Building a Next-Generation Sales Development Team with InsideView's CMO + Sales Development Manager

Just. Okay.

I need to. I just want to make sure this all runs smoothly first. Thanks, Lindsay. No problem. And good luck. I'm sure it'll be a great session.

And I can keep sharing my screen, correct?

That's definitely it. Yes.

It. Oh my goodness.

Okay, everyone, let's get started. Welcome to Saastra Annual at Home Edition and my colleague Kelsey Caracado and I are here to deliver some great information for you on the secrets to building a next generation sales development team. We have great topics for you, so give me a click, Kels. Both she and I have been studying this topic for a long time. Me as cmo, I got the opportunity to write a book about sales and marketing alignment four years ago that Wiley published. It's available for all of you. There's also subsequent research on the Inside View website that I've done on the very same topic. And it talks about how sales development is at the nexus point of alignment between marketing and sales. We came here together today to give you guys as much useful information as possible. So I'm going to kick us off talking about the impact that sales development has in the organization and then Kelsey is actually going to show you how to do it and everything that she measures. So it should be super useful. Get ready to take some screen grabs. I know that Sasra is streaming this, but also making it available for recording. So you could wait for that, but if you really want it in the moment, do it now. So let's talk about the impact of SDRs. All of you here today are here because you're trying to grow your companies. And there's a lot of marketing sessions about growth marketing and sessions about how to get people to your website and all of that. But what the heck happens once those people walk in the virtual front door of your store? They are greeted by people. Those people are SDRs. And so that's what today is about. Give me a click, Kels. The reason that this is so dramatic today is that B2B buying has changed forever. Now, this was true back in 2017 when Mary Shay of Forrester started studying. And it's more true now that we are in Covid and everyone is remote. Buyers are in control more than ever before, especially B2B buyers. I was on an earlier Sastra session this morning that was talking about the G2 cloud session that some of you might have seen. And they were talking about how buyers are taking longer, they're using more social proof, they really want to talk to one another. There's often more different buyers involved, but There's a different sense of urgency and value. And all those things are really true. All of this, in fact affects the sdr. Go ahead and click, Kels. Now, when we talk about what do we mean by the sales development team, it is a team of humans, everybody, right? These are people that are virtually greeting our guests. Sometimes they're strangers coming into our website, sometimes they're existing customers. But often these people are the only people that have interaction early on. And so they have to be the right folks, the right personalities, the right training and so on. Go ahead and give us a click there and we'll talk about the new funnel. So I want you guys to think about the fact that we were all trained classically that a funnel looks like a funnel, the kind of funnel that you use to bake cake or put oil in your car. Well, I'm going to argue the funnel looks like this picture and if it was animated, it would go back and forth like an ellipses or a crazy 8 sign, where first you're finding your prospects in the funnel, top of funnel, engaging with them. That's often middle of funnel, closing or winning that business and then growing that business. And one of the blind spots that a lot of marketers have and sellers, frankly, when they are thinking about where to use their SDRs is they only think about the top of funnel, only those first new logo leads. And we all know in a SaaS business that the annuity from your customer base is really, really important. So you might have CSMs or AMS or whatever, but you can also use your SDRs to help you grow those deals, especially if they are large enterprise deals.

So.

So that's an important thing to think about. There's another way to look at the process. Kelsey, give us a click. And I think it has a double bill. Just go right to it. This is a slightly more complicated way of looking at that very same easy thing I just showed you guys. And all it is is starting in the lower left. People are coming to your website, going through all of these stages. And us marketing and salespeople have nifty terms like MQL and SAL and so on. You're going to have equivalence in your company, which just means stages of that person going through the cycle. The SDR has a critical role to play very on in qualifying that prospect. And I like to say qualification is whatever the sales rep deems worthy. So you might use terms like bant, budget, authority, need and timeline. You might have other qualifications that make sense for your business. But I like to Think of it as this lead is worthy of the sales time because all sales has is time. They cannot control anything else except their focus. Now that sale is made and the customer adopts and expands and and off you go. Ready to use your SDRs in an expansive way if you want to. And that's kind of a 201 level, but it's something for you to think about. Now, a few other comments for us to talk about and go ahead and give us a click. Kelsey, relate to one really notable cool thing that we wanted to talk about today. Kelsey calls the speed to lead on the website. What I am showing you is a screenshot of two things. On the left hand side where the map is and the content. On the left is a view from our chatbot or conversational marketing tool called Qualified. It's a really great tool. Drift is a great tool. Intercom is a great tool. Those are three really good ones. We really like Qualified because it's really well integrated into Salesforce CRM, which we use. And what this is telling our SDRs who are monitoring this console, it is telling them who's coming to the website. And often those people are cookied or we de anonymize them in one way we can see what they're doing and. And then on the right hand side you can see where our SDR Garrett has engaged with that human being and had a very meaningful conversation about the fact that that prospect was looking at a competitive product and wanted to talk to us. This is a good example of the kind of very modern thing that is expected today in Speed to lead and something that the SDRs are the virtual front door right here. So my final comment before I turn it over to Kelsey is there's lots of ways you can use your SDRs and many of you are thinking, I'll have an inbound team and an outbound team and that'll be great and it'll be super simple and that is a way to start. But I'd like you to expand your thinking to your customer base. But also for cool projects like competitive takeouts, let's say there's a bunch of customers that you lost to a competitor, go back to them nine months later and see if you can win them back with an SDR campaign. It's a great way to add an interesting new thing for your SDRs to do. So that is kind of why SDRS matter. And I'll turn it over to Kelsey to tell you actually how to do this.

