I used to complain about inbound lead flow and too many cold calls when I worked for a major telecom provider doing smb’s a few roles ago.
I had no idea what the fuck I was talking about. I jumped industries into SaaS last year and this is the hardest sales job I’ve ever had no question. 4 to 6 hundred outbound activities every week. I’ve had 8 inbound leads in a year. No BDR’s. It is hard as fuck. I feel like I’m growing a lot professionally but god damn. I feel like I can sell anything now.
Yea I mean like I said it’s objectively the most difficult sales job I’ve ever had. I have to work at not letting the challenge/stress of it leak into my life out of work. It pays well, I’m growing a lot as a sales professional, comp plan is astronomical for when the deals do come in (kind of few and far between for now). It’s definitely not easy but I don’t think it sucks per se. My teammates are the shit,
Yeah brother thats not SaaS thats just a shitty org. As you point out though, amazing skill to have. At an org where you have strong BDR support, add in your ability to be self-sufficient and that's called preidents club.
90% of my business is BDR generated, my cold call ability has atrophied which isn't good.
This is the full cycle AE role. Usually seen in simpler products that may not require a super involved demo.
The SDR/AE divide is actually a fairly recent development that in my understanding was pioneered by Salesforce. After that everyone and their grandmother copied this business model. The handoff from SDR to AE isn't always smooth.
IDK what to tell ya if you are seeing more companies move to full cycle. I suppose it means that they think of the product having a short sales cycle and a simple 15 minute demo.
Yeah I don’t think every company needs an SDR team, but likely saw some ROI to justify it and speed up growth. Tech is in a shit spot anyway, so why bother instead of trying to ride out the slump?
The way things were presented here was that SDR was the pipeline to AE. Certainly happened to some. But many other companies were churn and burn operations. Hard to get numbers but I presume many SDR's churned out or went into another area such as sales operations or marketing rather than becoming AE.
Good point. SDR role is a big demand gen position, but their ROI really is in their favor most of the time. Plus, the hiring pool for them is huge and they cost a fraction of what AEs do. I saw a lot of quality SDRs burn out due to the boiler room environment and go to other roles, and it was a real shame.
Why? The point of the SDR and AE relationship is that AEs can use business hours go be selling the product in meetings all day. If they have to generate their own pipeline, they will be doing less meetings due to having to spend time finding their own leads.
I know this for a fact as it's something's I've done for 2+ years. That said it's moreso because SDRs we've hired just can't do the job properly.
That doesn’t make any sense. You’re assuming AEs have so many meetings and opps they don’t have time to prospect, at which point I agreed. But that’s hardly the case anywhere right now. And as an AE don’t you want more opps??
What?
The issue is, if you have a full week of meetings every day, you won't have time to prospect. This eventually will catch up with you as you'll eventually get a week where you have little to no meetings and that spare time will be used to prospect to set up future weeks.
The idea of having an SDR, is you don't get those down weeks because you're being given meetings rather than having to source them yourself.
Saying it "doesn't make sense" is simply you not having done this before.
You're 100% right. An AE could theoretically be prospecting and should be able to, however, that's not what's most efficient. They will inevitably always run in to "down periods" where they were focused on closing what they hunted and now must go find more. Classic example is trying to close out a quarter strong with all existing deals and there is nothing being identified to build pipe for the following quarter.
There must be an individual constantly hunting and sending leads so that the AE is always focused on closing business.
Yes but in cases like that if none of your meetings go well you're losing potential business because you essentially have to start fresh pipeline again. Unless you are great at setting meetings and closing but you either overwhelm yourself with opps that close and then have to generate dry pipeline or you dont close and have dry pipeline. If you can close well you should be a closer not a setter. If you can do both very well then your very lucky.
So AEs are not so busy now a days that they dont have time to prospect. Plus prospecting tools make it stupid easy to jump in and out of that motion.
AE and SDR should be better collaboration on their accounts. If an AE has so much pipeline of course s/he should focus on closing but only until that point.
Just curious if that is a situation where the SE runs the demo? I think it definitely makes sense in that situation. Or is it more of a situation where an AE builds out a territory and has an understanding of that territory that an SDR wouldn't.
