#609 - How to Hire SDRs Who Are Actually Built for the Job | Sam Nelson

0:00Sam Nelson: When new SDRs would come in, we would sit them down. I would give them a list of local businesses and a script and they would sell pizzas to these local businesses. And you realize in the most cold, awkward cold calling session that you know that you'll ever have, it's actually not that bad. Like even the most awkward one, like we're knocking this out of the way. I've never had any experience and it's not even that bad. I do this at Harvard Business School a couple times a year. Everyone always like gives you the death glare, especially at Harvard. They're like, are you kidding me? But then by the end, everyone's laughing.

0:24Sam Nelson: Everyone realizes, hey, like I can do this.

0:30Today, we are sitting down with Sam Nelson, who is a multiple-time President's Club Achieving SDR Leader. He built the SDR function from scratch at Outreach, and now he runs sdrleader.com and has quite literally worked with SDR leaders at over 2 ,500 companies. And today, he's going to be taking us through a clinic on his learnings around hiring, onboarding, and motivating SDRs. So, Sam, welcome to the show. So let's start with the background that you need to look for when you are looking to hire SDRs.

1:00Sam Nelson: Okay, so there's one really great litmus test is you definitely want to look for someone who's come from something less pleasant than what they're going into. Actually, like right out of college is pretty good. I mean, we look back fondly in college, but it's actually a lot of pressure, right? Like every test could like tank your scholarship or, you know, ruin your grade. It's actually SDRs have a lot more pressure than most other professions, but it's actually less than college in most cases. So new grad is actually fine for that. Someone who has done door to door is excellent. For example, someone who's been a waitress, like one of the universal ones that in the sdrleader.com community that people bring up all the time is teachers.

1:43Sam Nelson: Less pleasant job, a lot more stress. They come into this. It's an easier job. They make more money. Yeah. Are there other things you're looking for, like other accolades, athletics backgrounds, music backgrounds, like parts of the country that they're from, what they majored in? Like, I feel like as an SDR leader, sometimes you don't have the benefit of hiring somebody with work experience. And so you kind of have to look at their pre-work experience as a proxy to figure out if they can do something really freaking hard. I mean, they're getting pounded with rejection day in and day out. Yes, totally.

2:16Well, it's weird because, yeah, they either have SDR experience and that is not always like a positive sign.

2:24Sam Nelson: Actually, like most of the time when someone has been in SDR before and they left for some reason and they want another SDR job, most of the time that's a negative signal. People don't like when I say that, but it's true. It's not always the case, but it can be the case most of the time. So you need to really, like if someone has had another job, you need to really dig into numbers, really understand why they left, really kind of verify why, just so you understand. So if they have past experience, of course you're digging into past experience. The thing is most of like the top performers in my experience have been people who have had no experience at all.

3:01Sam Nelson: And so how do you, how do you vet that? There are a couple of things that I've found to be extremely reliable for top performers. One is they've been in the top 1 % of something before. So like you said, athletes, college athletes are a great example of that. If they're a college athlete, they're in the top 1 % of that. You have to have a certain, you have certain intangibles to get there. Sports isn't the only way you can do that. If someone is like, I don't know if they were like top in the state in robotics or they have like a top 1 % ELO rating in chess, doesn't matter. But if someone has been able to rise to like the top 1 % or something, usually they will be a top performer.

3:41Sam Nelson: So it's not relevant. A lot of people aren't that way. You want to figure out if they've been at least somewhat competitive. If they haven't done anything competitive, it's a disqualifier. If they're in the top 1 % of something, it's a pretty good indicator. I actually want to go back to what you said about the former SDR piece. You talked about, like, you've really got to dig in on their numbers. I actually think this might actually take us now to the interview itself. So it sounds like my big proxy that I'm using to figure out if I should take an interview with somebody is I feel good about them if they've done something really crappy in the past.

