Most SDRs Won’t Survive the Next 12 Months – Here’s Why | Malcolm Smith

We are definitely in a state of punctuated equilibrium. Right. Like the way if you understand evolutionary biology. Right. Like things can happen gradually. Right. You have change over time or you have an event that takes place that changes things really quick. How do I reduce my time that I'm spending on non revenue generating activity?

I'm pumped for this conversation because today's guest, Malcolm Smith does not just talk about sales. He's out there reinventing how business development works. Malcolm is the head of global business development at Centrical where he is leading the charge in transforming frontline sales team through learning, performance and gamification. With over eight years in B2B business development, Malcolm has built and led SDR teams at companies like Databricks and Hackerone. But what makes him stand out is his ability to adapt, experiment, push the boundaries of how we think about sales development today. Today we are going to discuss some of the biggest shifts in the SDR world. Is the SDR role dying or just evolving? How AI is changing the game? What's hype or what's real? The return of field sales. Why companies like Salesforce are sending sellers back into the real world. How SDRS can stay relevant when automation is doing more of the work. Why mastering in person interactions might be the next big advantage in sales. Malcolm does not just follow trends, he spots them before they happen. If you're an sdr, a sales leader or just trying to figure out how to stay ahead of the game, this episode is a must. Listen, without further ado, let's welcome Malcolm Smith. Welcome to the show. Malcolm. How are you doing?

I'm really good man. It's great to be here. I'm excited to chat about a couple different topics with you.

Absolutely. Likewise. So see Malcolm, I know that you know you have been an SDR leader for a while, in fact for a long time and we will definitely jump into that in a minute but I'd love to audience, if you can talk about a little bit about your intro that everybody knows who you are.

Sure, yeah. My name is Malcolm Smith. I'm the head of business development for a company called Centrical. They do a performance improvement gamification platform for frontline sales teams. Call centers. Anybody with a performance KPI. It's really interesting product, really having a lot of fun building out their program. Prior to this I was running BDR teams for Databricks. I also did a stint at HackerOne and I started my career at a company called Leap Legal Software which was selling practice management software to small law firms in like the Northeast, and they actually got acquired doing really well. So kind of been the gamut, Right. I've done a lot of like really large companies, really small companies and are kind of figuring it out. And I think I've kind of found my niche at the earlier stages, like nascent programs and trying to mature things and bring them to the modern age.

Thanks, Amy. Bringing with us. Yeah, I mean, today we have some hot topics to discuss. And given your experiences with small, large companies of different sizes, I'm sure that can come in handy. So let's jump right into it. A lot of people are actually saying Everywhere and on LinkedIn, I've been reading that on Reddit, that SDR role is kind of dying or at least evolving fast. From your perspective, what is really changing?

Yeah, so it's a good question. I mean, a lot of people are talking about it. We are definitely in a state of punctuated equilibrium, right? Like the way if you understand evolutionary biology, right. Like things can happen gradually, right. You have change over time or you have an event that takes place that changes things really quickly. So think the meteor for the dinosaurs change things pretty quickly. AI is a meteor, right? For BDR and SDR teams, for anybody, frankly, that has a lot of aspects, characteristics of the role that can be effectively automated. Not every element, but a lot of it can be. And we like, you know, people who aren't accepting that I don't know what you're going to do in a couple of years when it just continues to get better. You know, I call them technological Luddites. Like at some point, like, you can't deny Pandora's box is opened. It's here, right? We can rail against AI bdrs as much as we want. We can rail against Jenny generated emails as much as we want. The reality is a lot of end users, a lot of consumers of that content, they're not going to care, especially five years from now when it becomes really normalized. So. So for sure, I think it's not dead completely, but you have to shift. You have to start to embrace what the new paradigms are and consider where the actual value add is going to come from. Because it's not just doing some of the things that bots do really well, like building lists and generating initial prompts for emails, et cetera.