Thanks, Tracy. At this point, you're probably wondering how do we build this team? Jason Lemkin from Sastra has a rule where he says hire two sales reps out of the gate, not one because you don't want to put all of your eggs in one basket. Start with the two with the goal of them paying for themselves and see if this is possible. See if you can get them to close deals. Once they can, you then hire your supporting cast. This includes your demand gen manager and some SDRs. Your sales development representatives start there and that should get you to probably 1 to 3 million ARR or something like that. Now we know from looking at the attendee records about half of you in the audience today are startups, but many are bigger than that. You take that ratio and pull it forward. Now you might be wondering what do we pay these sales development people and what should their quota be? We are sharing with you our actual quotas. We have a range of SDRs from people who have little to no sales experience to others who have a lot more. We wanted to share with you what you can expect and share how this is working for us at Inside View. Now you might wonder where do I hire these sales development people? The old way is you run ads, you have recruiters, find you a bunch of people that are just right out of college with zero training and then you teach them how to be an SDR and all about your company. But that doesn't always work so well. This is a hard job, it's a grind, a stepping stone role that you use to be promoted out of it. But what if you could find job ready candidates? You can. Inside View has partnered with SV Academy. They take folks right out of school or from an adjacent industry through a very formal training program. They teach them how to be SDRs, how to use the tools necessary for the role and other things. They come in at our level too with the knowledge and skills to be an SDR and we just teach them our business. We have hired 12 people from SV and hired another four that will start this month. These people are often promoted into other customer facing roles in the company like account executive, customer service manager. We even have an SDR right now that we see as a future sales engineer. All of our SDRs have these potential opportunities in front of them. Inside view aligns with SV's mission to help hardworking people that are driven break into the tech industry. Ones from non traditional backgrounds and become part of a lifelong community of high performers. These are extremely talented people. Another way you can go is is to outsource a partner and we outsource to our partner Televerde. They have a very unique business model because these women are incarcerated. They work from a call center Monday through Friday. We have members from Televerde on our team today. They are incredibly talented and valuable. They are our team leads our top performers. They show up to work in a way I have never seen. Literally outsourcing your team is a very good way to get up and running fast. You don't have to go hire people. You can go to companies like Televerde and have a strong SDR team quickly. We have both on our team and have seen so many benefits. Coming up, we have a checklist that you can use to dig deeper into reasons why to go inside or outside. Let's talk about some more statistics as far as what you can expect from your SDRs. There's an organization called the Bridge Group. Trish Bertuzzi there is an amazing thought leader. This firm consults with companies on sales effectiveness. They've done a seminal report every couple years about SDR and AE metrics. What I'm sharing with you here is what you can expect as far as a typical time to ramp and other important metrics. Now, how much pipeline can we expect these SDRS to generate? I'm sharing with you what we expect from our folks. We use some of that Bridge Group data to help us understand what we really could expect. We see this slide is important to you in the audience to understand what is industry best practice. And as you can see, there's quite a long range. Our SDRs happen to be very high performing against this particular Bridge Group model and hopefully this is helpful to you. Now, you've been probably wondering about inbound versus outbound pipeline. Maybe you've heard here at Sastra, oh, is that an inbound lead process or an outbound lead process? And so on. Most businesses have both. Sometimes Companies organize their SDRs in inbound and outbound only teams because that's the promotion path. And this can seem to logically make sense. But we have found that our people get burned out. Their saws get dull because with outbound as you know, it's much harder to connect with people. So the outbound team is never having enough conversations. This also causes ramping to be a problem when I.

