You need to fire your sales development representatives (SDRs).
At least that’s what Jordan Crawford, Founder of BlueprintGTM.com, shared in his recent Hot Takes Live session.
He explained that SDRs are typically doing way too much right now. This is because we’re throwing bodies at a complex problem that entire teams need to invest more time and money into understanding, iterating on, and improving. A single person isn’t going to cut it.
Consider the following:
- 77% of B2B buyers state that their latest purchase was very complex or difficult.
- Your sales representatives have about 5% of a customer’s time throughout their entire buying cycle.
- 95% of those polled in a 2019 study said that the ability to deliver a consistent and seamless customer experience across the entire lifecycle—including pre-sale and post-sale) is emerging as a key competitive differentiator.
We also know that the sales model gets way more expensive over time, often doubling or more as you scale in size. Check out the image below from SaaStr demonstrating this:
You end up hiring one or two SDRs.. and then you’ll hire more. And then SDR managers, scaled AEs, and then moving onto VP of sales and directors of sales, and more. The hiring and salary costs become astronomical.
The good news is that it’s more than possible to have both scale and quality when it comes to sales departments.
In order to do so, however, you need great data and structure, which can result in quality outreach at scale. You’ll get results at a higher volume while maintaining great results and without breaking the budget.
This means we need to be buying and deriving better data. We need to look at impact reports for the problem we’re solving.
This means we need to be testing systematically without reps. Are you targeting the wrong companies, channels, and titles? Are your timing and approach correct?
We need to train reps to understand the actual market, not just the brand. We should also encourage them to only take inbound leads.
TestBox and G2 are full of honest reviews… and they’ll be coming for your downright terrible buying process. They’re disruptors to the industry, and you need to be prepared for that.
So, opting for what Crawford calls the GAS approach is a good way to go. At Blueprint, they build GTM engines for companies, and they help them put them into practice using the following processes:
- Give away value for free.
- Approach programmatically with value.
- Schedule meetings with customers where the free value was great.
He may be monitoring companies that are hiring online, and he’ll make the data free. He’ll say share the jobs he finds on LinkedIn, and he’ll take the best responses and automate sending them to the hiring manager in question. He does this for free, solving the problems for a potential customer programmatically.
Remember that we don’t have to be victims of the bad ideas of our past. As John M. Culkin has said, “we shape our tools, and our tools thereafter shape us.”
That’s true here, too.
Want more? Join 48 of the top SaaS leaders on February 16th, 2023, as they dish out hot takes and surprising insights on product-led growth, RevOps, marketing, and sales. Save your seat now!