Love that. And you know, I know that, you know, AI probably is getting a bad rap, but I mean, think about, you know, how we acted when the AI first came and from where we are today, where I cannot live without AI, I cannot live without the practical applications of AI, I think we use it every day. I mean, if you think about AI while recording this podcast, soon after the podcast is over, there's a single button I can click which can create different reels for me. That is AI functioning, which is actually going to make my job easier now with automation handling more of the repetitive task. Right. What do you see as the new core responsibilities of SDRs? While you have already admitted it's going to change, but what do you think the future would look like?

Yeah, for sure. I think in really concrete, practical terms as I continue to evaluate pieces of tech or spend that I want to consider from like a capital allocation standpoint, what I'm thinking about is how do I reduce my time that I'm spending on non revenue generating activities. Right. Is a key priority. So then I think about, okay, if I'm freeing up bandwidth, where do I reinvest it? So for me right now I'm looking at, I just want more interactions with prospects, wherever that's going to happen. And I want to increase the enablement around that. So I've made this strategic shift into like opening up more opportunities for calls, connects, coaching, like that realm. But where I see this going, where I really want to get my team, I want them to really become experts in the space with true credibility. So I'm actually looking at a world where I have them doing a lot of in person stuff, a lot of virtual events, a lot of actual industry conferences embracing what business development traditionally has always been with, which is acting almost as a conduit of information within a sub community or with a sub. So for my world, right, like I really want my guys to start learning a lot about running a call center, running large frontline teams, truly understanding the day in the life stuff beyond anything we've done in the past where it really has just been frankly rudimentary because we lacked the credibility. We weren't actually present in a lot of these places. If I can free up their time to be present, I'm all for it. And I'll just tell a quick story. I, I have a rep working in financial services. Very tough industry to break into. A lot of the traditional colder outreach doesn't really work there. There's a lot of relationships you need to leverage and you know, introductions from partners, what have you. We actually had an opportunity to connect with somebody who used to work for a large bank in the us has been retired for a couple years, but was right in the mix of all the places and business units we'd want to sell into. We had the opportunity to take them to lunch, learn a little bit, network with them. They helped us build out some org charts, really understand the point of view of this specific account. That was a three hour time investment that honestly a couple years I would have said wasn't worth it. But now because we're not lacking for output in terms of activity and I know that I still am generating week over week meetings like at a rate that I can call pretty decent, I can spend the time doing other interesting things. We're also trying to get more involved in like Slack communities. Right. And different groups and finding where our prospects live and actually engaging in those places with true credibility. That to me is like really where long term my vision is going for where the role is going to be.

Wow, that sounds like complete what companies are actually talking about today. But everybody's like hey you know what, AI this or AI that and you're trying to go back to the roots.

The roots.

I have a question, I have a question. See, I want to be optimistic. I also want to be realistic here. Now you are probably one of the kind of manager who is thinking out loud and you know, probably trying to go back to the roots and like you said, activity is not a problem. You're trying to find more creative ways, more ways where your industry can tap into. How would you, let's say if you were working as an SDR leader or let's say even as an SDR where your manager is not as nice as you are, what are some of the things SDR scan do to still stay relevant? Right. And you know, I need, you mentioned that you know, five years from now, forget five years, I think one year from now we will normalize all the AI emails and I'm pretty sure it's a matter of time. And AI can also start cold calling in my voice. And Malcolm, as long as Malcolm doesn't find out as a consumer he doesn't really care. Right. How would the VRs continue to adapt and still continue to add value and have relevance? How would they have a job?

