How to Hire Great SDRs | The Scorecard for Spotting Raw Talent

One thing that probably leaders could do is, I mean, if you think about leveraging technology in recruitment, for the first point, is you need to record every interaction with a candidate. If discovery and curiosity is important, have you been able to see over the duration of 3 interviews, what was every question that a candidate asked? Okay, you line up those 20 questions. Is that the type of discovery level of questioning that is going to lead to curiosity, that's going to lead to opening up prospects, customers in the long run? So, I think, Sometimes what we need to consider is like, what are those insights we gain through a process? And how can we capture those? So we've got a better understanding of whether that person meets that particular skill.

Josh English was the Head of Sales Development for Australia at Salesforce, leading a team of 50 SDRs and 7 managers, after which he went to Procore as the APAC Sales Development Manager. Now Josh has a wealth of experience when it comes to hiring SDRs, often from unconventional backgrounds. So if you are a sales leader who is looking to hire people outside of the box, you've got to listen to this because he has got some great examples from hiring comedians, teachers, and some common threads. And he'll give us the magic formula on how to hire great people. So let's jump right in. Josh, thank you so much for joining me on the call today. The other day when you called me and we got talking about SDRs, unconventional hires, and how to find great people when the past experience may not lend to it or the talent pool isn't there, I thought this is a problem every leader has, and I'd love to get your experience. You've worked for some great companies, led large teams, delivered big numbers. So thank you today for joining me.

Awesome to be here, Priyank. Lovely lead-in as well. Appreciate the accolades.

So Josh, tell me, people are always faced in a situation where the ideal person does not exist in front of them. And sometimes I think it's a bit of a lazy way to hire because, you know, the perfect candidate actually may not work out to be so perfect. So let's go, let's unwrap that and go beneath and say, tell me from your experience, tell me about some of the unconventional hires that you've made and what have you learned from it?

Yeah. So, oh, big topic. What I would say is that people are very used to familiarity. So, when you think about leadership and you think about who you work with, often, you know, you're going to go to places where you've seen that success or you're aware of that success. So, a couple of ideas could be, You know, you're an athlete yourself, you've had a successful athlete come into your team, an athlete applies, whether it's football, cricket, running, whatever that may be, that discipline. So, you're already feeling good about this person coming through. So, I think I just wanted to sort of highlight familiarity as one thing. I think the second thing is that a lot of companies, you know, benefit from, but also create risk in, is referrals. So, in my background at Salesforce and at Procore, that was definitely a huge thing. You know, talent acquisition was keen to get referrals because you'd be looking for like-minded people. But before you realize it, you've got people in the same circles, living very similar lives that don't offer that diversity. So, I think it's really important to highlight that. I think when it comes to looking at unconventional profiles, we spoke about athletes. I think the world of SDR today is that we're in a different phase. So, if you go back a number of years, athletes were good profiles, recruiters, you had probably real estate, you had people who'd done some form of selling. That was kind of your bread and butter. I think you've started to see a change, certainly after COVID, where you'd see people who were sort of reconsidering their career, because overnight, their roles were shut down. So, you think about retail, you think about teachers, who all of a sudden are doing something completely different, running a classroom through video versus interacting with children. So, I think you started to see that unpack. Now, I think we're in a completely different phase. I was reading about it last night, Gen Alpha, Pri, are you familiar with Gen Alpha?

Yeah.

So, we're talking about, you know, the demographic of kids who are brought up with iPads, and they're going to be reaching that sort of phase of 16. I think in New South Wales, for example, 16 is the legal age that you can work full-time. So, we're gonna start seeing a completely different market of candidates that aren't like those traditional backgrounds I've just spoke about. So, if you think about some roles I've had, It was quite enjoyable, kind of making a list of the different profiles. I wonder if they listen to this and they'll hear themselves, but I had a comedian, okay, awesome comedian, who did very well and has now moved into cybersecurity sales, running teams. Go back to COVID, I had a pilot. So, someone who was a second officer, and obviously, overnight, suddenly, no routes, nowhere to fly, and started to reconsider their career. I mean, other ones I'd talk about, we talked about retail managers. I think industry experience or persona experience is probably something a lot of people are doubling down on. At Procore, it was construction technology. So if we could have someone come in from, typically it was like a project administrator or contracts administrator, someone in the ecosystem who knew the challenges that were faced day to day on site, they would serve themselves really well. So, there's a whole heap of different profiles I think can be successful, but the one thing that each of them have in common was that they don't have anything in common, because it's not about the role they were doing necessarily, it's the story that's led them up to that experience over the course of the time they've been alive.

