How to Scale Outbound Sales with the CROs of Outreach, Malwarebytes, HubSpot, Seismic

All right, you guys hear me okay?

In the back?

I heard the sound was a little crunchy. You're good back there. Awesome. I am loud, so this should work out. Okay. Welcome, everybody. Welcome to Saster. Welcome and thank you for attending our session. We are going to talk a little bit about what's going on with SDR, BDR, XDR, there's like 5,000 names. You should think of another one. We're gonna talk about what's happened with those teams and our early sales people and their careers and what we're seeing in the market. So thank you for spending some time with us. We are psyched to be able to have you all here with us. I am gonna do quick intros across the team here for a minute. We've got Tony, Amy, and Michelle. I'm gonna have them introduce themselves. So we'll start with you, Tony.

Tony Benvenuto, SVP of Sales at Seismic. Been there for just under three years. Loving it so far. I feel like I'm a dinosaur in Sass there, but small stint at Marketo, small stint at Adobe, I'd say small, but five and six years apiece. Looking forward to the chat.

And what's something you wish you'd known back when you were early in that prospecting career?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Great question. So for. For folks coming in entry level, something that I wish I knew, that I know now is be you. Is be your authentic self. Right. I feel like some people when they're breaking into the industry, especially entry level, they feel like they need to walk, talk, act a certain way. Don't do that. We read right through the bs. Be yourself. It's going to go a lot further.

All right, Amy, memory from Prospector and something you wish you knew back then.

Okay, so I'll just do a quick intro.

Yes, quick intro. And then those two.

Yep. Amy Appleyard, and I'm the senior Vice President of Global sales at Malwarebytes. And I've been there for about a month, so just getting started, still trying to find my way around. And actually I'm based in Boston, but out here now I'll get to meet some folks from my team for the first time physically, which will be awesome. And then I think early career sort of memory of things that I would. I love your advice, like, be yourself. Totally be yourself. But I actually think make sure you find other people within the organization who would help you. Like, don't try to do everything alone. So especially if you're in sales, make sure that you are making friends with people in marketing. With people in channel because these are the folks who are going to help you leverage and really help you grow.

All right, Michelle.

Hey, thank you. Hey everyone. Michelle Benfer. I'm head of North America sales at HubSpot. Been with HubSpot for almost four years now. And I came up with selling cars, selling women's fashion magazines, selling media and somehow I got into tech. So I'm here today. So I have a lot of really interesting prospecting stories from door to door to bdr, a little bit of everything. So my advice, I'd say two things. One's count the no's. If you actually embrace the no's and know that they're coming, I think it really helps with that resiliency and the ability to know that that's part of sales and ideally you're working on your no rate as much as possible. And I'd also say don't be a robot, which is a little bit of what you're saying and that authenticity, I think for many of us who are overseeing young sellers bdrs. I mean I get so much robotic email every single day and you can just tell it is a sequence that they copy, paste, pump out. And I don't open anything unless it's perfect personalized. So be unique, don't be a robot. Cut through the noise. Yeah, that's a good path.

That is awesome. And Anna Baird, everybody CRO at outreach early my. I still remember vividly my very first cold call. It was to Symantec. So those of you know, they're like here in the. In the valley virus antivirus software. And I was scared to death. I still remember like literally not breathing when I left the voicemail because I did get voicemail and ended up with a $600,000 deal out of that. So don't be afraid to just put yourself out there because you just never know what's going to happen. I think those things are out there for all of us depending on who you're calling. And you never know what is on the other end of the line. I think today with all the things we have out there, it is way easier to understand what your buyers are looking for and make sure you know that too. It's like know something about their business, do your research. I think that is the biggest advice on. On the customized side where all the buyers are expecting you to. And that whole journey with buyers has changed, especially these last couple of years. All right, we are gonna kick it in and our first. It has been interesting. So the Wall Street Journal had just Published something recently talking about 65% of the open jobs out there for salespeople. I mean, it's like this incredible increase in the number of jobs out there. And I think we've got a slide on this in a second. But it is a market for somebody who's looking for a role in go to market and in sales in particular, and just wanted to kind of take it to the team. And Tony, I'm going to start with you. We keep hearing there's obviously labor shortages across all kinds of industries. There are supply chain issues, there's all these crazy things. Why is this happening in sales? What's going on?