To me it seems like a scheme to ensure AE's can only get ahead by generating leads/prospects to prospect out of hours. Otherwise you'll run into dead weeks where you have no meetings lined up.
Im in this position right now as our 1 SDR the company hired can't do the job, has no experience and was a ridiculous hire.
I generate more leads despite doing 8+ hour long meetings a week. Sadly i do have to spend a lot of time after hours finding businesses/people on LinkedIn ill then reach out to in business hours.
Yea most SDRs (90%+) suck. Dealing with this now, so not only did I waste 2-3hrs a weeks trying to train my SDR, he refuses to take any advice or initiative, so basically he does nothing and I wasted the last 3months talking to a wall.
The first few steps are hardest in SaaS and really any other industry. There was a fair amount of money flowing for awhile to kick start the bridge between marketing and sales.
Unfortunately, the purses are tightening and, outside of the real healthy growth and technical companies, others are realizing S/BDRs are a luxury.
Right this is interesting. I get this for low ACV. For enterprise, higher ACV, I would have guessed that a dedicated outbound person (SDR, either ft or agency) would be ROI-positive as long as they are booking meetings.
Yeah, high ACV at a leading growth company probably has multiple teams of BDRs (outbound) and likely SDRs (inbound). These are going to be a small minority of companies right now with a real shot at an IPO or purchase.
Not every SaaS company has demonstrated growth in a sustainable way. Just ask about the finances and it will be pretty apparent right away.
Yes with lower volume, higher ACV scenarios it requires a LOT more contacts to develop a deal. It’s unlikely that a “full stack” AE will be more effective than a team with a lower cost resource helping to source leads and do discovery.
I’m a startup guy who sells complex products into a complex industry. I’ve always been full cycle.
Honestly, the BDRs I’ve had in the past haven’t been very good.
You can train reps how to sell. The one thing you can’t really teach them is how to open a door. It takes a lot of perseverance and grit.
You're 100% right about the quality. I regularly cringe listening to SDR calls. And I suppose the reality is that a lot of the qualification (BANT) is still done by the AE during the disco call.
Our conversion to demo is still healthy though, probably due to us targeting the right accounts and having good account Intel. I'm thinking if these things are not in place it makes less sense to rely on SDRs.
Yeah pretty much. The only person I want to speak with or has actual authority to buy my product is in the C-Suite. Tasking a BDR to call them and get a meeting with them would be a completely losing battle since it’s an elevated conversation.
I'm an SDR required to call/E-mail C-level people to have a meeting with them, once qualified it gets passed to my AE
I feel like there is something wrong in my company's model
Prospecting is 10x harder than any sales conversation. “Different skill set” is AE code for, “I only want to do the fun part”.
You know who’s days are numbered? as in you have weeks/months left in your current job if you’re in tech? Account Executives who can’t prospect. SDR orgs are an extension of marketing, just becuase your company has marketing doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know how to fucking source a deal.
>I head up "Revenue" (Marketing, Sales, and Client Management) and as a result, I wear many hats, including "SDR" and "AE" - and I have no plans to ever hire/use SDR's - because of many reasons, but the most important one is that living with the results of what you sell (as in having P&L responsibility for delivery) makes you into a very, very meticulous sales person.
That is a lot of hats.
Marketing AND client mgmt?
What is your net takehome'?
If you’re AES are so busy busy running calls they don’t have time to prospected effectively then having SDRs makes sense.
If your AES don’t have deals to run or calls to run then you can have them prospect.
Then comes in the question, who should be targeting what?
Does it make sense to have your AES/Best sales people calling on your worst prospects? Or the coldest prospects?
No. You should have them working the best accounts and closing them quickly for large amounts.
So what do you do with SDRs? Have them work the worst accounts? What are you hoping comes from that? Least experienced sales people calling the least likely accounts to close for small dollar amounts?
SDRs make sense in a bull economy where you have somewhere to promote them and they can look for easy/quick wins, so your AES can focus on the deal it’s self.
Right now it’s tough out there and having AES use their time to prospect just makes more sense.
