How To Build Your SDR Dream Team (5/6): Building an Efficient and Scalable Revenue Machine — Why Your Sales Development Team Is Key

11 min readMay 9, 2017

You can download the full eBook PDF HERE!

Now that you understand how integral a team focused on prospecting leads is to building a successful business, we’ll deep dive into when and how to put that all-star team together.

Building a great SDR team takes a huge investment of your time and company resources for a few reasons:

It takes 2–3 months to fully ramp up an SDR team.
Onboarding and training will take time from various departments, since SDRs need to understand all aspects of the business, especially marketing and product.

However, as we’ve learned, if you don’t take the time to build a great plan to hire and onboard your SDRs, you’ll set your team up for failure.

To be successful bringing on an SDR team you want to do the following. Miss on too many of these points and your new team won’t justify the time and resources you’ll need to invest in it to make it worthwhile. All of these guidelines will contribute to optimal productivity and consistent, high-quality pipeline.

Hire two SDRs to start, not one so you have a benchmark
Have a dedicated SDR Manager
Build a detailed onboarding plan and print it out for your new hires.This should have in depth info on your business, market, and team.
Give your SDRs at least 2 weeks of training before hitting the phones.
Set up the AE/SDR partnership or handoff. Are they paired up, or is it a round robin setup in terms of lead qualification/demo setup? How do they transfer appointment info over to the AE?
Put together a compensation plan that incentivizes appointments set, as well as revenue brought in. They key is quality appointments here.

The SDR Manager Role

One key component to ensuring that your SDR Team is onboarded and implemented successfully is to have a dedicated SDR Manager.

Once you have a great manager in place, he or she will be able to focus on your SDR team, giving them the attention and direction they need to be successful. The fact is, if your SDRs are not building pipeline, then the rest of your sales team won’t be successful.

Hiring an SDR Manager will have positive externality on your organization in the following ways:

Help SDRs build pipeline and iterate on the process daily.
Develop their skills to be AEs or CSMs or managers in the future.
Serve as insightful advisors to C-Level Management about the market, product, and prospects.
Work with various department heads to optimize process building around lead generation.
Provide a consistent talent pipeline to director level positions when the company expands to new segments or markets.
Take charge of building repeatable process for hiring and onboarding SDRs, so it’s more efficient and scalable down the road.

Having a Sales Manager role will allow your company to experience more rapid and higher-quality growth if they can minimize employee turnover and promote for upper-level positions in-house. This will take less time and fewer resources while reducing training time as well.

If you’re thinking that you can have an SDR Manager who also works as an Account Executive, be careful. If you have an SDR Manager who is also responsible for bringing in revenue, issues can arise as they won’t have enough time to spend with the SDR team improving pipeline, looking at data, and iterating on the process. Ultimately, this will cause both parties to suffer in the long run.

In the case that your organization doesn’t have someone who can become a dedicated SDR Manager, determine whether there is someone else in your sales or marketing team with the bandwidth, experience, and interest for delving into something new and challenging. They will need to take on the role of building out process for a whole new team within the company.

If no-one in your organization comes to mind, then it might be a good idea to hold off building an SDR team for time time being, or hire outside consultants to do the job.

Finding The Ideal SDR Fit

Hiring the right SDRs to for your company culture and business model can be challenging.

First off, they’re a new and unique position for your company so you don’t know what they should look like. Every sales team and company is different and your prospecting team needs to have the right mindset and attitude to fit your organization.

To find the right fit, take some time to create the ideal hire. This is the similar process to figuring out your ideal customer. Keep in mind that identifying the perfect SDR will get easier as you scale and after you’ve gone through the process a few times.

Treat this like you’re building process to scale in the beginning. It’s important to figure out your ideal hire now, so that when you really need to scale like crazy, there aren’t as many roadblocks and you know exactly who to go after. Once you have this information in hand, you’ll then be able to analyze your current SDR hires and distill which attributes and skillsets drive success or failure. Conveniently, each additional rep will serve as an additional data point, so you can revisit and fine-tune the process as your team and company grows.

