A day in the life of an SDR Leader - James Bawden

What will be your biggest challenges while managing a team?

Our biggest challenges lie around, you know, identifying and setting up processes that make what they have to do on a daily basis as easy and as fruitful as possible. The toughest thing is when folks aren't performing. And if you were really real about it and true to yourself, a large reason they're not performing is they haven't been enabled properly. You know, I mean, that's just the reality of it. So I think biggest challenges is creating a system that continues to enable them as our own offerings as a business grow, right? What we provide to clients as we continue to react to what they ask for, we've got to change our internal processes along the way. So that's a big challenge for us. Tracking and mapping their individual goals, personal goals, that's big for me. I want everybody on my team, I want to be aware of their own individual personal goals, right. Whether that means I want to be at sales gig in a year or I want to run my own brewery in a year. Right? Like, how is sales gig right now helping you achieve your goals for the future? So making sure that we're tracking that and keeping up with that, which is just a constantly moving target, that's an always challenge. And then I think the third one would be continuing to create a culture and an environment because we're remote, where my team feels connected to each other and supported in a way that is really kind of tough to achieve when you're not all in the same building where you feel that kind of symbiotic learning and osmosis and those kinds of things, creating, you know, an environment where that can happen.

A sales engagement automation system is critical for any sales organization to achieve excellence, but it is a complex, tedious and expensive process for any sales organization. Sometimes it can end in a failure too, and you have to start all over again to fix this problem. PlayBook AI has introduced a program for SaaS and enterprise technology startups called the Sales Excellence Program. It is the most effective, fastest and the risk to deploy a sales engagement automation system in your organization to drive growth and achieve revenue excellence. Now, none of the top rated sales engagement platforms will give you a free trial, but in the sales Excellence program, Playbook AI Customer Success Team not only gives you the free and unlimited access to all the features for six weeks, but also does the heavy lifting of implementing a sales engagement system and provides you advice on what best practices should you follow when creating your sales playbook. Never heard of before? Right? There's an application process to get an invitation to join the program. But if you are a subscriber of Salespin, which I'm guessing you are, you can get access immediately provided you have at least four SDRs in your company. To join the program, first, subscribe to my channel and visit Playbook AI SCP. The link will be in the description box and simply type in R followed by my last name Wadhwa when the request invitation formats for the name of accelerator do you hang out in the sales community? If yes, what is that then? Why do you hang out in that.

Specific community if you're not a part of one already? Definitely look at somewhere like Revgenius. It's just such a large, vast community now of so many different types of people and with somebody like Jared at the helm and just the type of vision that he has, I think it's just going to continue to be a positive place.

If you were to start as an SDR today, what are the three things you wish you would have known today?

I would definitely start with the understanding of just how important it is to take the time to get your list right. The second one would be to not worry so much about what I was saying on the phone and worry more about getting comfortable with whatever I was saying on the phone. So I spent a lot of time early in my cold calling career listening to the people that said don't say this, don't ask how are you doing today? Or don't ask is it a bad time? You know, whatever the latest don't do was I was following and I was changing my approach every couple of weeks because I'd hear something from somebody else that seemed to work and I wanted to try it. What I realized over time is that it's much less about the words you're saying and much more about how comfortable you are and how good you are at delivering them. The third thing would be not only doing the work and executing at your job, but being able to effectively communicate what you're bringing to the table as you're bringing it to the table. Right? If you are working at an early stage startup, they might not have all of the dashboards and the reporting needed to really understand who's performing well. But what they will understand is, you know, Rahul is he comes to every meeting, every meeting, his one on one. He's prepared with his numbers, he's got good questions he's asking, he's brought calls that he messed up on that he wants help on and he knows exactly where his prospects are in his pipeline and he knows who's coming in and who's dropped and being on top and owning your role as an sdr, regardless, if you're the best one on the team and you book the most meetings, if you're doing all those other things, that's going to get you noticed by leadership. All right, what's the secret to your hair conditioner? Great conditioner. And no haircuts.

Okay, never mind. What makes you awesome?

My ability to recognize the awesome in other people.

All right, one place you would want to probably retire.

Hawaii.

Interesting. You want to trade your life with one celebrity.

Keanu Reeves.

One sales leader. Okay. This is like, sort of professional. One sales leader you think every SEO should follow.

That's a tough one. Come on.