How to build a sales development team?

Today's guest is solving a problem which I did not think even existed. He's the CEO of a bootstrapped company and he has few tricks up his sleeve when it comes to hiring great SDRs and setting up the sale development processes. I've interacted with his team in the past and I can vouch for what he preaches. If you're an SDR CEO setting up their first SDR team or the first time manager, this episode is for you. I welcome Kalyan Verma to the show. Thank you.

Come on.

Welcome to 17th episode of Sales Spin. And today we have none other than Kalyan. Kalyan is the co founder of Alma Base and today he's going to talk about things which I am very interested in personally. And I'm pretty sure a lot of viewers who are watching this today would definitely want to spare some time to understand how he has set up his own SDR team and the way Alma Base function. So without further ado, we have Kalyan here.

Thanks, Rahul. I'm excited to be here. I appreciate you bringing me on the. On the show. I'm excited to share whatever we've been learning over the last couple of years.

I had no choice. You asked me, Rahul, bring me on the show. Bring me on the show.

That's not true.

Okay. All right. So I think I've known Alma Base from Sandeep, of course, who was associated with Alma Base earlier. And I've met a few of your SDRs as well. And I think you guys have a pretty cool team if you ask me. Everybody is pretty knowledgeable then I think beside the sdr, I mean, goes without saying you have a great SDR team. But I think what's great is a great process you have set up which is like sort of repeatable if I. If I was able to see that. So today that's exactly what you're going to talk about. How you were able to set up a robust SDR engine and now that other companies can take inspiration from it. So floor is all yours.

Absolutely. I think we've been fortunate to be, you know, to be able to bring on some really smart people as an SDR team. Actually, we were about two SDRs until last year and now we're about seven SDRs. And a majority of the focus has been on the fundamentals as opposed to just looking at experience.

Right.

We've actually a majority of our SDRs, apart from one or two. Two SDRs. Actually everybody else is more or less just graduated from college and Then this is their first job. We focused on fundamentals, like, are they good at communicating both verbally and in written format? Do they understand what it means to sell value as opposed to sell features? Do they understand what it means, you know, when it comes to understanding the pain point of the customer and being able to articulate, you know, how we can help solve that problem. Right. And take them towards that dream island, right? And we focused a lot on hustle, right? Like, every time I hire, like, you know, we're always looking for. We're not looking for, hey, have you sold before?

Right?

Like, that's not necessarily the core thing. We're looking for whatever you've done in college, right, outside of academics, right? What have you done? Can I see some hustle as a part of that? Are you the type of person that's persistent through failure? Those are the kind of things that we've looked for, and we've been fortunate, you know, to be able to build a reasonably good team so far. Some of my SDRs actually amaze me with their email writing skills, to be honest. Like, I literally just copy some of their templates with, you know, communications that I'm trying to do as well, because they've just gotten so good at figuring out how to get someone to respond. What kind of lines work really well. They've been using GIFs a lot more than I would have been comfortable with, but it works. And, you know, I've been employing some of their tactics as well. So, yeah, it's been. It's been good. We've actually shifted our SDR methodology itself from last year to this year. You know, one of the things that we've shifted majorly is our approach from going after a large number of accounts until last year, where we would like, you know, add, let's say, about 100 contacts per week into an SDR split, right? And then say, hey, like, here's the sequence, or this is the kind of institutions we're going after. And they would come up with sequences and then enroll all of them in a sequence, make phone calls, things like that. But if shifted to an approach which is a lot more personalized now. So, you know, now it's. It's a combination of sales and marketing teams working together to actually generate, you know, engagement and leads from these named accounts. So it's a full fledged ABM play, but not necessarily like a 1:1 SDR handling 10 accounts, kind of like, you know, it's not enterprise in that sense, but, you know, each SDR has about 200 to 300 accounts in their plate.

Right.

And it's a highly personalized approach where the first email would typically be like, hey, John, congratulations on all the success with the alumni program at Harvard. This is one particular event that you did that I really enjoyed watching the recording off. I took a screenshot because I loved, you know, what you did. Can we get on a call and can you explain how you did this to me so I can share the learnings with other schools that we work with?

Right.

So heavily personalized, very focused on not being salesy. You know, focused on engaging the person and adding value.

Right.

And so the first five, six touch points are very, very personalized. And, you know, because each SDR holds accounts across quarters.

