruiter is fundamentally looking for across the board. Fundamentally. I think it comes down to a few things they're really looking for. Do you have the raw skills that an SDR would hopefully have some of those hard skills? And the thing is, most of you probably don't. You know, if you're getting into the SDR role, you're coming out of school maybe, or maybe it's your second job. You probably don't have a lot of sales experience. And for that reason, you know, you probably haven't gone through the process of interviewing for a sales role in the past. So really, at the end of the day, I think a lot of SDR leaders and hiring managers, they're really looking for a few things that are more soft skills, skills that, you know, you might not be able to. Might not be able to teach someone. I think that's the fundamental thing that's important for you to know as an SDR or someone early in your career is that the hire, the people that are hiring, they're hiring for things that they can't teach. They know that you don't have all the skills. That's okay. They know that you haven't learned it before, that's okay. But they want to know if you've got the raw, fundamental, perhaps behaviors and soft skills that they can't necessarily teach you. And some of those things are things like curiosity, Some of those things are things like coachability, or maybe it's an internal locus of control. We can talk a little bit about what that is. Maybe it's just general intelligence or grit is what we get a lot of. I hear a lot about as well, passion and grit. And ultimately those are the things that you'll go. The hiring manager will be trying to suss out in the interview process when it comes to hard skills. And back to your question. Kd around preparation. The BDR job or SDR job is all about preparation. The whole job is about research and being prepared for your call. And there's a lot of things you can do to prepare for your call with a prospect, you know, that is going online, looking at their company, making sure you have a good understanding of what the company does, how they make money, what probably their challenges are, then going to make sure that you look at their LinkedIn and getting a good understanding of what role the person's in, perhaps how long they've been in the role, maybe having some guesses around what they're passionate about, what they care about finding some things to maybe personalize your outreach and build some rapport before you even get on the phone with them or email them. A lot of those skills you can leverage in your interview process. Whenever I would have a first chat with an SDR on the phone, one of my first questions would be, what do you know about me? And then my second question would be, what do you know about my company? If they couldn't answer those two questions at a basic level, I'd be a little suspect if they've got that sort of raw curiosity and just the passion for researching at least a little bit about who I am and, and what the company I'm working at does.

And so let's give people kind of a checklist of things of what should you research before going into that interview? Right. If we give them like four or five bullet points of like, at a minimum, you should know blank before you walk into that interview or I guess into that zoom. What would that like, quick checklist be?

Yeah, things I like to look for, I mean, myself, before I reach out to someone, I'm looking to see if I know anyone that they're perhaps connected with as well. It's a really easy icebreaker. I'm looking for hobbies or interests or things like that that might give me some indication or maybe they have. When you search them online, you might find out that they've got a family or that there's pictures of them skiing or something like that. You don't want to be too creepy, but something that you could potentially relate to them on so that you can break the ice in the first 30 seconds. I mean, that's just an easy sort of rapport building tactic that you can use and you can weave that in at any point. So that's certainly. I'm looking for something that I can build off of that's going to connect us on a personal interest level. You know, next I'm looking for any sort of information on the company or what the company's strategy might be. You know, you can go as far depth down into looking at their financial statements and looking to see if the financials actually line up with what the CEO is saying that they're doing. Any sort of news articles, any sort of anything interesting that's coming through the company's website or any sort of news that you can find on them. That's a really great way to show that you've at least done some research and understanding of, you know, perhaps where they're going in the next year or two. Potential Strategies that they're going to be employing to meet their targets. And, you know, anything that would really allow you to bring the conversation into a business conversation and show them that you've actually done a little bit of your research. So if I'm interviewing for a role, I might say, hey, I noticed that you folks just raised a series A. I'm guessing that you've got some targets to hit next year. Walk me through a little bit about how I might help as an SDR in helping you get to those targets. Now that you've got a board of investors that you've got to now report to. That'd be a great question to start off the conversation as an SDR shows me that they've done research, shows me that they're thinking at a higher level of how they could impact something that I care about as the VP of sales is hitting their numbers and would really put them in a great position. I think that's ultimately what it is. I think of the interview as a way to show your sales chops. And what I mean by that is if an SDR can do some discovery in that first call, in doing so, finding the real problem behind why I'm actually hiring. It's just like sales. Ultimately, great sales means you have a solution to some problem that your customer or prospect has. And your job as a great salesperson is to do great discovery so you can nail down exactly what that problem is so that when you come out with your pitch, your demo, your presentation, your positioning directly on the center of your target, and so you're nailing that main problem. It's the same thing in interview. We're interviewing because we have a problem. We can't hit our number, we can't get to certain targets, we can't build enough of a career path. There's some problem that the company has, and they need to hire people to solve that problem. And if you put yourself into that mindset of figuring out what that key problem is and why, you as the solution might be the right solution to solve that problem. As a pipeline builder of some sort, you're going to show me that you got great sales jobs.