Good question. I think to state the facts right, sales is hard, it sits, it's tough, and it's high pressure. Right. I mean, ask my wife at the end of each quarter how much of a delight I am to be around. I've gotten better. But. But no, realistically, right. So, you know, user adoption is a direct correlation to the open recs that are in the market right now. And there's a lot of them and there's not as many folks that want to jump in and kind of get their hands dirty. You know, the reasoning behind that, at least in my thoughts are, you know, we're still in a global pandemic, rounding the curve, hopefully, knock on wood, but still a risky, risky time. So in my thoughts, you know, there are a lot of people still turtling. And what I mean by that is they're not poking their head all the way out. Right. And they're, you know, they're, they're open to it, they're super talented, but they're just not ready to take that risk. And you know, obviously we need to show them the way and coach them up. But I think come January, February timeframe, we might be in a completely different situation where the talent is saturated and everybody's ready to make a move. We're just not there yet.

Awesome. Amy, Michelle, you have thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think only thing I'd add is that there is a real need for it. And I think to your point, people are a little afraid or maybe are turtling. I think I just try to give advice to folks just saying like, you will never regret it. You'll never regret. Even if you just spend a year as an SDR or bdr, whatever you want to do for the rest of your career, you will always benefit from it. And I think just helping to encourage people to take that risk, like seeing it as a path to anything, it doesn't have to be be a path into just more sales or sales leadership or sales management. You will never regret any time that you spend talking to customers, coordinating with your channel partners or your marketing team or trying to figure out, like, how to message it is worth it. So we're just encouraging people to do so. I think a lot of people put their hiring on hold, and I think sales folks were the first to then sort of come out of it after that. So there's definitely a race for talent now, even though there are a lot of open positions.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. Just one added note. I mean, the talent war is real, which is why I should let you all know we're hiring at HubSpot. We're hiring at Malwarebytes, AES, sales managers, directors. We're launching a Canadian office in Toronto. Just letting y' all know.

Okay, okay.

But I would just add, I also think the idea of who a salesperson was is different than what it really actually is. And one of the things at HubSpot that we do is we really try to hire bright, empathetic, curious people. I think a lot of us do this, and it's not necessarily the extrovert that I think we used to think of in sales. The athlete, the person who was hyper competitive, the lone wolf. And so I think we need to educate people a bit more on really what the successful sales rep is like. And it's not that traditional sales personality that I think a lot of us probably grew up in.

Okay, we'll play off of that for the second then. So as you're trying to hire these maybe a little bit differentiated skill sets, what are some hiring strategies for people out there going, okay, we've got to just like you fill some ranks. Any tips or tricks from a hiring strategy in this environment?

Yeah, I mean, I think we have something called employee brand. And so we have an entire team that tries to push out, you know, what an incredible culture that we have. We also build our sales plans differently, which I think once we get people in the door, we try to tell them when reps hit 110%, the company hits 100%. I'd say for most of companies out there, it's usually with rep hit 80%, then the company hits 100%. So we build our plans for over performance. And so I think part of it is in that pitch, you know, that where our skin is in the game to make reps successful as opposed to we just need bodies to get to 80% of your number in order for us to succeed. So I, I think it's really, how are you investing in reps? And at the end of the day, people want to learn and they want to earn and I think the learning piece is so important and a key differentiator if you're trying to get talent.

We're going to talk about that a bit more in a second. We'll dig in on development in just a minute. But Tony or Amy, any thoughts on hiring strategies that are out there that you're seeing?