Right.

They're able to employ new tactics to be able to engage these accounts. And, you know, even the marketing team actually comes in with supporting the SDRs through this whole activity. That's where the ABM comes in. So we have a few different initiatives there. One is we have a podcast, Right. Which, you know, is essentially for alumni relations professionals to share their ideas.

Right.

So what happens then is whenever an SDR wants to engage an account, they have this as an offer in some cases where they are able to go and say, hey, would you like to be featured on our podcast?

Right.

As long as they have some interesting ideas to share. Similarly, we have a feature on our website called Album Based Spotlights, where we're essentially just picking one idea per school that they've done really well, and then we're just publishing that on our website. This is another offer for the SDR to sort of say, hey, this particular fundraising campaign that you did was amazing. You know, can we. Can we share it on our website so other schools like yours can learn from? It creates a little bit of an engagement with that account.

Right? Yeah.

And.

And I'm sorry to cut you short, I think a lot of viewers might not be able to relate to a few things, which is, what is albumase?

Yeah, let's. Let's talk about that.

Let's start with that. Yeah.

So, yeah, so Alma Base's mission is to help make education more affordable for everyone. And how do we make education more affordable for everyone? So the number one, again, our focus is completely on the US at this point. At some point, we'll go global. But so everything that I say is focused on the US Education market at this point. So what happens today is that for colleges to be able to reduce the amount of tuition fee that they can charge a student, they need to fill that from somewhere. Else, right? That money still needs to come to for them to pay their bills. And that comes through alumni generosity, right? So if you're able to engage enough of your alumni, if you're able to get enough of your alumni to give back, that money can be used to subsidize the cost of education for current students while still keeping the bar high from a facilities perspective, from a teacher's perspective and all of that, right? So if you're able to get more alumni to donate and more alumni to participate and engage with the institution, you're able to subsidize the education further, right? So for us, that's our approach to how we make education more affordable to everyone, right? The interesting thing is across the U.S. on average, 90% of alumni don't give back, right? Only 10% of alumni on across. Obviously there are institutions which get 30%, 40% participation, there are institutions that get 5%, but on average 10% is, is what the number is, right? So now if you think about, okay, why are the rest of the 90% alumni not donating?

Right?

And in the US it's a big culture, right? A lot of people do give back to their alma mater, so why are these 90% alumni not donating? It's fundamentally because universities do not do a good enough job of engaging their alumni once they graduate, right? When you're a student, the university does an amazing job of engaging you, giving you quality education, all of that, right? But once you graduate, universities don't do enough of that engagement and then they suddenly jump into, hey, here's the link to donate. And most people are disenchanted at that point, right? So that's where ALMA base comes in. ALMA base gives them all of the necessary tools and the expertise to be able to say, hey, here's what you need to do to engage this segment of your alumni. You know, here's how you create value for this population of your alumni. For young alumni, it could be about providing jobs. For mid career alumni, it could be about providing career support through business, networking, things like that. For older alumni, it could be about nostalgia, it could be about sharing notes from some of their old classmates, different opportunities like that. And where ALMA base comes in is giving them the toolkit to be able to do this effectively.

Awesome. Yeah, this actually looks interesting. How did you like come about starting all this? Because I think for this to start, especially for the US Education, you have to be in us. And I remember you were in us, right?

Yeah, I was in the US but I never actually studied in the us. Finally what happened is, you know, when I was in college here in India, there was a particular situation where some of my friends were being forced to drop out. And that's one thing led to another. And like, you know, we created a nonprofit foundation at that point, which basically did one thing which was reach out to alumni of NIT Warangal, which is where I went to college, and raise money and use that money to fund scholarships for students.

Right.