4:13They've done a very unpleasant, challenging job. I get on the interview itself. Let's actually just talk about the interview. I've got a 30-minute interview. I'm an SDR leader. I'm assuming we've already passed the basic recruiter screen, but this is the first time that I might be meeting this person. Can you just start with high level? How do you recommend an SDR leader run that 30 minute interview? And then let's get into some of the questions that you have them ask. Yeah.

4:37Sam Nelson: You want to like start off, kind of put the middies at the very beginning, right? Cause they've got nerves and that doesn't necessarily get you like the most accurate indicators. So it's really excited to talk to you. A background looks really cool. Just try to figure out what, what, why they applied. Another thing, another important part of that is just kind of asking why they applied is it's really hard to overcome them not wanting to be in sales. Sometimes people will apply because they just, the other things didn't work out. There's this one person that I interviewed that was like valedictorian at this, in college, extremely bright, extremely, he could be extremely successful, but he just wasn't excited about it and it didn't work out.

5:24Sam Nelson: They need to be genuinely excited about sales. So you need to dig into why they're excited about going into sales. Yeah. Okay. So step one, warm them up a little bit, help them get the nerves out. This is cool. Step two, why did you apply in the first place? Do you actually want to be here or did you just spam apply a bunch of jobs? Where do I take things from there? You kind of want to like pull on that thread a little bit more, figure out what they're excited about, what they want to do. One thing that I like to do at some point in the interview is understand how goal oriented they are. So I like to start by asking, do you have goals?

5:57Sam Nelson: Yes, and we talk about their goals. What do they wanna do? This also kind of helps you understand whether this actually fits into the puzzle or whether they're just saying they like sales. And then ask if they have written goals. If they have written goals and this fits into their written goals, it correlates extremely strongly with top performance. I'm surprised by how few people have written goals. And I'm also surprised by how well it correlates with top performance. Now, it's very easy to lie about that. And so you have to use like interrogator tricks to figure out if it's actually true. So someone says they have written goals, say, oh, interesting.

6:31Sam Nelson: Like, do you write them down or put them on your computer? They say they write them down. Like, if you've written them down, like, why? And where do you put them? Okay. Why do you put them there? How often do you look at it? If you ask really specific questions about their written goals, it becomes very clear to you as the interviewer, if they're telling the truth or not. It's very easy to know what the right answer is. It's very hard to stand up to scrutiny if you dig in that way. Where do I take the call from here? Because up until this point, it seems mostly behavioral. Are you doing anything related to screening for the ability to do the job itself?

7:04Sam Nelson: Doing a mock cold call on the call is still very effective. So we'll send them a script ahead of time and just let them know that we'll be doing a cold call on the call. and then just roll, run through the call with them. Um, and then as soon as they make a mistake, cut them off and just say, okay, so this is actually a little bit better. If you do this, it's for this reason. Let's like run it back from the beginning. They go again. We do the same thing three times. And I've never met someone who just like executed perfectly without three corrections. Yeah. But by doing it that way, you kind of get a feel of like what the ping pong is when you go a vibe for like, what would it be like to coach this person?

7:46Sam Nelson: Are they, you know, do they get flustered or do they take feedback? Well, um, and so that's the way I like to do role play, give them the stuff ahead of time and just have it be a collaborative back and forth things. You get a sense of what it's like to coach this person. What will you send them in the script in advance? What is the actual script look like? I'm sure we have some people listening that are like, I don't really have a good script for an SDR cold call. I mean, we just did the script that we used at the company. Yeah. So like whatever your other SDRs are using, just send them that exact thing.

8:15Sam Nelson: And then we're just going to run through it because you're really used to coaching for your own company. Yeah. You know, I used to do, I'm just like, Hey, just tell me what you sold before. I found it to be much better. Just like give them a cheat sheet ahead of time. Then we can just kind of get into what the coaching is actually going to be like. They don't need to be great at it. I'm testing them for the coachability more than their ability to execute this. After the mock cold call, which I'm not running once, I'm not running twice, I'm literally running it three times, not with the intent to see did they get it perfect, but with the intent to see, like, how they take feedback, can they roll with the punches.

