Good morning! This edition of First Meeting Set is coming to you straight from London where Chris and I just landed a few hours ago. We are here partly for pleasure, and partly for work as we just closed our first ever London-based placement (congrats to this candidate)! We don’t do a ton of work outside of NYC, but when existing partners are building offices in other cities, we’re happy to see if we can help out.

The Specific Responsibilities of an SDR:

Today we are presenting the second installment in our series on “All Things SDR”. We got some GREAT feedback on the concept last week and so for the foreseeable future, the focus of this note will be to share more info about the SDR seat with the goal of educating people who are thinking about startups/sales but maybe don’t know exactly what the role entails.

As a quick refresher, last week we discussed how the SDR role actually fits into a company. To help explain it, we used the analogy of an assistant coach on a college sports team tasked with the job of finding and getting in touch with top high school recruits. If you haven’t read it, it could be worth going back and giving it a quick glance.

With that said, today we are going to go a step further and try to answer the question: What are the specific responsibilities of an SDR?

One thing I want to make clear here from the jump is that being an SDR at a tier-1 startup does NOT mean signing up to work a call center job for 8-hours a day. I think a lot of people hear “outbound sales” and their mind goes right to cubicles, long dial lists, and very little in-office collaboration.

Of course, there is a lot of outreach and dialing that happens, and there are definitely hours logged hammering dials solo, but the role has become much more strategic as outbound has evolved over the past 5-10 years.

So what are the responsibilities for someone in an SDR seat? I would put them into four buckets:

1. Prospecting

2. Outreach

3. Follow ups

4. Learning how to close/shadowing AEs

Prospecting:

The first core responsibility of an SDR is to find new clients to reach out to; this is called “prospecting”. Prospecting entails using tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo.io, Clay, ZoomInfo and other to find companies and individuals who could potentially be a good fit for your company’s product. Effective prospecting requires understanding what types of companies buy your product AND equally important, who within those companies is the right person to sell to. In my experience, the best SDRs have blocks carved out in their calendars each week/day dedicated to prospecting. Having a healthy list of prospects at all times is critical if you want to generate pipeline.

Outreach:

Once you have developed a strong list of prospective customers, the second core responsibility of an SDR is to get in touch with those prospects. These days, the most common forms of outreach (in no particular order) are

1. Phone (cold calling)

2. Email

3. LinkedIn

4. Conferences

5. Other creative forms of getting in touch w/ people (sending cakes to their offices, sending custom gifts, direct mail etc.).

What’s interesting here is that there really isn’t a single channel that works better than others. It’s so dependent on the rep and the market they’re selling into. For some teams/individuals, calling may be the saving grace, for others, conferences may drive 75% of pipeline. Usually though, the reality is that some combination of all 5 methods above are needed to actually get people’s attention. This day in age people are inundated with so much info every second, that it’s rarely the first touch that books a meeting. Generally it requires several touches before a person will book a call. That could mean sending an email, connecting with them on LinkedIn, and then leaving them a voicemail so that by the time you meet them face to face at a conference, your name at least rings a bell.

In a later note I will go deeper on outreach specifically including best practices, how to handle rejection etc.

Follow Ups:

Once you have built your list and started reaching out to people, the next core responsibility of an SDR is following up. One of my biggest weaknesses early on as an SDR was that I was not religious about tracking every “call me at the start of next quarter” or “we don’t have budget right now.” As it turns out though, those replies are where the $$$ lives.

The best SDRs have a specific system that works for them, but the end product is the same: a very clear understanding of exactly who they need to follow up with and when.

For some that will mean google calendar holds, for others it could be notifications in salesforce/hubspot. Whatever it is, the best SDRs know following up with someone who you’ve already engaged with is MUCH easier than convincing a totally cold prospect to take a meeting.

In fact, I would guess that most current/past SDRs reading this would agree with me that it’s follow ups, not the initial cold outreach, that are MOST important for booking meetings.

Learning how to be an AE:

The fourth and final responsibility of an SDR is to spend time shadowing AEs to understand how to actually close deals. Personally, I would say this is secondary to the other three priorities listed above (after all the best way to get promoted is to crush quota), but it’s still important to make sure you have one eye set on leveling up.

Different companies/teams/reps will have different preferences around how SDRs learn the closing role. Some AEs will happily let reps sit in on live demos, while others would prefer they watch the Gong recording. Whatever the case is in your org, make sure you don’t let studying the AE role interfere with booking demos. Yes learning how to close is important, but it’s irrelevant if you aren’t booking meetings in the first place.

Alright that is all for now. Next week I’m going to try and get some quotes from reps we’ve placed on what their actual day to day looks like so you can get a sense of what all of this stuff looks like in practice.

Until then have an awesome rest of the week!

-Andrew