From "founder magic" to repeatable sales
The founder's guide to SDRs (part 3)
Hi all —
This week, I’m continuing on the SDR series. I’ve talked with some amazing experts in preparing this series. Special shoutouts this week go to Ries McQuillian, Mor Assouline, Brian Denenberg, and Kim Cram.
Here’s what we’re covering:
Founder-led outbound (2 weeks ago)
How a functional early-stage SDR function works, and do you still need SDRs in the age of AI and automation? (last week)
How to get from founder-led outbound to a functional SDR org (this week)
PS - Want all my playbooks, totally free? I’m open-sourcing this in the coming weeks, and would love your feedback before they go live. Here’s the link to a Google Doc with all my B2B playbooks. If you like it, let me know and/or share with other founders!
PS #2 - Want to get interviewed by Harvard? If you’re a founder and have pivoted your way to product-market fit, we’re working on an article for HBR that will pull together the “real” stories of finding PMF. Reply to this email or email me at rob@reframeb2b.com if you want to learn more!
We know what “founder magic” looks like. Asking for feedback, saying you’re a founder, etc. etc. etc.
And we know what a repeatable SDR outbound motion looks like. Allocate accounts every month, get meetings every month.
How do we get from Point A (“founder magic”) to Point B (“repeatable sales model”)?
I can’t understate how important this question is. Get it right, and you’re on the path to repeatable, scalable revenue. Get it wrong, and you can’t scale, and generally die. Existential.
So I’ve talked to a bunch of sales leaders about this exact question - specifically focusing on people who’ve figured this out from near-zero, and the processes they’ve taken.
What’s cool: They all took pretty similar approaches.
What’s crazy: Their processes look NOTHING like what you’re told to do in all the startup books, accelerators, and viral social media posts.
It confirms a hunch I’ve long had: What works in practice rarely makes it to theory, and what “sounds right & makes sense” rarely works in practice. (This is why I wasted 2+ years hitting my head against a wall as a founder.)
Conventional wisdom says that to figure out the SDR outbound motion, you do one of 2 things:
Run tons of experiments, and measure everything!
Implement tried and tested SDR playbooks & do a bunch of volume!
Yet every single sales exec I’ve talked to apparently hasn’t listened to the gurus… and instead has said something extremely different:
Do everything manually, personalized, and based on carbon copies of your best customers to figure out what works… then worry about automation & systematization later!
The Misconception: Automation & Systematization Isn’t the Hard Part
Remember my chart last week? I drew out the operations and math of a functioning SDR motion:
When we look at a chart like this, we think, “Ok, cool, I just need to go get a bunch of accounts, figure out titles & contact info, and put them into sequences. Let’s do that and automate it.”
What we don’t realize: Setting up data flows, automations, and doing all the operational things of making this work isn’t easy… but it’s not the hard part.
The hard part is figuring out what actually works, so that it’s WORTH automating, operationalizing, and scaling.
How do you figure out what actually works? Don’t you just run a bunch of experiments?
No! As I’ve written before and will certainly write again, there are too many damn variables to actually learn anything. You could get lucky by experimenting, sure - but don’t bet on it.
Instead, you figure out what actually works by doing the thing that’s most likely to work, manually.
Said differently:
Find accounts and prospects who are the closest thing to CARBON COPIES of your existing customers
Reach out to these prospects manually, & make every touch personalized (no automation!)
Learn and iterate based on the responses you get, and build a playbook when stuff starts working.
Spend 1-2 hours on this per day (every day). Experts had different thoughts on quality vs. quantity (SMB focused more on quantity, mid-market focused more on quality) - volume likely depends on your end-customer.
“Hire and automate once your calendar is full, and you can’t find an hour a day to do outbound prospecting.” - Ries
Make this happen
This is easier to start than you think - get moving!
Here’s how:
Block 1-2 hours on your calendar every morning from now on for cold outbound prospecting. Other meetings? Move them. Founder magic? Schedule that after. This takes priority.
Determine which customer(s) you want to clone. Find their exact matches (industry, geography, size), and find prospects within them.
Determine whether you’re going to do a 2-week, call-heavy sequence (if your customers are SMBs) or a 5-week sequence (if your customers are mid-market or enterprise).
In your CRM, set up a set of 12+ tasks to email, call, & LinkedIn over the course of the sequence → but these are all manual tasks with no scripts.
Write personalized emails & follow-ups
Execute and observe what you get back from this… and start to build your playbook based off what works.
In time, you’ll be able to automate, operationalize, etc. But not yet.