8:52I assume you do something if you feel good about this candidate where you like you try to sell them on the opportunity to an extent because if you've got someone that you don't feel good about okay fine you're probably going to push them away what do you do in terms of like if you're like this this is someone who's good and I want to like start to go from I'm interviewing them to shoot they might be looking at other places I need to make sure I land this person yeah this depends a

9:16Sam Nelson: lot on the company, right? So it depends on what you have to offer. So that's another reason that you ask them kind of what they're motivated by and why they want to do this. Because you kind of have in your back of your mind before you get to this point in the call, like what they are excited about and why they want to land. So figuring out what their motivations are and then aligning what you do to that. I do like asking people if they're money motivated on the call. It's not obvious to them what the correct answer that I'm looking for is. But if someone is money motivated, that has never been a bad thing in my experience ever.

9:51Sam Nelson: If they're not money motivated, that can be okay too. I mean, for me, I was like an entrepreneur before. I was an SDR leader and I was like, building pipelines is the most important skill I can develop. That's why I wanted to be an SDR. I would have been an SDR for free. Honestly, I would have. That's how much I want to do it. So not that they have to be money motivated, but asking that question helps get a sense for it, what they're motivated by. Do you set expectations for how hard the job is going to be in the interview itself? Well, one thing that we would do before HR shut it down is at the end of an interview, no matter how well they did, we would say, hey, like, I really like you.

10:30Sam Nelson: You are clearly going to be successful in something you do someday. I'm not quite sure this is going to be a fit. It's a hard job. It's, I don't know if this is exactly what is if this is exactly going to be for you. Okay. And then you pause. And you see how they respond. This is another one of those things that is kind of like what I was talking about with like people with written goals. Like it's an extremely accurate indicator of how successful they're going to be. My experience in doing this is people who will fight back at you on that are extremely likely to be top performers. Yeah. People that say, ah, you're okay.

11:16I'm sorry.

11:18Sam Nelson: Maybe you're right. Are very unlikely to be top performers. Now, again, it's controversial. We were asked to stop doing it, but I found that that was very, very accurate. Let's talk about onboarding. So before we get into all of the different things you do onboarding wise, can you just orient me on onboarding structure? I'm thinking of like how much time. I know you have a philosophy around like cohorts. What does onboarding look like high level? And then let's go into some of the principles that matter to you in SDR onboarding. Well, I think a good frame for this is that onboarding SDRs during their first couple of months is so different than managing a ramped SDR that you could almost consider it a different job.

12:04Sam Nelson: In fact, when I was at Outreach, we segmented those roles. We had enough onboarding new SDRs that my first management job was everyone who was new, they came in through me. I specialized in only ramping. Everyone came through me, and then we would pass them off to other leaders. It was much more efficient that way. And so you mentioned cohorts. If you are bringing new SDRs in, it is much easier to bring in four at one time than it is to bring in one a month or one a week. Like, because everyone's kind of at a different place. You're answering a lot of the same questions. It is not much harder to onboard five at the same time compared to one if you have other SDRs that are ramped.

13:20Thank you. It's free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Full & Rich, which compiles 20-plus premium data vendors in one place to dramatically improve your call connect rate. When you're cold calling, you have to make sure you're not showing up as spam-likely on your prospect's end, and one way to do this is to stop calling bad numbers over and over again. Mark your disconnected or fax lines or wrong numbers so you know not to dial them again. Or even better, make sure your data provider only gives you verified numbers to start with. We partnered with Full & Rich on a guide of nine ways to improve your call connect rate Get it for free in the show notes.

13:53today's show is brought to you by pipe drives easy to use and customizable crm with built-in meeting intelligence my favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question which sounds like typically when i'm talking with folks like you they're focused on a b or c which is it for you now a b and c have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them now pipe drives built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question not on scrambling to take live notes and we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub.