Yeah, so perfect launch point here. And I think the press release, press release just hit today, but Seismic is rolling out a program for entry level hires. And what we're doing is we're focused on the unrepresented candidate. Right. De and I is definitely something that is top of mind and top priority for Seismic and should be for everyone. And we're rolling out a program in alignment with SV Academy and really the outcomes and objectives that we're trying to do is place up to 1100 candidates over the next three years, provide them the training, technical skills, coaching, mentoring, interview, internships. And we're going to be partnering and give opportunities for other organizations and individuals to partner with us. You know, related to not only funds, but volunteer time. So you can guest speak, you can, you know, content create, you can mentor coach, all the above. But this is something that we're rolling out literally asap. The press release hit today. More information. Swing by the size of the booth.

That's awesome. Yeah, yeah. We all need to be looking at how do we diversify and this is such a great place to do it. Amy.

Well, I was also going to say that's awesome. I think that's amazing. And I think it gets at that thing that Michelle was also pointing out of just kind of going for talent or somebody who might not seem like your traditional salesperson or might not even know about it as a career. So I like that approach. I think there's the usual college hiring referrals, like all of that that everybody has been doing for a long time, but this is really interesting and impactful and important. We also have just switched over at Malwarebytes to a remote hiring strategy. So we're hiring people anywhere as long as the manager is comfortable with it. So it's up to manager discretion. They could have a team that is entirely remote or some sort of a hybrid team if they do want to be able to bring them into an office. But I think this opens us up to a whole other level of talent and a whole pool out there that we just haven't been able to tap into because we've been trying to hire near our headquarters.

I think that from the diversity perspective too, I think that's awesome. All right, so we're going to dig into development a little bit. Obviously SDR, BDR, XDR, secret weapons built in SaaS. We created them. The whole category exists I think because of the SaaS companies really putting this super hyper focused role into play. And I think as we've did that, it was like, okay, so then what? And I think Michelle, you'd hit on this. They're looking for development, right? This is a role where people are like, how do I build a career from here? And so a lot of us have been spending a lot of time thinking about that. We're going to dig into what does that look like and what's been working. I think we can talk also about what doesn't. That is totally on the table because everybody needs to learn all of that. So when you look at some of the key things that you've done to retain, develop the, the talent, your young professionals that are working their way through the ranks, what are some of the programs you're turning them into, future coaches, managers. What are some of the programs, things that you've done to develop that talent? And Michelle, why don't we start with you?

Yeah, I think, listen, we're iterating on this right now at HubSpot. So as you scale what worked in the beginning, that playbook doesn't necessarily work in a year and a half, two years. So we're working on our BDR playbook right now. I think a big part of it is it's that learning and education. And so, you know, for example, for our BDR team, you know, they go through a one month new hire onboarding program, then they have consistent training and coaching one on one with their managers after that. But then it's also hearing from the other AES and the reps that have been promoted and what, how they've been able to excel within the organization, hosting those roundtables, understanding that also if you start as a bdr, your only path isn't necessarily into sales. And Amy, you mentioned this like even if you do sales for one year, we have people that have moved into sales operations or sales strategy or marketing or customer success. It's just a way to understand the company, the systems, the culture, the community around you and you learn those professional skills, those business skills, you get that business acumen. And so, you know, I think I feel this way now. I had dinner with My boss last night, she's like, what keeps you at HubSpot? And it's the learning. It's just, I'm continuing to learn. And so I think if you can create an environment where somebody is getting fed professionally and they can really grow personally in that professional development as well as within the company, it's just, it's a good recipe.