Yeah.

So, I'll give you an example. Kind of going back to that familiarity, a lot of people get very comfortable with making decisions because they've seen people succeed. But what's the likelihood that someone at 16 made the right choice to go to college, at 18, 19, made the right decision to do the right degree at university, was brought up in a household where they had full visibility of every potential profession they could do? What's the chances of that? I would say it's—

Zero.

0.1%. And I'm probably the perfect example. I came from a family of teachers. My mum was in primary school, my dad was a secondary school teacher. So, uh, there's definitely a link between myself and coaching, getting into leadership, but there wasn't really the business acumen in the corporate world to know about sales or SaaS, uh, or software as a particular profession. So, I think it's really important that we sort of dwell on that for a second, that yes, someone can have experience and have learned skills, in a particular role, but that's not necessarily the be-all and end-all because it's quite possible they're not in their, um, their best profession.

Wow. Yep, absolutely. My, my mom was a surgeon. My dad worked in the bank and I ended up, I didn't want either and basically found myself in sales, which in the beginning I thought, you know, Maybe I couldn't get a job doing something else, but I realized that one way or the other, I'm genuinely interested in people. I am curious and I am stubbornly resilient in going after my goals. So lo and behold, it took only 10 to 15 years to figure out like, yeah, this is exactly what I do and I do it well. So I wish somebody had the foresight to say, you don't have to color within the lines. You can change lanes and do what you want. So yeah. So how do you identify? So Love, the teacher, the comedian, the copilot, and everything else that you've done. And you've got in my eyes, a ton of credibility because you've run large organizations and you can see the stories. What can someone, a leader, use as a scorecard or some criteria to identify if that person in front of them is going to succeed or not, especially in the world right now where you've got tech stacks, you've got You've got far more complexity than just picking up the phone and calling someone, right? So what's, what would be a checklist? Yeah.

Yeah. I'm going to fire out an acronym. So an easy one for anyone to follow is MAGIC. Okay. And so what we're looking to do, and I'd encourage people outside of just SDR hiring to think about how are they shaping questions that could allow anyone from any background to answer that to the best of their ability. Typically, people like to funnel a question and keep it quite closed. So, if you haven't had sales experience, sometimes it's very difficult to answer a question when it's shaped based on metrics in a sales role. So, the acronym MAGIC, I think, really encompasses how the roles change. So, we're gonna start with M, and M is multiplier. Okay, an example of multiplier is, you know, for SDR teams in particular, you're talking about potentially 8 people in a group, and then you've got, you know, larger teams where you've maybe got 5 or 6 other teams with SDRs in. So, multiplier is someone who brings something different. They elevate the team around them and actually raise the capability across the team. And that can come in many ways. So, it doesn't have to be a particular skill, it could be life experience, it could be empathy, it could be the way that they deal with people around them, their optimism, positivity. But it's something that you kind of look in your team, and you go, that's missing, and that's what someone could bring to the role. So, multiplier is M. A is probably the newest one, and you could put it under a different A few different topics, but I'd say AI-ready is, you know, we go back to sort of Generation Alpha. We need talent coming in who are AI-ready, are familiar with tech, are familiar with AI and how to use it, in order to be way more productive and resourceful in their role. So, a very simple example is, you're having an interview with someone, and you understand, you maybe realize they've got an iPhone.

Mm-hmm.

ask them about Apple Intelligence. So I just simply say to them, walk me through, you know, Apple Intelligence has just been released. Could you describe to me what that is? And can you share with me in the last 30 days how you've actually used that to be more productive in your life? So it's about getting a sense of how technically savvy someone is with updates and transformation that's happening in the market, because when you then come to adopt new tools, if I think about Procore, I think we had at least 20 systems that we were bouncing in between as an SDR in order to generate pipeline. And, you know, that's a real challenge because that can pull people in many different ways. So, I think AI-ready is something we've absolutely got to consider when we bring people on.

