About this episode
Eddie Reynolds, CEO and Founder of Union Square Consulting, brings 25 years of go-to-market experience and deep expertise in sales operations. He has built and scaled high-performing SDR teams and revenue organizations, and is recognized for his operational rigor in defining and executing GTM processes.
When your SDR team isn't hitting targets, the problem is almost never the people—it's broken process execution and operational misalignment. Most revenue leaders' first instinct is to fire the SDR manager or swap vendors. But before making those expensive changes, you need to diagnose what's actually broken. Is the team executing a clearly defined process consistently, or does no process exist at all?
The core insight is this: there are only two possible failures—either you don't have the right process in place, or you're not executing the process you do have. Until you fix execution discipline first, you'll never know if your process actually works. The real operational foundations that most teams skip are ICP clarity, account capacity planning, segmentation discipline, and CRM reporting rigor. Without these, SDRs are either doing data analyst work or banging the phones on the wrong accounts.
In this episode, Eddie walks through the exact diagnostic framework he uses with customers, including how to calculate sustainable account capacity, what a capability-based territory plan looks like, how to define ICP specificity (not just industry + revenue range), and what metrics actually matter on an SDR dashboard. He also makes a case for why SDR managers are set up for failure and what realistic expectations look like for first-time managers.
What we cover in this episode
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49:00
The Two Failure Modes Either the team lacks a clearly defined process or it's not executing the process consistently. Until execution is disciplined, you cannot validate if the process works.
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7:05
Account Capacity Constraints Most SDRs are given 2,000 junk accounts when they can realistically work 200 quality accounts per year. This forces reps to choose between doing analyst work or calling wrong prospects.
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23:30
ICP Definition Specificity Generic ICP criteria like 14 industries and $1M+ revenue describes millions of prospects. Real ICP work requires qualitative and quantitative precision—and feedback loops from CS and closed-won data.
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34:03
Calculating Territory Capacity Map activities per day, number of contacts per account, and outreach frequency to determine realistic account capacity. At Salesforce, Eddie covered roughly 115 accounts annually.
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46:06
SDR Dashboard Metrics Track call activity, meetings set, qualified pipeline (not just MQLs), and close-one revenue. Most teams track only meetings—not the revenue those meetings generate.
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9:58
Why SDR Is the Hardest Job SDRs prospect all day on little support, they're 22 years old calling 50-year-old decision makers, and most want out within 18 months. It's the highest-leverage and most demoralizing role.
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17:32
Why Leaders Get Fired Companies hire SDR managers hoping they'll solve everything alone. But they lack support—no Rev Ops, no defined ICP, no systems. Asking first-time managers to design processes from zero is unrealistic.
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5:28
Inbound vs. Outbound Validation When leads don't convert, run an outbound test. If outbound works, the inbound criteria wasn't good enough. This isolates whether the issue is leads or execution.
The lines worth sharing
Either the team is not executing the right process or that process isn't working. But if we're not even executing it correctly, we won't know.
Eddie Reynolds · 0:47
I can either go become a data analyst or I can just start banging the phone making calls to inferior prospects, which is by definition going to get an inferior outcome.
Eddie Reynolds · 7:25
Salesforce had an army of people doing this stuff. If an organization doesn't and they just expect the SDR manager to figure it out from zero, that is just wholly unrealistic.
Eddie Reynolds · 21:22
If I call an ICP fit account the conversion rate from cold call to meeting to pipeline to close is going to be significantly higher than anyone else, by definition.
Eddie Reynolds · 25:38
Common questions from this episode
What should I do first if my SDR team isn't hitting targets before firing the manager?
Map your current process and audit execution consistency. Validate that your ICP is defined with real specificity (not just industry + revenue range). Calculate realistic account capacity for each rep. Check CRM reporting to see if reps are logging activity accurately. Most teams skip these foundations and jump to personnel changes.
How many accounts should an SDR realistically be able to cover per year?
It depends on sales cycle length and research intensity. For enterprise software, 200 quality accounts is realistic if reps spend 20-30 minutes per account on research. For transactional products, you might double that. Use this formula: (activities per day ÷ activities per account) × working days = account capacity.
What's the difference between companies with strong ICPs and companies that think they do?
Strong ICP is extremely specific across both quantitative data (revenue, headcount, growth rate, tech stack) and qualitative factors (website quality, philosophic alignment, funding stage). Weak ICP just lists industries and broad revenue ranges, resulting in millions of prospects and zero focus.
What metrics should be on an SDR dashboard?
Call activity, meetings set, qualified pipeline (stage two opportunities, not just MQLs), and close-one revenue attributed to that SDR. Most teams only track meetings. This is a disservice because SDRs learn to optimize for meetings, not revenue.
Why do first-time SDR managers struggle more than other new managers?
They typically lack support infrastructure. No Rev Ops partner. No pre-built playbook. No systems or reporting. And yet they're held to unrealistic revenue targets. They're also usually the most junior person on the management team with no experience building repeatable processes at scale.
How do I know if the problem is bad leads or bad execution?
Run an outbound pilot with the same SDR team. If they generate qualified pipeline from outbound but inbound leads don't convert, your inbound criteria is weak, not your sales execution. This is a diagnostic test, not a permanent pivot.
SEO meta description
Eddie Reynolds explains why SDR teams fail and how to diagnose the real problem before firing leaders or changing tools. Process execution, not people, is usually the issue.
Target keywords
SDR team not working
SDR manager performance
sales development training
outbound sales process
account capacity planning
ICP definition
sales territory planning
qualified pipeline generation
Eddie Reynolds Union Square Consulting
SDR metrics dashboard
sales rep capacity calculation
buyer persona segmentation
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Read the full transcript · 67 KB
EDDIE0:00every sales job I've ever had,
EDDIE0:01can maybe cover, let's say, 200 accounts in a year because there's like, you know, five, ten individuals in each account that I need to call 15 times each.
EDDIE0:07instead of having 200 amazing accounts that were like hand-selected by Rev ops, with all this data, I just get 2000 like junk accounts that were like downloaded from a tool like zoom info based on like some really cursory filter criteria,
EDDIE0:20let's click these industries and click this revenue range and done.
EDDIE0:23Okay, cool. I now have one of two choices as a salesperson.
EDDIE0:25can either go become a data analyst,
EDDIE0:27then I'm not selling anything or I can just like start banging the phone and making calls to inferior prospects, which is by definition, going to get an
EDDIE0:34inferior outcome.
EDDIE0:36Salesforce had an army of people doing this stuff.
EDDIE0:38if an organization doesn't and they just expect the STR manager to figure it out from zero, that is just wholly unrealistic.
EDDIE0:44Either the team is not executing the right process
EDDIE0:47that process
EDDIE0:48working.
EDDIE0:49so what we see again and again and again is like we always start off with,
EDDIE0:52do we have the right process in place? And is that being executed consistently?
EDDIE0:56it's not, then that's the reason why the STR team isn't hitting their targets.