And we did that. Me and my current co founder at Alamo Base, we both actually started that nonprofit foundation and we did that for actually like several years on as a part time endeavor. But through that journey, what we realized is, hey, like, whatever we did for, you know, NIT Warangal, there's actually many, many more colleges in India which don't have that kind of capability. And if we were able to implement that successfully, everybody in the ecosystem would benefit. The college would benefit, the students would benefit, the alumni themselves would benefit with better networking and things like that. That's how ALMA Base got started. But interestingly, we tried essentially doing this in India because we thought everything in the US Was sorted because they were so much more advanced from an alumni engagement perspective. We made the assumption wrongly that everybod understood how to do alumni engagement in the U.S. but yeah, again, like, as the years rolled by, we started getting a lot of interest in the US and we realized that some of the core problems that we're trying to solve here in India are worth solving in the US and people, I mean, there were staff members sitting in every university and high school who are trying to solve these problems. So it's much easier for us to sell SAS because there was someone responsible for that outcome. And so that's how we shifted focus and, you know, spent plenty of time learning, you know, the core of this problem in the US Spent a lot of time physically also in the US to be able to learn this problem better. And yeah, that's how we sort of shifted, you know, in terms of our focus to the U.S. wow.

Okay. This is actually interesting, to be honest. I think I have a. I had a probably different image of what ALMA Base does.

I think we need to do a better job of communicating on our website.

Right. Okay. So back to Amabe's. From what I understand, you guys are a bootstrap company, right?

That's right. We're fully bootstrapped with a majority of the employees here in Bangalore and some employees in the U.S. so yeah, that's how we are structured. Yeah, interesting.

So worked with one bootstrap company. So I know, you know, what are the advantages and disadvantages, but I never ask the founder or. Since you are here, I would probably want you to shed some light. Why should somebody consider a bootstrap company and why should somebody not? So basically, pros and cons.

Yeah, absolutely. I think. Are you asking that from a founder perspective, whether they should consider a bootstrap company?

Like from employee perspective? Basically, from a founder perspective, I think I understand. I want to understand from an employee perspective because a lot of audience, let's say, might be watching right now, and let's say a few of them could actually be potential candidates for you. So. Yeah, and at the same time, I think this is. This is a. This is a question which I'm sure is not answered at a scale because there are not many bootstrap companies in India. If there are, I don't know, honestly, many of them. So, yeah, I probably want to understand from my perspective, let's say I'm an employee. And from NCR's perspective.

Yeah, absolutely. One thing that's useful in terms of, you know, working at a bootstrapped company is that there is a lot more freedom in terms of what we want to experiment with, what we want to try. So there's a lot more flexibility and sort of excitement in terms of, like, you know, hey, like, we could do this, we could do this. Let's give this a shot. Let's. Let's have a small squad of maybe two SDRs try this. Like, we're trying various things as a bootstrap company, which, again, we have flexibility to be able to do that quickly and not have to rely on a board and things like that, for example. That's one. The other thing is typically there is this assumption that, you know, with bootstrapped companies, maybe there's less stability, you know, because you have to generate your own revenue. I would actually say there's more stability, at least towards the latter stage of a bootstrap company. Probably not in the first couple of years, because for us, there is no choice but to remain profitable month.

Right.

And we plan everything for that.

So, you know, we've.

We don't run into a situation where we run out of money and, you know, can't pay salaries and the very unlikely that that will happen from this stage for Alma base, because, you know, everything is planned based on that and not based on the possibility of someone funding us.

Right.

The other advantage to a bootstrapped company from a potential employee perspective is that, you know, funded companies typically ramp up very Fast from an employee perspective.

Right.

And also sometimes have to unfortunately ramp down very quickly, you know, if things are not going well.

Right.

But with bootstrap companies, we tend to plan more like, you know, linearly. Like we are very, very clear about why we want a certain person and like, you know, we make sure that that's a more long term bet and we invest heavily in like their training and things like that. Not that funded companies don't, but I think the risk of sort of ramping up quickly and having, having a possibility of ramping down as well, I think is a higher risk with a funded company.

Interesting. You know, I think I can probably relate to some of the stuff since I worked for some time. I think I would probably totally agree with when you said, you know, there's no other choice. I mean, you have to win. And because you have that thought in mind, like you said, you have to backtrack all the steps and every action is, you know, consider keeping in mind that, you know, there's no other way but to win. Yeah, I totally get that.

Cool.

Yeah, I think we can, we can probably can probably go back to, you know, you were when you were talking about your secret sauce of building a great SDR team. So I think would you want to maybe break it down? Let's say, if somebody want to, let's say, understand the whole process of building the team. And I'm thinking like about people who are, let's say either the first time sales development manager or people who already are SEO manager. Maybe they want to look at your side of things like how you have built up.

Yeah, yeah. I think in terms of looking for good SDRs, what's worked really well for us.

Right.