Yeah. So I think I'm definitely more open minded when it comes to trying things and ultimately I have a lot of the economics and the macros going in my favor where I don't need a ton of output to make things work because we have really high ASPs and few other factors. I think if you're at a place, look at the end of the day, here's what I would say, right. I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that this is still a performance role, right? Like you still have to produce. And I don't believe that just posting on LinkedIn and doing the social side of it alone would make you successful in any realm. Right? Because again, we lack the credibility. I think that, you know, I agree with a lot of the sentiment I see on LinkedIn that in a lot of ways over the last few years the culture of accountability and performance to holding yourself to a professional standard has slipped a bit. I think remote is part of that. And my point being, I start with the fact like you still have to do your stuff, right? Sales ultimately still comes down to your controllables, right? Your attitude, your mindset and your daily production. So you still have to make your calls, you still have to send your emails, you still have to do the social outreach. You should still be, if you're in a frontline BD role, you should be producing meetings for your sales team. Like, I truly believe that prospect facing meetings are the atomic unit of B2B sales. You have to have those. And like, if your sellers are having less than probably eight to 10 conversations with prospects, either expansion or new business, there's a problem. And you got to address that before you start doing the more, let's call it creative, innovative stuff. And the one analogy I would share that, and I say this to a lot of teams, but I'm kind of going through this mindset thing is if you guys know who Picasso is, the artist, he did a lot of crazy stuff. He's very well known for his more abstract art, but if you look at his early work, it's very classical and it was really good. So my point being you master the basics before trying to go and do something abstract. So I'd start there. So then how do you do that right now? Well, I would say this, you really need to embrace what AI can do for you outside of things like, hey, you can write an email for me, sure. But you have to start elevating yourself and learning how to actually manipulate the AI for your own purposes. So don't just think about, hey, I'm going to go to ChatGPT and write an email. Here's my person's Persona. Help me out with that. You at the very least start understanding how to prompt it really well. Prompt engineering is a skill set, should be on your resume. You should know how to give an initial input, create it and format it in such a way that you're restricting the potential output you're actually prompting correctly. And that goes into a whole sub discipline. Beyond that, stop Thinking small, right? Think big. Think about what you can actually do. Can you actually build your own GPT, right, and you may have to come out of pocket for some of this stuff, but if you want to be a champion, this is championship stuff, man. Like, you got to sometimes put a little bit of skin in the game and have a little bit of risk. But don't just think about. I'm going to write one email with my AI. Think about building your own AI, programming it with your controllable inputs on all of your Persona stuff and then using that. Right? I think also think about where you can have it, even if your overall company architecture is not fully mature yet, if you don't have all the stuff you would need, you know, like a dialer, like, like an AI copilot in of itself. Like, if you don't have these tools yet, think about where you can start using the free versions, right? And just get familiar with them because the new tool stack is here. We're going to start looking for people who know, for example, how to use clay, like, who really understand AI video, who really understand, you know, all the different signals that come out, how to actually operationalize those signals. So start investing in that and find people who are already doing it. There's a broader community of sales dev. We want to make sure that you're tapping into that, right? Like build relationships with people. Look on LinkedIn, see who's already doing things really well. Good artists copy, but great artists steal. So just take stuff that works and try it out. But you've got to start again, going back to the first point. Master your basics first. At the end of the day, all of this is. It's seasoning, it's not the steak, right? Like you really want to make sure these are a means to an end. The end being we still want to have commercially productive conversations with people who are potential buyers. If you're not at least orienting around, that's part of it, you're starting from a bad place. So I would say that.

No, I simply love that. In fact, I had so many thoughts and I do want to tap into a couple of them. I love the fact how you said. Because I remember, you know, back in the day when I was. And I. And you were probably starting the career, knowing the software, knowing how to operate a tool or knowing a particular skill was a huge advantage. And we all have seen, you know, if a particular. If a candidate A knew stuff and candidate B did not, even though they were probably marginally good, we would definitely give them the advantage, and from what I'm hearing from you, is if you're going back to the roots, if you are, if you're. If you're talking about the evolution, I feel that time is about to come. Right now, you know where AI sits today. If you know a particular tool and the stakes are the same. If there are two candidates for equally good, one candidate knows how to get the job done faster, I think they would get the job or they would probably get the promotion. One of the things I would like to probably talk about for the SDRs, if anybody's watching this, if you think, you know, you cannot afford it and your company is not, first of all, one of the things which I did as an sdr, anytime I would be joining the company, and if my company was not giving me as much money I wanted, and if there was a negotiation lever, I would always ask them, hey, can you give me $1,000 budget for books, videos, for trainings, anything?

Right.

And then you can obviously leverage that budget to experiment with all these things. And I think as an SVR leader, I'm thinking about, if I were to run this, I would probably run a spiff. Hey, you know what? Whosoever is the number one performer, they get, let's say, pro chat, GPD, you know, prescription, like for $200 a month or whatever that is. I don't know, just picking out.