RACHAEL1:23Today we're talking about what to do when your SDR team isn't working. So before you fire your SDR leader, swap out your data provider or change your cadence software. Have you actually looked at what's underneath in this episode? Are breaking down exactly how to diagnose and fix what could be going on before making those expensive changes? My name is Rachel Budgets.
RACHAEL1:44I'm the marketing manager here at Union Square Consulting, and I'm here today with Eddie Reynolds, our CEO and founder. Hey, Eddie.
EDDIE1:50How's it going? I love that we're, like, starting a podcast with, like, let's talk about firing people. And it's so funny because I was on the phone of a PR firm that's invested in one of our customers and yesterday, and he was asking me like, oh, like, how often do you, you know, suggest, like, this person and that person should get fired on, like, not really having those kinds of conversations.
EDDIE2:10But I just thought it was, yesterday's conversation was funny. And then that, you know, opener was funny, but, like, it is important. And actually, I think what I'm going end up doing is probably defending the SDR manager quite a bit here in this podcast. But yeah, like, people do get fired when they're not hitting, targets.
EDDIE2:25And what we're trying to talk about here today is what do you do when the SDR team isn't hitting their targets? So I'm excited to dig into that.
RACHAEL2:32Yeah. I think, with all the pressure from above it, maybe revenue leaders feel like I got to make a change. And this is the easiest change to make. Just get them out, get somebody new in and and pray that it works out better.
EDDIE2:45Yeah. I mean, if you're not hitting numbers, like just fire the person and replace them and it's a magic bullet to solve all problems in business.
RACHAEL2:53Absolutely nothing will go wrong that way.
RACHAEL2:56All right, so, Eddie, what are you seeing out there right now in the SDR landscape?
EDDIE3:00Oh, man. Big question. Well, how much am I seeing in the landscape? I mean, I think, like, I'm seeing the same thing that everybody else is saying, like, I'm not. I'll be candid. Like, to our listeners,
EDDIE3:12I'm not sitting in calls with SDR managers and Sierra's like multiple times every day, like seeing like problems that are, you know, super persistent in the middle of February in 2026.
EDDIE3:24So I want to like, be careful and not answer your question and like, pretend to be like this expert with all this detailed knowledge. I don't have the stats in front of me. I'm not having these conversations every day. More. What I'm seeing is that, you know, with our customers, like we see common challenges that people are struggling with.
EDDIE3:41I've got, you know, 25 years of experience being in sales and working with sales leaders and revenue leaders, etc. and I've seen a lot of stuff over the years. And then thirdly, like, of course, I'm aware of like the macroeconomic stuff where, you know, outbound is really challenging. There's all this pressure to use AI and, you know, the SDR role and then kind of by extension, the SDR manager or to the hardest roles and go to market.
EDDIE4:04And then also two of the most valuable. And so you're going to see me like share a lot of empathy for the SDR manager in this podcast. And what we're going to talk about today are the specific operational challenges that we're seeing again and again and again that contribute to said SDR manager missing their target. That's the thing that we're focused on.
EDDIE4:24And if you want to know, like what percentage of SDR managers are missing target, you can find that elsewhere. Or Rachel, you just wrote up this amazing report on the set of Go to Market. I read this morning that's going to go out and there might be some stuff in there, but I'm not going to pretend like I have all those stats in my back pocket.
RACHAEL4:37That's fair. So when a zero comes to you and they say my SDR team isn't working, what does that usually mean and what are they actually describing?
EDDIE4:46So what they mean when they say that it's not working is that they're not hitting targets. They're not generating a pipeline. Or by extension, enough revenue, to meet the targets that the company has. But, like, what's behind that, right. Let's break this down into two components. And like, you know, scientifically, mathematically, how we call it. There's only 1 or 2 things that could be happening.
EDDIE5:06Either the team is not executing the right process or that process using air quotes for right isn't working. And so what we see again and again and again is like we always start off with, do we have the right process in place and is that being executed consistently? If it's not, then that's the reason why the SDR team isn't hitting their targets.
EDDIE5:28It might be the wrong process, but if we're not even executing it correctly, we won't know. So let's use a tangible example from one of our customers. So we had this classic issue with like sales and marketing misalignment. We've talked about this on podcasts in the past. And customer came to us like, hey, like we've got all these leads we're sending over to sales, sales and and calling them marketing says that, you know, the leads aren't converting because sales doesn't do their job.
EDDIE5:53Sales says that they don't want to call these leads because they're worthless. It's the classic story. So like, how do we approach this? Well, we sat down with them and we mapped out the process. You know, what exactly do we need in order to make outbound successful? We have this outlined in our go to market efficiency pyramid as well as our outbound modern outbound framework, or updating that shortly.
EDDIE6:13But first like what are our ICP and buyer personas by product? If we have multiple products. Second like what is that outbound process. Do we have capacity base territory plans? Meaning like have we identified the best possible accounts for our reps, for our orders that fit within the amount of accounts or contacts or prospects that they can actually work in a given period of time?
EDDIE6:36I really harp on that a lot, because every sales job I've ever had, I could maybe cover, let's say, 200 accounts in a year because there's like, you know, five, ten individuals in each account that I need to call 15 times each. So just basic math, like that's how many accounts I can cover in a year. And instead of having 200 amazing accounts that were like hand-selected by Rev ops, with all this data, I just get 2000 like junk accounts that were like downloaded from a tool like zoom info based on like some really cursory filter criteria, like let's click these industries and click this revenue range and done.
EDDIE7:05Okay, cool. I now have one of two choices as a salesperson. I can either go become a data analyst, which is essentially what I did and led me to this, this like role in my life right now. And then I'm not selling anything, or I can just, like, start banging the phone and making calls to inferior prospects, which is, by definition, going to get an inferior, inferior outcome.
EDDIE7:25So either way, you end up losing a lot of valuable selling time, not calling the best accounts because you have to choose between being an analyst and calling the wrong accounts. So like that's something I'm really big on. And then what is the step by step process. So we're going to email five times call five times and five LinkedIn messages.
EDDIE7:40Or we're going to send a care package in the mail. Like what is that process step by step. How do we do it. Like how much research needs to be done? Do we go to the website? Do we spend a couple minutes looking at these things? Do we use templated, messaging? Do we tweak that messaging?
EDDIE7:55Like what is that step by step process? And this isn't rocket science. Any company that has a full SDR team knows exactly what it takes to reach out to a great prospect and turn that into a meeting. The problem is, they haven't codified it, and their reps, especially like newbie SDR, are not doing that thing. And then we need to build that into the systems.
EDDIE8:14We need to drive them to adopt that process. So this is exactly what we did with this particular customer. And they actually didn't have an SDR team. So we talked to them about building one. They built one. We helped codify that process with them. Marketing sent all the leads over to the stars. The SDR is called 15 times or however many times it was.
EDDIE8:31And then they got a big donut for a result. So okay, cool. Like we got them executing the process. Mission failed. No pipeline. Well, what we did with them is we actually shifted them over to Alpha and said, well, like, what's the outbound process? Like, who should we be reaching out to? What's the step by step process, etc., etc..