And I've hired SDRs both in the US and in India and I've sort of had to let go of some people. So I've had good and bad experiences. So I think for me what works really well is one look for hustle. That's the number one thing.

Right.

Like if this person is just here to follow a process and you know, if you, if you as a manager tell him you need to make 40 dials and they make the 40 dials and say, okay, you may ask me to do the 40 dials, but I didn't get results so there's nothing more I can do if that's the kind of person they're not going to succeed.

Right.

You need to see evidence of where this person has gone above and beyond just going through the motions and actually figured out new ways to get results, right? That's the first thing that I look for, Hustle, right? The other thing is persistence, right? And I look for that typically from stories of failure, right? I typically try to understand, when did you fail, right? Has there ever been a situation in your life where things didn't go as per your plan, Right. Or things did not work out the way you had anticipated? How did you actually get out of that situation?

Right?

A bunch of people that we have hired actually are essentially school or college dropouts, right? And they talk about the story of this person we recently hired who basically quit school, high school, literally, right? Like, I couldn't have the guts to do that myself, but essentially quit high school, moved to Bangalore with 300 rupees in his pocket 10 years ago, right? And figured out a way to basically thrive from a professional perspective, right? With no formal high school education, no formal college education, pursuing evening college, things like that, right? So, though mean, it need not be that extreme, but I'm essentially looking for, can these people, you know, persist through failure? Because as an sdr, you get a lot of rejection, as you know, you know as well as anybody else does, you know, how do you actually go from there when 10 people tell you, hey, I don't want to hear from you ever again? To sort of still be able to make that 11th call needs a lot of persistence, right? So I look for that. Those are the two core things that I look for from a personality perspective, and then from a skills perspective, I'm always just looking for good verbal communication, good written communication in terms of are they concise? Anybody that writes a long email sort of saying, Here are the 25 features that we offer will not be able to do well as an sdr, right? So I'm looking for, are they able to crisply communicate? Are they able to personalize? So every time a candidate applies for us, we are looking for, we give them a task to write an email and we look for, are they actually, you know, personalizing to the person that.

They'Re writing to, right?

Those are the kind of things that I typically look for. And so far, I think that formula that I've learned the hard way over the last couple of years after having hired and let go of a lot of people. Now, actually, everybody that we've hired over the last seven to eight months have all been phenomenal, actually, thankfully. So I think that's working well for me.

Great. So you have a secret sauce which you know is going to work, which has worked for you, and you learn that from your hardships from your, you know, past success and failure. I do want to follow up on a question and you know, this is something which I have done for a while, but I always want to understand others perspective because that helps me, you know, always succeed. Which is so every founder will say and every sales manager, every hiring manager would say, hey, this is what I'm looking for. That how they. And the question which you have is like very common now. Okay, so it's one of those questions, right, which if you remember, if you go. If I go, let's say back to my college days where I knew the interviewer is going to ask me a question which I can easily prepare the answers for. What I'm trying to understand is how do you judge if the answer you're getting is actually true or not? I mean, are there any, are there any secret sauce around that?

Yeah, that's a good question. There's actually an entire research on behavioral interviews and so we. I forget the acronym for it. I think it's called star or something. Situation, task, action, something like that.

Okay.

Basically we go to the depth of someone. Just saying, hey, I participated in seven fests. For example is like first layer. Then we go into the. Okay, like can you give me an example of what happened in that situation? Can you walk me through, you know, how you reacted, how you felt? You know, has there ever been other situations like this? Do you think this is natural to you? So we go into a little bit of the depth and usually I think that's where you can tell whether the person's actually making it up or whether they really went through that experience.

Right.

I think the number one thing for me in any interview is at any point in the whole interview, if I feel like this person's making up something which is not true. Like for me that's the biggest red flag irrespective of any other skill. Right. So yeah, I'm usually trying to. I think that research around behavior interviews is, is very helpful. That's what we've used to be able to go into the depth of each situation to discern whether this is actually real or not.

Interesting. Yeah, I think I probably might have done it, but I did not know there's a term to it. And if there is, like if you actually have to go, like, I think to be honest, if, when I did it, I would probably just go with the flow and just to get to the depth of it without realizing that there was a process which we could actually follow to maybe make it easier. Interesting.

Yeah, yeah, I'm happy to share that with you. I mean, that's actually quite interesting. It just gives a little bit of a structure to that questioning, which is very natural as well. So, yeah, I like it.