And so how would you recommend they do that? Or what are some good questions that an SDR in an interview could ask to kind of show that they're putting it all together right? Like, because I think there's two things. There's questions they should ask about the opportunity that I want to dive into, but more so, like, what are some good questions they can ask to show the interviewer, like, wow, like, they've really done their research, or, wow, like, they're trying to find my problems. Because what I don't want to have happen is I don't want an SDR to listen to this and then go interview with someone like you and go, so what problem are you trying to solve? Sure. Right. Because, like, I don't want that to happen. So let's paint that picture of, like, well, how do you craft a good question that shows them, like, wow, like, they got some chops to them?

Yeah, that's a great question. You know, just like sales and doing great discovery, not only are we trying to find the problem, but we're trying to find what the buyer, in this case, the hiring manager thinks is the right solution to the problem so that you can position yourself accordingly. And so ultimately, you might come out.

With.

A generic sort of question of like, hey, I'm guessing you're growing and you're in need of more pipeline. Can you walk me through some of the targets that you folks need to hit this year and perhaps why hiring another SDR would help you get to those targets?

Right.

Just to quantify it a little bit more and actually put it into a bit more context. I like when SDRs or salespeople start talking about the numbers need to hit and actually want to break down how they individually could impact that number. So that might be a great first question. Do you mind walking me through some of your targets and then walking me through. Okay, great. So I now know your targets. How many SDRs do you currently have in place right now? Or BDRs do you have in place right now? Great. So with your current team, where are you going to land? Are you going to be at 50%? Are you going to be at 90% of your targets? What's the gap? Right. What are we trying to really solve here by hiring me? I think just starting off with some quantifiable numbers makes it a really easy way to get into a conversation that the person hopefully knows a lot about, but also really helps you identify the gap. All right, I get it. So you need to double your team size, or else you're not going to get to your number. This year you got a team of five. You got to get to 10. So I can represent perhaps 20% of you getting to that target this year if you think in the right fit. So we kind of land on what the gap is. And I think that's like, step one, then step two is like, what's the right person to fill that gap, am I the right person? What things do you want to know about me based on what you think is important to know that I'm the right person or not. So this is when I love when salespeople or SDRs start asking me questions like, tell me about the best rep on your team. What do they do really well? What do you like about the way they operate? Why did you hire them? Why are they different than the rest? Right. And I think there's a bunch of questions you can ask there, but you're really just getting the hiring manager or the SDR manager to tell you exactly what the blueprint is for the perfect SDR in their eyes or the best STR at this company. And that's a great way for you to then ask a bunch of layering questions of like, oh, they got great work ethic, they were just in first last day, whatever it might be. And if you don't get enough meter on that work ethic, tell me a bit more like what else about what else do you love about that person's work ethic? You know, so you can really start to gauge what you like, what they like about their best sdr. I also like to ask or I like when SDR is a salespeople, ask, tell me about your lowest performer. Why are they struggling? You know, why are they different than your top performer? You know, was it something in the hiring process? Was it something that, you know, feel like they didn't get the right training? You know, where do you think, you know, where do you think they're struggling? And how do you think about avoiding that your next hire? Just by those two sides of the spectrum. By asking about the top performer and asking about the low performer and what their skills and behaviors are and how they operate on a day to day, you're gonna get a pretty clear picture on what they're looking for in their hire.

And I love that top performer and bottom performer question. I think that's really good in a way it shows genuine curiosity. You should want to know what the top performer is like and you should want to know what the bottom performer is doing incorrectly or not doing that's leading to them being at the bottom. So I think those are great, great questions to ask the just kind of show that you think differently and that you're curious and that you're trying to learn. Now let's look at the other way because not all SDR opportunities are the same. And a lot of times I think SDRs, especially first time SDRs, even second time SDRs get blinded by the shiny. We just raised our series B and upward Mobility and here's 200 shares. Like they get blinded by what all looks good on paper and don't actually ask the questions that they should to determine whether or not it's the right opportunity for them. So what are some questions that SDR should be asking to really vet the opportunity? Because I think a lot of people forget, especially when you're trying to break into something, you feel like the interview is all one sided. Right. They have to ask me all these questions so I can earn the job. The interview's supposed to go the other way too, where they need to earn you as a candidate and not a lot of people approach it that way. And so what questions should they be asking or what are things they should be looking out for to say, wait a minute, maybe this isn't the best opportunity for me?