14:23There's a link in the show notes. How long do you ramp in SDR before you put them on full quota or exit them from the ramp program? And then let's talk about what goes into the ramp program.

14:32Sam Nelson: Okay, so we actually just did a big benchmark survey in sdrleader.com about this. Amazing. And it is three months, no matter how you slice it. Big companies, small companies, everywhere is pretty much three months. The other thing that was interesting in the benchmark report was like very few people said it was like tools and stuff. It was all like process and structure. So I'm glad we're talking about this. But like, yeah, like three months. And three months is what we did back when I was ramping. Yeah. So three months is a good time frame. You know, top performers, we'd almost always know if they're going to be top performers by that second month, kind of like first full month.

15:13So let's go week over week over week over week. Let's talk about when we start onboarding. What are some of the principles we have to follow? What are the first sessions we run, et cetera?

15:21Sam Nelson: Well, okay. First of all, you treat everyone the same. Another thing about like brand fresh SDRs for people who've been in SDR before. The other thing we saw in our benchmark survey was like people with experience as SDRs had no decrease in ramp time. So everyone, everyone is on level footing. So we bring everybody in. the first thing I like to do was not a not a hazing ritual but like um we make a pretty strong statement that we are a cold calling culture so one thing that I am famous for is when new SDRs would come in the first thing that they would do is we would sit them down I would give them a list of local businesses in a script and they would sell pizzas to these local businesses.

16:13Sam Nelson: We wanted to get the most awkward cold calling session they would ever have out of the way when they first got there. So number one, they don't forget it. Everyone's terrified. You know, like it's your first job, you're in there, what's going to happen? They have the most awkward cold calling experience that they will ever have. So we haven't sold pizzas for a couple of reasons. One is it's so different than anything anyone has done before that it's very easy to kind of like drill a new framework without them falling into their old habits. So that's one piece of it. The other piece is it's just extremely awkward.

16:46Sam Nelson: And everyone's kind of doing it. And you realize in the most awkward cold calling session that you know that you'll ever have, it's actually not that bad. Like even the most awkward one, like we're knocking this out of the way. I've never had any experience. And it's not even that bad. that. And so like, we would always do this. I do this at Harvard Business School a couple of times a year. I do the prospecting class over there. And everyone always like gives you the death glare, especially at Harvard. They're like, are you kidding me? But then by the end, everyone's laughing. Everyone realizes, Hey, like I can do this.

17:19Sam Nelson: So we make a statement. Everyone kind of feels a little bit relieved afterward, even though it's tense at the beginning. I can do this. When I think about SDR onboarding, there's three big buckets that I'm thinking about that I think lead to them being successful or not. I feel like you need to get them ramped on minimum viable sales skills. I feel like they need to know something about the product. They can't know nothing about what you're selling. And then I feel like the tech that they use is a really important part of the job. If they don't know how to use outreach and your working sequences, they're going to have a tough time sequencing enough people and working enough people.

17:55You can challenge me on that frame of those three buckets. But I guess I'm curious about where you think you should be allocating your onboarding calories with SDRs, knowing that you can't get them up to 100 % on everything in their first 90 days.

18:10Sam Nelson: Yeah. Okay. So the first thing you need to do is really simplify the job during their first couple of months as much as you possibly can. So for example, like we can sell to the SDR leader persona at Outrage. We can sell to sales enablement. We can sell to sales odds. We can sell to marketing. We can sell to CRS. We can do all of those things. but it is much easier to say this is the most important persona this is where we get most of our meetings as dr leaders in that case um we are just going to focus only on this for now they got a lot of new things they got to figure out so simplify the role a lot start with one product of your multi-products company start with one persona let them master that then you can figure out other personas when you try to do tons of personas it just like multiplies the confusion it.

