How the Best Outbound Sales Teams Are Managed with ServiceNow, Box, and Mark Roberge

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome author of bestseller, must read, predictable revenue and co author of From Impossible to Inevitable, Aaron Ross.

I'm excited for the panel today. Oh, there we go. I'm gonna take this spot. Now, do I introduce them or does God introduce them? And we've got Ralph Barsi from ServiceNow. Super bowl entrance. We need paper here. You can break through. Hey, thanks for joining us. Yep. And mark Robert, former CRO of HubSpot, now lounging at Harvard as a professor, man of leisure.

Good seeing you, buddy.

Hey, glad to have you. And Lauren here, McGuire from Box. 34 weeks. Yeah, glad to have you.

Thanks.

I guys could take a seat.

Cool.

Thank you. So quickly. Lauren's managing the SDR team at box. Prior you also worked at Salesforce. Mark Roberge. I don't think we need much more introduction for you. Sorry. And Ralph here. So managing an SDR team at ServiceNow. At ServiceNow. But before that too. You've done at least prior.

I was at Inside View and Achievers in San Francisco.

Okay, sorry. One more thing. Before we start the actual panel, I'd like you to share just a bit of a fun or weird or a random fact about yourself. I think obviously mine. I've got 11 kids, but besides that, I like tattoos. So does my wife.

Nice. I have a degree in pre veterinary medicine and was supposed to be a veterinarian.

Oops.

Oh, okay. Never too late to follow your dreams.

So I have a slew of celebrity stories from my twenties in New York. I had a fun time. One of the good ones was I fell asleep on Diana Ross's shoulder in a club. Which was cool. Now, what was really cool about it asleep was I tell. Yeah, kind of. I was tired. But what was really cool about I tell this story to, like my. When we do our millennial BDR group meetings. And I was dating myself because two of them, who's Diana Ross? And the other one said, I think she knitted the American flag.

Oh, God.

Like, what am I, 300 years old?

So I've been a drummer for 42 years. If I had not gone the sales and sales leadership path, I would have been a drummer in a band. My band is called Segue. S E G U E. Not to be mistaken for what you ride around San Francisco and we have three albums all on Spotify and itunes. How about that?

That's cool. Yeah, Come up.

Cool stuff.

All right, so let's start off with like a gen. A conversation started here. So in terms of we're talking about managing teams and reflect back on mistakes that you have made or may be making that you still see everybody making time and again. Lauren, want to start here? Sure.

I think the biggest mistake I made early on was not getting loud when my ratios got too high. I let myself get up to 20 to 1 reps.

Okay, so define a rate of like 1 prospector SDR to 20 closers.

Actually how many direct reps I was managing.

Oh, that you were managing. I got it. Yeah. One to 20.

Yes. Not accomplishing a lot.

Okay, what do you think is a fairer number?

I would say closer to 10.

Yeah. Okay, good. Good answer. You passed.

Cool.

Yeah.

Yeah. Throw two out there to start. So when we started our BDR program first off, I think we had like five or 10 of them throwing appointments over to a couple of reps and we were comping them on the meeting set. And basically what happened was the reps were like lying for the number of meetings that were set if they crushed their number to hook up their bdr. And they were complaining that they shouldn't get credit for meetings when they missed their number. Right. And also what was happening was all the reps had sort of different, slightly different preferences on like how far along they wanted the appointment and what they wanted the BDR to accomplish, et cetera. So we had a lot of success in having just a tighter alignment. We went to like a 3 to 2 ratio of BDRs to AES and they just, you saw the AES, 3 BDRs, 3 BDRs to 2 AES. And they just had a really great relationship that we didn't have to like just get in, define all the rules. And they all had like their little preferences. And the AES tended to mentor the bdrs a lot more because it would come back to them. And the other big thing is we had a shorter sales cycle. So we comped the BDRs on the revenue success of those AES. We didn't comp on meetings at all. Not everyone can do that. You guys have longer sales cycles. But I think the point there is I'm not a huge fan of comping on meetings, something that short. But comp on revenue if you have a short sales cycle or if you have a longer one, comp on something.