Yeah, that's a great question. And we can certainly get into some of the best practices or at least the mindset, because in SDR Nation, I do a lot of coaching session with SDRs that are either in an interview process to get promoted or for a new job. And I, I think the biggest gap for a lot of them is their mindset on how they answer questions. But we can talk about that a little bit later. Getting back to how do you suss out whether the opportunity is the right opportunity for you in SDR Nation, I've actually built out a checklist for anyone that's going through this process. Some of the key and so I won't necessarily get into questions, but I'll get into areas that I think you should explore as you're thinking about the opportunity. And some of these areas might not be as important to you as they are to someone else, and that's totally fine. But for me, I think the overarching thing for someone usually in their first or maybe second job or really starting out in their career, is that this time of your life is about learning. This phase of your life is about learning. You will be, you'll be shocked at how many SDRs I'm talking to where it's their third SDR role. And that took them two to realize that either the pay or the benefits or the excitement and the allure of the product or whatever it might be means nothing compared to what the learning experience is going to be like for you in that company. Because this part of your life, it's about nailing specific skills that you can take on layer on top of. And you might go to A great company. But if you have a shitty manager, if you got a really shitty onboarding program, if there's no real onboarding or enablement and training, ongoing or coaching, that's going to happen, you're going to not only hate your job, but you're probably going to suffer. You're probably going to struggle, and you're probably going to fail for a lot of those reasons. It's a really, really hard job. It's the hardest job in sales. We talk about that all the time. And if you don't have a strong support net around you to catch you when you fall, because you will fall, because the job, in a lot of ways is about failing. You know, we're in the business of missing a lot of the time. It's just like baseball in a lot of ways, right? I mean, the best baseball players miss seven times out of 10. And so, you know, it's very, very similar. And so what I tell people to really try to get insight into is who's your leader? You know, do you know who your manager is going to be? And if maybe there's a team of four leaders or something, or four managers. Do your due diligence on those, folks. Is this their first managing job? You know, and it can be for a lot of SDR managers. Are they just a brand? Like, are they a new SDR manager that they were an SDR two years ago? They're 26 years old. They were the best SDR, but this is their first time leading. They're going through a huge learning curve at the same time that you're going to be going through that learning curve as well. And so that might not be ideal for you. They might be great, but not, you know, many times those early SDR leaders tend to struggle as well. And they don't know what to do, and they don't know how to coach you, and they don't know they're learning at the same time you're learning. So that's one of the things I think you should really dig into. I think you should really dig into the onboarding program. What does onboarding look like? Do they have a structured onboarding? How long is it? How does it relate to your ramp? You know, as you're, you know, are they expecting you just to jump in and hit the phones and start producing? Or is there a ramp? Is there a certification? Is there any sort of, you know, checkpoints that they've. They've actually outlined that are going to, you know, give you the indications and give them the Indications that you're on the right track or not. So talking a lot about that and then talking about, okay, cool. After that happens, walk me through, you know, what a week to week looks like from a learning perspective. So, you know, am I going to have one on ones with my manager? How long are those one on ones? What do you usually talk about in those one on ones? How do you diagnose if I'm struggling or not? Those would be some great questions around the ongoing learning or how often do you do trainings? What are those trainings? Looks like. What was the last training you did? What was the, what we do in weekly.

Cool.

What was the one you did last week? What did you train them on? So trying to really get a really good picture of what the learning experience is like. I think that's what's most important. And you know, and if all of us, I mean, Katie, you know, you've been an SDR leader, I've been one as well. And we've come up through the ranks and here, there, but we know when we look back the money will come. Right? The money always comes. But right now and in year one, year two, you need that, just that knowledge and you need to know that you're in a place that's going to give it to you.

And could you give some people some maybe red flags to look out for, to listen for? Right. Because if I'm a first time SDR and I ask some of those questions, I may not know what a good answer is. Right. I say, so walk me through your onboarding program and the person goes, yeah, we get you on the phones fast and we really help support you. You're going to learn from your peers. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? What would be some things to maybe they should listen for? If they ask some of those questions and the answers come back a certain way to maybe kind of be on alert that it might not be the best opportunity.