18:56Sam Nelson: And so you want to do it. You kind of want to go over everything, but keep the job as simple as possible when they start out. Yeah. I mean, I think back to when I was an SDR, I remember what really tripped me up was what you just said, which was we could sell to the C-suite. I could sell to marketing. I could sell to the CFO. I could sell, I was selling like the sports ticketing product. I could sell to like the ticket admin at the company. And every different persona had a different value proposition. And dude, I didn't even know an opener to open my cold calls. I was asking people, sir, did I catch you at a bad time?

19:35And then I'm like looking at my script. I didn't even have scripts. I'm like looking at our value proposition guide on my other screen about like, oh, what does CFO care about? And I like, I lost them. Like I would never, my calls went terribly. And so what I'm hearing from you is like, I want to make things as linear as possible where it's like, I said, I'm selling one product to one persona. And then once I've mastered that, maybe I add another persona or I add another product, but actually throwing too much, you have to dose the complexity of the scripting that you give to them.

20:03Sam Nelson: Yeah. One product, one persona. Cause you're there learning like everything else is new. Let's let them get that down. Then you can expand to the complexity there. Okay, great. What next? So that's important. So we'll do, we do a pretty short bootcamp, like one week and we'll spend one day on one thing, right? One day on cold calling, one day on research and emails, one day on sequencing. You try to kind of like go really deep as much as you can on one day. And then after a week, we would say, all right, let's go. We will put them on the phones doing the entire job after that week. Now, through classroom lectures for four days, are they good enough to do it without questions?

20:49Sam Nelson: Absolutely not. But that was really important for us to improve our onboarding program over time. So we would do the best we could in that first week, and then we would get them on the phones. We said, any questions you have. I know we've only talked about things once. It's okay if you have questions. Put them in this one Slack channel. We also get a readout of exactly where the gaps were or what things weren't sticking in our bootcamp. So that was really, really important. So if we're getting a lot of questions about like, okay, how do we handle this part of the cold call? We would know that we need to refine that.

21:21Sam Nelson: So that's one way that we could refine that over time. That's really good. With AI, you can really just like take all of those questions and really get a good idea of just how you could refine those over time. I would love that. If you just give them all the information they need and say, go run, and you never check to see how they are doing, they're going to deviate or drift or not know what they're doing. And what you're doing is you are actually putting them on the phones before they are ready as a way to figure out where there were gaps in their onboarding. And that is so much better than doing three weeks of onboarding and saying, does everybody get it?

21:56And of course, they're all going to say yes. When you actually go make them do the job, that is what exposes what they missed.

22:01Sam Nelson: And I think one more thing I would say to make this easier, right, because it is stressful to just kind of jump in, is there are multiple different ways to cold call that are successful, right? You've probably talked to a lot of people, a lot of very different opinions. There are top performers that will do all kinds of different openers, all kinds of different ways they approach cold calls. Unless there is a really dramatic difference in outcomes, you need to have a bias to the simplest one that works. lots of different ways that works some are simpler than others have a bias to simplicity where is your bias what opener do you what opener do you feel like is most accessible but also still performing well most people don't like it when i say this but did i get you at a bad time and here's the reason why you say did i get you at a bad time there are only two things that they can say usually they'll say yes you got me at a bad time got that out of the way okay i'll be brief.

22:57Sam Nelson: If they say, no, this is not a bad time. You say, okay, I'll be brief. It just really minimizes the things that they have to think about when they're on the phone. Because when you're on the phone, like that will get you to the next part, like within a rounding error of other things. It's just a lot more simple. And then you can, you can allocate that headspace to listening to them and figuring out how you react next. And so I would just say, look, there's a lot of different openers that can work. People love to talk about the different openers and the one that you've never heard about before that you should do tomorrow.

23:25Sam Nelson: Yes. Let's do the simplest one. Yes. It works just as well. And then you can spend your time focusing on other things. Amazing. Awesome. Okay. Let's round this thing out, Sam. I want to do a rapid fire on, we've got the right people hired. We've got them onboarded. The reality of the SDR job is like, you are just getting, you're taking rejection day after day, hour after hour. And it is really easy to lose your motivation as an SDR. Part of your job as an SDR leader is to keep your reps motivated. And so you listed out, I don't know, like eight or nine ways that you've seen SDR leaders motivate their teams.