I actually really like the idea of tools as a spiff. I have a rep who would go nuts to that. No, you're absolutely right. Right. And I think also a really important piece of this. It's less about mastering the tool itself. Yes, that's great. But ultimately it's like, are you consistently challenging yourself to get better and using all of the available resources to do so? That just, it's really just a mindset thing. Like, somebody who really wants to be successful is going to do everything they can to be successful. And this is part of it. And another area that I think, you know, I'm really falling in love with potential and that the art of the possible with AI is from an enablement standpoint. Like, again, if you're thinking about this critically, you should be using AI to, like, if you don't have this already, you can do it yourself. Use AI to review your calls. Right. Take your recording transcripts, Get a. Well, take your recording, create a transcript of it, put it into an AI and ask it what you can do better. It's not going to be perfect, but it's going to be good enough and it'll Help you do things like improve your tone, improve your speed, your pacing. There's a lot of cool tools that will pop up and actually coach you in real time on some of this stuff, right? Like I've started to look at, as you know, AI role players, right, to actually practice calls. Like the idea that you can start really refining a lot of the core elements of what good sales is, which frankly boils down to just really effective communication. That's always been in my mind one of the biggest factors separating like really successful reps versus less successful is the fact that it really came down to how much time were you getting to spend crafting your skill. And if most of your time was spent building lists, not getting calls returned, not getting calls answered, not getting emails replied to, you weren't actually learning much, right? Like that was actually a challenge. And then you would try to go and be an AE or be an AM or do something else. And like you didn't actually have enough trigger time with prospects doing things and learning how to interact and like communicate effectively. So that to me is such a big deal. Like if you can't, even if you don't want to use AI for like outbound reasons, which I get, maybe you don't want to do that. Use it for enablement for yourself. Take a sales book, get the Kindle version, put it in the AI, make a summary for yourself. You can start consuming so much more content. Like, you know what I'm doing now, I'm taking a lot of cold call YouTube videos, getting the transcripts and then creating an enablement for my team. Here's a really good tip I learned, let's practice this a bit. I can start creating drills and stuff like that. So important. Yeah, absolutely right. Like you have to be willing to do these things. And I love your idea about having a company budget for enablement. That to me is a no brainer if your company doesn't have that. Really suggest that to your HR teams because that's really a nice benefit.

Yeah, amazing. I think you touched upon a great point and that is something I can vouch for. It works because even from a podcast, I believe when I started the podcast I used to really suck at it. And the way I think I got better at it is by listening to better podcasts or by using my own transcript and feeding into chat GPT and say, hey, you know what, tell me, where should I improve? And that's how you are able to marginally improve week on week or month on month. And then when you look back, you're like, wow, I can't even recognize the guy who I was like one year ago. This is amazing. I do want to touch base on something. Malcolm. So I was reading and I saw that, you know, Salesforce is, for example, moving more sellers into the field. And I wanted to hear if you have any views on why do you think that's right in that strategy and how does it change the prospecting game where everybody's talking about AI but if I'm hiring sellers, who will be field sellers? Now, again, going back to the roots, why do you think that's happening?

