How to DOMINATE as a Sales Development Representative (B2B & Tech Sales)

[0:00]All right, today I'm covering how you can dominate the SDR role from the top down. The problem I see is a lot of SDRs show up with the right attitude and ready to work hard each day, but they don't have a well thought out strategic plan as to how they're going to be successful. People understand this in other areas of life. If you're into fitness and you're trying to grow muscle, you generally come out with a workout routine and you know what you're doing on which day, which days are going to be rest days. You don't just show up to the gym ready to go and say, time to get big, or if you're trying to get good at basketball or in sports or something, you don't just show up to the court and say, time to, time to get good at basketball. You plan out, here's what I'm going to work on today. I'm going to work on my three-pointers in the corner. I'm going to work on these dribbling drills. It's the same thing in the SDR role. So in this video, I'm going to be sharing how you can use that same philosophy to dominate the SDR role. So let's get into it. All right, first, and this might seem obvious is you have to know your metrics, you have to know your targets, know what your KPIs are, and not just being able to recite like, I need to get five opportunities and a million dollars worth of pipeline, but you have to know and reverse engineer what that means as to how you're going to get there. Most SDRs, their key KPIs revolve around the number of meetings they set, the number of qualified opportunities they get and maybe a pipeline value associated with that, like a million dollars is the example I'll use here. So if you have a million dollar pipeline quota, for example, you don't just think about that number and that amount of pipeline. The first question you should ask yourself is, what's the average size of an opportunity in my organization? And that'll tell you how many opportunities you should expect to need in order to get there. If the average opportunity is $100,000, then you should expect to need 10. It's not an exact science and you want to be aiming higher because sometimes you get ops that are bigger than expected or smaller than expected, but this is the first step to reverse engineering. Then you can think, okay, how many meetings does it take to generally get a qualified opportunity? What's the conversion rate? Is it 50%? Do every two meetings you should expect one, is it every four meetings? Because that'll tell you how many meetings you should need to expect. And then you can take it a layer deeper. I don't think it's totally necessary, but how many cold calls and cold emails generally does it take to set a meeting? The reason I don't like that one is because every rep's different and every rep conducts themselves differently. So I don't think it tells you much information about what you'll need. And then it becomes about how can we give ourselves as many high quality shots on that as possible. How can we move fast at a high quality? And that's what the rest of this video is going to be about is how to do that. So the first step to doing that is what I call coiling the spring. And the idea for this stemmed from when I was an SDR, I found myself doing things on a daily basis like sitting down ready to work hard and then then I was like, okay, I got to build a list today. Okay, now I got to create a cold call script or an email template that's targeted for this list. Now I got to pick out a time of the day that I'm going to be sending those emails or those cold calls. And I found that it was just adding a lot of friction to my day that was unnecessary. So I thought, why don't I just take a day, two days, even a week to just do all that added work that I was going to do on a daily basis throughout the quarter and just do it all upfront once so that I never have to do it again and I can just focus on execution the rest of the quarter. That's what coiling the spring is and it starts with segmenting your territory. So when I first segment my territory, I separate what I consider my very good A-level high target accounts, either because I have certain information about them. Maybe I worked with my account executive and they know something's going on at the company and if I'm able to set a meeting with the right persona there, it'll be certain to be a qualified opportunity. I separate the ones that I want to be extra targeted on, and then for the rest, that's for my daily operations. And the goal is to create as many targeted lists with as similar characteristics as possible and then create email templates and scripts that are targeted specifically for those lists so that when I sit down to prospect, I can pick a list, take the associated template and then just go. So some ways to do this and you can get really granular is segmenting lists by industry. So contacts that are in the retail industry, contacts that are in the life science industry, contacts that are in the construction industry. You can also separate it by installs in my territory, greenfield in my territory, installs in the retail industry. You can also do it by revenue, by employee count. Ideally, if you have the time, you can combine all these because then you can make your email scripts and your cold call scripts slightly targeted. You don't have to change that much about the script, but make it slightly targeted for that specific industry on that list. And then the next step is separating it by personas because most companies don't just sell one product to one persona. They sell either one product that applies to multiple different personas or they sell multiple products that apply to a multitude of different personas. So you can do people in finance in the retail industry, people in HR in the life science industry. You do each line of business or each persona that you could possibly target for each industry. And then you build the lists and the templates that are targeted for each of those lists. I'll link to my value statement framework and how I personally do this because the goal is that you don't have to change that much about the script or the template. Just a few key words you plug and play depending on the persona or the industry, and then it could apply to everyone on the list. This takes a lot of work to do right, but when you do it, you're going to be so happy you did and it can last you so long if you do it right and save yourself that daily friction that just slows you down when you're making cold calls, emails, or LinkedIn, whatever you're doing. All right, so we know our metrics, we've reverse engineered them, we've coiled the spring and done all that day-to-day drudgery upfront, so that we can just focus on execution. Now it becomes about implementing a daily process. And that's going to involve the interactions and actually doing the work and giving yourself those shots on nets. That's the emails, the calls, the social media. You got to come up with a process that you adhere to each day to make sure that you're staying consistent. My personal process was to start the day with emails. So I would sit down 8:00 a.m., put the headset in, drink my coffee. I'm listening to music. I've already decided the day before who I'm going to be emailing