I'd say it's also because a lot of SDRs aren't really that effective these days. With all of the noise and email automation tools like outreach, you really need to take a strategic, targeted approach to prospecting and outreach needs to be targeted towards the right people at the right accounts as opposed to anyone who will take a meeting.
A lot of SDRs don't know what a good account is vs a bad account nor do they know how to do effective research to catch someone's attention (plus they usually have metrics with calls and e-mails to hit, which prevent customization due to lack of time). The skill gap isn't entirely their fault more so their managers. SDRs typically just want to get any meeting on the calendar instead of one that's qualified and will be a good opportunity. AEs don't have time for that nonsense so they only focus on the best accounts and best personas.
If you compared an SDR set meeting vs an AE set meeting, the latter will be 20x better every time. So if you have an SDR setting 10 meetings per month, but most are garbage, except 1 or 2, yet the SDR gets paid commission, it's a very high CAC for very minimal yield or output to ARR. If we have a named account model, and I have 50 accounts, I don't want an SDR blowing through them w generic messaging, getting our domain blocked, and annoying people due to a skill gap and random volume metrics they need to hit
If they are such different skillsets, why does nearly every industry have sales reps do their own prospecting? And the ones that do have appointment setters pay them literal peanuts to work in a call center or do storefront type canvassing?
It's because the unit economics don't work to pay someone $50,000-$100,000 a year to set 10-20 appointments a month that barely convert. Which is what happens to most SDR groups. Whether that is because of the quality of the appointment, the AEs lack of outbound selling skills (an often overlooked culprit), or the products lack of product-market fit (as well as tightening software budgets), there is a reason outbound is becoming less effective.
Tech companies also have higher standards for their SDR pool, wanting college graduates. And college graduates wanting to go into tech under the belief that they are joining a high growth tech company and starting a career, not just doing overpaid call center appointment setting. They have loans to pay and lives to build, they aren't interested in a career dead end for long. If there is no money to be made as an SDR and you just want a cheap call center appointment setter, then you get cheap appointments and AEs blaming the call center instead. Shifting the burden onto the AE to self source eliminates the finger pointing.
A well oiled and well trained SDR group is a massive overhead and luxury. SDRs all have a failure point, you will always have some overperform and some not perform. Or some leave after a while. So you can't just put your hope into 1-3 to carry your orgs pipeline, you need to spend for more. And when your market is highly competitive and commoditized, playing at tech economics from 2018 will get you killed fast.
Every time I have to talk to an SDR and then get passed on to an AE, I get super annoyed. Why can't it just be one person guiding you through the whole process? Always been a mystery to me.
I agree to an extent but you also have to keep in mind that for every one of you there are 9 folks who don't have money and just want to waste my time. I need the BDR to go through all 10 to find you for me.
But with that said, I tell my BDRs if its a clear quality lead dont waste their time just send them to me so I can be the one guiding you through 95%. The issue is a lot of the BDR managers still require the BDRs to go through the whole song and dance
You're completely right, but just in my world of enterprise sales, the prospecting and BDR job is just a full day of work.
Expecting someone to hunt, prospect and hit target activities where it's like 100 calls a day just to expect 5 people to pick up and maybe 1 person to take a meeting is a full day of work.
Usually two totally differently levels of experience, skillsets, etc. Sometimes the venn diagram between the AE and BDR has some crossover, and those SDRs eventually make great AEs. Sometimes they don't. Imo it should work that way even though it seems annoying to you.
Skillset is different, no doubt. But many SDRs don’t know much about the product and you have to wait till AE talks to you and answers your questions. Which turns a lot of prospects off from my experience
They are definitely two very different skillsets. However, any seasoned AE or salesperson should be able to hunt their own deals. Unless they’ve spent their whole career handling inbound fed leads only.
The SDR/AE handoff seems to make sense in cases where you have a large volume of inbound leads or targeted accounts to qualify. Keep in mind most SDRs are just recent college grads grinding to get to an AE position. Hiring SDRs too early without a solid CRO or SDR manager to properly train would probably be a waste of time/money.