Yeah, I mean, I think that the devil's always in the details. And so it takes a lot of gumption and guts to ask those second layer questions, I think. So if I was to layer on to the answer you just gave me there, you know, it might be okay, cool. So you sort of get folks on the phones. Last I'm curious, does every SDR make it out of your onboarding program? You know, what's the average 10 year like for an SDR? Like I might want to go down that path. A lot of companies unfortunately hire, you know, five and keep three and that's their onboarding strategy. And so you might just. Rather than trying to look into the crystal ball about what might have happened to you, maybe ask about the last cohort. You know, ask about the last group that got onboarded and walk me through how that went. And, you know, are all five of those folks there and the ones that are at the bottom of that group, why are they struggling? What could you have done differently in onboarding? And if they don't have really good detailed answers or good examples or they actually have an onboarding process that unfortunately is designed to basically just. We're going to throw five people into the blender and see which three spit out. That's a big red flag for me. And that's unfortunately how a lot of folks hire and onboard these. These days.

No, it is crazy. I think those are things to really pay attention, y'. All. If they say things without specifics or they dance around it or they won't answer the question, those are things where, like, it's. It's worth it, y'. All. I hope you caught what he said. He said the money always comes. Don't just jump at the role because they offered it to you, because picking the wrong role quite literally can ruin your career. I think we lose so many SDRs who get their first opportunity that was just a bad opportunity, and then they think sales isn't right for them. They think they're not cut out for sales, when really they just got into a bad situation and it ruined their entire career. Drives me nuts. Like, we lose good people across this industry all the time simply because they got into a wrong opportunity right at the beginning and think that's what it takes, like, everywhere. Right. So now, before we shift to promotions, any parting advice of, like, how to really stand out in an interview? Right. Because, like, they're interviewing multiple candidates. Like, how do you stay memorable? How do you make sure, like, you're the one that, like, wow, like, there was just something about that Charlie guy. There was just something about him.

Right.

Like, what are some things to stand out or be memorable in that process?

Yeah. And this is. I'm glad we're talking about this, because this is the big one, I think, which is that that mindset of how you want to portray yourself throughout the entire interview process. And I think where, you know, where a lot of folks get this a little bit mixed up is an interview certainly is a time to gloat. It's a time to promote yourself. It's a time to be very comfortable talking about all your achievements. And, and be brazen about that and perhaps not as, you know, not as much humility as you might have in your normal day to day with anyone else. And that's completely fine. I think where that can get mixed up though is hiding flaws. And when I manage teams, I always try to create a sales culture where we would expose each other's weakness. And what I mean by that is I as a leader would talk about my weaknesses all the time because I wanted to create a culture where people were really comfortable talking about the, the things that they weren't good at, the things where they were struggling. Because what that created was a communication layer that was really honest and transparent and there was tons of coaching and learning and just all kinds of knowledge being shared because we weren't trying to pump our chests and prove to each other that we were smarter than someone else. We all know we have flaws. Let's just get comfortable with it and just start learning. And I think what I'm looking for, at least when I'm hiring for an sdr is I'm looking for a high, high learner, a learning animal. Because I know you're not going to.

Have all the skills.

Like I said, I know you don't have never maybe sold before. I know you maybe have never prospected or done a cold call. I can train you on those things. What I can't train you on is are you self aware about your areas of weakness? Are you comfortable talking about those areas of weakness so that I can actually coach you? I don't want to sit in a one on one with a rep that's guarding all of their challenges, guarding all of their struggles for fear of me judging them. It's going to make it really hard for me to help that person out and get good at the job. So I want people that are like, hey, I'm struggling right here in this part of the process. I think here are the things that I've done to maybe fix that problem and I'm stuck. Can you help me out? Like that's the perfect rep for me. I'm not looking for the person that's saying, I don't know what's wrong with me, I don't know what I'm struggling with or I don't want to tell you because I'm worried that you're going to judge me. So if we're, you know, that's going back to coachability and self awareness and learning animals. So in an interview process, what that means is your mindset should be one where you're very comfortable talking about your weaknesses. You're very comfortable talking about the things you haven't done before. And so many STRs are trying to glaze over that they're trying. New promotes are trying to glaze over why they left the last company, why they maybe failed in the last job, where they struggled in the process, where they're nervous about in the new job, whatever it is. And we can all see right through that. Now all I'm hearing is you're lying to me. You're making up some excuse about why you struggled. That's not the person I want. I want the person who's like, you know what? I failed in that last job because I didn't know shit about cold calling. I thought I was good at it. And then the other three reps that were there were way better than it at me. And I started to learn it, but I just didn't do it fast enough. And here's the things I learned. I learned that I needed to have a much stronger opener. I needed that I called at different points of the day. I'm also reading this book around cold calling and I'm really working on that skill right now. Those are the things I'm doing because I really struggled on my last job in that now I don't want the person who's like, yeah, my manager didn't like me, my territory was crappy. Excuse, excuse, excuse for all these reasons why you got fired. I don't want that. I want the person who owns it and knows where they're struggling and is really self aware. And so that should be your mindset. It should be your mindset of being very comfortable with your flaws, very being very comfortable with the fact that you don't know how to sell, but then talking about how you're going to get there and your journey to get there. That's going to stand you out from the pack 100%.