I mean, it's. To me, it's really obvious. It's just because that's going to be the last basin that's probably automated, right? Like, we're really far away from in person taking over. That will happen. Don't get me wrong, it's a little science fiction. I get it. But I mean, I've seen some of the robots that they're making in Boston and some of the other things like it's coming, but we have a really long time for that. So I've been looking around and it's pretty obvious, like, if you're doing anything tactile in person, that is something a, it's been underutilized because for a long time the ROI of large field events is still. I mean, it's still questionable. You got to be really careful because a lot of these big conferences, et cetera, they can be really expensive. But that's all also why it's not just about the big conference ecosystem. It's like every little thing that's happening, there's probably some version of an industry meetup happening in your major metro area that's closest to you, relevant to your Persona that you can find on meetup, right? Like it is happening. But I guess the point is those types of interactions are at a premium now because a, they happen less often. A lot of people have become pretty inundated with just a digital first communication system where, like, that's where they exist and they don't do a lot of things in person. So it makes in person stuff more meaningful by design. So then if you're able to cultivate that skill set, I think it puts you at a huge advantage because it is challenging, right? Like, not just selling necessarily, but building relationships in person with intentionality. That's not something most people do, right? Like, it's not organic. It's very different than just making friends. It's structured. There's a purpose. There's like, like I said, Intentionality, like your word selection is really important, like how you make people feel the emotional side of it. Like and again a lot of the generations of reps that are coming up now, they haven't really done that or like they haven't done it with as much focus. If you think about it, that's what sales used to be. It was very much always in person. I mean there was definitely called calls, it's always been around. But you know, door to door, being in person, trade shows, like that was it, that's what we're going back to. And I think it's a natural reaction. Plus there's just a really strong reason to always be where your customers are because you just learn so much more. At the end of the day you're not going to learn about something sitting in a classroom the same way you are being in the field. Like imagine trying to learn archaeology just from textbooks. Like at some point gotta get your hands in the dirt. So yeah, I think that that's such a strong signal to me that if a company like Salesforce is making that investment, I'm on the right track.

No, I love that. And again I'm getting so many ideas because the moment you said that I'm like, I don't remember the last time I watched a webinar. If I did, I waited for the recording to come and I'm pretty sure something took over. However, I do remember I attended a coaching event in Nashville in September and I remember taking detailed notes and I do remember going back to those notes. I would have never done that for a webinar. Probably learned a thing, probably applied, probably never did. But I think your point is banged on as to the kind of experience you create. And another thing which we, we should address the elephant in the room, the next generation of decision makers would be Gen Zs, right? And that means they have to learn, they kind of grew up in a tech world. That means they kind of never had the experience you and I probably had, you know, attending trade shows, you know, doing door to door selling. So out of all they have to definitely take the initiative actually to learn all these skills for sure.

I mean, within reason, right? Like at the end of the day it's probably not going to be a complete shift here where like this now becomes the only thing to worry about. And it remains to be seen what let's call it business culture is going to look like when you've got Gen Z, Gen Alpha, sort of in more major leadership positions. That's still enough time away that like the small details of good in person engagement I still think is absolutely worth cultivating, mastering and deploying. But yeah, like, I think when you look at a landscape, which you always want to kind of think about is, all right, what is sort of the de facto, like, what is everyone doing? There's a while, for example, a few years ago using just something like outreach or Salesloft was in and of itself innovative because not a lot of people were doing it. So you had an advantage. But now that's kind of normalized. It's not an advantage as much because everyone's doing it. So then what are people not doing? That's really where you always want to be thinking about. Like, and by the time you start seeing it compiled on tip lists and like, hey, you know, double tap your phone calls, for example, like, once that tactic gets publicized, you can't really rely on it anymore because now it's reached mass adoption, it's hard to scale field stuff. It's hard to again, automate that and do things like really cost effectively there. So you have to be really smart about it. And that's why again, it's worth learning because it's hard to do and a lot of people aren't going to be doing it. And yeah, I would notice, I would notice if someone had, for example, really studied the art of banter and really understood how to make conversation happen in small group environments, which is essential if you want to be effective in your role as business development because you can't rely on, on conversations kind of happening organically a lot of the time. But you also don't want to come across as too pushy. That's a big deal, right? Like if you make people uncomfortable, you're doing the work, you're doing worse than a bad email at that point. So you got to be really careful. I think it's one of those things where you should force yourself into situations that you normally don't do. And I think about any competitive or performance based endeavor kind of always want that championship mindset of like, what is a situation that I'm not going to find myself in frequently but has high risk or high reward, I should be practicing that, right? Like it's the proverbial, like when you're practicing a sport, you're going to put yourself in a very precarious position and practice getting out of it. So if it ever did come down to it, you could figure it out. Like, that's the real thing for me. It's like, are you making yourself as performant as Possible in any scenario, whether it is in person, whether it is digital, anything like that.