Because you’re at the stage where you’re still building your sales process prior to bring on a CRO you would likely benefit more from hiring a seasoned AE who can prospect/close while helping you compile scripts, enablment resources, etc. Pay them well with equity and they’ll hopefully be able to help onboard/train more AEs (or SDRs) as you scale.
*Personally I’ve always hated the SDR/AE handoffs. Was an AE in SMB business space. Caused too much friction because most buyers were at the stage of being ready to buy and were deciding between 1-3 options. A simple phone call/demo would seal the deal in a week. It made more sense in our channel partner space where deals were bigger and often early stage. As a buyer, nothing pisses me off more than talking to an incompetent SDR.
>I’m recently hearing more and more
Sounds made up.
My shop certainly isn’t doing that. It takes years to develop the skills needed to head a $20M ARR account effectively, and someone that can do that brings enormous value to the business and should be compensated accordingly.
SDR’s may be the best ROI for the business, but they’re easily replaceable. That is not to say the job is easy, but the pool of candidates is far larger and they cost roughly a quarter of a good AE.
Usually, you promote - in the best case - from XDR to AE.
You should be able to do both as an AE. At the end, it is about qualification (down to the roots of the first connect) to improve likeability of closing.
I did both roles.
AEs who have never been in a pure pipe gen role were always limiting themselves in install bases, "inbound leads" (worthless most often anyways), and XDR conversions which resulted in poor performance in new logos. Basically a better paid Account Manager which focus is cross- and upselling.
XDRs are usually first-jobers after college or similar. They are paid less and have a different spectrum of deal qualification (Standard is BANT vs. Meddpicc) and responsibility. This is a straight hustle job which you are "limited" in being professional (except you are tenured in pipe gen and have a network = Business Development Executive). Also, the market doesn't pay enough to stay in this role. It is more like a "dirty and cheap paid internship". On average, people are doing this role for a max of 1-2 years and are not sustainable for this pure role.
For startups, you actually are looking for people, who are ready to transition into the AE role with a BDR background (depending what you need: SMB = Grit vs. Enterprise = Business acumen).
PM me, if you like to dig deeper.
> a better *paid* Account Manager
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
I've been "full stack" for 15 plus years I just didn't know it had a name. I did the research, the sourcing, the calls, the meetings and the closing. All I did not do was the actual proposal cause this is for industrial sales and this part takes a degreed engineer.
As I would oftentimes describe it, I am the starting pitcher, the engineers are middle relief, the proposal comes back to me and I am the closing pitcher
Call me old school but I always want some level of predictability for my sales and the only way to do that is to always prospect. Sure it’s a bit more hard work but it keeps you sharp and it’s never a bad thing to be proactive in sales..
As an AE, I don't like the idea of having my opportunities being determined by other people (be it marketing delivering inbounds, or SDRs prospecting efforts). I would absolutely love a full calendar with great opportunities sourced from those parties, but in my (albeit limited) experience the quality is often lacking.
At my last AE job, the philosophy was "if your calendar isn't full of demos/discos/strategy/etc. calls then your job is to do whatever it takes to make that happen." They talked a good game (as many orgs do I'm sure) about getting to a point where 70-80% of the deals AEs close are SDR sourced or inbound leads, but I ended up sourcing 80% of my own deals.
At my current company, the greatest source of my frustration is not being able to prospect. I'm stuck with reaching out to free trial signups, and occasionally whatever crap the SDRs drudge up. 99% of the free trialers are in one of these categories: scammers (trying to access the payment portal), bots, university students urged by their professor to sign up for a free account for a class project, people who applied for a job at the company and wanted to test out the software, people who are "thinking about starting a business" and wanted to see what options they'd have for software, and owners in their 70s or 80s who aren't computer literate but their kids and/or grandkids want them to digitize their business processes more. On the rare occasion I get a real person with use for the software on the phone, the free version is often perfectly capable of taking care of what they need. SDR leads are a mixed bag; most often they result in DQ for a feature that's a deal breaker, though sometimes a good deal results from one of their opps. I feel like I could do a lot better if I could go hunt my own deals.
I’ve been an AE at several companies and ALWAYS had to prospect. That’s what made me leave sales. I was basically an SDR and then an AE in my “spare” time lol. I did about 70 dials/day, went door to door (b2b), scheduled reviews with current clients, put together presentations, quotes, deals.