I love that. And that's different than I think what a lot of people give advice there, right? They're like, oh, we'll send a follow up email or, you know, whatever else. Like, no, that being human, you guys. And being honest is memorable. Being authentic is memorable because so many people put on a facade, a mask, a Persona that then doesn't land with anybody versus being yourself and being honest and being real is what people remember. And that is what gets people to say just so y' all listen, that is how, you know, two leaders like myself talk about candidates sometimes is it comes down to like, man, like everything looks Good about both of them. But there was just something about her. There's just something. And we can't even put our finger on it. Sometimes we can't even define it. But there's something that stood out. There was something where that attachment was there. And being real and honest really can help drive that home. So I think that's phenomenal, phenomenal advice. Now let's make the transfer. All right. Got the job. Cool. I'm doing well in my role. Cool. How do I earn that promotion? I want to make sure everyone's hearing the question right, too. How do I earn the promotion? Not how do I get promoted? How do I earn that promotion? Right. So what are some things that from day one, people should be doing to set them up for success? Then we can kind of continue along the career journey? So I just got that job. How can I set myself up for success to earn that promotion from day one?

Totally. And, you know, I'm going to preface this with I've been the sales leader, you know, at companies where that promotion path hasn't necessarily been extremely clear. It's tough in a startup, you know, and. Or even a larger company where you've got maybe a couple hundred people, you're changing all the time. You might have big org restructures, you know, different ways of going to market. And for that reason, the career path can be a bit muddled. And I would say for most SDRs out there, or most folks early in your sales career, unless you're at a big, big company like a Salesforce, where you can literally map the path from beginning to end and see hundreds and thousands of people going through that, it's a bit gray, and that can be really frustrating for you. Obviously, as an early salesperson, what do I do? How do I take control of this whole process? And so really, ultimately, in the first three months, even six months, my best advice to folks is just to really not. At least in the first three months, don't be thinking about that too much. You want to show that you just want to nail the job, put your head down, work hard, get to number one and get that motion down. If you're angling and positioning too early and perhaps looking a little bit too far down the line for your next promotion too early, it's going to take you away from just being really good at the job. And so you want to be known. You want to have that foundational sort of perception of the person. She just works hard. She gets the job done. She knows how to hit her number. She knows how to get through the hard times and you want to be known as that person. I think that's really important for the first three to six months. But at some point in that, in that probably three to six month range, you're going to want to start perhaps Talking to other SDRs that are now AES and just getting to know. I'm a big fan of just forget trying to invent something, just go and see what someone else did before and get to know these people and understand their journey and understand how they went through that process. Just to get a little bit of an understanding of why they think they got promoted, things they did earlier in their tenure and the previous role, and start to think about how you can maybe mimic some of those behaviors, but do it in your own authentic way, obviously. But look at that path. Now. Here's the key piece of advice though, is I talk to tons of SDRs that are in month 14 or maybe month 9 of their tenure. They're the top performer and they just don't know how they're going to get promoted. They don't know what the process is. They've talked to their leader ten times about it and the leader keeps saying, yep, yep, you're totally on the right track. You know, we're gonna, we're gonna define a career path for you and don't worry, keep going. And you know, we're. And it just never happens. And there's just so many reasons for it not happening. And you can't blame the manager or maybe the vp. It's just sometimes the business is changing and those things change. But where it sucks for you is you're just waiting. You're in a waiting game and you're being, in a way, you're being a really shitty salesperson because you're doing the follow up thing where it's like, hey, just following up. Where are things going? And did you talk to the vp? Is there actually a real career path? What's going on? And what I would say is if you want to take control of your promotion, treat it like a sales process. And I've given this coaching to a lot of reps and SDRs and it's really changed the whole game for them because. It'll give you the confidence and it'll give you the empowerment to actually be running the promotion process yourself. Because what you don't know is that a lot of companies don't have a strong promotion process. So if they don't have one, you need to create it. This is what the reps that for the most part that earn their promotion, do they own their promotion process and they create their own promotion process. And here's how you do it. You run it like a sales process. So what I would start to do first is I would start to do discovery with the next hiring manager. Ask your manager, say, hey, is it cool if I meet with the AE manager or the marketing manager, whichever path you want to go, or csm, and just ask them about what their business is like, what they're going to need in the future, what the best performer looks like, what the worst performer looks like, and start to get that discovery down. That's the first step in any really good sales process. But you're ultimately trying to figure out, do they have a problem that needs to be solved with a new hire and do they want to solve that problem with an SDR or do they want to bring in someone externally, just what is. What is their problem and could I potentially be a solution for that problem? So you do that initial discovery with the ae. Now, usually in the sales process, you move to the proof, which is I'm going to show you a demo or I'm going to show you some sort of deck or something that outlines why your solution is the right fit for their problem. In this case, it's you. So if I sit down with an AE manager and I understood what the best performing AES do and what the worst performing AES do and what success or failures look like for SDR promotes, I can then put that framework against me and say to the AE manager, hey, do you mind if over the next six to nine months I outline, you know, where I think I'm going to be where I think I am right now? You mentioned that, you know, discovery is a really important skill that you want to make sure every AE has. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'm guessing I'm probably a 5 right now. I'm not going to say I'm a 10. We all know I'm not. I haven't done it a lot before.

