TL:DR up front:

SDR’s historically aren’t very helpful in the enterprise space.

Many think SDR’s will be replaced by AI. I say not so fast.

The SDR role will morph to help ENT sellers with research and follow up as well as getting the initial meeting.

Smart ENT sellers coach their SDRs and work as a team.

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Ever since Predictable Revenue popularized the SDR position, the approach taught to SDRs by sales managers has been very formulaic, my very definition of a run rate selling motion.

1. Tell them what problem we solve, 
2. Build credibility by mentioning a use case, 
3. Then set a demo for the AE.

This run rate formula has worked marvelously for years, especially among the crop of SaaS companies like Salesforce, Intuit, and Workday that exploded in growth over the last couple of decades.

This formula can still work well today for smaller transactions, simpler sales cycles.

But it fails big time in enterprise accounts. 

Today, SDR’s

• Put customer stakeholders on email sequences (kiss of death, will get you blocked)
• Use formulaic scripts like the one mentioned above
• Don’t know enough (or anything) about the customer’s business or current problems
• Have no compelling Point of View that is specific to that customer

Most enterprise sellers I work with despair that their SDR’s don’t bring them quality leads and resign themselves to doing it themselves. 

It doesn’t have to be this way.

There is a significant swath of the SDR world who genuinely want to be more strategic in their efforts and have the mindset to do so. The failure in the current system is what they are enabled to do, how they are compensated and how the seller's work with them.

Today SDR’s are given tools to do, at best, light segmentation and pre-qualification of companies and people. Then they are trained to do light research on people (who are the ICP based on role) and company (are they within a wide band of their product’s applicability).

This is simply not enough to start an intelligent business conversation, so the only topic the SDR feels confident in is to talk about their product and how the target should accept a call with their AE. This approach reinforces the concept that sellers don’t know about or care about the customer, they just want to sell widgets.

Research is the bedrock of being knowledgeable enough to pass the first smell test that customer stakeholders use to decide whether to engage with an SDR or not, especially in cold calls. 

Here’s the difference:

Zero research (a real email I received):

“Hey (prospect),

I have been trying to track down someone at (your company) and I thought you might be the best person to speak to?

I Co-Founded (their company).

We help companies in your industry generate a steady flow of pre-qualified leads…”

Strong research:

“(Prospect Name),

On the last earnings call (prospect’s CEO) made clear the goal of increasing top line revenue 25% this fiscal year. 

With Walmart and Target reducing prices in the sporting goods category, this will add pressure on that goal.

Here are three ways we can help within your project Mustang (discussed in your Investor Day presentation last month….”

The well-researched email leveraged findings in the prospect’s 10-K (annual SEC filing for US-based public companies). It also referenced specific internal projects the prospect is running which were discussed in Investor Day presentations (typically available on the Investor Relationship website of the prospect). 

Unearthing these realities will not come from 15 minutes of scanning google and LinkedIn. It will come from:

• Deeper research of public documents, press releases, interviews, etc. and it will come from calls with customer stakeholders where the main topic is 
• Fanning out to include other stakeholders in the conversation.
• Follow up 1-1 to get feedback.

And guess what - SDR’s can totally be coached on how to do these things.

They are not traditional SDR tasks, at least not at this depth.

But the output of these activities are worth their weight in gold for large enterprise deals.

The conversation starter for larger, more complex deals still has to start with a problem. Your solution solves a problem, but does this organization recognize that they have a problem?

The answer to that won’t be an easy yes or no. 

It will be a complicated answer; the SDR will need to understand the nuance of the target’s business. If you can’t have a real conversation with this type of buyer without relying on a script, they won’t give you the time of day.

You have to find out if this problem is something that they care about right now, and if they care enough to allocate funds to solving it.

This type of call doesn’t end after 4 minutes with a calendar invite for a demo. In fact, there is no clear next step after a call like this: It takes the SDR understanding the target customer and determining the next best step in the moment.

Many SDRs can’t live with that uncertainty, and would prefer to simply churn through calls to get clear yes/no answers from prospects.

This is where coaching comes in.

Unfortunately, many SDRs only get roughly 30 minutes a week with their sales manager, which rarely includes coaching. Usually there’s just time to run through the pipeline in Salesforce. 

But as the SDR position evolves in the way I’ve described above, coaching needs to get better. SDRs need help talking through the psychology of the buyers on their target accounts. How to approach them, what their paint points might be, and what else to know about the organization before making the next call.

While some people may be good with SMB owners on the phone naturally, almost no one is good at enterprise sales naturally. There is a lot more nuance to the conversations that must be learned.

But unfortunately, many companies have this tendency to throw SDRs out after a month or two of bad performance. But their knowledge has to be nourished. SDRs need coaching and they need to observe more skilled peers making calls. Over a series of months or even years, they’ll sharpen their skills and get better at having these complicated conversations with sophisticated sellers. Companies need to emphasize talent development more than churning through SDRs quickly.

After all, moving upstream increases the complexity of the sales process exponentially. As you do this, the formulaic approach no longer works.

5 strategies to turn your SDR into your enterprise selling secret weapon

Coach them how to:

1. Do discovery
2. Do creative outreach
3. Do follow up calls
4. Map customers to internal resources

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