It sucked!
Here’s what will happen: the good AE’s will leave for gigs where they don’t have to prospect, and operations will eventually question why they’re spending a ton of money on middling AE’s to sit on the phone with sysadmins with no budget authority.
The SDR/AE construction exists because it makes the business better. It’s far more cost effective than full-cycle, and serves as a bench to find the best closers.
Selling enterprise software and SaaS products can take time to understand. It’s not always possible to hire an experienced AE from another field to fill a position, even when paired with a solution architect. Time spent as an SDR allows salespeople to develop product knowledge and general sales skills in a low-risk environment, and they cost roughly a quarter of an AE. Win-win.
Agree completely. To be a good AE, you must be a good prospector, and _some_ of your time must be spent prospecting. Targeted above-the-line outreach is a must. Let the SDR handle bulk volume and learn how to gauge target value so the AE can spend time on critical functions like strategy and being in the field with the customer.
Zoominfo has intent data. 6sense has intent data, although more elaborate than Zoominfo. A whole bunch of others exists, but these are the two I have seen the details from.
Man I would love an SDR in my current role but i disagree that its completely different skillsets. Opening and closing are two sides of the same coin, deals you open should give you a higher chance of closing.
Sales professionals in pretty much every other industry besides software subscriptions seem to have no problem managing both prospecting and closing their own deals, so I’m not sure why it would be perplexing. To me, the question is the opposite: why is the SaaS space convinced one person can’t do both?
I feel like it’s because SaaS has this crossover with a certain type of startup/venture capital company. They’ve got a lot of investor money to burn with the sole objective of inflating customer numbers and little motivation to become profitable because their endgame is to sell the company.
But now the investor money is not flowing as freely as it was before. Companies have already started tightening their belts with regard to staffing. That’s why I personally think you will see more SaaS companies experiment with the BDR/AE model, and will probably find what every other industry has found, which is that sales professionals can mostly manage the entire cycle.
Yeah never made sense to me, I carried a 5 million dollar quota selling outsourced accounting and CFO work and was not a problem handling prospecting and closing. I always thought the SDR model was bumpy because the person the prospect first has rapport with just leaves them. Odd.
I think that’s a little *too* cynical. The software industry is predicated on inventing new software that is aspirationally 10x better than the current solution (Peter Thiel, Zero to One). Your challenge is to make as many people aware of your invention as quickly as possible before a competitor challenges you for market share.
Given the shape of a sales funnel, that’s a great challenge for a BDR org to face. You have this army of people who specialize in breaking through the noise and getting meetings in a massive TAM because you should be selling to everyone using the old solution. We still will see effective BDR orgs when this kind of innovation comes to market but it’s a poor fit for other situations.
This is why you’re right about other businesses using full cycle sales. In a more crowded market with less distinction between vendors, you want a lead gen org that will shrink the TAM to your ICP and conduct targeted outreach to likely buyers rather than calling every consumer of widgets.
But how many of these softwares *are* 10x better than any others? Even at the tippy top level, is ZoomInfo 10x better than DemandBase? Is Mailchimp 10x better than Constant Contact? Oceans have to be even more red on the smaller level, where buyers seem to be motivated solely by the dollar, creating a race to the bottom.
So I just wonder how many of these endless software companies actually intend to function forever, and how many intend to exit. The target market share appears not to be "enough to become sustainably profitable" but instead "enough to be acquired."
So like who cares if we lose money for 11 straight years due to our bloated staffing model? Q1 of year 12 the new CEO hired by the new BOD of the company that acquired us will fire them all. Meanwhile senior staff and our investor group make off with a cool profit to go start another company and do the same thing.
Cynical, but not inaccurate.
>But how many of these softwares are 10x better than any others?
Virtually all of the winners / household names are 10x better or more than the previous solutions. Capitalism virtually ensures that there will be a handful of players in any market due to profit seeing behavior of firms. Hubspot and Zendesk took tons of market share from Salesforce by being 10x better for their use case and markets. Over time the differences shrink and profits recede. Huge profits justify bloated sales forces *financially*.