All of these tips are especially pertinent today as many of you are currently building your prospecting teams from scratch. You know if this is you. Either you’ve just received funding and need to grow fast while building pipeline or you’re prepping to do something similar. Data is king here, as it is in most situations. If you have no previous experience or data from an SDR team, borrow or steal it from another company in a similar industry or with a similar product. You’ll need to figure out a few keys to get started:

Ideal SDR Profile?
How many leads they need to hit quota?
What to set quota at?
Pay structure?
Onboarding Content, Schedule, Timeframe?

Here’s a solid formula to follow for finding the right hire:

In general they need to be motivated, strong willed, and willing to hustle. Most great sales people are athletes and have characteristics that are built on the field or court. You need to be resilient and be able to get turned down and told no hundreds of times. If you’re going to be an SDR, you need to be able to overcome and experience adversity.

Some qualities to look and think about when building your ideal hire are below:

Sales Intuition — Does the candidate instinctively have a knack for solving customers problems or wanting to help? This will tell you whether they intuitively understand the first steps to the buying process.
Level of Urgency — Does the candidate demonstrate a consistently high level of urgency every day? Look to the candidate’s previous experience and see if you can uncover if the work they’ve done requires them to have high activity levels day in and day out. Are they driven?
Confidence — Does your candidate have a confident persona? This is a critical attribute for any sales hire and is fortunately pretty easy to test, particularly over the phone. Can they sound confident on the phone or in person? You can’t have a shy sales hire, who won’t be comfortable on the phone day in and out.
Cultural fit — Are they entrepreneurial? Does the candidate exhibit the company’s core values and ideals? Do they fit with your AEs and CSM’s? Are they all athletes? Close-knit teams are much more effective and tend to stay together longer.
Intellectual Curiosity — To be a successful SDR is to be a generally interested person. You want a candidate who asks thoughtful questions throughout the evaluation process and understands your company’s mission and industry. A great salesperson, always wants to help the customer first and genuinely learn about their business.
Can you coach them? — Coachable SDRs grow and learn fast. Did they play sports in college? Were they successful? You want reps that you can mold into allstars down the road as your company grows.

When to Hire Your First Two SDRs

Knowing when, not just how, to hire your first two SDRs is also an integral part of this process. You’ll need to time this just right and make sure that you have certain processes in place before they start. You don’t want your new team to come in and then have to figure out the process along the way, because you’ll lose months of productivity.

You need to make sure that your Account Executives can handle more leads. If they can’t, then there is not enough demand for your product yet, so wait on the SDR team. The last thing you want is your closers having too many appointments on their calendars, and not have enough time to focus on the right ones.
The Marketing Team needs to be in a place where they can provide at least 300–400 leads to your SDR team per month. You’d don’t want your SDRs running out of leads or calling the same prospects 3 times a day. It won’t be efficient.
SDR teams take a lot of time and investment to onboard and bring up to speed. It usually takes 2–3 months for your SDR team to hit a stride and get to the point where you can rely on them each month to build consistent pipeline. Make sure your company is ready to make this investment.

Some leadership teams can be tempted to hire one SDR to start in the hopes that it mitigates some risk of investment. However, consider the following counter arguments to that thought:

How will you know if your SDR is doing well? There’s no benchmark to compare. You need data in order to optimize the process. KPIs are not yet right-sized and therefore quota attainment can be misleading. Hiring in tandem solves for both of these problems.
Hiring a single SDR creates for a lonely environment to do a tough job. SDRs learn from each other and share best practices.
If one hire ends up leaving then the pipeline disruption will be less dire since you’ll still have one SDR providing leads.
SDRs who start in tandem push one another at each stage of their development, raising the game of their SDR peers. Don’t underestimate how much pride can be a motivator. Whoever is trailing the leader, particularly if performance is visible in a CRM dashboard or on the whiteboard, will raise their game.