Before.

Would you agree on that? Yeah, I probably agree. Okay, cool. How do you think I can move from a five to a nine or a ten over the next six to nine months? AE manager. Well, I think you could shadow these calls. You can listen to these recordings, you could do more in your SDR calls. You could read this book or whatever. Cool. Is it cool with you that, you know, I've set up some time perhaps twice over the next six months. We meet once every quarter and I'LL come back to you and I'll show you where I've improved and what I've done to improve in these areas based on your feedback. Does that sound okay? So what I've done there is I've created a sales process. I've done discovery, understand what they're looking for, what their problem is. And I'm now creating a way to deliver proof that I'm actually the solution for that problem. And I've created the sales process that I'm in control. We're going to meet once every quarter or once a month or whatever. We're going to review this matrix of where you think I stand in all these areas and I'm going to show you how I'm getting better month over month, quarter over quarter on the things that you care about in your next hire. Is that okay? So this way of owning your promotion works and I've just seen it work over and over again because it's so there isn't a process sometimes and it's very gray and at a minimum you'll feel just so much better about you owning it and not just being a follow up waiting person throughout the whole promotion process.

And I love that because it's so proactive and I hope people listen to. One of the questions he asked is he didn't ask how can I get promoted? He asked how can I develop this skill? Right. You expect someone to be at X for Discovery. The question was how can I get better at Discovery? It wasn't just how can I get promoted? And it's that skill development that I wish more SDRs focused on in their promotion path, not tenure. Just because you've been in SDR for 18 months doesn't necessarily mean you've developed the skills necessary to be an ae. They are very different roles and I really hope people caught that because I think that's so important. It's how can I get better at this skill? Right. And by the way, how soon should they start working on the skills it takes to be an AE? Charlie? Should they wait until they've hit 18 months?

Well, yeah, if you're going to do this process right, this is a year long process for a lot of folks. I mean, I think you should be in the SDR role for 12 to 18 months in order to really nail it. And so you might get promoted faster and that's fine. But yeah, I mean, if you're going to start this process, you should be starting it in month three to six like I said. And it could take a year before you get there. But you'll be owning your own enablement and you'll be owning your own promotion if you run that process properly. But you nailed it, Katie. So many folks, they think it's a tenure based thing when at the end of the day, I've turned down, unfortunately, tons of SDRs that were top SDRs. But then when you really dig into an interview process for an AE role, they're missing a lot.

Absolutely. And I think that it's unfortunate, right, because you've been at that company a year, right? Which means you've been setting demos for a year, which means your demos have been running for a year, right? Like, I had an SDR on my team ask me this question a couple months ago, right? Like, what can I start doing to get ready, right? And I said, well, how many demos have you even listened to over the past three months? It's like, well, none.

So.

You could maybe start there.

This.

Thing that you want to go do, maybe go listen to those, right? When I was SDR and trying to get ready to be an ae, I was listening to a demo a day, a demo a day, breaking it down, writing it out, paying attention to like, oh, like what did they do? Or what questions did they ask? So by in three months, that's already 60 demos listened to, broken down and scored, and that starts to be absorbed. And oh, by the way, sdr, do you think that might also make you a better sdr? Listening to these demos and listening to what questions get asked and why people buy and things of that nature. So that's so, so important. Now I'm gonna ask the opposite question here though, right? And you know, we'll see how this goes. So I've been doing those things, Charlie. I've been performing in my role, which, by the way, we kind of glazed over SDRs. You have to perform, you do need to perform. You have to be good at your role. So I've been, I've been at my role, I've been asking these questions, I've been developing these skills, and I still can't seem to get promoted. At what point do I consider leaving to try to get an AE role?