I would just echo that as well. I think being very conscious and very, you know, specific about what your program is and spelling it out and having be something that you can explain not only to the people that you would hire, but also just internally so that when you're asking for folks, hey, could you mentor, could you do this? Could you do that for folks as they develop that they understand what their role is also. But I kind of think it is a lot like when you think about bringing in SDRs into an organization, you're hopefully growing the talent to stay in sales. But it doesn't always happen. It often, I mean 70ish percent of the time they do, but maybe they're just more interested in HR or in recruiting or in working in product development. I mean in marketing there are all kinds of paths that they could take. The goal is to keep them at the company. In my mind, I think it's our job to find just raw talent and train them. In the cybersecurity industry you often just need to spend a year just understanding the industry. And once you've learned all of that, even if you don't want to be a salesperson, you usually don't want to leave the industry. It's quite complicated and there's a lot of competition out there. So we just try to keep them at the company is the goal and making sure that people do understand. Not necessarily like, ooh, it might not work out, you might not be a salesperson, but just that there's all kinds of paths and this is just an entry for you into the organization.

I think that's such a huge. We've learned the same at outreach and we created when I came three and a half years ago, over three and a half years ago now time flies. It was. We didn't have a career path, no development for our SDR teams and we actually put in career development from the SMB team on the SDR team to a mid market team to an enterprise team team and then from those into our SMB AE teams and then obviously our mid market AE teams and on up and it has made and then also into leadership within the SDR organization and then also into Other roles. So into our customer success, professional services, all of those teams, it's been amazing to see. And so we keep doubling down on that investment. We put in a new program. So onboarding obviously I think huge, giving them the opportunity to really demonstrate their skills. So being able to present in front of other groups. We also have them doing a, there's a five week that they get nominated into, preparing them to be an smbae. So our small business AE team, they have a five week, they get nominated into it, they get to work with the AES, they get to learn what that's like, prepare their skills before they interview for that role. And just that investment and then their development I think has just been game changing for us on just how excited they are that we care about them. You know, everybody talks in this environment, especially with the pandemic and I hate using the word, I'm so tired of it. It's like, okay, but if you pick a different word, this crazy time we're in, it is, it is. People being seen and heard is so critical. And that's not just your young sales teams though. They are struggling probably the most sometimes our younger professionals, it is, how do you make sure they feel like they are seen and heard? And I think any program that helps to do that is huge.

Yeah, sorry, one last out on that. Also having your customers be seen and heard. I mean, for anyone that you want within your company to really understand the customer and the prospect and the marketplace and the product market fit, even if they don't stay in sales, it is just, it is a, you know, receptacle of information and a pulse on the market. And so it's such a great learning opportunity for these young people and, or career switchers to really get a pulse on, you know, that business and that customer.

Yeah, and, and you know, touching to your point, you know, career pathing is one thing, providing them options, but taking it a level deeper, especially from a BDR to an ae, we love the mentor system or buddy system if you will, and allowing them to get deeper and, and really ride shotgun on a deal. Hey, I've thrown over this, this potential opportunity over the fence, but now I'm going to ride shotgun and be, you know, a fly on the way wall and hear exactly, you know, what goes on to get something across the line. SDRs and BDRs typically don't dive deep in any type of, you know, demoing or, or you know, procurement cycles, things like that, negotiations. You let them ride shotgun and hear this front to back, all of A sudden the light bulb is going to go off. I throw over higher quality, quality. It's not so much a volume game anymore and I'm invested. I want to make my AE shine because then inevitably I'm going to be the next wave of AES that are going to come in and dominate.

