🎙️Transcript: Hiring for the Modern SDR
Rainmaker 2015
"Hiring for the Modern SDR"
W Hotel Buckhead • Atlanta, GA
January 2015
Ralph Barsi (00:00):
...the good news, though, is that the W staff was very accommodating. They were communicating with us on the speaker over that hour, and when we got to the top to the Whiskey Blue, drinks were on the house for the night.
So I wanted to publicly thank the W staff for that evening. It was fabulous. I was a disaster on the flight home the next day though, I'll tell you.
Okay, let's cut to the chase. We don't have too much time.
So this statistic, unfortunately, continues to increase. The last time I presented on this statistic, it was "69% of employed Americans are actively looking for another job or open to it."
Last time I checked, prior to putting this deck together, had gone up to 75%. This is my opinion solely: it's because leadership sucks. It's because leadership is not paying attention to the people that they're bringing on board.
(00:56):
It's because leadership, in most respects, is really focused on the numbers, really focused on that revenue pipeline - which, by all means, is an objective of a sales development leader.
But there is a twofold objective that is often overlooked for sales development leaders: and that is they're primarily responsible for driving revenue pipeline for the business, and they're primarily responsible for driving a people or talent pipeline.
When you bring a sales development rep onto your organization, it's absolutely critical that you show them a lighted path forward, so that they see the career that can unfold based on their success, based on their performance.
And the leaders that are missing that second piece are dealing with statistics like this: 75% of people actively looking.
So I'll not do a show of hands of how many in this room are actively looking, but I will bet that it's because you're not being recognized, you're not engaged at all with what your company's doing.
(01:56):
You certainly don't feel aligned, and the grass is looking a lot greener on the other side. Ironically enough, how about this? 75% of employers are struggling to attract or retain the top talent.
Again, the focus is not on the top talent. The focus is not on attracting the top talent. The focus is in the wrong slot, which is really the money, and I think the more you focus on your people and the development of those people, the money and everything else is going to come with it.
Start to develop leaders. Start to look for leaders when you're hiring. I work in San Francisco, in Silicon Valley. It is arguably the toughest market on the planet. Atlanta is getting there. Atlanta's picking up.
So what I want to do for you today over the next 20 plus minutes is just share some of the practices that I have applied in my organization and some of the practices I know are working in other organizations.
(03:00):
If you could take home one nugget today, then I've done my job. And while you're taking notes today, draw a nice line down the middle of the page and on the left side, write all the notes, but on the right side you have to write your action items.
You must take action on the notes that you're getting today. You can't just keep copious notes in notebooks only to get stacked onto your desk and never used.
So do yourself that favor and take some action on some of the things you're hearing today. Okay?
Really critical to know that what you seek is seeking you, and for the sales development leaders in this room, your top candidates are actually looking for you.
They're looking to work for you. They want to be part of your organization and your vision. And you should be looking for them too, and just through the basic law of attraction and a little bit of zen, it's going to happen, but there's some activity and some action that you have to do in order to attract that talent.
(04:00):
This reminds me of the late great motivational speaker, Jim Rohn, who said that "success is something you attract by becoming an attractive person."
He said, it's not something that you pursue, and how you attract success is by adding value to the marketplace.
Guess what? The more value you add to the marketplace, the more valuable you're going to become. It's just going to happen.
Some of the things you're going to want to do is team up with the best. Not everybody in the room here works with a recruiter. I do, and I work with the very best recruiter that I think is in the SaaS B2B world today, and that's bets recruiting.
I am privileged and blessed to have somebody like Carolyn Betts who's an awesome leader in the recruiting space right in my backyard. She's in San Francisco and she is the premier recruiting firm in San Francisco and in Silicon Valley.
(04:56):
She is now in New York, she's now in Dublin, Ireland, and she also has representation in Austin and in Atlanta.
So find Carolyn and find Carolyn's team sales development leaders in the room because they know a lot about the candidates before you even find out.
They know who the candidates have talked to already. They know what your ideal candidate profile likely is. They will send a team into your office, they'll get the tour of your office, they'll talk to you.
They'll really do a full assessment on what it is you're looking for and they will help whoever is seeking you, find you and vice versa.
If this talk today gets boring, go ahead and just download this white paper now and just start reading it because what I'm going to share with you are the insights that Carolyn's team and I have found over the course of several quarters of trying to hire people in Silicon Valley and in San Francisco.
(05:53):
So definitely look up Carolyn, follow her, check out her team. They can help you too. If you're looking for top candidates, this is my team, excuse me, there's 10 of them. They are a hybrid role. They do both inbound and outbound.