EDDIE8:48Like I just went over and within weeks they were generating hundreds of thousands of dollars of qualified pipeline. So that like is a pretty scientific way to validate that those marketing leads were not good. And we're talking about going from inbound outbound orders. The inbound process failed. The outbound process worked, and it's easy to pivot back to inbound.
EDDIE9:06Just say okay, we just need to raise the bar. Like what is different about these cold prospects that allow them to be converted into meetings? A qualified pipeline where these warm leads I use warm and air quotes did not convert. Well, clearly we need to raise the bar on our Amc+, right? So I don't want to like, just kind of go down a rabbit hole for a half an hour and, ramble.
EDDIE9:27But that's like the fundamental answer to your question of like, what are we doing? Things are working. We have to figure out and isolate the issue. If you think of a chain of events, it's like, well, we have the process, we have the execution, and then we have the effectiveness of that execution. And until we're actually executing consistently, we can't know if that process is effective.
EDDIE9:45So we've got to go execute first, and then we can rinse and repeat and figure out what's working, what's not.
RACHAEL9:50as you mentioned, the stars have the toughest job. Can you build the case for that? What's going on with them? Why is that? Why is their job so hard?
EDDIE9:58I mean, anybody who's ever spent, like, a day in sales knows, like, nobody wants to prospect. It's it's miserable. It's difficult. I mean, like, I've even enjoyed prospecting from time to time. But it's just like, it's the least pleasant activity in sales, right? The most pleasant is that you just show up to meetings and you ask questions, and you do some presentations.
EDDIE10:18And that's just, like, set up for you. And so, like, this is where we have, like turned as an industry into, like these eight EAS that are just fed all day long. I've never personally had that job. Sounds really nice. I've always had the prospect, including, like, starting my own company. I still prospect today. But, yeah, it just sounds really nice to just get fed leads, and I just show up to, like, pre-scheduled meetings.
EDDIE10:40The alternative to spend all day, every day just hammering the phones can be miserable. Especially if you're not, like, achieving your results. I mean, it's really, really tough. It's demoralizing. What's the most important and the hardest thing? Like any organization, if they can set up meetings with the right people that convert into qualified pipeline and close one business, if they can do that at scale, you have, I mean, truly a scale.
EDDIE11:03You have $1 billion company. I mean, this is kind of how Salesforce started. You know, they kind of wrote the book on it. It's a bit outdated. And there's some stuff in there that worked for them at that time that doesn't work now. I'm talking about predictable revenue for anybody that's not familiar with what I'm talking about.
EDDIE11:18But like, it's a in a way, it's a magic bullet. It's so incredibly hard. But if you can find a way to just book an infinite number of meetings with the right people, then you have a magic bullet for generating revenue, so long as the rest of your process isn't broken. And so it's the hardest and most valuable thing and go to market.
EDDIE11:36And most people that spend 12 to 18 months just banging the phones all day, every day, getting hung up on and cursed out like they want to go into the a role. Oftentimes they want to go into a prematurely. They're not ready for the eight year old. There are stats that I'm aware of that, like a lot of stocks today, is fail miserably because they're just so anxious to get out of this miserable job.
EDDIE11:58And then you know, they're the least experienced people in the organization. And so it's really tough. Like, they it's their first job out of college. Oftentimes they're trying to learn everything about working, about the product, about the company, about the prospect. They've got no context. They're 22 years old. They're calling into a 40, 50, 60 year old decision maker that, you know, doesn't respect them or thinks that they have any idea what they're talking about.
EDDIE12:19And they're probably right most of the time. It's just a really, really tough job. And then the SDR manager, by extension, is similar. I mean, like by definition, the SDR manager is the most junior person on the management team, right? Oftentimes these people were star stars, or maybe they became an account executive and then they became an SDR manager.
EDDIE12:38But like you don't typically see somebody become like a sales manager, VP, sell CRO and then go to become an SDR manager. So they're the most junior manager. And so by definition, I mean we see this problem with VP of sales and cross too, you know, just because you're good at like you're a good SDR, you're good AA doesn't mean that you know how to build repeatable process and get your team to execute it consistently.
EDDIE13:01Those are two very different things. And so it's kind of like this idea of like, you know, am I a coach or an architect? Like, is it my job as an SDR manager to like sit down with my SDR and encourage them and teach them how to make a cold call and, you know, help them, like, learn and grow?
EDDIE13:18Yes. But is it also my job to build a repeatable system that is going to work at scale? Yes. But like, do I have the experience to do that just because I crushed my quota for 18 months as an SDR or as an AA? Probably not.
RACHAEL13:31So if this role is so important, why do you think so many companies and crows are quick to turn over the team or the leader when things aren't going well?
EDDIE13:40I mean, I think like there's this there's this thought process that
EDDIE13:43you should hire these people that can just figure it out. And I see this problem, like being rampant across all of go to market across all levels from startups to giant enterprises, where there is this belief system that if we just bring in the right leader that they can figure out all problems, they'll solve everything, and then we will hit our target.
EDDIE14:05And a lot of times we're setting these leaders up for failure. And I would say a few things about that. I mean, like as somebody who's done this myself, like starting my own company, there's some truth to that. I've built a company from nothing with $200 into, a real enterprise that's profitable and cash flow positive. But did I do that along a timeline that was decided by someone else while answering to someone else while getting a paycheck and not like, you know, ownership of a company?
EDDIE14:32They're two totally different things, right? So, like, could I have done exactly what I did? Like, let's just assume that I'm an A player and I'm not trying to be egotistical. It's just for the sake of like example here. Let's assume like I'm an a player leader or whatever. It's one thing to go do it for myself when I have, like, this infinite timeline.
EDDIE14:51It's another thing, like for someone else to hire me. And it's their baby, and it's not mine. And. And there's all this stuff that's completely screwed up, and I'm trying to fix it, and I'm being, like, held accountable to hit this target within 12 months. That's a whole different thing. And so I think across the entire spectrum with revenue leadership, people are brought in and they're told you need to hit this target.
EDDIE15:16And there's so many things that are broken, like this operational framework we talk about here, we maybe don't even know our ICP. We haven't defined it well enough. We haven't defined the process. We're hiring an SDR manager that doesn't have the experience to to figure that out on their own. If they did, they probably wouldn't be interviewing for their first SDR manager role.
EDDIE15:35They probably be interviewing for a VP of sales role, or a key role role, or potentially their second CRO role. Like, you got to learn this stuff somehow, right? And so we're just going to bring them in and give them a target. And like if you don't hit this like you're fired when in fact and I've been in this situation many times, we're calling the wrong customer because we haven't bothered to define it.
EDDIE15:53And who's going to figure out who the right customer is? Some new SDR manager that just came to the organization and is still figuring out where the bathroom is or like the founder, CEO, CRO, etc. that have been around forever and should know exactly who the ideal customer is. And if they took a little bit of time to sit back and say, oh wow, we need to define this more than just like, what industries are they in and what revenue range of the.
