I joined my role as an SDR leader when were a team of 5 and at $500K ARR. Fast forward 5 years, we have 100 XDRs globally and are at $50M ARR. Here are the 5 biggest lessons I learned from growing an SDR team. Build a repeatable hiring process and don’t deviate away from it ✅ We are religious with our hiring process. For each candidate, we run a first interview on Zoom and then meet in person for the second interview. This way, every time we interview a new candidate we’re comparing apples to apples. As soon as you change the environment, your mentality toward hiring changes too. Plan your onboarding incredibly well ✅ It doesn’t matter what level your new hire is, no company operates in the same way. The product and persona will be different. How you sell the product will be different. KPIs and comp plans will be different. We built our onboarding plan with this in mind. Whether we’re onboarding a brand-new SDR or an experienced SDR, our onboarding is suitable for all levels and built to deliver the same outcome. If you adapt your onboarding plan to fit the needs of the new hire, it will be a lot more difficult to track progress and affect ramp time. Standardise as much of your sales process as possible ✅ For me, the human elements that relate to the team (i.e. commission structures, hiring and progression plans) must be aligned as you scale and expand into new regions. Everyone is on the same page on how much they can earn and their path to get there. This way everyone feels equal and you mitigate any animosity across regional teams. Where things differ are cadences, messaging, and KPIs. This is where cultural differences come into play. For instance, our call expectations are different between the UK and the US. Because of this our US connect rate is half the UK connect rate so in order to generate the same number of conversions we simply have to make more dials, and therefore we expect US to need to call more. Continue to experiment and test new things ✅ The landscape has changed massively. What worked 3 years ago won’t work today - or even next year. 2 years ago you could get away with telling your SDRs to do 100 calls a day. This no longer works today. Your reps need to be super-targeted in how they prospect to break through the noise. As a leader, you need to keep your ears to the ground and proactively adapt your playbook in line with how prospects are buying. Ensure your managers ARE managers, not player-coaches ✅ In 2020 our managers held their own personal quota as well as the quota of their team. As a small company, this can work. But as you scale the only goal your managers should have is improving the performance of their team. If managers are prioritising their own quota, it's to the detriment of the wider team. 10 reps hitting quota is better than 1.
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