Like pipeline generation, some sort of qualified step after meeting. Beyond that, just a quick question. What do you think is the most like the terms of ratio of 1BDR can support up to how many salespeople effectively?

I think it's so, so contextual, like on like your deal size and that kind of stuff and I think it's something that needs to be experiment on, experimented with. You know, obviously the trade off there.

Is more is not better.

What's that?

More is not.

I mean it's not necessarily. I mean your unit economics are going to blow up, your CAC's going to blow up. So you've got to maximize that 40 or 50 hour work week for the rep as efficiently as possible and you've got to just find that right ratio for your team.

Ralph?

Yeah, I guess mistake or challenge or something I would do differently is get the BDRs to focus more on how they're branding themselves in the marketplace. So I used to not make a big deal out of what their LinkedIn profile looked like and what it said and how they appeared and how they represented themselves and the company and, and my mindset has really changed over the years because that's a critical piece. BDRs in their unique role, they're obscure to the marketplace for the most part. A lot of companies get emails from a bdr. They have no clue who they are and they're immediately pitching. So if they send a halfway compelling email and it's enticing enough for the recipient to want to look them up and learn about them, you've got to give that recipient a location to go learn from and let them kind of do their own studying and research before they decide to engage. So I've really doubled down on the social selling aspect and really making sure that the BDRs are branding themselves better.

Do a lot of the younger BDRs have LinkedIn profiles? Usually or not.

They all do in my organization. But there's a lot of younger BDRs in the industry that while they have a LinkedIn profile, they're certainly not optimizing it. There's still a lot of cases where you see a silhouette as the profile.

Picnic or there's like a party picture.

Yeah, exactly. That just doesn't help.

Yeah, okay. Actually Speaking about young BDRs, one of the questions people constantly ask and are struggling with are sort of expectations and motivations slash promotions. Right. So actually Mark, I think you want to. This is one of your main points.

Yeah, I mean I just had, we had a lot of success with this. It was, we were banning our head. Like I would interview these, you know, 22, 23 year old BDRs and like, so what do you, like what do you want to be doing in a year? And like a year I don't even know. I don't even living here. You Know like they're just like, there's just so different perception on like time. Right. And that like got a light bulb going. One of our great sales directors put it. So what we did was we created a six tier promotion path. They went through six levels and each to get through each level. One of the requirements was not tenure, was not three months. It was like it was.

None of it was time based.

Level one was like pass this test, set five appointments and get one customer, then you go to level two. Level two was have an install base of like 30,000 MRR and a churn rate less than 2%. Level three, you can keep going on these things. You could not get through in a week. They weren't set up so that it was going to take somewhere between two and four months. But it's really up to them on how fast. And there was always that carrot that was like once they got to level two, there was that thing that was out there and the rewards were meaningful like options. A $5,000 bump in your base, you can work at home one day a week. At level four, you are now qualified to go into account executive training. And that was like that worked so well to turn this really hard job to be like cold calling all day for nine to 18 months into something that felt like you were continually making progress. So that was a home run for us and I think worked very well for this, this type of.

So it was like six little bit sort of tiers in the first X, like four to six months to get them rolling. And then after that was there anything else or more Is it more than.

The basically were an A to be honestly because the fastest ones got through in seven or eight months and some of them it took two years and it was just like it was really cool to have the person I got through in seven months be there on the first day of BDR training and say hey listen, this is what I did and I got through. And they were like that rock star that everyone wanted to be and you kind of controlled your destiny. It worked really well.

Lauren or Ralph, do you have anything else you want to add about motivation?

Yeah, it's hard because you have to walk the fine balance between what you've committed pipeline wise to the business and if you move someone too close at that six month mark, you might not get it and that's not sexy for them. Your reps don't care about that.