You know, it's so funny you say that. So we have that promotion track from kind of SMB to mid market to enterprise sdr. And I was having cocktails with an enterprise, our enterprise SDR team. And so when we could have all cocktails with. So it was a while ago, hopefully doing that again soon. And I was sitting there, we were at cocktails. It's not a huge group because they're enterprise. So getting to that level. So there's probably 10, 12 of them. And listening them talk about their customers and targets and what they understood about their business blew my mind. And so what we did and so they partner obviously with the AES, which is obviously so critical as well for their development too. On the account strategy, on the account plans, who are they going after? How are we multi threading really looking at that as a team? They are expected to do that as a team and who's going after what as they look to make contacts and learn about those businesses even more importantly, and we're starting to use some of them as now kind of the junior AE on those accounts where they're booking meetings, booking smaller deals and big accounts because they can. And you talk about having that mentorship, being able to shadow watch what that was like, partner on strategy on an account like that. And we're talking these are accounts with 10,000 people or more at the highest ends. Right. And so these are, that's what they're strategizing on. It is amazing to see the talent they develop in themselves because of what they see and learn every day. But to your point Michelle, which I love that and great point Tony, thank you for hitting on that. Okay, so anything that you know, anything else that you guys are doing to keep those teams engaged, this is such that the seen and heard piece of this is, is these teams are remote a lot of time. First, second job in their career. Anything you guys have done to sort of keep them engaged, keep them feeling balanced, positive in the not pandemic environment that we're talking about.

I think just going back to some of the things about the recognition, things like making sure they're celebrated on all hands, not just all about big deals, but it can just be about who landed even if we never won the deal or if it's still in pipeline, just making sure that they're getting enough of that and feeling kind of connected to the rest of the org. Definitely. Mentors. I love that you're doing the mentoring also, but making sure that everybody has some kind of a mentor and then including them in team meetings, like, letting them see some of just the output of the work that they do, is super helpful. And then we've done everything from. At the last organization where I was just book clubs, kind of ongoing learning, things specific to being an sdr. Fanatical prospecting is a great one. There's all kinds of things like that that you can do just to keep them in that. That mindset of just, like, actively learning, but then getting to have time with whoever is in a leadership position to talk through some of the stuff that they're learning is helpful.

And can we talk about Spiffs? I mean, you know, dollars drives and splits. Dollars drives, behavior. Right? So let me talk. So we have a pretty cool one going on right now at Seismic, and it's called the battle of pitches, right? Battle of the pitches. And we set it up like a March Madness tourney bracket, if you will. And we have two or three people from each segment, each team basically going up against each other for new messaging and a new pitch, right? With the new narrative of Lesley joining the Seismic crew and all of that. So there's a little bit broader narrative that's getting. Getting rolled out, but it's these. These competitive pitches, and, you know, they're. They're making their way through the ranks, and SDRs are doing fantastic, right? And they're going up against AES and crushing some. Some. Right? So, you know, you get that kind of recognition. You get leadership on some of those calls and some of those Zoom meetings. And we're seeing it firsthand. We're recognizing them firsthand. We're applauding them. But at the end of the day, too, there's an envelope with money, you know, dangling at the end, which also drives not only participation, but people are rolling up their sleeves and getting into it. Right. Making it, which is amazing to see.

We had a.

A.

Also just taking it a totally different direction. We're doing. We have an exec coach doing a mental health tip a week as well on how to stay balanced. Oh, got some crazy music going on here. Yeah, little beat here. We had, you know, this.

These.

This mental health tip a week, like eight weeks of somebody coming, going, here's something you do for yourself to make sure it's like how to balance your all all across the board. It has been phenomenal reception and I think as all of us know, what worked six months ago doesn't work now. So you're always trying to think of how do we think of something new and different to try to put in play. And it's obviously not just our youngest team members. It's a lot of the team members across the organization. And I think that is always something I think we also need to keep front and center of how do we make sure we're investing in all sides of the person? Because all sides of the person is what they're coming with every day in front of your customers. So I think that is a huge piece of that as well. Anything else?

Yeah, I mean plus one to all that we need. We really need like a hub of icebreakers and a hub of those, you know, mini workshops. We do a lot of the similar things. We have like a demo, like a pro which is, you know, a demo contest. We do Sandler sales. If you can pick up, you know, quid pro quo. We have all sorts of reverse.

Double reverse.