Again, we sell to human resources, teams comp and benefits teams, and my team is primarily focused on, I'm sorry, setting meetings that occur.
So I measure them on the number of meetings that they book that actually happen and obviously the number of revenue opportunities that fall out of those meetings.
So these guys are grinding it out on a daily basis and they are a very successful team. I sought them out, they sought me out, and one of the things I do is really focus on branding my team, and I think it's critical to focus on your reputation and your brand in the marketplace by constantly working it.
(06:52):
If my team has a fabulous month or a fabulous quarter, I'm not just going to congratulate them and we're not going to just go out to dinner.
I'm going to tell all of you how well my team is doing as well, because what happens is when I post a picture of them on LinkedIn, I end up tagging all of them, which opens up that status update to their networks too, and all of a sudden the reach starts to increase exponentially.
And the people that like the picture below, if you do a little research, you find out that potential prospects have liked it, customers have liked it, potential candidates have liked it, board members have liked it, et cetera, et cetera, and the reach just grows exponentially and all of a sudden your reputation is starting to precede you.
Holy shit, Ralph's team did it again.
(07:39):
They did it again. There they are at the Giants game. They hit another great quarter. Wow. They all dressed up to mock one of their top sales reps and he was a good sport.
He's got the hipster look going. So they all came in one day looking exactly like him. What do we do? We take a picture, we put it on LinkedIn, we post it onto Twitter, and we use social media to accomplish the goals that we're trying to accomplish.
There are a lot of folks I meet today that are still very reluctant to use social media and to dive into the whole social selling world. Here's the answer. You ready?
Use social media to help you accomplish your goals, not to become great at social media. That's how it works.
So if I can tout the reputation of my team and the reputation of my company, suddenly I get a reputation too as a really good leader who gives a shit about his team and people who are looking to become sales development reps, want to work for somebody like that, somebody who's going to help develop them and help them grow and help them get off the sales development team in a timely fashion.
(08:46):
Okay, lastly, bottom left, that's a tweet from John Barrows. I highly recommend you look into John Barrows if you do not know who he is. He's got a fabulous app called "Sales from the Streets" where he has sales reps and sales leaders from around the country basically take a video of themselves giving a nice tip or technique on something in the sales funnel, and they upload one minute videos onto sales from the streets website.
So you could talk about negotiation, qualification, et cetera, et cetera. And the best are on John's website. John's also an exceptional trainer. His pitch is "I trained Salesforce's sales development team and sales team how to sell."
That's that's a pretty huge pitch and he means it. So look into John. I had my team certified on John Barrows' methodology, which is called "Why You? Why You Now?", and it's a spinoff of an older methodology called BASHO.
(09:45):
Check out John. As soon as the team gets certified, I write to John and go, "Hey, can you send a tweet out that says congratulations to the Achievers team for becoming certified?"
"Sure, no problem." John's got a much bigger network than I do, and now even more people know that not only is my team doing well, but they're buttoned up, they're solid, they're certified by a guy like John and they know what they're talking about.
And just to piggyback off some of the things we've heard in main sessions, how to pitch and sell your product. He's teaching you about the buying process. He's teaching you about what your prospects are actually thinking in their process, which is really important.
(10:28):
There's Carolyn again, wrong button. Okay, A bit of an eye chart, but I am going to go through some of this. These I think are critical steps.
There's eight critical steps that I've found that once you get the best talent, they want to grow. As I said earlier, they're looking for growth in their career. They're looking for opportunity to develop their skills and they're looking for a great culture one where they can learn, one, where they can improve.
So by applying these eight or any of these eight components, you're already progressing. The first one is a sign, a mentor, and a buddy.
I have found it very helpful to sales development reps to get a buddy who's a peer of theirs, maybe an SDR who's a little more senior than them, but what's really important is that mentor who is a seasoned account executive, somebody who's where they want to be in the next two years or so.
(11:23):
I also set expectations upfront that this is a two year gig, and I do this in the recruiting phase when I am posting a job description when I'm interviewing, I'm telling them upfront, you're in this for roughly two years, and here's why that's important.
You could go to a lot of different SaaS companies today and you'll start on the inbound team only and you'll do nothing but follow up on the leads that demand gen has put in the funnel, and you'll do that for about a year and you'll get really good at it.
Then you'll get promoted and you'll move up to outbound only, which is so much harder. You don't have the luxury of that inbound inquiry, somebody knocking on your door.