EDDIE16:18And we need to look at our data and be really thoughtful about who we're targeting and build this process out. Like I explained earlier in the podcast, then we're going to set this person up for success. And then if they can't motivate their SDR to make the calls, if they can't coach them, we can kind of narrow in and say, like, these are reasonable expectations of like a first time SDR manager and you're not meeting those expectations.
EDDIE16:40And so we have to either coach you up or coach you out. Okay, cool. But don't hire any leader in an organization. I don't care if it's an SDR manager, a Sierra, a CMO, a CFO, whatever, and just expect that they can, like solve all your problems overnight just because you think you pay them enough money to do so.
EDDIE16:56It just it's just not realistic. I wish it was. I would be like, you know, sipping mai tais on the beach. I would hire that person. But it's not realistic. And, Yeah, just it's just not realistic.
RACHAEL17:08And we gave, a brief like an overview of all this earlier in the podcast, like you said. But let's dig into that a little bit deeper. Now, what's the first thing you would want a CRO to look into when they're facing this? You know, knowledge and skill gap with their SDR leaders. And they need to fix it.
RACHAEL17:27And they don't want to fire their team right away. They want to see what could be going on at a deeper level.
EDDIE17:32Well, maybe from that perspective, I'll share what I saw at Salesforce. So I know Salesforce is a giant, giant enterprise that's also not doing that well right now. And if you're like in a, in an organization that's got like 20 salespeople, it's kind of hard to compare. But I think that there's some comparisons that are really, really valuable for a small company to make.
EDDIE17:51And so when I look at Salesforce, I had like five or 6 or 7 layers of sales management between me and the CEO. It's a huge company right now, like, of course, like a smaller company is not going to have these layers. But what I think is relevant is like, what do they do with these layers? So if you start off as an AA and then you get promoted to a manager and then, from there you get promoted to, an area vice president and then an SVP and an EVP, etc..
EDDIE18:18Well, like, what is the, what is the AVP doing with their frontline sales managers? Or RVs, as they're oftentimes called? Well, like they're coaching like people on how to coach. Right. Like they are trying to like take somebody who was just an account executive and then in their first time as a manager and say, like, this is how you manage a team, you've learned how to sell.
EDDIE18:42And you did really well at that. And that's why we promoted you. That doesn't mean you know how to manage. Now. Then you go to the AVP role. Now you're learning how to manage managers. That's a different skill set that you now have to learn from your SVP and so on and so forth. At Salesforce, you have to go quite high up the chain and into a different department before you get into like operations and the people that are actually designing the process.
EDDIE19:05So especially like this is really relevant if someone wants to hire somebody from Salesforce, which at least back then they were doing better in the market, everybody did. It's like all this stuff is designed for you. People always talk about how like these leaders like, oh, they're going to come with the playbook. They didn't invent that playbook. Someone else invented it, right?
EDDIE19:22So when I was at Salesforce, they already had a playbook for every single sales role and management role across the entire organization that was developed by somebody that, like, nobody that I worked with ever met. Maybe the executive that I reported under, right. So when you think about like, what is that methodology like on the,
EDDIE19:39cold calling side, like, shout out to, John Barrows, who I've been talking to recently, to help us, find our new amazing, podcast agency.
EDDIE19:51He provided all the training for our outbound, and it's like, here's the step by step process. And then Salesforce codified that. They gave us like online training. They had systems built in Salesforce. They had reporting for it, like they had everything. Like this is who you should be calling. This is how you research everything that I laid out was already designed.
EDDIE20:08Do you think my sales manager designed that or knew how to design that? Or even his boss or his boss? No. So now that that person was in Salesforce or it started Salesforce goes into this like startup, or scale up and they're an SDR manager. And now all of a sudden, like the Salesforce playbook doesn't work because they're they're selling something totally different and they've got to adjust it.
EDDIE20:32That's not their job. Like not to pitch our services. But like that is why you have a VP of Rev ops to sit down and help design that. Even a lot of crows don't have that, and the crows that know how to do that usually are working in organizations that are too large to allow for them to spend their time on that.
EDDIE20:50So that's where they delegate that to like a VP of Rev ops and they say, look like I know what good looks like. And I know how we need to do this, but like actually putting hands on keyboards and codifying this into like process documents and training manuals and then building this into like all of our systems and building out the reports.
EDDIE21:04You know, I know that I need a report that shows me a, B, c I know that I want my sales managers to be looking at these reports to hold their team accountable, to execute this process, but it's a ton of work to get that done. So unfortunately, shameless plug for our services. Salesforce had an army of people doing this stuff.
EDDIE21:22And if an organization doesn't and they just expect the SDR manager to figure it out from zero, that is just totally unrealistic. What they should expect that SDR manager to do, especially first time, is like, hey, look, you know how to sell. Or at least you, you know, as a successful SDR, know how to like prospect and set up meetings.
EDDIE21:40Your primary job is to coach and encourage your SDR to do the same. So help them do that. We've got training and enablement to help you. We've got rev ops to help you. We've codified these systems. We've built all this stuff out so that you can do your job. And then we are going to teach you, as an SDR manager how to do that, how to be a manager.
EDDIE22:02That is the role of the CRO in this instance. Unless there's some other person between the zero and the SDR manager. That is a realistic expectation of someone, but asking them to like design the system from zero with no experience doing that is unrealistic.
EDDIE22:19Quick pause. If you're getting value from this episode, I want to ask you a small favor. Take 30s right now. Open up the app you're listening to this on. You can give us a five star rating. It sounds small, but it's the single biggest thing you can do to help us get conversations like this in front of more revenue leaders.
EDDIE22:33While you're there, hit follow so you never miss an episode. Okay, let's get back into it.
RACHAEL22:38So let's talk about the fundamentals of that playbook that you just mentioned a little bit deeper. The things that need to be in place before you can even evaluate whether your SDR team is performing or whether somebody needs to get fired or tools need to change. You know, you mentioned, ICP persona definitions, account capacity, target list, quality, segmentation, mastering all that stuff.
RACHAEL23:01So let's start with ICP and buyer personas. What's the difference between a company that has this nailed and one that just thinks that they do
RACHAEL23:09specificity?
EDDIE23:11The company that has it nailed is extremely specific about lots of different criteria. Some of that criteria can be run through tools like zoom info or Clay, or a combination thereof, so that they can get like a more refined list. Some of that specificity you only see once the rep is actually looking at the website and researching it.
EDDIE23:30And that also also depends on, you know, the cost of the solution being sold and how much time you can justify for a rep to do account research before, you know, starting to make calls. But that specificity is at the heart of like how narrowly you can focus. So if I say our ICP is and I'm like, this is a literal example that I pulled from, you know, a company that I've been working with, our ICP, are these 14 industries, every company in that industry that's in North America that has revenue above $1 million.