Love the question because it is something anyone can do, and that's such a good on-the-spot question around just getting to know. And you'll learn so much more about, you know, and it'll be real, it'll be authentic. Either they've used it and they know it or they don't. So I love it. Okay, keep going.

Yeah. G. So I think this is probably the stable, I guess, theme, which is growth mindset, right? So I think for years, we've been talking about growth mindset and what that means. You could probably umbrella 20 terms Under that, adaptability, resilience, grit, determination, coachability. But this is something that is rife with people's stories. So, if you kind of think about someone's upbringing, how they've been brought up through their caregivers, life experiences, you don't necessarily need to just tap into a career or a particular role to understand how they sit on that front. You want people who are going to be humble. You want humility, because that breeds growth and openness. and that ability to change. So, I think growth mindset is crucial. I think the only thing that changes is just, you know, I guess, in the market today, what we need, we need adaptability. So, I think it's just thinking about what those elements within growth mindset that, I guess, reps or candidates could showcase in the interview.

How do you figure that out?

Yeah, so, I think it's a really good question. So, a growth mindset perspective, it could be as simple as, what's something that you change your perspective on, based on someone else's belief or perspective, right? You kind of think about that. And I can actually kind of go back to, like, life scenarios where that's happened. So, you think as simple as, like, talent, who could be successful in a sales team? When I started my career, there was only 15 people in the team. And I'll give you an example. Back then, predominantly women who came into the organization were failing in the sales role. So, if you viewed that lens, you would automatically think, okay, the profile of SDR we couldn't hire would be female, because that's all you've seen. But what you need to do is be able to get exposure and actually talk to different people to kind of understand a theme or topic, to really change that mentality that you shaped because of that one experience. So I think that's what you're looking to do with growth mindset is really understand that perspective.

Excellent. Excellent. And I think that we all have hidden biases that have been shaped by past experiences, but those blinkers, then we start missing, missing out in a big way. And I think that especially as you go up the line, From SDRs to SMBAs, mid-market commercial through to enterprise, a lot of the hiring is based on what I call the relevance relationship axis. What that means is, number one, have they sold this solution or into this market? Number two, who do we know that they know? You are at risk of getting more of the same, especially if that's not working. You're going to find yet another person who— and like you said, the multiplier effect is what are we seeing in this person before us? And they don't have necessarily that solution set experience, but what is the multiplier factor that they can bring? And so, for example, if you were going to transition from a BDR leader role into an account executive role, you could write a playbook on prospecting and run prospecting strategies yourself. That will be better than a lot of AEs who just haven't, who've been depending on BDRs and marketing. Right.

Yeah, exactly. But which has happened a lot. There's a lot of companies who've maybe been in a growth phase and they've had AEs who've worked on inbound or referrals or other resources like SDR, BDR, and then all of a sudden, the company's reached a certain phase, they're now gonna go try and go upmarket or get into a different industry, and they actually don't have those skills. And trying to unlearn something is really challenging. So you kind of need a pacesetter. I think that the one thing I've learned from leaders is they're generally looking for pacesetters, and that is on a particular topic. And just like you said, they're outbound and prospecting and building pipe, you wanna have someone Who's a pacesetter so you can actually bring everyone up to a new level of performance.

That's what I would challenge every leader who's even listening to this or a candidate is that you've got to know within yourself in that conversation, what is the multiplier effect that you're bringing into the team, right? What is the AI readiness that you're bringing into the team? I think that just like what you've just said, And we are working our way through this MAGIC acronym. Those things are critical for you to actually see in yourself as you go into the conversation, because I can tell you a lot of sales leaders are not following a set interview methodology that leads to really good discovery. People would reluctantly admit that they've not been either trained on it or they just wing it. And they've got varying levels of discovery, 'cause I'm, as the recruiter, debriefing sales VPs and said, so, and they're like, you know, oh, this person doesn't have it. I said, but did you know that they had 1, 2, 3, 4? They're like, oh, okay. So they didn't even get that far into the conversation.