Glad. Okay. I think you've already solved the one puzzle, which is the hiring. And I think I totally agree with that. Hiring is like fixing the first puzzle. What do you do next? So everybody who's watching it, they have. They understand now that they have to fix the hiring first. And of course, there are 10 ways to do it. What's next?

Yeah, yeah. I think it's really, really important to onboard and train the SDRs properly.

Right.

I know a lot of companies. This. While this sounds very obvious, I know several companies who just like bring in an SDR and say, hey, man, here are the a hundred numbers. Let's go.

Right.

Which. Which doesn't work.

Right.

I think you need to make sure anybody that's in that SDR role gets sufficient context and get sufficient understanding of why they're doing what they're doing.

Right.

And what works, what doesn't work. So training is a really, really important component. There are two parts to that training. One is context specific to the market that you're selling to, the pain point that you're solving, and things like that, which is obviously different for every company.

Right.

That's very, very important. The other part is probably a little more generic. And we do that especially because we hire a lot of freshers. We go, we send them through, we put them through training specific to how to write a good email, how to write, how to make a good cold call.

Right.

And we spend a lot of time doing mock calls within the organization, like the SDR manager sitting down with the SDRs doing mock calls. Let's do it again. Let's do it again. Let's do it again. You know, that kind of repetition actually really helps. So, you know, typically we have four to six weeks of sort of onboarding and training.

Right.

And then another, like roughly four months of ramp up before, you know, month five, month six is typically we. When we expect them to hit 100% of their quota.

Yeah.

And one other thing that's worked really well for us is what we call as a war room approach.

Right.

So basically any new segment that we're targeting or any new experiment that we're doing on the SDR side, we create a daily war room.

Right.

And whoever, whichever SDRs are part of that particular experiment would get on that call every single day.

Right.

And say, here's what worked well for me Yesterday, here's what did not work. And then they would practice that and share learnings every single day. And that war room is established till we hit a certain number or a certain goal.

Right.

Saying that within this segment, let's say we have to get to 10 mqls per week, let's say right until we hit that number, that war room continues. And the beauty of this daily sort of catch up is that people are learning in real time and people are learning from the others as well. And that makes it really quick for them to actually fix their issues and figure out what works better and all of that and then get to a point where it's repeatedly working. That's the other thing that's worked really well for us. That whole approach, what we call as war room, is something that's been working well for us.

That is interesting. I think it's probably a modern version of what I used to practice in one of the companies. Not me personally, I mean the company used to have something like Kaizen, which is like a Japanese term of, you know, continuous improvement on a daily basis. We used to do this on a daily basis as well. So I think that's probably a modern corporate version of it.

Yeah, yeah, it's probably true. I. Yeah, I think that's exactly what we do. Yeah.

Interesting. So, okay, so. And I think I want to probably go back to one of the things you said. So you go give like four to six weeks of training, which is fantastic because I think a lot of companies who are hiring right now or who actually have SDRs right now, I know, are probably giving 10 or 15 days of training, maximum, maximum 30 days. And then they would expect the reps to maybe start hitting the numbers, the full numbers, 100% quota from the second month onwards, which I know is setting them to failure because the morale is probably very down because they have not seen the success. They have not. They're not realized, they've not tasted that success yet. Right. So unless they've done it, I don't think so. It makes sense. So fantastic. Like you said, you expect them to hit the hit 100% by six months.

Yeah. So it's a slow ramp. And There are some SDRs who start hitting their goals from month four as well. But again, I. This may be a very counterintuitive suggestion, especially if you have a large team, but I personally feel that, at least in my experience, putting them under a lot of pressure by giving them. Putting SDRs under a lot of pressure by giving them very high targets does not Actually motivate them, I think setting realistic targets, having clear plans for how we will get there, and working with them, making sure they have, you know, somebody that they can lean on every time they have an issue. All of that is really, really important. I think far too many people that I've seen sort of look at SDRs or salespeople in general as, okay, I bring this person, give them a number and they'll figure out a way to get there.

Right?

That's not going to happen. Right. Just like when you hire an engineer and set them up for success. Just like that. You need to hire a sdr, you need to hire an ae, but set them up for success. And that's on us, that's on the company to make sure that they're successful. And I think it does take time.

Right.