EDDIE24:04Okay. Like there's 33 million companies in America. And you just described like 3 million of them. And you have five stars to call 3 million companies and ten individuals in each company. So 30 million people like that. It's just completely unrealistic. So and I think most companies fall victim to this, like you wrote a report that we're going to publish soon, and I forget the exact staff that you put into that report that you found from other reports that you aggregated, showing that I think it was only 23% of pipeline across the B2B SAS industry currently is, you know, ICP fit, meaning that like, these are actors that are setting up these meetings, are handing
EDDIE24:45these deals over to ease. And three out of four of these deals are with companies that are not in the ICP. Yeah. And that's probably a vague definition of ICP, not what I'm describing. So what I'm saying is get laser focused. If you've got five stars or 50 stars, what is every single data point, both qualitative and quantitative, we can use to identify the absolute best prospects that fit into the narrow number of accounts or prospects that stars can call on that.
EDDIE25:15And also, according to the report that you I've been saying this for a while, but this is in the report that you're you're writing. That is one of the biggest unlocks, right? Like just by definition, if I call an ICP fit account the conversion rate from cold call to meeting to pipeline to close one is going to be significantly higher than anyone else by definition, because that's what makes it ICP, right?
EDDIE25:38And if we don't know what our ICP as we look at that data and reverse engineer it. Right. So like that's the biggest unlock. And then the next piece is are we executing the right process to convert those those prospects.
RACHAEL25:52And from that report that you mentioned they also said there's eight, eight times more or eight times higher sales efficiency in those instances where they had high ICP fit accounts that they were, that they were going after. So this is really important.
EDDIE26:07It's not a surprise. Like I remember when I was at Salesforce, and I think they could have done a better job of this. But I remember like one day I just got an email and there's like, here's the six codes and nine X codes of like all the, you know, industries that we sell best into. And it was like, oh, surprise, surprise.
EDDIE26:20Like we do best with B2B SAS. And I was like, oh wow, that's funny. That like all my like, highest, you know, paying customers, the ones I like have the most adoption of Salesforce are all in B2B, SAS. And it's like, well, and then I had a pretty narrow revenue range that I covered as well, and also pretty narrow geographic range.
EDDIE26:35So it's like, okay, well, who am I going to call? I'm going to call B2B SAS companies first before I go and call on like, air conditioning manufacturers, which is funny because I actually had an air conditioning manufacturer that I tried to do a deal with. And this brings up my point of, of segmentation.
EDDIE26:52The air conditioning manufacturer. I have no idea how that works. They were doing commercial air conditioning manufacturing, and they I think they came inbound and I was like, scrambling. I'm like, I need to find a Salesforce partner that knows this industry. I need to find use cases, like I spent hours and hours and hours just trying to prepare for my first meeting because I was like, I know nothing about commercial air conditioning manufacturing.
EDDIE27:13And I see company after company after company that take their reps, whether they're skiers or 80s, and they're like, you're going to call into these 25 different industries, and every single time you pick up the phone or you write an email, you're going to be talking to a different, you know, role in a different industry. And so like email number one, I need to email the CFO in a commercial air conditioning manufacturing company.
EDDIE27:34And I have to figure out what messaging is going to resonate with that person. And then I switch. And now I have an email to the VP of marketing in a B2B SaaS company, and I gotta figure out what messaging is going to resonate with that person. So we're big on segmenting because like, first of all, if you narrow the focus and just say, look like these one, 2 or 3 industries or this one industry is where we play best, great.
EDDIE27:56Now reps can spend all day thinking about just that one industry or that three of those three industries. Here are the personas that are absolute best for us. Now I can only think about these folks, right? And then if I batch them together, like as an SDR, I can spend all day or all week or whatever period of time only focused on this one buyer only focus.
EDDIE28:14I'm trying to figure out the messaging that's going to work with this one buyer. I'm taking the templates that are provided to me, which is also more focus because we have less templates to create that are specific to that segment that are already going to perform better because they're tailored to that segment. And then do I want to personalize these or customize these to make it like really relevant to that particular buyer?
EDDIE28:35If I have to bounce around across 15 different industries and 15 different types of buyers all in one day, like there's just zero chance that I'm going to do that. Well.
RACHAEL28:43And, piggybacking off what you're saying about, like, you know, our best segments and our best buyers and customers, like, does your company have the feedback loop capabilities in your systems or meetings or however you do things to, to get feedback from customer success and from marketing to ensure that the people you're selling to are your actual ISP's and buyer personas, or are you chasing people who actually churn very frequently or really, really hard to expand into?
EDDIE29:15That's a really, really great point, you know, and it's a case for having really clean data and making sure you're capturing the right data in the sales cycle so that when customers onboard and go through the, you know, customer journey, you can see which customers are playing out well and which are not. The good news always is you can also just take all of your closed one deals and backfill and augment that data with tools like zoom, info, Clay, etc. and then say, okay, like maybe we have like really crop data.
EDDIE29:41But we know, like because they sign a contract and they, you know, they pay pair invoices. We know like the company's legal name and address and stuff. And so we can cross-reference that against these databases and we can figure out what is their revenue range, what is their industry, what is their subsector, what tech stack are they using?
EDDIE29:58What's their headcount like? What funding do they have? Like what's their growth rate? What geography are they in? And the thing that I think is really interesting about ICP is when you really do a good job of this, you get into like weird stuff, right? So like the two examples that, like always come to mind is like when I was at Salesforce and I was trying to sell their marketing tool, which was at that time called Pardot competitor HubSpot.
EDDIE30:20It's like, don't try to sell this tool to companies with shitty websites, right? Like it's $20,000 a year tool. If I open up a prospect or customer's website and it looks like they spent $500 on their website ten years ago, and we also had a tool, that would show us like what kind of trackers they have on.
EDDIE30:36So for example, if they were using HubSpot, they'd be tracking the visit. I could see that with, in my web browser. Well, like, what do you think? You want to sell a $20,000 marketing tool to? Probably not a company that thinks that their investment in marketing involves a $500 website that's ten years out of date, right. Another example of this is, like with us, like when we're selling our strategic services, we have to align like philosophically with the CRO.
EDDIE31:03That's unfortunately not something that I can like, pump through, zoom in for clay. And when we're talking with folks, it's like, are they interested in building a scalable, repeatable motion? If so, they're going to value what we do with our strategic consulting meaning specifically bringing an experienced VP of Rub ops that understand go to market and not just building systems.
EDDIE31:24If they don't appreciate that, then the best that we can hope for is to sell them like outsource Salesforce architecture and admin services. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But like that for us is like within the first meeting, you can tell that. And if you've really clearly defined your ICP, then you can design your sales process around that to discover these things up front.
EDDIE31:46And when I'm talking to a CRO, like the first thing I'm trying to figure out is do they want to build an engine or do they just want to like, slap tools together and say like, like here's a classic example. They come to us and say, like, our, SDR team isn't working. Well, what's the solution to that?
EDDIE32:01Do they want to, like, sit down and define the ICP and the process and, you know, get the systems in place and get the reporting in place and do all the things we recommend or do they just want to like, implement Apollo? Really quickly and get their team to be banging on 100 calls a day? Okay, cool. I mean, we could do either thing, but if we try to pitch the strategic stuff to the CRO that just wants to bang 100 calls, a day and implement Apollo in the next week and a half, they're just not going to value it.