Lastly, If you don’t have the budget to hire at least two SDRs concurrently, consider waiting until you do. Don’t forget that it’s much better to have a full time SDR Manager if possible. This will benefit your SDR team as it will help them to grow and learn. Most SDRs are fresh out of school and early in their careers.

Hire To Promote and Retain

What’s extremely important here as well is bringing on the best SDR talent.

Miss on that, and your team is almost certain to fail — not just this year, but years down the road. This can happen because your SDRs often become Account Executives, Customer Success Managers, or General Managers if the startup is successful. Therefore, if you hire the wrong SDR talent initially, you will potentially have poor leadership as your company grows.

That being said, it is also necessary to ensure that the SDRs you hire are engaged in their work. As a majority of SDRs are competitive by nature, it will be crucial that your SDR team is not only well trained, but well incentivized to move up within the company along a specific career trajectory.

This trajectory can take many shapes depending on the size and stage of your company, however it should generally look something like this:

Month 1 — Complete on-boarding and get them on the phones. They should be ready to build pipeline and feel comfortable on the phones 4 weeks in.
Month 2&3 — Get each SDR to a point where they are meeting fifty percent of their quota. In the meantime, continue sales training on a weekly basis or until your SDR(s) begin to hit their quota consistently. These months are crucial, not just for building confidence, but to integrate the SDR(s) into your system so they can be effective down the road. You want your SDRs hitting 100 percent of their quota by the end of month three.
Month 3 to 12 — Take this time to build predictability and fine-tune the process with your current SDRs.
Month 12 to 24 — This is the promotion window. If your SDR(s) are efficiently handling leads in the CRM, hitting quota consistently, and are setting meetings that convert to revenue, then they’re on track for promotion to an AE or CSM.

By keeping SDRs motivated along this timeline by setting career path expectations and training sessions, as well as by monitoring underperformance, you will be able to maintain optimal growth for your business. Perhaps most notably, keeping SDRs satisfied will help you retain top sales talent for higher level positions in the future.

There’s no better way to cut your teeth in the sales, marketing, or the startup world in general, than by grinding through the hard yards of prospecting leads and talking to hundreds and hundreds of people at companies in the space.

Compensation

First off, make sure to pay your SDRs right and incentivize them to succeed.

It’s important to be upfront with them about the timeline and path for them to move up to an AE or CSM. Not many people want to prospect forever. Most SDRs want to be able to bring in revenue and sell direct to the customers in the near future.

That being said, it is incredibly important to keep in mind that the compensation structure is one of the strongest incentives for driving competitive SDR behavior. Compensation plans should include a base salary along with a variable bonus based on success that month. A solid baseline metric to consider when determining compensation is that of the total amount you pay your SDRs each year, around 64% should be salary and the remaining 36% should come from bonuses. This ratio will strike an appropriate balance to both attract talent and incentivize them, while remaining satisfied in their roles.

While base salary will vary depending on company size, industry, and cost-of-living in expensive cities, all great SDR comp plans have a few things in common:

Incentivize setting as many appointments as possible, but remember, they need to be quality appointments
The base salary should be between $35-$50K, and commission should be set at around $20K
Commision needs to be based half on appointments set and half on revenue brought in. This aligns incentives to set lots of appointments, but forces SDRs to schedule quality ones which bring in revenue

While the above is a good place to start, there are also some other key things to remember about how to structure your compensation plan around your SDRs when looking at the big picture of your business as a whole.

Namely, your base salary has to be make sense when compared to your company’s overall revenue. This is especially important to remember since a well structured base salary can attract top talent to your company, but can also sink it if you do not appropriately account for what you can afford.

Also, pay attention to the fact that there are other base expenses you will have to consider when bringing on a new SDR. Equipment such as computers and sales-software, data to show your sales teams who they should be calling, training, and other miscellaneous expenses can all add up quickly as you bring on new employees.