23:56And I'm wondering if you'd be so generous as to publicly recognize some of those ideas. Oh yeah.

24:02Sam Nelson: Okay. So it's a big part of the job. This job is the grind, right? So one thing, and this may be kind of is related to onboarding too, is like matching a mentor that's a top performer with a new rep is actually extremely effective for making them successful. Some people have like the old guard is good. If they're a top performer, that's good. If they're a moderate performer, it can be really bad. So that's one thing that you can do to have like someone in the game with you. Public recognition. You want to have leaderboards everywhere. Everyone should always know where they rank relative to their team at all times.

24:38Sam Nelson: It's free. It's extremely motivating when you have competitive people. Celebrate wins in every channel that you can. In Slack, you do the gong, you bring it up in the morning meetings. It's very hard to overdo it on public recognition. Another one that a lot of teams don't do that is extremely potent is send some wins to the CRO or CEO to shout people out in Slack or in some kind of morning meeting or any kind of public forum. Slack's a really easy 30-second way for them to do it. Recognition from the CEO or CRO goes an extremely long way. And if you make it easy for them to do, they are more than happy to do it.

25:20Sam Nelson: They love doing stuff like that. They love to dole out good news when they can. So yeah, have public recognition everywhere, especially the CEO or CRO. They're happy to do it. Let's talk about SPFs because I've seen them go well. I've seen them go not so well. What's your take on SPFs? And then if you are pro SPF, what is your recommendation for SPFs to run? Yeah. Okay. So there are a couple, there are a couple of things that have been successful. One that was really successful was what we call the fast start bonus, where if they were ahead of quota halfway through the month, they would get a SPF.

25:58Sam Nelson: What this did, one is like they would work harder earlier in the month and that was good, but it also really leveled out when the meetings were coming because the default was like people would really, really hustle at the end of the month when the AEs are trying to close deals, right? And it's the hardest time to kind of get new meetings. Like if they're getting all their new meetings, when they're trying to get things over the line to hit our number, it wasn't really optimal. And so when we did that, the SDRs were excited about it because it's like extra money. The AEs loved it. And so this is one of those things where it's very easy to get approval for an experiment.

26:32Sam Nelson: And that experiment is very likely to continue to get approval. It's just because it's just a win-win for everyone if you can smooth out when those meetings come. Yeah, love it. What else? Okay, if you are going to spend money, I have found that giving just like extra money is good. It kind of goes to the people that are going to do good anyway. And so that's kind of the downside. I have found that doing tangible things that are things that no one would justify spending the money on. in some ways are more motivating than giving them that money itself. Little weird, but like, if it's like, this is probably the only chance in your life to win a$400 chocolate bar, for example.

27:14Sam Nelson: Yeah. No one making 150 ,000 is going to spend 400 on a chocolate bar. I'm not going to spend that much on a chocolate bar. I'm going to freak out anytime my wife wants to eat an air one. So it like, but it toes on like FOMO in a different way than the money does. Like your comp plan is going to cover the money motivation. So it's just like this other layer. so you've got like recognition which is one layer you've got the money motivation you've got if i don't hit it this month there's an experience that i'll never have in my life so you can stack up these different motivations and they can kind of layer on top of each other

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28:20Today's show is brought to you by Full & Rich, which compiles 20-plus premium data vendors in one place to dramatically improve your call connect rate. When you're cold calling, you have to make sure you're not showing up as spam-likely on your prospect's end. And one way to do this is to stop calling bad numbers over and over again. Mark your disconnected or fax lines or wrong numbers so you know not to dial them again. Or even better, make sure your data provider only gives you verified numbers to start with. We partnered with Full & Rich on a guide of nine ways to improve your call connect rate.

28:46Get it for free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy-to-use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question, which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C. Which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, Pipedrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes.