Yeah, yeah, negative reverse. Yeah. So similar. But you got to keep it active and engaging and competitive and give them some money and. But I really think also, you know, your company values tying people, you know, recognizing people not just for being number one on the charts really who's embodying, you know, empathy, who's an incredible team player. So we try to do a lot of that kind of recognition as well.

Well and I think the something that you all are hitting on and this will be a takeaway from this session and I'll say it again later, but it is. There's a hiring crunch. You gotta promote from within. How do you take a look around and what talent you have and how do we develop them to make sure they can get to the next level and whether that's next level sales, next level customer success, next level professional services, you know, scs, all of these roles that these teams can do and are so amazing at when they get, I mean I forget people who were SDRs at our company, they're three roles in and doing something totally different. And I think that that is just, just if we remember that starting out, what are we investing in in that day one to make sure those are the outcomes we get as a company. Helps with that hiring challenge.

I'll say we have somebody at our company right now we call the intern, nicknamed the Intern. Started as an intern and is now running a mid market team out east and he's built his way through basically all AE ranks, all segments, dominated those, and then wanted to get into leadership. Young guy crushes, it always comes over prepared. But that's what you want to see is that kind of career path and then shout it from the mountaintops and let other people see it, recognize it, so that they're trying to follow suit.

Yeah. It's funny, you said one of our managers, he was a manager in the SDRs, but like, you know, early still in his career, is now running my SMB segment across the US and doing, you know, tens of millions of dollars a year in business and he's a vice president and he rocks. So we also had One of our SDRs who came through the US ended up transferring to help lead the UK. Is running a UK team now for us, runs the whole SDR team in the UK for us, and is thinking about her next role too. So just I think there are so many examples and I think we just need to keep those coming if we're going to fill all those roles everybody was talking about.

Yeah. I'll just add, we also highlight, for lack of a better word, the losers, but the people who have been on performance plans and they've beat them and they've gone on to succeed and become managers or directors. So we do these forums of people that were very close to being let go and how they were able to turn it around and what they did and what their mindset was and what they worked on and how they partnered with their peers, people that were doing it well, their manager. And so we do a lot of those highlights of people who were on the brink of being let go and how they turned that story around, which really helps with that retention as well. Well, and it might feel bleak for these, you know, underperformers.

Yeah, there's success stories. Not losers are to manage up, not out. Yeah, yeah, it is. Well, in turning something like that around, you learn so much.

Right?

You learn so much. Okay, so not all companies use their best BDRs SDRs for the sales function. And how do you define this at your company? Maybe let's start. Are they doing something besides sales? How are you segmenting out, Amy? You want to kick off?

Yeah. So is this just the age old question? Stick them in marketing, stick them in sales?

Yeah, a little bit of that. Yes, definitely part of the question.

I think it depends on what you want, like what the outcome is. Right. So if you're in an organization where you need to grow people within sales, because you have so many sales Roles that are opening up. Like if you're in significant growth mode, it makes a of lot of sense to have them within a sales organization because they'll just carry that lead farther through the sales process. Like you can teach them how to do the early qualification. I've also seen on the flip side, a company I was with before was just acquired by VMware and all of the SDRs sat within marketing and they did a lot. There were just a lot of leads to sort through. So they did a whole bunch. But then what they handed you was a lead. They didn't hand you something where they could tell you about the decision maker, they could tell you about all the process or whatever, what the procurement, anything. They didn't do typical ban C or anything. So it was just a different way to structure it. My preference obviously is to have it in sales But I do 100% believe in being very aligned with marketing because your SDRs or BDRs, whatever you choose to call them are the first kind of out loud voice to the customer and you want to make sure that it's the same voice as what marketing's voice is. So I think it could go either way depending on what you want.

Do you have inbound versus outbound?

I'm both right now. So it had other. You're all inbound. Right.