that day. I take the associated email template, so there's no work I've already done it upfront. And I just start firing off the emails as fast as I can. I'm not an email automation guy. I do it one by one and try and add little things before I send it off to make it more targeted. But I've done most of the heavy lifting upfront and from 8:00 to 9:30, I would generally focus on sending emails. Then I would take a break. Maybe I had an internal meeting or two. And late morning, 10:30 to 12 is when I would start focusing on my cold calls. And again, I already have the list picked out. I have the cold call script ready to go. I'd get in a conference room and just bang out those calls. And it didn't always work out this way. I'm an Eastern time, but I would call accounts on the West Coast or mountain time because it was early morning for them. So I did get that early morning cold call effect. I think it's a good time of the day to call people before they've gotten their day started. And that's not the important piece. The important piece is the daily process that I followed. That was something I sat down. I knew exactly what I was doing. I'd already done the busy work upfront and then it was just go time in the morning. Then the afternoon was when I spent 30 minutes or an hour deciding who I would be targeting the next day. And then again, at the end of the day, usually 3:30 or 4:00 till 5:00, till my day concluded, I made more cold calls again. And in this block, I tended to focus on the East Coast accounts and try and catch people at the end of their day. Social media, I get a lot of questions on social media. I never really cracked the code on social media and I chose to just double down on emails and calls because that's what I was good at and I was getting more than enough success from them. So I was just doubling down on the areas I had success. The way I treated it is after I went home, I was winding down for the day. I don't know, I was watching TV or something. I'd pull out my laptop and just start sending off some social media people, some contacts in my territory. And that was just a little extra mindless way to give myself some shots on net and more potential to get meetings, which could potentially lead to qualified opportunities and get to my pipeline goal. So that was, let's call it Monday. That was day one. What I would follow is an A B A B cadence. So the next day, I would do the same routine I just laid out. And then on Wednesday, the first thing I would do in that email call block in the morning is follow up with all the emails that I sent on Monday to list A. And then on Thursday, I would send follow-ups to list B, and I would follow this A B A B schedule. When I wasn't cold calling a certain list that day, I was emailing them. And when I wasn't emailing them, I was cold calling them that day. I'll link to a video where I go into that structure in more depth. But the key to this is the daily consistency. You can't just do this one or two days and then give yourself a pat on the back. You spent all the time coiling the spring, doing the hard work upfront. You got to be consistent with it because your results are going to ebb and flow. You're going to have weeks where you do everything right, but the results just aren't there. And then you're going to have weeks where you didn't do a single thing differently, you did the same thing as the prior week and it, the meetings just flow and it feels too easy. Anyone who's been in the SDR role a reasonable amount of time understands that feeling. It's the same thing with cold calls. You can go 50, 60 dials without getting a live call and then you get a string of 10 calls where you get like eight lives. You never know when that hot streak is going to come. And it's the same thing with meetings and that's why this won't work unless you're consistent with it every day. That's by far the most important. And lastly, you got to optimize. You got to sharpen the wheel. When you first start doing this, it's going to feel a little bit uncomfortable. You've never done it before, it's your first week doing it. But the more you do it, the more it's going to become second nature and it's going to start to feel like a game. So some of the ways you can optimize is nailing your AE and internal team and all of those relationships. Because they can often point you in the right direction. And when you have a strong relationship with your AE that you're communicating well with, again, it just reduces friction, it reduces any worry. You generally have more visibility into what the outcomes are going to be because they've told you if you set a meeting in that account, it's going to be an opportunity or they're able to point you in the right direction and tell you things in one meeting that it would have taken you weeks or months to learn like an account that you should be targeting if you hadn't just been in communication with them. You can also report back on this process so that they know you're grinding, that they're working hard, and they're going to be keen to reward you so that you keep doing this stuff for them. Another area to optimize, which I talked about earlier in the video is those accounts you set aside for more targeted prospecting. So this process I laid out, that's for your general prospecting so that you're able to move fast at a high enough quality. But there, you're going to have some very key strategic target accounts that you either know are a good fit for your product or service or that your AE has explicitly pointed out to you. Those are the ones you're going to want to spend a little more time with and not just include in your general day-to-day cadence. And then as the weeks and months go by, you want to be testing and tweaking your templates, your scripts, your follow-ups. Don't change too much at once, but try a different follow-up. See if it starts getting more hits. Ask your peers, who's performing really well? What scripts and templates are they using? Sales is one of those jobs where plagiarism is okay. If a rep has a script or a template that's working for them, hopefully they're sharing it. If you think it's going to be better than what you have, try it. And again, don't change too much and be very careful who you're taking scripts and templates from. Make sure they're actually doing well and you understand why what they're using is working. But you want to be tweaking and optimizing your templates because when you're doing such a mass amount of interactions at scale, the smallest improvement can lead to massive increases in results. If you send out a thousand emails and you go from a 1% success rate of booking a meeting to a 2%, that's a difference between 10 and 20 meetings. That's a lot. So don't fix what's not broken, but always be looking for areas where you think you can improve at the margin. And again, any time you're implementing a new process like this, it's going to feel uncomfortable, but it'll eventually become second nature, and this is how you can start to gamify the SDR role. So high level, know where you're going, do the busy work up front, reduce friction in your day, focus on daily consistent execution, and then optimize as you go. Hope this helped. If it did, hit the like button and I'll see you on the next one.