29:15And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub. There's a link in the show notes. I have one question on this one, which is like, as an SDR leader, if you threw me into an SDR leader job today, like I wouldn't necessarily know how to go to my leadership and ask for money for a SPF. Do you have any guidance on like how as a leader I should be making those asks to management? Yeah. I mean, the easiest thing is tie to what their needs are.

29:41Sam Nelson: Everyone kind of knows what the big problems are on the AE side. And if you can tie it to that, like, hey, look, here's something we can do to kind of juice the numbers here in this segment or something like that. Like, you know, a Spiffer and a certain number of enterprise deals or something this month. It's pretty easy to get approval if you're attaching it to the biggest pain of the CRO or the CEO. Yeah, killer. Okay. You have one other that I want to ask about, which is travel, which is really interesting. This is not sending them on an all expenses trip to Costa Rica. This is a different type of travel you use to motivate them.

30:16Sam Nelson: We would do trade shows and things like that in the course of business. And usually that's done by marketing people, right? Who they understand a lot of the marketing things well. Are they the best sharks to have at the booth? Not always. Yeah. The AEs, they demo really well. Are they really motivated to go and get opportunities for their other sales reps that can be against? Sometimes. However, SDRs are the best people to have there. And a lot of companies do not do that. Okay. So getting approval to send SDRs just as an experiment to do, just kind of be at the booths at one of these conferences that you're already doing is a pretty light lift.

30:58And then once they do it, they usually outperform everyone else and it becomes a thing.

31:02Sam Nelson: But as a bonus, doing a competition to figure out who gets to go to that thing is surprisingly motivating. Right? Right. Like in my job, I fly like I fly like one hundred thousand miles domestic a year, like work travels lost a little bit of its romance. But when you're new in a job, I think some people forget like that is extremely motivating. And there's a lot of FOMO attached to that. And you end up selecting for the right person to go to this thing. So just, again, stacking a completely different motivation. And it also will almost certainly turn into a huge win for your org too, because SDRs, if you send them to a conference and they're good, will almost always be more motivated to get meetings and will be bold enough to get those meetings set there than the other people they usually default to.

31:52I will never forget how excited I was the first time I got to book a flight from LAX to DFW to go stand at a booth for 12. I mean, it actually gets you so excited when you're in SDR. Oh, dude.

32:05Sam Nelson: And conferences too. Like when I went to Black Hat, I hadn't been to a conference before. I was just like, what is this? Dude, this has been a freaking clinic. We literally covered how to interview, how to onboard, and how to motivate SDRs. I got one last question for you, which is, I don't think there is anybody out there who knows SDR leadership better than you do because you quite literally run a community of hundreds, thousands of SDR leaders. Like, and you get these people together sharing best practices. I am curious about the top three ways that you are seeing the SDR job change and have seen it change over the last, call it three years.

32:45Interesting.

32:46Sam Nelson: I will say that AI, I mean, everyone's thinking about AI right now. And it really is a jump ball. I mean, everyone's kind of doing stuff. It's really unclear to me, like, which tools are going to win, like, how that's going to affect certain things. Certain things that it has not affected. Or is cold calling is the number one way that meetings are set right now? And that has become more true. in the age of AI. Like proof of human is more important than it has ever been before. So that is a trend. The calls have been indisputably, they're kind of indisputably the number one way that meetings are set right now, especially through outbound.

33:31Yes.

33:31Sam Nelson: Yeah, email is tricky. I think like there's some useful things there, but it's not. I feel like deliverability is making it more and more challenging nowadays. Yeah. It's also like, I think you can detect AI with a 99.9 % rate randomly all of a sudden. And so like spam filters are considering it. There's a lot that's up in the air right now. Yeah. But I predict phone, anything where you have proof of human is really valuable. Phone in person, there's a lot of alpha in person. Also pipeline is not going out of style, right? Like people want more pipeline than their competitors. and the SDR leader profession is stronger than it's ever been.