EDDIE32:27And that's like this, like really subtle nuance. But I think a lot of companies are lacking. And I could spend months trying to convince a CRO to like, drink our Kool-Aid, and they're just not going to do it.
RACHAEL32:38And I think some of the, some of the best custom clients that we've had are, you know, crows that, we don't have to instruct too much on strategy because they already have their strategies and they're already lined philosophic. So philosophically with us, like you said, they just need, you know, more resources to execute the projects and the vision that they have in their head.
RACHAEL33:00And then we can just, you know, take along and do that or take on to their team and do that.
EDDIE33:05Yeah. And a lot of that stems from like these people having worked at other organizations like, you know, where I worked at Salesforce and they've seen the show and they're like, oh, this is how go to market operates. Like, I need this in my new organization that I've just joined. Yeah. Which is interesting. Like I literally just lightbulb came on in my own head.
EDDIE33:22I'm like, what if we targeted crows that worked at, like, certain organizations previously? Like, that could be a data point that we could use ourselves. And without really thinking hard about your ICP, you're going to miss those data points, which is going to influence everything downstream for outbound and all of go to market. But I feel like we've harped a lot on ICP and we should probably move on.
RACHAEL33:39We should. I mean, ICP is super, super important. So, I'm happy talking a lot about it, but we should move on to the next thing. All right. Let's talk a little bit about, account capacity. So how many accounts in SDR can actually work without skipping steps needed to close those accounts? So how do you how do you figure out what that number is, and is there an easy way to calculate it?
EDDIE34:03Yeah. Let me just use a tangible example from my experience at Salesforce. So, when I was there, I was like technically on the SMB team. I think for a lot of companies who I was selling into would be considered mid-market. These were organizations with, you know, 20 to 200, employees oftentimes like tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions and venture capital, you know, sub or over 100 million in revenue.
EDDIE34:29And the but the process at Salesforce was like fairly enterprise. It's kind of interesting. Like, it's weird to say that I was like in SMB sales because it's not anything like what I see in SMB sales. And other organizations. And I say all this to like, paint a picture of what like my capacity looked like. So if I'm reaching out to an organization for Salesforce as an example, let's start by thinking like, how many different people might I want to reach out to?
EDDIE34:57Of course, I could reach out to the VP of sales of the CRA. That's an obvious one. Then you have the head of Customer Success. You have the CFO, which is actually we found to be a better role for us selling like our our service tools. You have the chief marketing officer, of course, we're gonna sell marketing tools to that person.
EDDIE35:15You have the CFO that was always involved in a lot of decisions and influenced a lot of decisions. You have the CEO, of course, because these organizations are still small enough that the CEO will, participate in evaluations. You have the Salesforce admin, potentially you have a, an implementation partner if they're an existing customer of Salesforce.
EDDIE35:36You have like the office manager, and then you have other executives in the organization. For example, I sold into a couple of research organizations and there were people like that, managed all of the analysts, and there was a play for us to sell Salesforce to like 200 analysts. So you have all of these different roles, which kind of rounds out to like, let's just call it eight, eight people.
EDDIE35:58So then you say, okay, like let's just say that I want to make, 20 calls a day. So the process is I'm going to go in, I'm going to look at the company's website. I'm going to do like a fair amount of research, and then I'm going to tailor my outreach. Now, keep in mind, I was there ten years ago.
EDDIE36:14We got AI tools that can make us more productive now. But the bottom line is, like without skipping steps, I could probably do 20 to 30 activities in a day. And when I say activities, I'm talking about reaching out to one customer. We could double that number and call it 60. If I'm like sending an email and like or leaving a voicemail and following up with an email, whatever.
EDDIE36:31But the point is, like I'm I'm reaching out to, you know, 20 to 30 individuals in a given day. Well, if I want to reach out to each of those people, let's call it ten times on average before I give up. Well, then eight times ten is 80. That's 80 activities per account. Okay, so let's say that I can do 40 activities a day to make the math easy.
EDDIE36:55What that means is, is like, if I'm going to reach out to an and give an account 80 times in it, let's just say in a year, because let's say I reach out those 80 times, I get nothing back. I'm not going to call them back six months later. Maybe I will, but let's say that I don't. All right.
EDDIE37:07So then basically, if I can do 40 calls a day, then I can get through one account in two days. There's like 233 working days in a year. So okay, like let's just call that 230 for easier math. So that means that, if it takes me two days to get through an account, then I can work 115 accounts.
EDDIE37:27And there's your number. And that's kind of like, actually about what the math ended up being at. Like, my territory fluctuated between like 60 and 180 accounts at any one point in time, depending on. I was there for three years. So it really fluctuated a lot. And when I had 280 accounts, like I couldn't call everybody, I just couldn't do it.
EDDIE37:45So if you can land on that number and say, all right, like let's call 115, now we can get really narrowly focused on our ICP. And let's say that we've got ten sales reps. So it's not 115 per rep. And I was an 18 on an SDR. So you could maybe double those numbers for an SDR. 115 times ten days.
EDDIE38:04Let's call that this is round to a thousand. So we've got 1000 accounts that we want to call. And now there's a question of whether it account based or whether we're just like individual based. But a thousand accounts. What data points can we find to identify those thousand accounts? Maybe what we do is we actually identify 1500 and then give those to the reps and say, why don't you guys narrow this down to a thousand?
EDDIE38:26You can go to the websites and poke around. We're not giving you a thousand accounts for each rep and expect you to go to 1000 websites. We'll give you 150, and then you can go to each one of them, and you can manually research that website, and you can start to determine whether or not this is a fit.
EDDIE38:41Lots of use cases for AI tools here. As well, right? There's a lot of powerful things we can do, but at least every sales job I had granted I started this company almost ten years ago, so it's been a while since I've been on the front lines. I just get this, like, dump of accounts and I'm, like, trying to figure out who to call, and it's just like a really, really inefficient use of sales time.
RACHAEL38:59And this like, account capacity thing is so important, especially when you're team isn't performing as well as you want them to. Because if you have no idea what your capacity is and they are way, way over capacity, not only are they not even touching a lot of those accounts, but the accounts that you touch, they're probably rushing through it and skipping so many steps in their sales process or not, just not giving them the attention that they need.
RACHAEL39:24And also, you know, if they're so over capacity, do they even know what their best accounts are in that list? You know, do they have their like the top accounts that they need to be focusing the most on? And are those accounts even enriched if this work hasn't been done at all?
EDDIE39:42Well, and this is the exact process we would go through at Salesforce, I would get like my 60 accounts or a hundred accounts or whatever it was and like, yeah, your first like day and territory, you're going through all those accounts. You're trying to look at the past history and you're trying to stack rank them. Here's my tier ones.
EDDIE39:56I'm going to pick ten tier ones, I'm going to pick 20 tattoos and 30 of them are going to be tier threes. Right. Now I can do that because I got 60 accounts or 100 accounts. So there's just no way to do that with a thousand accounts unless I'm just using tools. So I think that that's a really, really big unlock for go to market.