Right.

So you're trying to walk that balance and still move them in that reasonable time frame. So I really like what Mark was saying, you know, kind of like setting these goals that you can maybe achieve 12 months in six months or whatever it may be.

Sorry, I was going to say I definitely start with a macro perspective and I show them a statistic that if you make $40,000 today in the United States, you're among the 3.5% wealthiest people in the world and you're 52 times wealthier than a billion people. So that gets the BDR to start developing an attitude of gratitude that you know you've got it made already. And also find a personal trigger, whether that's people or places that you want to aspire to achieve in your career. And that alone will pull you through that day to day grind.

Yeah, so actually, quick question on day to day motivation, because it can be not only whether you call it a hard job or it can also be like a rote routine job. Once you've got your system down, you're at it for three months or four months. All right, I'm doing this. At Salesforce, we probably kept them about eight months before we had to promote them. But sometimes you have them in the job for two years. So do you see things that they have done, you have done to help them enjoy the day to day job more or at least bring more learning or creativity to it, to help shake it up, to help balance out the goal setting.

So for us, I think we have to kind of position our roles as building the foundation to be an amazing account executive. And I think when you do have this elevation or promotion path that you tell them, look at that person, they're an enterprise account executive. It's because they learned ABC in this role. So I think it's super important to kind of paint the vision as far as your skill set. You're building this foundation and that's why this making 40 calls or whatever value of the skills. Yeah, you have to tie it back.

It's a life skill to learn how to do this.

Exactly, yeah. I mean, I've seen some amazing cultures. The best one I've seen is probably Yelp. I went to their New York office, Jed, their CRO. We had a dialogue for a number of years. We're just hanging out, having some coffee downstairs. And he's like, yeah, let's go up, check out the office. It's a frigging dance club. I mean, it's like you walk in, the music's blaring, there's tables of 20 bdrs. Each table is a start class. That's the September class. That's the October class, that's November class. On the pillars, there's huge life size paintings of the BDR of the month on the wall. Then the bell rings and someone stands on the stage and someone goes up to the second floor and there's dollar bills floating down.

I mean it's like, sorry, where was this?

Yeah, it was Yelp in New York. If you have a chance to like I've seen ones like this. I mean you can picture this. It's like you can get very creative in the culture. It's super fun for them to show up to work.

Although after six months of that burnout, everyone gets tired of you could live.

At the, you know, maybe I think it worked pretty well for them. But like, yeah, maybe they do get burnt out. But you've seen these environments are just a lot of fun. You can get creative with that.

So while Most of the BDRs end up pursuing a sales career, there's a lot that don't. So we want to make it very clear that there's a multitude of paths that they can take and the ones who are doing the best work ultimately become indispensable to the organization. So we will move obstacles out of the way to get them in a place where they're truly going to shine. And, and that could be as a customer success manager, it could be in the finance team. It doesn't have to be in sales. So we do follow along kind of a two year tenure and at that one year mark, we actually have a Come to Jesus meeting and we talk about the first year and we reflect on where their successes have been and then they decide whether or not they want to throw their hat in the ring and really pursue sales. And then, you know, it'll be a two way street and we'll help get them there. Or we have a deeper discussion about the other options that are in the organization. And this again assumes that they're an A player and they're adding value.

Yep. Okay, other sort of switching topics here for part one. Question. How do you like how big is your team? But how then do you juggle life and work yourself? Obviously appropriate question here.

Wow.

And the second part is going to be how, what do you expect or tell your team to do on their own? Should they people do they work a lot or tell them to take time off or you tell them not to? There's no right answer. I'm just curious because everyone's a bit.

Different here for me personally. So my organization is 130 people around.

The world around the world, right around the world.

100 of them are BDRs. The other 30 are directors and managers. For me personally, this I see as more of a vocation versus a career. So it's the life, work, balance. It's all one to me. I have a wife of 20 years and we have three boys. So there's definitely. You have to straddle between the two roles on a 24, 7 basis. But when you live by the philosophy, one team, one mission, and at work they know what you're getting after and at home they know what you're getting after, the synergy is there and it's pretty easy to do.

Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of time these days. I mean, it's kind of busy during the semester, but not very busy. Not so I'm a lot of time to be a good dad and a good husband and a good church member and a good community member, which has been a blast. I'll speak to it. More from the HubSpot days. I put a lot of effort into time management. I would kind of every month have this list of three critical things that I need to make happen. And I check in that list after every week to see if I'm aligned with it. And then I would just probably every Sunday night just lay out the entire week schedule, make sure everything's aligned. And I usually left the office at 4 on Wednesdays and Fridays to just, you know, the other days I usually didn't get home before the kids were in bed. But Wednesdays and Fridays are my days to get home, chill, you know, do the baths and, you know, do dinner and that kind of stuff. And I never worked on the weekend except after they went to bed. So I'd do a lot of like. They'd all crash at like nine and then I'd do another three hours there. So it's rigorous. You got folks going through this stuff. It's rigorous. But you gotta find that balance for the long term view. And I put a lot of time into that. Time management.

Yeah, I mean, I'll echo a lot of what they're saying, but I put a stop at the end of the day. I take the train. So we have to work on.

This is your second. How old is your first?

She's two. Yes. And I have a husband that travels 300 days of the year. So, yes, we kind of manage Google Calendar is our best friend for managing that. But yeah, we make it work. You go home and you're home, you're present, you're a family member. And when they go to bed, you get back online and kind of fix up whatever you need to. But even if you talk about the reps, I don't know how your orgs are structured, but ours are hourly. We have to remind them go home. And because they're quota based they want to keep working. And so yeah, I definitely encourage my reps to go take vacations and sometimes it's just a day off, just go take a mental break. Everyone needs it, not just us.

So we have a little bit of time left I want to point out. So Ralph shared a couple tools and maybe in the back you can put up the screen.

Cool.

So one's your reading list of favorite books. I noticed there's a key one missing but another one.

Well it's on there.

No, the other.

Oh the other one.

Yeah, it's not there yet.

But the other one, I haven't read it yet is an SDR bookends. So I don't know if you can scroll down a little bit to see the picture.

Yep.

So you can grab this. This is my Twitter. I put it's Moto CEO on Twitter. This picture. What is this?

Yeah, so it's a time management tool with that I call the bookends approach and a lot of BDRs in my organizations have use this where they use Monday and Friday as the bookends or the caps of the week where they do a lot of admin work, internal meetings one on ones but then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is solely dedicated to inbound lead follow up or outbound prospecting and the entire organization knows that and will not book meetings with the BDRs because they have blinders on and they're getting after it on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

So you can download that from and also I posted Mark has a bottoms up sales and marketing template. It's either it's below or above this. It's okay, but you can download the Excel. Stop, it's already. Anyway you can download the Excel sheet and this is.

Yeah so like I wrote a pretty lengthy article on Medium if you google my name. Marco Berge, Medium this summer one of the things was there's so many numbers are missed because of bad planning and this Excel allows you to input how many reps you're going to hire a month, what the ramp is, what the attrition's going to be, your manager to rep ratio. The demand of either appointments from BDRs or meetings or leads from inbound is matching up to hit the numbers. It's just a really nice checking point for you. You can play with that. Just to make sure, as you're planning for the year, the quarter, all that stuff's aligned.

So find them online. Also, there's a link to it here. And last things we wrap up. I will share that there's now, finally, after a year, the audiobook of From Impossible to Inevitable came out. Thank God, if you didn't know that Jason Lemkin and I wrote a book. It's out there. Finally. Audio took forever. Hey, I want to thank you all. Ralph, Mark and Lauren, great panel. And then we'll be back here in a few minutes with the next panel, which is on building your first outbound team.

Thanks, Aaron. Thanks, everybody.

Take care.