Megan Killian, who's generated $550 million in B2B tech revenue, says managed services is the hardest product to sell because SDRs struggle to position it and lack early wins. Without frequent small victories, reps burn out. She recommends enabling teams with clean data and realistic quotas, then celebrating responses and conversations, not just meetings.
Hey, hey guys, I'm Megan Killian, and I've done $550 million in B2B tech revenue. And I'm here to tell you that managed services is the hardest thing that I have ever sold. I've sold SaaS, I've sold CDN, I sold infrastructure, I've sold cloud, I sold compute, I've sold streaming media tools, I have sold cybersecurity, telco, B2B telco, all kinds of things. Managed services is the hardest thing I've ever sold. It is also the hardest thing every SDR I've ever employed has told me they have sold. Now, I primarily hire junior SDRs. As you may know, one of MKC's core values and our vision and mission is all around elevating marginalized talent. So I frequently hire people basically off the street, retail workers, hospitality, bartending, food service. And I really like hiring people with no experience because they don't recognize how hard managed services is to sell. That's their baseline. But from time to time, I hire somebody in who has worked as an SDR elsewhere, maybe another agency or maybe at a tech company. Every single time that I do that, within 6 weeks of working for me, they have something to say about it. So I talked to both Josh and Angela this week, who are 2 SDRs on my team who have worked outbound cold calling before, and both of of them told me in the last week that they are really struggling with positioning managed services. They're not getting those early, easy wins that they're used to. Now, if you've ever sold anything, if you are a salesperson by background, you know that we really thrive from those success hits of dopamine in our brains, right? Those of us with hunter personalities love to win. We love the thrill of the hunt. We love catching our prey and eating them. That's a terrible analogy, but I'll get to that another time. Anyways, What I'm saying is that if you have salespeople on your team, outbound callers, outbound sellers, people whose job it is to set up that meeting and get pipeline for you, please, please, please, please, please remember to go to them, praise them, tell them that they're doing a great job. Make the win the conversation, not the meeting. Not only does managed services have a long sales cycle for closing, it also has a long sales cycle for touchpoints to get a prospect engaged. It takes more work. Than selling SaaS, even selling CDN cybersecurity as a standalone. It's the hardest thing I've ever sold. And so if you are expecting someone to just be booking 10 meetings a day, that's an unrealistic expectation. And if you're not telling them that they're doing a good job for having those early conversations and contributing, and contributing to the CRM to add kind of nuggets for you for the future when you go back and you need to do more prospecting, if you aren't praising them for that, they're gonna burn out really, really quickly and get down on themselves and think that they're not doing a good job and quit and go find something else. So just a couple tips for when you are hiring an SDR for your organization to sell managed services. First, enable the crap out of them. Have a process, have a system, a CRM. Do give them really good data. Pay somebody else to clean that data so you're not paying the SDR to do it. You can outsource that offshore if you want to. Um, set reasonable expectations, give them a ramp-up period, and give praise early and often for small wins like getting a response from someone, having a conversation, feeding the CRM new info, moving the ball forward. Don't put them in a corner where the only way they get to feel like they've succeeded is if they've booked a meeting. Bye for now, talk to you later.