So we're actually considering. So we have a BDR team for our mid market and our corporate segments and right now we have a proposal on the table to build out an inbound demand management team. And I mean the great news about HubSpot is we have, we have so much inbound demand but how do we make our reps, deal managers and hyper focus? Because not only do they do net new business acquisition but they're also on customer growth and expansion. So we're trying to take away lead management and deal management and customer growth and expansion. And so we're thinking about a new name, Inbound Demand Manager.

Yeah, whole new name.

That's a whole new name. But I'll say I'm a firm believer of the center of excellence that should live within sales. Nothing against my friends in marketing, but I do think there is a sales culture and level of repetition that I think is beneficial to keep the BDR organization in sales. So that's how I've always seen it in the organizations I've been in and.

I've seen it both ways. Right. I've been in organizations where they've sat in sales, sat in marketing, at seismic, sit in both. That's a Different conversation. But what I will say is that it's the connective tissue between sales and marketing. Right? So you need to be aligned to both sides of the house. And. And there really does need to be deep alignment from all the way from the leadership perspective too. You know, leaning in. That's where you're going to get the most volume and quality.

Well, and it's funny, I think we have a pipeline management meeting every week and it is my demand gen SDR leader, sales leader, ops leader, leader, marketing leader, and we do it together every week because it is one funnel, people. So it is one customer journey. So the closer we connect this stuff, the better it is. And I think the technology today is obviously really enabling that. How are we seeing what messages work? I mean, how do you do that unless you're pulling all those teams together? No matter where it sits, where are you pulling them together to have the conversation about what's the funnel looking like and how are we making it more successful? Where are we taking risks and trying things with new messaging or new markets? You can do that if you have a cohesive strategy and know where you can make those plays. So I think that is also huge.

Okay, anything.

Do you have any, any of them switching? We talked about this a little bit ago from lead to deal management on the str BDR side. Anybody doing deal management other than. I was talking about that, obviously as we look at our upper segments a little bit, they're starting to do that.

Ren, yet another team that we haven't mentioned, which is our chat inbound chat team. Okay. And so that's the group actually Amy and I worked together previous to our current roles. We were at Logmein and we had a chat team there too. We've seen, you know, that group at HubSpot be able to take down those real kind of starter entry level. I'm in here and I'm ready to buy. We want to really reduce that friction. If someone is just asking one last question instead of having a handoff to a rep and then the rep trying to have them expand, let's get them in the door and let's close them and send them a quick link and then, you know, get them on the starter journey. So that's the team that's, that's doing those kind of quick hit conversions. But we don't have our BDRs right now doing any of those full sales cycle deals.

Okay, anybody in the audience have BDRs doing full sales cycle deals at all?

No.

No. All right, well, here you go. You heard it first. Start, start maybe thinking about putting some of that in play because we got some talented people out there. Okay, I'm going to ask a question that wasn't in our pre meeting because we've got a minute. We got a minute. What would you change about how the function of SDR BDR is set up? It's, you know, we always take these steps back and we say, okay, there's pivotal points. You were hitting that a minute ago, Michelle. Of like how you think about the function and where it's going and there's pivotal points in the company of when you're changing it. And we've been talking about a couple of them. Do you have them start managing some deals? Do you have. Where do they. They're running with account plans. There's all these different ways that you can look at. But there's also as we take a step back today with what we know in this remote environment in particular something you would change about how you see the function.

But I'll tell you, this is one of the areas I'm trying to build out right now. But for me it's really systems intelligence. How do we get better propensity modeling, AI ML when it comes to feeding bdrs accounts that are appropriate, let them nurture, let them work the accounts. But serving that up when it really is that kind of open forest of just go and find something and there really isn't direction. I think it's a real time waster. And so the more that we can focus them on the right things at the right time, with the right content, knowing the sequences that work, personalization that works, I think that's really the winning combo and it actually is a cost saver and you're not going to be so headcount reliant the more systems intelligence that you have to feed your team. So that's what I would change because we're still in too much of a manual process and there are incredible tools out there that you know, really help that journey and I think that's where we'll be in the next two to three years.