34:17Sam Nelson: People say that we're going to die in six months. They've been saying that since I started at Outreach and it's stronger than it's been in my 10 years of doing this. People need pipeline. If they're doing poorly, they need pipeline. If they're doing excellent, they really need pipeline. It's this evergreen thing where you always need more than your competitors. And the ones with great high-performing SDR teams are the ones who edge out their competitors. All right. It's time for the 60 second recap on this episode on hiring, onboarding, and motivating your SDRs. Let's start with hiring. Sam talked about looking for the right background.

34:50You're looking for people that have had unpleasant jobs in their background. You're looking for teachers, ex-entrepreneurs, people that have done door-to-door sales, people that have worked in restaurants. Those people have dealt with hard stuff and the SDR job is not easy. Sam talks about that in the interview, his interview structure. Step one, Put them at ease. They're going to be nervous. Warm them up a little bit. From there, figure out why did you apply? Do you actually want to work in sales or did you just spam apply? From there, you want to ask how goal-oriented they are. They're always going to say yes, but then you're going to ask them about, do you have written goals?

35:25And you're going to dig in then to, are you writing in a notebook on your computer? How often do you look at them? You get in the details to see if they're telling you the truth. From there, you're going to run a cold call role play three times, give them the script in advance just to see how coachable they are. And then at the end, you're going to push away. This was controversial, but he says, I don't know if you're going to be able to be up for this hard work or rejection or grit. And you want to see if they push back. Now this was banned by HR at his company, but if you like it, give it a shot.

35:52From there, let's talk about onboarding. Sam talks about onboarding in cohorts, just like you might do batch laundry. Don't wash one shirt at a time. Don't onboard one SCR at a time if you can help it. From there, he talked about getting the people cold calling literally on day one by having them call your local mechanic to try to sell them a pizza. It's awkward. It's weird, but it gets them used to rejection and sets the tone for, we are going to do hard things at this company. From there, he talked about the three different buckets. We talked about product, tech, and sales skills stuff. His frame on this is you want to give them a one-week bootcamp and then get them doing the job before they are ready as a way to expose where there were gaps in your bootcamp where you're going to need to revisit things.

36:35From there, let's finish off and let's talk about the different types of motivation Sam talked about. So we talked about public recognition, which is a leaderboard visible everywhere. Your CEO or CRO giving people a shout out in Slack. We talked about SPFs. So we got the fast start to the month bonus as a way to incentivize people front loading the month with meetings, which is going to make your AEs who are focused on closing in the back half of the month happier. He talked about the$400 chocolate bar as opposed to giving 10$40 Starbucks gift cards because that is novel and most people are never going to spend$400 on a chocolate bar themselves.

37:06We also talked about travel as a way to motivate people. So let the SDR who hits a number go to the next conference in Dallas or D.C. or Seattle. Most SDRs are at a point in their career, I know I was, where they are very excited by travel and it hasn't worn them down like it has for me at this point in my career. So this was a killer episode. Folks, if you want, we have put together an entire SDR leader pack in the show notes of this episode. We've got call scripts. We've got Monday morning meeting templates to track activity. We've taken a lot of our best 30 MPC SDR leadership resources. They're entirely free.

37:42Check them out in the description of this episode. Thank you for watching. We'll see you next week on the show.

38:12We'll see you next time. multi-threading playbook powered by Align. It's free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Full & Rich, which compiles 20 plus premium data vendors in one place to dramatically improve your call connect rate. When you're cold calling, you have to make sure you're not showing up as spam likely on your prospect's end. And one way to do this is to stop calling bad numbers over and over again. Mark your disconnected or fax lines or wrong numbers so you know not to dial them again. Or even better, make sure your data provider only gives you verified numbers to start with.

38:43We partnered with Full & Rich on a guide of nine ways to improve your call connect rate. Get it for free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy to use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question, which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C. Which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, Pipedrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes.

39:15And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub. There's a link in the show notes.