I like that. I'd like to touch upon the rise of the BDR influencers and industry experts. I remember the last three products I bought, you know, for my companies did not come from inbound or. It wasn't that I was looking out, it was that, you know, because I'm on LinkedIn a lot and I saw SDR screening create, you know, content. And that's when it immediately hit me, I want to check those out. And immediately, you know, without even selling, I ended up buying the, you know, booking a meeting and buying. Buying that too. Why do you think that is now becoming such a big trend? And again, I do have further questions facing that.

Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where, like, people will have an opinion on anything. But what does the data say? The data says influencer marketing can work. Doesn't always work. And I know there's a lot of companies that are in this space that I've kind of had side conversations with where it's hard sometimes to even prove the ROI of things like this. But at the end of the day, I don't see the issue in making the effort. Right. It's where I would go with it, I think. When I think about influencers, what I think about is essentially it's just a new spin on, like, we're product spokespeople or pitchman. But it's a relatability, and I think that's the key indicator. Right. Like, do you have a Persona and a public profile and a draw that makes you relatable and then allows your content to be consumed easily? Like, that's. Ultimately, it's. All of it is just. It's a vehicle for content distribution. Ultimately, you have to make the educated and, you know, financially responsible decision of, like, understanding. Like, is this the right vehicle for my business? It's not going to be in every single case, but I think people who dismiss it out of hand as silly or gimmicky, I think they're missing it because, again, it's like it's. It's a relatively new idea taken from places that. It obviously does work. My whole thing, though, is credibility. Right. I think it's disingenuous to try to position. If you have a team that's inexperienced, it's fine if they don't have a tenure, they can't propel them, they can't propose themselves as experts. But if they are legitimately experts in certain things, I don't think there's any reason you couldn't cultivate a community around that. So, like, it is something that I would consider. Right. Like, I want to take advantage of all the mediums we have available to us, which would include the TikToks, the Instagrams of the world, et cetera. LinkedIn's making a big push for video. Like, it's, it's there, it's a distribution channel. But I think again, you. You just have to be smart about it. There are people that I would label BDR influencers that I think are doing really good things. I'm not going to name any names here because it is what it is. But, like, I see them, I see their content, they have a lot of followers. I don't know the ROI behind it, but it almost sometimes doesn't matter. Like, sometimes you have to look at things like this is a brand expense, and for certain brands, it makes sense to have someone like that really visible. Where I would go with it more is like, into the thought leader side. How do you develop someone to become a legitimate thought leader with credibility and authenticity that allows you to kind of sell indirectly? I think it's possible. And it's one of those experiments that I'm kind of running at a macro scale where I am right now. And I think it ties into a lot of those elements of what I would look for an influencer to do, which is again, just a spokesperson at the end of the day.

Yeah, I think you touched upon some of the points which I have again, often debated with founders when I worked in the past. And I hear your concerns and I think I might have a solution because this is something which even my co founder asked me a lot of times. What's the ROI of the brand? And that question kind of bothered me for a while and after which I kind of did the whole analysis. Every time I would post, I would go back and track all the UTM links which we created to find out how many leads did we generate. And now I can clearly show him, and I have the data right now where I know exactly what kind of content should I push to generate the maximum number of leads. So I did the whole analysis for a year. I don't think so. It was possible before the AI came in, but today, you know, with the. With a lot of chatgpt and with a lot of analysis, which is possible. So I think it can be done. And you. I totally agree with you. I know a ton of VDR influencers. In fact, I brought somebody as a guest in the Last podcast. I also brought them in a podcast as well for my guest session for School of sdr. Yeah, they're doing a really good job. I think they know their craft and that's a reason, you know, otherwise people would simply call their bullshit out there and you know, so you really can't hide that much. Thanks for sharing the views. Lastly, I would want to touch base and this is where I think we close the whole circle. We've talked about how SDR world has already shaken up, how it's going to change in the next few years. I want to touch base again on what skills do you think will define the top SDRs in a few years. We talked about how they will look like, but what kind of skills would we be looking for in the next few years besides knowing the technology, of course.