I wouldn't change the goal, move it forward by a couple of months just because that's better numbers for us. Because I think if they actually go through that journey and they start to hit consistently like quota from month, five months, six, I typically see that those SDRs continue to hit their goals.

Right.

As opposed to someone who's dealing with a lot of pleasure from day one.

So, yeah, interesting. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure, for example, four to six months, let's say, worth of the training and the whole ramp up period would actually apply to everyone. Because at the same time you're also hiring for complete pressures. Right. A lot of companies who are probably hiring SDRs might not be, you know, my mind, hiring the experience folks. So the ramp, it could be somewhere between two to four months, depending on the complexity of the product and then depending on, you know, how rigorous the training is and the same time audience as well. Right, I agree.

That makes complete sense.

Fair enough, fair enough. Okay, so we, we are down to you. You said the hiring, then you said the onboarding and the training. What's next?

I think after that it's, yeah, primarily about regularly. I mean, having the regular cadence of, you know, sort of discussing within the team in terms of what's working, what's not working, how do we get, I mean, after six months, we typically expect our SDR to start coming up with new experiments or request the marketing team for specific support, things like that. In terms of, hey, I want to try this idea. For example, our SDRs come up with ideas like here. A lot of alumni associations of public state universities in the US are typically talking about this on this Facebook group. Can we do a webinar so that we can Push all of our accounts to join that webinar.

Right.

That's a great, That's a recent thing that happened. Right. Similarly, we're usually starting to look for, hey, what else is a good opportunity for you? I mean, if they want to continue as an SDR grade, but if they want to move into like say an AE role or an SDR manager role or a slightly different kind of role, we're always looking for opportunities because for me, I think people, people are probably not probably, but people are the most important asset in the company.

Right.

Irrespective of which role you play, you know, if you're doing well, if you understand the culture. I mean, culture is something that, I mean, we can talk about separately as well. But like that's a big, big part of, you know, what we focus on as a company within the SDR team, but also across the larger team. And if they're a good culture fit and if they're performing well, we will always find an opportunity for them somewhere in the company.

Right.

Because I don't want to let go of a person who's doing well and understands the culture to. Just because, you know, they don't want to do a particular role at that point, I'm always looking for additional opportunities for them.

Interesting you brought that up. And I think I have a follow up question. I'm not sure if this might sound like. Right. Forum. I think it should be. See, I think I worked with multiple companies and I'm not saying I'm proud of it, but yeah, I've worked with multiple companies. I've not found one founder who would say that, you know, culture and people are not important to me. Right, yeah. And SDR, especially SDRs, you know, who are very young in the career who have not worked with a lot of companies, they might get persuaded, right. They might get influenced by anything and everything which they will see around. So they see, for example, let's say one company getting funding and you know, showering their process, showering their, let's say, employees with gifts. Just an example.

Okay.

Other company. And I'm not saying, I'm not judging them on the culture, you know, basis that I'm just saying, right. Every company would say, hey, people are important for us, culture is important for us. And every company would do one thing or another to promote their culture and to show that, you know, this is how culture means to us. Especially when everybody's working from home for the last one and a half year. I think every company has come up with their own ways to Promote their culture to show at least, you know, that they actually care about the culture. How can people, let's say a lot of audience who are probably young, you know, probably in their mid-20s. Right. We're watching right now. How can they find out really what the culture is like at Alma Base, for example?

Yeah, I think there's a really simple litmus test, right? Just go look at glassdoor ratings as a first step.

Right?

Some people game it, but that's fine. Typically, glassdoor ratings are a reasonable reflection of how happy are people with that particular company. Right? That's one. That step one, again, like, if you're applying for an SDR role, we expect you to be more proactive. What I would do if I were you as an SDR candidate, let's say, applying to Alphabet, I would actually reach out to at least three different employees across three different functions at Alma Base, basically say, hey, like, do you like working for this company?

Right.

And if you pick a random sampling, I think it should give you a reasonable picture the best that you could while you're not at the company. I think those are a couple of things that I would recommend everybody to do, irrespective of which company they're applying to, because people don't understand how important it is. Because, look, the pay from different companies may be different depending on what situations they're in. And I think, unfortunately, far too many young people optimize for pay, right? Like, they're always looking for, hey, what's the company that pays me the best?

Right?