We could definitely go on a tangent, but just on that point, I think, you know, in transparency, I am looking to transition career, right? So I'm moving from that BDR leader, second-line leader experience to an AE. And that is something I've seen across the board, you know, the inability to potentially look beyond the hiring criteria of, you need to tick these checkboxes. So, I think one thing that probably leaders could do is, I mean, if you think about leveraging technology in recruitment, for the first point, is you need to record every interaction with a candidate. If discovery and curiosity is important, have you been able to see, over the duration of 3 interviews, what was every question that a candidate asked? Okay, you line up those 20 questions. Is that the type of discovery level of questioning? That is gonna lead to curiosity, that's gonna lead to opening up prospects, customers in the long run. So, I think sometimes what we need to consider is like, what are those insights we gain through a process and how can we capture those? So, we've got a better understanding of whether that person meets that particular skill.

Fantastic. And for those who are listening, Josh called me out of the blue. He sent me, it was a terrific voicemail. It was about He had done the research on me. He had watched the podcast. He had sent a LinkedIn connection request. And it was classic. So I'm just going to say, you are prospecting ready, right? We talk about AI ready, but you are prospecting ready. So that's fantastic. All right, let's move on to I and C.

Yeah. So I is, you know, you can call this innovator, innovation, and actually Salesforce When I was there for 4 years, it was one of their core values. And the way I'd look at this is the ability to influence process, change, be creative, and do something different in order to get a better result. And I think the easiest way to probably ask this is, again, it's agnostic. You don't need to have been in a particular profession, but you could simply ask a candidate, what's something you did that impacted the team that wasn't part of your job description? So, when you think about what I love about, you know, trying to find, let's say, the leaders of tomorrow, the AEs or the solutions engineers of tomorrow, if they're gonna be a successful SDR, they not only do really well in their role, but they're doing additional, or they're going above and beyond. And I think if you can identify those people who potentially were a retail manager, you know, and they were running stores, and they've got a P&L, they've got to manage staff, but then they're doing something creative, or they're doing something that impacted the whole business across regions that wasn't part of their remit. does that mean they'd then go and do the same thing? And there's a lot of people who would just live by the job description. But I think if you're looking for that top 1% talent, they're great sort of nuggets of information you can sort of pull out from someone. And it's something I did in my early days within a career. Whilst you might have, I remember, a sales operations role, this was just before I got into sales, and it was about delivering equipment on-site to deliver for financial services. So, you imagine it was dealing with suppliers, arranging logistics, but then we had an ERP platform, and I started to work on the workflow and the process to refine this down, so we can actually make it more efficient. Not part of the remit, but just something I did at an early point to really, you know, sharpen the sword. So, I think innovator is really important.

That's good. And what's C?

Yeah, so C is something I took from Salesforce, and I think it's really, really important. It's actually something I can really align with, you know, now turning 40 and sort of changing my perspective on life, but a courageous communicator. So, this is someone who stands up when the people around them just continue life as they know it. So, I don't know if anyone's on the podcast now listening, who's watched Ned Brockman's Run, which has just been released on Netflix, but he talks about, from a young age, he challenged the status quo. If someone was being unfairly treated, he spoke up. Often, it might have got him in trouble at school, but it's what he believed. And so, I think someone who's able to do that in an SDR environment, this is critically important, because you think about, The solution in SaaS, we're typically asking customers to change. We're talking about change management. We're trying to challenge the existing process, the existing way of doing things for something better. And you're also working cross-functionally with partners, if you're an enterprise or strategic accounting executive, who've potentially been selling for 20, 25 years. And that comes with its challenges, but I think if you can speak up and voice your opinion, Um, you, you carry yourself a long way. Uh, and that's how you get change, um, both externally by, by bringing new customers on, but also changing things internally for the better.

Josh, fantastic. That is memorable and that is very useful. And based on what you've said, I can tell you that's not only relevant to SDR hiring, that's literally relevant to every level. of, uh, hiring, because, um, I can see that having clarity on those factors will make a huge difference to the level of discovery that the hiring manager has and can make better decisions using this framework. So thank you again. I appreciate you immensely. Uh, you've added a lot of value and, um, I wish you great success.

Awesome. Pleasure to be here. Thanks, Priyank.