So it's interesting. I can go a couple ways with this. I think what we're going to see is a maturing of the top of funnel roles. Like I think you're going to see a lot more with this go to market engineering thing that's starting to emerge. And I think just like we saw a split from like taking a full cycle sales, breaking off prospecting as its own discipline and kind of turning that into the sdr. I think we're going to start to look at the orchestration side of what go to market is pulling that out and then you're going to maybe have a world where it's like you have your public people who are very front facing right and have personality type and a profile that that matches that. And then you're going to have kind of like the mad scientists behind the scenes that can do a lot of funky stuff. Like I, I heard an art of the possible use case about a guy who's selling solar equipment and is using clay to pull Google Maps images of businesses to see if they have solar panels on their roof moves. Like that's wild. That's just one small example. There's a lot of people who are doing some funky stuff with things like a clay or you know, and I keep using that one because it's the one most people are probably the most familiar with. Like you're going to start to see a lot of that. I think that's going to be one area of skill that we are uniquely positioned to be part of because we already have kind of that built in familiarity with using things in conjunction with each other. But then that opens up a whole slew of like I think you're going to see a lot of people who actually know how to code. Right. And like know how to use AI to write code, to do things kind of bespoke. That's going to help orchestrate a lot of these other elements. Like that's going to be one side of it. And then I also think you're going to see a lot of people, like, interested to see how people who are transitioning from other industries into tech, potentially doing more of that in person stuff. So like actors, teachers, people who are used to being kind of a different or playing a role, let's say. Right. And kind of embracing a personality type of. I think those are going to be really good skills as well. And I would say this right, like if I was starting out, I would really try to approach both camps, see which side I'm more comfortable with, and then kind of pick a lane and try to dominate it. So either really master the in person engagement stuff or really master like the new emerging tech behind the scenes. Because one of those two things is going to set you up, I think, for longer term success.

Love that, Love that. This was wonderful. Malcolm, I think I do truly appreciate you coming to the show and, you know, sharing your insights. As a last part of the podcast, I do have a surprise where I'm going to ask you a rapid fire if you're ready. You get 30 seconds maximum to think of the printing of the answer. But, you know, the sooner the better. Let me know when you're ready.

I'm ready.

Okay. Why did you choose to be an SDR leader? Wrong answer.

Only wrong answer. I'm a glutton for pain.

I like that. All right. Best company you have ever worked for. Best organization you work for, honestly.

I mean, I love my current work, but there was really something special about databricks and my previous manager there, Grace, was phenomenal. Probably one of the best sales leaders I've ever worked with. She really helped me develop as a leader myself. So I'm forever, forever in her debt.

What is one sales tool? What is one sales tech you absolutely, absolutely hate?

Oof. Honestly, as. As useful as it is, Sales Navigator, there's so many things about it where I'm like, why is it like this? Like, why could I only do 25 per page? There's just so many little things. I'm like, why are you like this? Like, you're the only tool that you can use to do this thing. So I kind of stuck with it. Yeah. Sales navigator.

All right. What is one sales tool you absolutely love?

I'm not going to name it because you know, I'm doing an evaluation of a few, but I would say I'm falling in love with dialers. Like dialers to me now, what it represents. And I know there's a lot of people who are on the fence about it, whether it's parallel or power dialer, but like, that has always been such a hassle of actually getting people on the phone and that it's solving for that and it's opening up a lot of other interesting places and I'm starting to see where it's good. So that is probably one. And then, you know, I mean, I'm gonna cheat a little bit. Bit. But I have Chat GPT open all the time and I'm always interacting with it and it's become kind of like a really interesting, dynamic live journal for me. So that's another one I would say.

Not surprise about Chat GPT. Thank you. And final questions. Okay, you have one wish from a genie and you can only use it to make your sales process better. In 2025, what will you do?

Okay, so I'm realizing that with a lot of these new tools, at the end of the day, if you have bad data, you're done. Because, like, if you're using first party data in any significant capacity, if it's degradated or not accurate, it's just garbage in, garbage out. So my genie wish would be like, give me perfect data for the last for like my whole company. Like clean everything, make it perfect, make all of my account hierarchies clean, all the nomenclature for naming clean. Like no bad data. Like no duplicates. Like, make it perfect. And then I can throw all the cool AI stuff on top.

Love that. This was amazing. Malcolm, thank you so much for being on the show.