So you learn prospecting, you learn territory management, you learn all the objection handling and qualification at the enterprise level. You're talking to multiple buying centers.
(12:14):
It's not transactional, it's consultative. There's a lot of variables involved in outbound versus inbound.
I tell them that you can go to another SaaS company and you could spend a year in inbound. You could spend a year in outbound or you could develop all those skills at once in a hybrid role here at Achievers, and I guarantee that by the time that two year term is up and you are successful in that two year term, you are going to kick ass as an account executive.
You'll ramp faster, you'll produce faster, and you won't be a consumer of value very long. You'll hit that breakeven point where suddenly you're a contributor of value, and that's what we groom and develop in the two year term of a sales development rep.
Number two, you illustrate that inbound and that outbound process. The SLA, between demand gen and the SDRs, the SLA, between the SDRs and sales, you show them in a playbook, you give them a hard copy on their desk.
(13:13):
Day one, Sean Kester was talking about it yesterday, how they do that at SalesLoft, you provide them that playbook and in fact, it's the same playbook that even the seasoned reps use.
So a lot of the seasoned reps grow in their career and all of a sudden you hear, eh, I know that, I know that.
Well, the playbook helps reinforce a lot of those basic steps. At the end of every chapter of a playbook, for example, you give them a checklist and you make sure that all those steps have been followed so that nothing falls through the cracks because you definitely want to lose in the first round and not in the 15th round, right Chris? It's proven.
Number three, provide the enablement tools that help the SDRs win. I won't hang on this too long.
I've already promoted the webinar that Sean and I are going to be doing on January 23rd via BrightTALK, so check it out and we're going to talk about the best enablement tools to use in sales development this year, or at least to consider certifications rule, continually train the team, bring in people like John Barrows, but don't just train them as was mentioned earlier on your product.
(14:18):
In fact, you want to train them and certify them on case studies and customer stories. So my reps, for example, are certified on 10 customer stories.
So regardless of the vertical, regardless of the title, regardless of the problem that the prospective company is encountering right now, my reps can address what the problem was with these three customers.
What happened when Achievers parachuted in, and where they are today, how they've gotten better.
Typically, my company gets the call when morale sucks, when retention is an issue and people are jumping ship and we come in and we evangelize and talk about employee recognition, engagement and alignment.
So knowing those customer stories is critical. I always encourage SDRs to go to the field, do ride alongs with account executives, first of all, tee up the entire week for the account executive and then go into the field with them and sit in on those calls.
(15:16):
What's really, really important to remember as a sales development leader is you need to see your sales development reps as who they're about to become, not who they are today.
Don't see 'em as the sales development rep that's on the phone cranking. See them as the next great account executive that your company's going to have and treat them as such and encourage them at the same time to act as if when they start acting as if they're already a senior account executive, they're going to ask different questions on the phone.
They are going to approach prospects differently because they know when they bring a good meeting or a good opportunity to an account executive, they need to picture what they would ask if they were that seasoned account executive, have a story that correlates already that could help paint a vision and engineer what next steps are going to happen.
(16:10):
When you start talking to sales development reps like that in your one-on-ones, treating them as if they're already there, you'd be amazed at how they start to act like that, and it's a beautiful thing to watch because as a sales development leader for some time now, one of my biggest fulfillments in my career is the growing alumni group that I have.
I feel that when I develop a sales development rep and they go on to become account executives or go on to run their own teams or go on to run their own companies, they are a representative of me and they're a representative of the tutelage that they had when I had them.
I have them for only two years, so I sell that. That's a very finite amount of time, and frankly, it's not much time for us to get into gear and get some shit done because you have a lot to learn and there's a lot of experiences that you need to go through in the next two years.
(17:00):
If you seriously want to use sales as your profession and want to be a top producing account executive someday, there's a lot to learn. So we try to fast track that in that two years.
Shop stewards are really important. That's a great union term. It's a person who is a liaison between leadership and between the people in the bullpen.
And so I elect a shop steward once every two quarters or so is what I'm trying to do. And what that shop steward does is bring all the grievances, the gripes, but also the ideas of the team.
For those of you who were here yesterday, you could hear what Salesloft is doing. They do the 15 five sessions and they do a lot of one-on-one sessions with the team to just gather ideas and see what's not working so that they can fix it and get better and better and better on a daily basis, which is phenomenal.
(17:51):
Team meetings. I don't mess around with team meetings, 20 minutes, 30 minutes tops. There's always an agenda. We are specifically going to talk about these three things. Please come prepared.