Help them learn the skill and share grit. It turns out it took five to six months to ramp because they were not having enough conversations. So I made the decision to flip it. They start on inbound. Now they do it as a blend as the ratio of what they spend their time on changes more throughout their tenure.

This is our actual ramping data. Starting on inbound with that blended model is highly recommended as it cut our ramp time in half from five to six months to two to three. And tracking the data this way really helped us to do that. The last thing to think about when building your team is what kind of technology do you need. This event is full of vendors like Inside View who want to sell you technology and so you have a lot of choices to make. I have a recommendation of where to start at each phase as you grow and add more people, what kind of technology you should actually use. Hopefully this will help. And there are websites like vendor neutral, G2 crowd and smart selling tools that can advise you on how to shortlist vendors.

Means they don't have time to use them all. As you get more sophisticated, you add more things. Now let's talk about metrics. Let me tell you how I measure the team. This slide starts high level on the type of things you would want to measure for your SDR success. The one that is of course most important to me here is pipeline quality pipeline that turns into revenue. Of course 100% of our SDR's variable is quality pipeline. But I look at other things too. Here are some of the other KPIs you can look at to make sure that your people are getting where they need to go as far as ramping and in general. And here are some of our actual dashboards. Now you can see that we've anonymized the people because I don't need you trying to recruit them. I took these pictures a couple weeks ago to show the kinds of dials I'm always looking at. We built these simply in Salesforce Lightning. The most important thing I look at here is AE accepted opportunities this quarter as that's what we are all compensated on on this slide. The rest of this dashboard most important metric I look at is created opportunities. Because the more opportunities the SDRs create, the more they're going to get accepted. Hopefully this gives you a good idea of how you should be measuring your SDRs to ensure their success. But wait, there's more. I've thrown some extras in here for you as we get asked all the time, where should the SDR team report into? Where do they fit within the org? And Inside View has thought a lot about this very carefully. Whether it should be marketing or sales. It's really up to you. At Inside View we have our team reporting to our CMO here.

Tracy.

I like it this way because as an AE myself for 10 years before I got into leadership, I witnessed a lack in sales appreciation for the engine that is marketing. Reporting into it early in your career can allow you to see that value early. But on the other hand, sales development reporting into sales can work great especially for that SDR to AE career path. Serious decisions. In a recent event that Inside View participated in asked people for their company what part of the org their SDRs reported into and found 54% report into marketing. So it really is a coin flip. However, they found the fastest growth companies correlated to marketing. I think the reason for that is if you consolidate your demand gen and everything you're doing with your website into that first conversation and front door SDR experience, it works much better. You're more efficient. You have that speed to lead, speed to opportunity and a clean handoff to sales. I believe that we've got it right in our business, but you have to do what's right for you. Here's that checklist I talked about that we put together to help you answer that question. Should I go inside or outside? Should I have an internal team or outsource? As we discussed, our blended model is what's best for Inside View. But this can help you go home and decide what's best for your company. We put together this checklist to help you through it. So where are we? We've told you why the SER function is crucial to your business, how to actually build your team, and most important, how to measure them. We've given you some extras to think about. So what are our key takeaways? Motivation is everything. I work to drive these talented people with emotion while holding them accountable to process hard but efficient work outcomes and performance. And we have a blast doing it. Our name is Team Hustle for a reason. We foster a culture of showing up as your real authentic self. As their leader, it is my responsibility to model this and give permission. It is risky, but it is worth it. Here are our final key takeaways. Traci, of course most important to me on this one is the focus on Pipeline. What's most important to you on this list?

Yeah, I gotta say the alignment part. And we have a bunch of questions in the chat that I think we should answer. Kel, so I'm gonna give you a couple of those. First one I'm gonna take which Travis is asking is there a link to the study showing 54% of the teams SDR teams report through marketing and actually no, there's not a link to it because it happened in a live meeting that I was at. It was a CMO roundtable at a Serious Decisions conference. Their cmo, Jay Gaines, was running a talk and I asked the question, hey, where does marketing report? Or sorry, where do the SDRs report? And we went around the room and talked. But then he said they had done a study. So if you're a Serious Decisions customer, you might be able to dig that up. I'll see what I can find, and if I can find it, I'll post it on Twitter. The 54% of those teams were associated with higher growth companies, I think was the biggest part of my takeaway. Someone on the.