EDDIE40:14And a lot of organizations that don't have a go to market engine that's as mature as what I'm describing in Salesforce, this is the first thing that I would do to try to improve outbound is just like how I get my reps. Focus on the best possible accounts is very simple question. But I think like the way that we've ordered this in our, go to market efficiency pyramid, I always question whether this is out of sync because it's like
EDDIE40:34you can't figure out the capacity until you figured out the process.
RACHAEL40:38So yeah.
EDDIE40:39If I'm selling like a highly transactional product, like you had, Kyle Naughton on the podcast,
EDDIE40:44and he was selling it on A.com. And they're selling a solution to mom and pop restaurants. Right.
EDDIE40:49So I imagine I have no idea. But like, if I had to guess, I'm guessing like, they're selling something for five grand, ten grand, 20 grand, whatever. Like, very, very transactional, super fast sales cycle. It's probably not going to be the same sales process that I had at Salesforce. You know, like how different is one restaurant to another?
EDDIE41:06Like, I don't know, owner ecommerce product. But like, does it matter if they're serving Thai food or Italian food? Maybe it matters what their price point is. I have no idea, but I could see how the sales process might be okay. We fed the tool with all this information. All you need to know is that this is a Thai restaurant with 200 tables, and this is the messaging, the associates with a restaurant with 200 tables.
EDDIE41:30And it just benefits you to know that it's a Thai restaurant, because the person running a Thai restaurant probably cares that, you know, it's a Thai restaurant. I don't know, I'm just guessing. But like, I don't know how that's different for the solution selling right.
EDDIE41:40You know, so you might say, okay, the process is, is that you pull up this information in Apollo or Salesforce or whatever.
EDDIE41:46You look at it for five seconds and you pick up the phone and call. I could very easily imagine this being like heavy on calling. So now the restaurant owner answers the phone, you're like famous restaurant owner. I know you have like 200 tables in your restaurant. I imagine maybe you're using XYZ solution and this might be your problem.
EDDIE42:01Boom. Okay, I can do all of that in like 30s. That's very different from what I did in Salesforce, where I might spend like 20, 30 minutes, an hour researching a website because I'm only I'm only covering a hundred accounts in a year anyway. So if I spend three hours before I send my first email, everybody thinks this is crazy, but that's three hours.
EDDIE42:18It's going to serve me for the next 80 activities. So that's perfectly that's a perfectly reasonable process. So we have to define that process in order to identify what our capacity is. And if our processes that the rep spends 30s reading some like information that we've piped into, like whatever tools they're using, then fine. If that process works, then we're going to have a lot bigger capacity.
EDDIE42:41And now with all the AI tools out there, there's a lot greater capability to do that kind of thing. Even when you have like really personalized messaging. But you have to really think through what that is and how long it's going to take to execute that process.
RACHAEL42:51And this is such an important point for anyone listening like we can give you, you know, these playbooks and all this advice. But you need to take it and look at it through the lens of your own company. Nothing is going to be cookie cutter. There's not like one way to do something that's going to work perfectly across every single company, in every single industry.
RACHAEL43:11So just like, like take the core of what we're saying and you know, the ideas behind it and the curiosity and like looking into your, sales process and your systems. But make sure you're also doing the work to see what works for your company. And we me, Kyle and we talked a lot about this on my podcast with him.
RACHAEL43:30And, you know, the things that he did to discover specific things that worked for his salespeople, they were completely different than, you know, the best practices that exist for sales. And he increased their win rate from 38% to 53% in a single quarter from doing that. So, absolutely, you know, test things, be curious about your own company, and make sure you're doing what's right, right for your business.
EDDIE43:57Yeah. And I mean, my biggest takeaway from listening to that podcast and reading the newsletter you wrote up on, it is like, you know, how do they go from 38% to 53% win rate? Or specifically like, why are these behaviors that they identified with their I call scoring so valuable to them and so different? It's like the way that you you kind of like, position this is that, you know, Kyle imagined that it would be discovery skills, right?
EDDIE44:20Like everybody thinks like, well, how do you improve your close rates like you do better discovery. That's just like sales 101. But they're selling highly transactional product to a mom and pop business. So with that context, maybe hindsight's 2020 when I read through this and you're saying, like, ask for the sale, make sure you have clear next steps, etc., etc., it's all about driving that momentum.
EDDIE44:40I'm like, oh, that makes perfect sense. If I'm selling a relatively inexpensive solution to a mom and pop business, the sales cycle super short. It's all about maintaining that momentum. That makes perfect sense. I can't go and take that playbook and then go apply it to like enterprise SaaS, where we're trying to sell like a half $1 million software solution to a fortune 500 company and expect that to work.
RACHAEL45:03And I want to quickly disclaimer here, I don't remember for sure if it's just Mom and Pop restaurants. I just know that they I remember that they were restaurants. But in case Kyle's listening to this and he's like, what? No.
EDDIE45:13And maybe we're doing a disservice to them. And maybe and I've seen this so many times with so many customers, they'll come to us and be like, yeah, we have the software solution we sell to mom and pop restaurants, and we have this enterprise team over here, or we're trying to sell to like, all the franchises or chains across the country.
EDDIE45:26And that's a completely different sales process.
RACHAEL45:29Yeah. And then again, with that different sales process, you got to look back at your ICP and your buyer persona because those might be completely different people and you might need completely different, you know documents and, and processes that your reps follow. And then also based on product, you have different products for these different industries. What is the sales process for this specific product.
RACHAEL45:49So you can get really, really granular with your segmentation here. And you should.
RACHAEL45:55So let's talk about the CRM and the reporting side of this a little bit. If a CRO wanted to pull up a dashboard tomorrow morning and get a read on how their SDR team is actually performing, what should be on that dashboard.
EDDIE46:06So I think there's a set of reports that are kind of like basic and obvious and the same for everybody. And then there's a set of reports that are unique and different for everybody. So I'll start with kind of the standardized stuff.
EDDIE46:15obviously we want to look at call activity, a meeting set, qualified pipeline generated.
EDDIE46:21And then of course close one revenue now like this is pretty basic and obvious, but unfortunately a lot of SDR teams that are only looking at meeting set and they're not looking at qualified pipeline, or they're only looking at qualified pipeline and not looking at close one business. And I think that not only is a big disservice to the revenue team or the company, it's also a big disservice to the SDR.
EDDIE46:41And this is why I think a lot of SDR fail when they become a is because they get trained to think like my job is to set a meeting as opposed to my job is to set a meeting that turns into revenue. And there's a big distinction between the two things. It's similar to like the mql,
EDDIE46:56you know, if we have a dashboard, we just want to see across the team. Like, is everybody logging their activity? Is everybody setting enough meetings? Are they generating enough pipeline. And by pipeline I mean qualified sales opportunity. So for example, when I was at Salesforce, we would call these a stage two opportunity.