We usually go around the room very quickly with great stories or we'll share maybe one or two stories, but in 20 minutes or less, they're out the door and know exactly what they need to do for the week.
I rarely have one-on-ones in the office, put the laptop down, let's take the elevator downstairs, and we take a nice walk around the block. And what happens is the guard comes down when they've got oxygen.
When they're breathing, they start to talk as the people that they really are, and you as the leader get to uncover the purpose why they're there. You know why they're sitting in that seat. And then unless you do, you're not going to be successful as a sales development leader.
(18:47):
You have to get to know your people. There are results and outcomes that everyone is after, but once you identify what the purpose is of your reps, you're cooking.
I've got my three boys, I've got my wife. That is purpose enough for me to get my ass out of bed and do really well.
I was in a band with a lead singer that I went to college with in 2009 when he was 38 years old. He dropped dead of a heart attack, had no idea that he had this heart condition, but he had an enlarged heart.
Turns out his condition was genetic and his daughter has the gene. She happens to be my goddaughter. So suddenly there's a little more purpose in my life.
And what I did with a couple of my buddies is I mobilized and we created a 501 (c)(3) foundation to prevent this shit from happening to people where fathers are dropping dead of heart attacks at age 38. Athletic, fit, great sales guy, great person - gone.
(19:48):
So that's a second purpose.
Third, in June of 2014, my brother-in-Law died at age 45, 6 foot four basketball player, married to my wife's sister has three girls. One of them is also my goddaughter. He's gone.
So now I have one foot in my family and I have one foot in his family. That is my purpose. That's what fires me up every day.
Plus, I love sales, but unless you're tapping into what the purpose is of the reps on your team, you're going to have a really hard time motivating them when they're having a shitty month or a shitty quarter, and you're going to have a really hard time moving them down the track, but you've got to know what it is they're there for.
Finally, you show 'em a career path. This is the most critical thing, and it's an eye chart, but please pay attention to this when you are recruiting an SDR, when you just hire an SDR and you're in the onboarding phase, you show them something like this, you show them the roadmap year one, month one through six freshman year, we want you to accomplish these things and we want you to keep track of 'em on a checklist.
(20:55):
And in those one-on-ones around the block, and in those team meetings, we are going to assess together how well you're progressing in this one month, one to month six block, sophomore year, junior year, senior year, they see the path ahead of them, and all of a sudden, two years really isn't a long time.
At the end of one year, I ask them to schedule a meeting with our chief revenue officer and me, and we do a one year anniversary meeting, and it starts out with a retrospective of how their first year has gone, what successes they saw, what failures they hit.
And frankly, if they're not doing well enough, we agree together that this is not a fit. And they go, it absolutely happens.
Personally, I'm not a fan of performance plans. I don't think it motivates anybody. It doesn't elevate their spirits. It certainly doesn't make them want to work hard for you or for the organization.
(21:50):
So instead, you have a heart to heart talk about what they really want to accomplish in their career, and you move them forward that way, it's a much healthier, better way to do it.
So for anybody who does PIPs in here, it's okay. You can continue doing them, but from my experience, not a good thing. Definitely not a motivator.
So I would eliminate them and find a better, more creative way to motivate people. We do a retrospective of how their first year went, and then the CRO and I ask, so are you throwing your hat in the ring? Do you want to pursue this path still? Do you still want to become an account executive at our organization?
And we have very constructive dialogue and we talk very seriously about what junior and senior year is going to look like. There's a lot of work to do because it's an eye chart.
I'll just read some of these. From month 19 to 24, we want them at that point to demonstrate proficiency in qualification, discovery, pricing, discussions, negotiation, territory management, et cetera.
And when they see this in this part of the career path, they know they've got to get their ass in gear if they want to be proficient in these areas by this timeframe, right? So we help 'em get there.
(23:04):
This is what happened to me. I was struggling to find them. I had Carolyn Betts and her team helping me out. We were doing really well with getting top candidates in the door, but they were failing in the interview process.
They weren't asking the right questions. They didn't know who I was. They hadn't seen any of the tweets or anything, didn't do enough research.
You guys have all experienced it. Those who've interviewed really crappy candidates. So what did I do? Out of frustration, I wrote an article, if you want to nail an SDR interview, do this.
And I published it online and I tweeted it out and I sent it to Carolyn and her team, and they handed it to all their candidates. Whether you're interviewing with Ralph or not, if you really want to nail an SDR interview, just do these seven things. So when it came time for looking, I had one SDR two quarters ago get promoted up, which was fabulous, and I only needed to backfill one spot.