What I think matters, really, what matters the most, especially in your 20s, right. Is what exposure are you getting?

Right.

And is the company allowing you to grow holistically Right. Beyond the work even? Personally, are you being surrounded by really good people, Smart, but also great ethics? You know, are you being surrounded by those people? Because, like, they always say, you become the average of the five people that you're surrounded with. Right? And I think, unfortunately, not enough young people understand this to be able to sort of discern and say, hey, someone's paying me 10 lakhs. Someone's paying me 12 lakhs. But I'll still pick the 10 lakhs company because, you know, these are things that they care about far more than this other company. For example, right? It's hard for students to learn this in college, but I wish they did.

No, that's a very good point. I think I know a lot of SDRs who have probably taken other offers because they found, you know, for example, that was something closer to their home, and they wanted to give time to the family. There are people who rejected offers, for example, because they did not feel they know they would actually get the exposure, even though the pay was considerably, much higher. So you're right. I think few young people, I would agree that, you know, actually are trying to probably go in the direction where they understand that, you know, there are more important things than money, like exposure. I think that's something I probably sell most of the companies on. So, yeah, I totally get that.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I think we've talked a lot about your company and you know, how your SDR teams are set up. Let me ask you, when we asked you a question, direct question, are you hiring right now?

Yes, we are. We're a SDR team of seven at this point, six SDRs and one SDR manager. We're hiring for one more SDR manager and another five SDR. So we're looking to build a team of 12 SDRs and two SDR managers in the next few months.

That is interesting. Okay. And let's say if anybody's watching this, and of course, I'll try my best to, you know, promote this in a way that, you know, a lot of SDRs can probably reach out to you after this. How can they reach out to you? Let's say if they were to apply.

Yeah. So if you just go to our website, almavaze.comcareers, you'll see all of the openings right there. You could apply from there. Always feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn as well. I'm guessing we can leave my LinkedIn link on the show notes. People can feel free to connect with me, and I'll direct them in the right direction as well.

Awesome. Okay. I think we've already discovered that how people can reach out to you. Let's say if they were looking for an SDR role, and like you said, you're already growing your bootstrap. I think I'll really like them. On the training plan and onboarding plan you kind of mentioned, if I were an sdr, I would probably probably, you know, ping you off for the meeting. All right, What I want to understand is give us top three reasons. Let's say, why should somebody try to. Why should somebody consider MMAs?

Yeah, absolutely. Number one is mission. Right with the work that we do here helps make education more affordable for thousands and millions in the future of students.

Right.

So then you know that what you're doing has an impact.

Right?

That's number one. Number two, from a culture perspective, I know culture is Very broad. Like you said, everybody says they care about people and all of that, which is a great point. I want to point out a couple of specific things within the SDR team, right? One that I said is all while each SDR has their own incentives in terms of hitting their goals, the whole. The whole culture of the team has been set up in a way where everybody's focused on making sure the team wins, right? I'll give you a couple of examples of how we do that. One is the war room, right? Where everybody is openly sort of talking about, hey, here's what's working for me, right? Here's what's challenging for me. And then someone else chips in and sort of helps each other contribute, right? And then one of the things that we do which has worked really well, you know, which makes me feel like, hey, I want to be part of the SDR team, is every Friday, right? So every week, we set a certain goal for the overall SDR team, right? And if the team hits the goal, irrespective of which individual person performed well, did not perform well, if the team hits the goal, everybody does a pizza party on Friday, right? And that way, like, you know, there are certain weeks where one SDR is doing well, there's a certain other week where another SDR is contributing to it. But as a team, they celebrate together, irrespective of, you know, which individual person hits it. And so, like this, we are always focused on how does the team win, as opposed to everybody focusing on their individual targets, which, obviously, the incentives are still there for each of them. You know, so there's individual motivation as well. So I think the second thing is the culture. The third thing I would say is just people, right? I mean, obviously, I think, again, like, every CEO would say this, but I am really honored, you know, to have the kind of people that we have within the SDR team and in general, the larger team as well. But I think, you know, being around the right kind of people with the right skills, with the right ethics, with the right kind of culture can catapult your career quite significantly in a couple of years. And that's the other reason that I would say Alma Base would be a good choice for a potential sdr.

I can personally vouch for the kind of people you've hired, including Sandeep, and, you know, the kind of people you guys have trained in the SDR team. I can personally vouch for that.

Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah.

Right.

I think the last question I want to ask you is no team Is perfect. No company is perfect. Perfect. So maybe talk about a couple of things which you think. For example, let's say from the SDR team's perspective, what are the challenges which you see in your current team right now and what you plan to solve in the next two or three months?

Yeah, absolutely. One of the biggest challenges that we're working on right now is from the ABM approach, which is about marketing and SDR team coming together and delivering highly personalized content in different ways. What that's doing is it's giving us a lot of engaged accounts. Right? Whatever goals we set in terms of engaged accounts, that's, you know, we're able to hit that.

Right.

Like the SDR team and the marketing team is constantly able to up their game and that's working.

Right.

But converting that, those engaged accounts into sales qualified leads, right, Is where the challenges. Because they may not feel the need right now. They may not. And we are also trying not to be too salesy.

Right?

Like that's where you draw the line between how do you stay engaged and build a relationship without, you know, trying to sell yourself?

Right.

That's where the problem is today. And this is ABM is a long term game. We're willing to wait it out for, you know, a couple of, couple more quarters and see how this plays out. That's what we're trying to solve where without necessarily selling, how do we create more urgency for our prospects while still continuing to build the relationship?

Right.

That's what the SDR team is focusing on right now. That's one of the major challenges. The other challenge that we're trying to figure out is on one hand we have SDRs handling high value prospects, but we haven't yet cracked the formula properly around how do we make sure their time is not getting wasted in mundane things?

Right.

So we're trying to optimize their processes in such a way that maybe other people, maybe some of these things can be outsourced and things like that, where the SDR skills can be focused on what they do best, which is communicating with prospects while taking a lot of the mundane things off of their plate is the other challenge that we're trying to solve. So I would say those are the couple of key focus areas for the SDR team right now.

Interesting. Okay, I think this was actually pretty good. We are moving towards the last leg, which is, which is my favorite, like a rapid fire. So let me know when you're ready and I'm going to ask you like a couple of questions completely impromptu I have not prepped you for it. You were probably not expecting it. Okay, ready?

Wasn't. Let's do it.

All right. Your favorite author.

Favorite author.

You have to pick one.

I would say Ben Horowitz.

Wow. Okay. I can't even pronounce.

He's not really Ben Horowitz. Wrote a couple of books, maybe three. But yeah, I love reading his books because he's very focused on sort of going to the crux of the problems as a CEO and a founder, you know, like the real, like, cultural issues. One of his books is the Hard Thing about Hard Things, for example, and weird title.

Right?

You probably heard of that book.

I think every.

Is a vc. He's not an author, but he's written a couple of books that I really like. So he's the top of mind for me right now.

All right. Okay. Your favorite company from India, other than Alma Bates.

Favorite company from India, other than Alma Base, would be.

You can't take more than three seconds.

Oh, sorry. Okay. Freshworks.

All right. Your latest tech find.

Latest tech find is this app called Krisp, which actually removes noise from zoom calls.

Nice.

Yeah, it's been really nice. Yeah, I loved it.

Your favorite destination in India and in the world.

India. It's probably Chikmangalur. That's a place that I really love. We drive there quite often. Chikmangalur in India, Worldwide. I really liked Netherlands. I wouldn't mind going back there. So I wouldn't mind going back to Amsterdam, Netherlands, in general.

Interesting. Yeah, they are. They are probably profiting weed there, by the way.

That's not the reason why I want.

To go, but that's what everybody says. All right. Your favorite leader from India, it could be sales marketing, irrespective of the department.

Yeah. Again, Girish, I think. Founder of freshworks. Amazing, amazing inspiration in terms of the way he tells stories. That's the part that I love the most about him. Yeah, there's probably several more, but right now, top of mind is Girish from freshworks.

Okay. All right. This was actually pretty interesting. I did not anticipate that, you know, we would probably go in such a flow. I think it came out pretty good. I mean, you're probably the better judge since you were on the receiving end. Thanks for watching this video. If you liked the video a teeny tiny bit, would you like the video? Subscribe to the channel and tell me what you like. Throw your best insult at me. If you did not like any part and you would want me to improve, I promise you will not offend me. Seems like too much work, right? Stop with subscribing and let me know in the comments what I should cover next. Thanks again. Hey, come on.