EDDIE47:11So the SDR, on the rare occasion that I got an A lead from an SDR, would pass it over to me and it would be in stage one, and I would have to move it to stage two before the SDR would get credit. Now, the really nice thing in Salesforce is about 90% of the time I would move it over to stage two because it was like genuinely qualified because like, they were really well trained and they knew what they were doing.
EDDIE47:30And then of course you have revenue, right? But then you get into the nuance, okay. And this is where I think it's unique to each organization. I'm a really big fan of account base. So if we say, well, we really want to target accounts and not just contacts, then I'm a big fan of a report that shows a set of named accounts and how they're moving through the funnel.
EDDIE47:51So let's go back to that example we had where we say we have 1000 named accounts that we have carefully curated with all the tools that we can come up with. Maybe we even stack them out like tier one, tier two, tier three. And then we want to say, okay, of those thousand accounts, how many of those are sitting in like, and we actually have like account stages in our Salesforce.
EDDIE48:11And I think our first stage is called like just new or Target. So how many of those thousand accounts are just newer? Target. We built some automation in our own Salesforce. Like the second that we send out like an activity and moves to working. Okay, so how many of those accounts are in working? The second that somebody responds to us that moves to engaged or not?
EDDIE48:30Not responded, set a meeting. And that's just because of like the automation. It just easier. So we get a meeting with somebody. Now we're engaged. Then we create an opportunity that's an open opportunity. And then they either become a customer or they become stale. We can have a report that shows how we're moving those accounts through, and we can look at each individual rep and how they're moving those accounts through.
EDDIE48:50But this is all premised on the idea that, hey, we want to do account based, and B, we want to do like a named account set instead of just saying our account base. What we're like going after like 100,000 accounts. Another thing you might want to look at is like, what stakeholders are we going after? So when I was at Salesforce, Salesforce had figured this out.
EDDIE49:09Top performing reps would call into the C-suite and bottom performing reps would call into like the Salesforce Admin, the more junior people in the organization. So we tracked this. We literally had a button and said, like calling into power, and not power or whatever. And ironically, like people would actually like put an accurate data in Salesforce. And you see all these like bottom performing reps with like 30, 40 calls in a day, all to like, not power.
EDDIE49:31And then you see all the top performing reps that made like five calls that day all to power. And you're like, okay, this person made five calls and they're crushing the leaderboard because they're talking to the right person about the right thing in the right accounts. So those are really big things. You know, and I don't know if we're only talking about outbound on this podcast or inbound, but like on inbound, obviously, like speed, the lead is paramount.
EDDIE49:51How fast are we responding to these new leads, especially hand raisers. And then for both of them, like how many activities are we doing before we give up on an individual contact or account? This is something I'm really big on. I've seen so many reports where somebody says, oh, we pass these mql over to sales, or we these cold prospects and they work them and they're like, they're not qualified.
EDDIE50:10And they moved on. I like dig in to Salesforce. And I look at it and I'm like, you call them twice and you call them once. You waited two weeks and you call them a second time, you're like, I can't get a response to them. Like, that is not adequate. I've never seen an organization that sells effectively that way.
EDDIE50:24Maybe for one organization it's ten touches, maybe it's 15 for another or whatever. Maybe it's five. I'm okay with five if we're talking about, like, five individual separate instances of reaching out with maybe a voicemail, an email, whatever, five might be enough, but two is not enough. And I see this all the time. So I think those are some of the things that I would want to look at.
EDDIE50:44You also have, of course, like intent signals and trigger based, you know, signals, things like this. So like you might want to incorporate that in and you say, okay, well every single time, like an organization hires a new CRO, we want to call them, you know, ten times. Okay. Well then we probably want to have a report for that.
EDDIE51:01You know, like there's an expression inspect what you expect. Ultimately the reports need to be what do I expect my team to do every day and do the reports tell me whether my team is doing that or not? A and B do the reports. Tell me whether or not that's working or not, as in like generating pipeline that results in close one deals.
EDDIE51:20Those are the most important things for me.
RACHAEL51:22So how much of this can a DevOps team realistically build and maintain on their own versus, where do they usually need some outside help?
EDDIE51:31I mean, whether or not they need outside help is just a function of like their bandwidth and their expertise. But in terms of, like the capability to build everything we're talking about, there's absolutely no reason that rep ops can't do 99% of this. If I'm a CRO and I'm trying to build this out, I'm going to have rep ops do all this work and I'm going to have them take it to the two yard line and then hand it over to sales and say, look, we figured out your capacity, your territory.
EDDIE51:56We enriched accounts with clay and zoom info and every other tool on the planet that we could think of that would give us accurate data. We've built out the system. Here's a step by step process. We gave you some email templates to start off with, some call scripts to start off with. We've given you everything on a silver platter.
EDDIE52:11Now your job is to potentially, for example, log in to the website and validate that this is a good account. Disqualified. If it's not whatever, you're only doing the things that rev ops can't do because it's not rev ops job to go account by account by account. Now, I would put a hard sales pitch into like hiring admins.
EDDIE52:30Like as in like a virtual assistant overseas or an executive assistant. I have both and they are worth their weight in gold. I know not everybody's going to buy into that because like, everything needs to be software and I like we're not spending money on assistants for our salespeople, but it's just insane to me because like an 80 with $1 million quota and spending a third of their time selling is selling $1,500 an hour, and you can go hire a virtual assistant overseas for, like, in the range of ten bucks an hour.
EDDIE52:58It's like, why would you not do that? Or we've had like folks on our team that in past roles running off sort of like hired whole teams in India to go like manually, like scour accounts, like there's incredible value in that. If you can take it to the two yard line and then get like a human to take it, maybe to the one yard line and then hand it over to sales.
EDDIE53:18We should be doing everything possible for sales reps to get them to spend as much of their time as possible. Just focus on trying to sell into the right accounts. That is like the biggest unlock we can do for the SDR team.
RACHAEL53:30So if you could leave listeners with one thing to go check to fix or fix in their SDR SDR process this week, what would it be?
EDDIE53:38Oh, that's a tough one because we're going to refresh this. But this week, check out the modern outbound framework, which is also part of our go to market efficiency pyramid, which is going to be updated in the next few weeks. So go check that out on our website right now, or maybe it'll be updated.
RACHAEL53:52Before I was just about to say it might be. Yeah.
EDDIE53:55All right. Either way, check the links in the show notes for that, and then make sure you subscribe so that you will get the updated versions of these in your inbox when we release them.
RACHAEL54:05Absolutely. And newsletters also. Oh yes. Great fun. All right, Eddie, thank you so much.
EDDIE54:11Thank you Rachel, this is fun as always.
EDDIE54:14Thanks for listening to the episode. If this resonated. Please give us a five star rating and a follow. It helps us reach more people, and you get our latest and greatest content without having to search for it. And if you're looking for hands on help and go to market strategy and or rev ops, please reach out to us.
EDDIE54:28We help our clients with everything from annual planning to improving processes and go to market, implementing systems to support those processes and go to market AI. We're always happy to offer a free consultation to help you identify the best opportunities to improve your go to market engine, with or without our help. You can find us at Union Square consulting.com and the info will be in our show notes.