Yeah, this is another common, common scenario that I find in STR Nation in my coaching calls. And unfortunately, in some organizations there just isn't a career path and that's the first thing to look out for. And I think you again, going back to that sort of hiring criteria that you might want to look for if you're at perhaps a small startup, but it's a very enterprise type solution, you know, with a, with a big ticket item and you look at all the salespeople at the company and they're 10, 15 year veterans of sales and they've all come externally and none of them have actually been promoted internally from an sdr. That's a big red flag if you're an SDR looking to get into sales. I mean, I'm not saying sales is the only path for sdr. A lot of them do want to go into that path, but you know, it's very unlikely that you could crush it for a year and a half in an SDR role there. But they're simply just not going to promote someone without any sales experience into an enterprise sales role. It's just not going to happen. And that's just the nature of the product that they're selling. It's just, you know, it's something that you need to be aware of. A lot of companies will create a mid market, you know, segment or an SMB segment out of an enterprise product and to create that career path a lot of ways. But that's something to look out for. Just has any AE here ever been in sdr? If they haven't, watch out. You know, you might just do two years of SDR and that's it. You know, they cycle through you. The next thing I would, you know, I think the trickiest thing is it's really difficult to, you know, actually we're seeing a lot of this in the market now because I think it's such a hot market and people are really scrambling for sales folks where they are hiring AES from SDRs of other companies. But traditionally that hasn't been a traditional path. You know, you really, I would say you can put yourself in a tough position if you're trying to go from SDR to an AE in another company. Usually the most, the easiest path is to go to be an AE at your current company and just get there and then start to look for other AE roles because it just tends to be a big leap and a big leap of faith for the hiring company to hire an AE as an sdr. But I think, you know, things you'll want to, the big red flags are going to be any SDR that has, you know, been there longer than you and seeing what they're doing. Are they getting promoted? And another red flags would be SDRs that did get promoted and are they succeeding? You know, are they having any success at all in the job? And, and why, why are they struggling? Where's the challenge there. And if you're seeing a lot of that, then that might be a good indication to maybe start to think about pivoting to somewhere else. Because you're probably going through the motions with a dead end perhaps.

And that's why I enjoy being able to talk with you about this. I was like, well, ask the hard questions that maybe people aren't willing to ask or go through of. Sometimes you do need to make that change. But, but, but, but, y', all, you have to do it the way he's talking about. Because if you make the leap from SDR at one company to AE at another company, but you didn't at least work on developing those AE skills at your current company, you are almost guaranteed to fail. The Bridge group released a study on this a couple years ago that showed, like, the failure rate of SDR is moving to AE at another company, I think was high, 60%. Like, it was a high number that failed out in that first AE role. And it's because more often than not, they didn't take the year ahead to learn the skills an AE needs to have. So now we've already. Man, we've already been riffing on this for 40 minutes. This flew by here. So I got two last questions for you here. Right? So the first one is, you know, we call it like the big three, right? We've talked a lot about the interview and promotion. If you could give people three parting pieces of advice that you'd want them to remember from this conversation, what would those big three things or three takeaways be?

If I'm going to summarize the top three things I think we talked about today, and maybe I'll go backwards because my memory can get a little bit shaky, but owning, taking control of your promotion and treating it like a sales process. Do discovery about what you know, you. You know what the hiring manager is looking for, and figure out a way to create a process to prove that you're developing in those areas and improving those areas. So treat the promotion process like a sales process and take control of it. Number two would be be very comfortable with your flaws in the interview process and be very comfortable talking about how you overcome those or going to be overcoming or are overcoming those flaws in order to prepare yourself for the job. Don't try to hide them. Don't try to be perfect. Don't try to be the best, because good interviewers are going to pick through all that bullshit and they're not going to hire you because they can tell that you're Glossing things over and you're basically telling them what it's going to be like coaching you, which is a really going to be a tough, a tough person to coach. So be very comfortable with your failures and your where you're struggling and have an answer of why you're, how you're going to improve in those areas that's going to set you out from the pack. You want to be, you want to come across like a learning animal. And learning animals talk about their failures and their flaws all the time. They're comfortable because they're going to, they're going to overcome those not hiding anything. And then lastly would be to.