(23:59):
So I sent this tweet out in one hour. I had referrals. Not only did I tweet it out, but I tweeted out the interview article so that I knew any candidate that was going to come into the door had read that article, and at the very least, they were going to be on point in those seven areas that I highlight.
So make your life easier and attract the talent you want by becoming an attractive person and an attractive leader. Help add value. Always be helping, and the payback is tenfold.
Okay, I think we're out of time and very good. Go make it rain. Thanks so much for having me and have a wonderful day. No time for questions, Sean, is Sean even in here anymore? We're good. Anybody have any questions? Yes, ma'am.
Attendee (24:55):
How often do you do your one-on-ones? Are they weekly or less?
Ralph Barsi (24:58):
How often do I do one-on-ones? Weekly. When you've got 10 reps, sometimes that's my entire week. So I called an audible and I said, one-on-ones on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That's it. You get 15 to 20 minutes with me.
We'll walk around the block, we'll go get a cup of coffee. We'll bullshit, and we'll make sure that you're good to go. And the one-on-ones are critical.
Do not overlook one-on-ones because as an active listener and as somebody who really cares about their sales development reps, those are the times when they're going to tell you what they're really thinking.
They're also going to tell you what the pulse of the team is. You're going to learn a lot of information. Please take that more seriously than a lot of stuff. These are your people? Yes, Lori?
Lori Richardson (25:43):
How do you help people learn the difference between coaching and just solving problems?
Ralph Barsi (25:50):
Oh, that's great. So the question was how do you help people learn coaching versus solving problems?
So for sales development leaders, to be a good coach, you have to instruct your sales development reps that as you learn as if you need to teach someone the next day, the sales development role is constantly turning.
People are out, people are coming in. So these sales development reps know that just in six months, they could be asked to shadow with a brand new sales development rep. So when you're teaching your sales development reps all that there is to know, teach them as if they need to then teach someone when they come in the next day or the next month or the next quarter, and they'll grasp it like that.
And that's how you encourage coaching, because the best sales development leaders, in my experience, they create leaders.
(26:37):
They create leaders on their teams. And as Anthony and Sean were talking about yesterday, leaders are servants.
We are not looking down upon the sales development team. More calls, more opportunities, more pipeline.
We are instead going to them, how can I help you? How can you be better? How can I help you be better? What could I do to be better? Do I need to spend a little more time on our one-on-ones instead of 15 minutes? Should be 18 minutes or 30. I might make an exception, but tell me how I can help you. Any other questions? Yes, gentlemen in the back.
Attendee (27:11):
Sorry if I missed this, but if you're actively recruiting SDRs, do you have any resources you point us to? Right. Interview questions that might process to go through or we out the good, the bad?
Ralph Barsi (27:20):
I will. And find me afterwards because what I'll do is I'll email you a number of links and what I should do, and this is overdue, is post an article where all those references are. Lori, do you know of any blogs, Matt Heinz or yourself, anybody who's got the questions for interviews, for sales development reps?
Lori Richardson (27:39):
Yeah, I have a whole list of them
Ralph Barsi (27:43):
At...
Lori Richardson (27:43):
Score...
Ralph Barsi (27:43):
More sales. @ScoreMoreSales is Lori Richardson's Twitter profile. She's got a bevy of info on that stuff. Thanks for that question. One more? Yes, sir.
Attendee (27:55):
Given the content of your informal dialogues, where do you implement your data-driven coaching and performance management metrics?
Ralph Barsi (28:07):
Great question. So the one-on-ones very people oriented, one-on-one time. I mean the elephant in the room is you guys got to look at data, you got to look at metrics.
So what we do is we use Salesforce and we look at those metrics together in that team meeting. We don't look at them in the one-on-one, unless we absolutely have to, but we look at them in the meeting.
We have a team dashboard that tracks what we're measured on. But most importantly, what's really helped my team is I've had our Salesforce administrator create individual dashboards for every SDR.
So when they log into Salesforce, they're looking at their dashboard only, what they are doing, how they're measured against the team, what progress they're making or lack thereof.
And that really, really encourages them because they're staying in their own lane. And then in addition to that, I will always share data analyses that are being pumped out regularly in the sales development world online.
If there's a great article from Steve or a great article from Lori or Trish or Craig Rosenberg, I'll make sure my entire team sees that article and we'll even discuss it, what metrics are being gleaned from our industry and from other sales development teams.
And that really helps people compare and contrast really how good we're doing. Thank you for that. Thanks everybody. I really appreciate your attention.