No, that's awesome, Amy.

I think I would just keep going with the something we were talking about earlier, which is when I think we think of it as a personal privilege now when an SDR gets to kind of stay on and watch a deal go through and see it to fruition and experience a close or a negotiation process. And I think that happens sort of on a one off like it happens maybe because it's a big Deal. Or because somebody is being mentored. But if that were actually built into the program, you would need more SDRs because they would have less time. But I think if you did that it would make the ramp time into being a quota carrying rep that much faster. And I think it would be interesting to explore that just having them stay apart. They would be listening out on every call. They would be just understanding, getting that mentorship kind of live and in action just while listening. But you would just need a different little bit of a different structure because we still need those leads.

Yeah.

It's funny, I've coached some of the teams that looking for different jobs is like go listen to a QBR call with your customer success person on the deal you close. Right deal you brought in. Go listen to what it looks like successing that customer later because you're going to learn so much about what they cared about and what's going on. So never be afraid because you can listen, you can be a fly on the wall. Those are, that's okay. You can say hey here's the three deals I big deals that I was proud of last quarter. I'm going to go listen to their first QBRs or second QBRs and that takes an hour out of a quarter. Right. But you will learn way more than an hour's worth of understanding of what's going on at that company. So I love that.

If this truly is a wish list, the one thing that I would add is 100 more SDRs. No. No BS. Right. I think that their, their role in the organization is invaluable. Right. They provide so much. They're helping to drive the pipeline generation. When there is that tighter alignment SDR to ae they can get more strategic about how they can go attack their tier ones, tier 2s or however you segment your, your account list but have a more just a hyper focused strategy behind how they're going to go do that. So with more headcount I can get more granular with doing that and it's a win win more money in the bank.

No, that's awesome. It is. It's been amazing to watch the orchestration and again back to like even utilizing on the account planning level. Right. Those teams working together to go how do I go after these accounts and what are we, what are we targeting? With a partnership between that AE and sdr I have seen just phenomenal things happen. We do we call it a boom email. So every time a deal closes there's a boom email that goes out to the company. That boom email is the ae, the SDR and the solutions consultant that was on those deals. Because it is and it should be marketing and it should be like it takes a village. As we all know, there's no one person that is doing all the work anymore, especially with the technology we have today. All right. We have hit some amazing topics. We have an amazing audience here. Anything else that we didn't hit on that you think we should?

I would love to just come back to the diversity component because I think as any sales leader knows, especially if you have an SDR organization, if your company has a goal of changing sort of the composition of the organization. We hire so many people in sales and we hire them in so much in that, that entry level role and they can move up so quickly through the organization that you really can move the needle. We just do so much hiring. So making sure that you have a really strong and firm strategy in place for that. You can impact the total organization's numbers and it's very impactful.

Yeah, we just started actually because this happens at all levels. Right. So we were starting to recruit and similar to Tony, that's an amazing program. It's ours isn't that extensive yet, but it is even recruiting at the historically black colleges and we opened Atlanta office. Having locations where you can hire diverse candidates in and giving them an opportunity to stay closer to home if that happens to be home for them, I think is huge. We also just started, we launched it this week. It's called our Rise program. So I'm taking our women sales managers and teaching them how to be VPs. So I think I'm doing a small group. They're my guinea pigs. We're going to take them through a nine month program and we will see how this goes. We're publishing it on LinkedIn so we'll talk about it live. What works and what didn't. We're going to give everybody a blueprint when we're done because I want every company to do this because it's not just for women, it's for a lot of our leadership. How do we do that and how we pull that all together? Okay. This has been fabulous. Thank you all for joining us for being part of this session. We obviously a lot of abundance of positions out there. Promote from within, develop your teams, invest in them, bring diversity to the table. You will win because of it. Thank you to these amazing sales leaders for joining us today.