Where.

We talked about at the beginning there was finding the right fit for you and having a bit of a, I guess a matrix on what's important to you. But ultimately don't get sucked into the money or the growth or the career opportunity. Focus on the learning that you're going to get at this company. You're going to be way better off if you make 50 grand base at a company with a fantastic enablement onboarding great managers, SDR director, someone that's actually caring about how the managers are improving, then you making 80 grand or 70 grand base somewhere where it's a startup. Perhaps I shouldn't say that. A lot of startups do great work there, but they just, you know, you're maybe reporting to a Director that's got AES, CSMs and Rev Ops under them as well as well as two other SDRs and you're not going to get a lot of focus on your, on your enablement because, you know, you said it, Kevin. The number one thing that keeps me up at night and the reason why we built SDR Nation is because so many great smart young kids get into sales and just because they didn't have that support net, they fail and they think that they're not meant for their sales and they are and it's a great career, but they just have a really sour taste in their mouth after bombing out in the first six months and they pick a different career path. And ultimately that's what we're trying to. That's the problem we're trying to fix with SDR Nation is build that support Net for folks that don't have it perhaps or just being additional support Netflix for folks that do have it but want more. But ultimately you really need to think through what kind of enabled learning you're going to get from that company and make that the focus for your, for your first job.

No, I could not agree more. I mean, it really is just focusing on the long term, y'. All. It's slowing down to speed up, slow down at the beginning, it's okay. Like, it's okay. But then it starts to accelerate in the long run. And so I think that's just such clutch advice. And so let's bring it home here, Charlie. The name of this podcast is Live Better Sell Better, right? So I have this really weird idea that if we did, if we took better care of ourselves, if we had more energy, more joy, more enthusiasm, more just energy in our lives, the sales also would get better. So what would your Live better advice be for people listening?

Just give a shit about other people. Genuinely, you know, I've maybe sworn a little bit too much on this podcast.

But I. Oh, no, you're good.

And, you know, when people ask about my culture, you know, I'm not a VP of sales now. I'm now doing full time at STR Nation and trying to build this out.

But.

What I focused on a lot at an organization was happiness and creating a culture where people were very comfortable talking about five areas that I think make up happiness. And I think a lot of those five areas are, yes, your work life, but number two is your love life, your romantic life. Number two is your three is your friendships, Number four is your family, and number five is your health. And if you can bring that those five pieces of the puzzle to your work environment and actually get to know your colleagues, your peers, your manager on those five levels, everything will open up. From how happy you are at work, the kind of trust you start to build with your peers and teammates and your manager, or the trust you build with your reps on your team. If you're a manager so much, we just talk about work at work, and it's not easy to talk about those other areas of our life, but that's the shit that's most important. And if you're happy in all those five pies, you're going to be crushing it at work because you're going to be happy. Because when you're struggling at work, I've sat in many meetings with folks who basically, they're struggling in their job. And we're talking about we're looking at a dashboard and we're picking apart the process, but underneath it all, maybe they just broke up with their boyfriend and that's okay, but do I have a trusting relationship with that person where it's okay to talk about that and that's the reason why you're struggling right now? Wouldn't work be so much better if we could actually talk to each other in a more authentic way, because we trust each other to share that kind of information. So that would be my live, better advice is push your colleagues and push your peers and push your manager to talk about those other areas and really. And then ask them question about those areas because that'll mean you generally give a shit about them and your work life will be much more happy.

I love it, man.

I love it.

That's phenomenal. This has been great. Where people. Where can people go get more of you? Where can they learn more about STR Nation? Like, where can they get a little bit more of what you're dropping today?

Yeah, man. And before I end off, I just want to say thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of yours. I think you do amazing work for the entire community and the sales profession, and we just need more people like you. So thank you. But you can find me on LinkedIn. Charlie Locke. Locke. And SDRNation.com is where you can see what we're all about. You can apply to be part of our next cohort if you're an sdr. If you're a manager, an SDR manager, feel free to reach out to me. There's also a way you can apply for your team to join the STR Nation if you want to basically put your enablement on autopilot and build a little bit more of a support net for them. But again, thanks a lot for having me today. I really appreciate it.

Hell yeah, my dude. Well, I appreciate the energy, the enthusiasm, the expertise you dropped. If y' all are listening and you are an aspiring sdr, current SDR who wants to then grow up, I would say get into STR Nation. Highly recommended, what they're doing and supporting people on their journey. So, my man, thank you so much and we will be in touch.

Thank you.