B2B Sales: The SDR Motion, Part 1
Slap some SDRs on it
Hi all —
I’ve talked to a *ton* of experts in the past few weeks about hiring and managing Sales Development Reps, and building a SDR-led outbound function.
This is the number one topic I get asked about, because building consistent pipeline is the #1 thing that matters if you’re trying to grow.
Because it’s such a big topic, we’re going to have at least 3 weeks of posts:
Founder-led outbound (this week)
How a functional early-stage SDR function works, and do you still need SDRs in the age of AI and automation? (next week)
How to get from founder-led outbound to a functional SDR function, and when to hire SDRs (2 weeks)
If you have any specific questions about the SDR function you desperately want to be answered, reply to this email - OR ask the experts at Help a B2B Founder!
In next week’s post, I’ll shout out the list of experts who helped contribute and answer my dumb questions. Most are sales leaders, SDR managers, and founders at fast-growing startups - and all have experienced the pain of setting up a SDR function from scratch.
Let’s begin with the basics about outbound sales and SDRs:
Outbound sales is magic, then it’s math, then it’s babysitting.
Want to know if your VC understands outbound sales?
When you’re struggling to build consistent pipeline, do they tell you:
Hire some SDRs
Figure it out yourself
If they answer #1, they don’t understand outbound sales. How they think it works:
(Even worse? If they tell you to hire a “head of sales”… yikes.)
Why is this bad advice?
Because in the early stages, getting someone to meet with you is really freakin’ hard.
You don’t have a brand. You barely have a website. Oh, and: You rarely know exactly who you’re selling to, exactly what they care about, and exactly what to say to them to get them to take a meeting with you.
It takes a magician to get sales meetings in these circumstances. That’s you, founder. It’s nearly impossible to find a magician who wants to be your first SDR… and it’s definitely impossible to exclusively hire magicians to scale your SDR motion.
However… once you figure out your targeting, messaging (and it works in the real world), then outbound sales becomes a math equation:
We give each BDR X accounts
They do Y activities to reach out to those accounts
As a result, they generate Z sales meetings
And that leads to $$$$ predictable revenue
When outbound sales becomes a math equation, you just keep hiring BDRs and iterating to make the math work better. Eventually, you wind up with a whole herd of BDRs and then it seems more like babysitting than math.
BUT.
You can’t jump straight to the math or babysitting stages.
You have to figure out outbound. Here’s what that looks like.
Founder-led outbound
As a founder, you have to do 2 things:
Generate revenue
Figure out how to take your outbound motion to “math” that scales
In the early stages of building your “scalable” outbound motion, Goals #1 and #2 are in direct conflict. Why?
The best way for a founder to generate revenue is to use “founder magic”, warm intros, and referrals.
Your scalable outbound motion won’t work… for a while.
What’s a typical founder-led outbound motion? It has two components:
Warm intros
“Founder magic”
Warm intros are great. You should totally operationalize them:
And what’s “founder magic?” It’s that thing where you reach out to someone cold, but with a message that only a founder can send. Like, “Hey I’m a founder and would love to get your feedback!”
Founders can automate this on LinkedIn (see my post on how to do this). It’s great. And can work forever. But you can’t hire a SDR to copy this playbook, because it’s founder magic. Which means founder magic is a crutch that can’t scale long term.
Hence, this graph - which is how pipeline evolves over time.
Always continue doing warm intros + founder magic. They will be a part of your outbound mix forever, they just don’t scale.
As soon as possible, start figuring out your replicable, scalable motion… which will become your company’s engine for growth. It will take time (and a LOT of pain) to figure this out.
PS - Outbound Always Works (in B2B)
We all have product-led dreams. We all pray for virality. Product people want to avoid hiring salespeople.
Even if your goal is to go product-led eventually, it still makes sense to do outbound today. (And most product-led companies wind up with massive sales teams.)
No matter your market, outbound will work in some shape. I have seen WEIRD outbound motions, but some form will work:
Pure LinkedIn outbound
Automated voicemail delivery, that leads to a call back to a salesperson
Call-heavy sequences that leverage parallel dialers for a single rep to make 200+ calls per day
You’ve just got to figure out the version that works for your end-customer and product, and makes your math work.
Yo! Rob here. This Substack is totally free. All I ask is that if you find it valuable, please consider:
Sharing with other founders you think will *also* like it. (E.g., post about it in communities, or on Twitter/LinkedIn)
Sharing Reframe and Help a B2B Founder with founders who could use some help getting from “magic” to “math”!