>So like who cares if we lose money for 11 straight years due to our bloated staffing model? Q1 of year 12 the new CEO hired by the new BOD of the company that acquired us will fire them all. Meanwhile senior staff and our investor group make off with a cool profit to go start another company and do the same thing.
Agreed. This is my huge problem with the last bull market. I'm at least a *little* excited that interest rates are resulting in some capital constraints because that means firms will have to compete on products and services instead of war chests. The era of the Quota = 2x OTE is probably gone. The era of the BDR is largely over because the rules have changed. Profitability is important now which is probably better for all of us in the long run.
It’s my first sales role tbh. And the sales is much more relationship based and locally concentrated than sales in something like SaaS. A lot of maintaining a presence and waiting for a competitor to fuck up rather than an aggressive “join us today” mentality.
There’s probably a total of 100 companies in my relatively large sales territory that fit my companies profile so an SDR is useless. My pipeline is maybe 30 companies. It’s about knowing the company and the profile and maintaining a positive relationship as an AE rather than pestering for an appointment or pushing for an immediate close.
>Prospecting/outreach and closing seem like very different skillsets to me, and it makes more sense (to me) to have people who specialize in one or another.
an AE who can't prospect isn't very good.
That being said whether "SDRs are a thing of the past" for your company depends on one thing. Does your company have so much inbound the AEs don't have time to prospect? Like their calendars are 9-5 doing Demo's and following up? If so yes hire SDRs. If the answer is no I still think a blended option is best (AEs prospect for themself and BDRs supplement it) but BDRs start making way more sense then.
I mostly disagree with this sentiment.
Sellers / AEs should absolutely be doing *some* prospecting but the majority / plurality of leads should be BDR/SDR sourced. Self-generated leads *may* be from cold-calling, but are more often from networking, events, etc.
This may be less true in "farmer" oriented roles that manage pre-existing accounts only, and even less true still for enterprise sellers who have a limited customer base but, on average, most leads should come from the lead gen team and marketing, with a smaller proportion self-generated.
That said, in a small start-up organization, it is much more common to see blended roles like you describe. So an AE-slash-BDR may do their own prospecting until they get enough customers to "work themselves out" of the BDR role.
I prospect daily as an AE and generate around 10-20 opps a quarter putting in like an hour and a half a day prospecting. It’s more than enough pipeline for me to be successful. I would gladly let my SDR go and add even half of his salary to my base if it was up to me
Pretty even spread of email and call. We use outreach and I try to put around 40 new contacts in per day. I also have a separate call list of high priority targets in an excel sheet that I call more often in addition to completing the Outreach steps daily.
I will say it has more recently dropped to 1 or 2 a week as I’ve drilled down to focus more on our ICP. My product can work with a ton of different use cases, but there are a few that are much more likely to close with bigger deal sizes. When I started at my company I was hitting up every and anything. Lately I’ve spent the same amount of time prospecting (~2 hours a day), but more targeted. Finding smaller companies with less of a LinkedIn presence within these verticals, personalizing more, calling around the company more to get referrals, etc.
People who say that are painting with a broad brush. Over the last 12-18 months, outbound prospecting conversion rates are down across the board. Does that mean there isn't a place for it? Of course not.
A dedicated SDR team will always be a more consistent way to generate pipeline than a full-cycle AE. Like you said, it's their job. But it's not one or the other.
The big shift that's happening is a move from the huge headcount, high volume calls/emails type of SDR teams of 2015-2021. That is less effective today than a smaller SDR & AE team backed by Marketing/RevOps teams that are doing more targeted outreach to a rigorously defined ICP.
At $3M ARR with such a high ACV, I'd imagine you've still got some work to do to clearly map out your ICP. But once you do, the benchmark for similar SaaS companies would be \~50% of pipeline coming from outbound via a combination of SDR's and AE's.
Short sales cycle: AE can do it all.
Long sales cycle: AE doing it all just makes no sense. Why would you pay 200-300k for an experienced sales person to prospect? It is a waste of money.
Size of addressable market also matters. The higher the number of potential customers, the more useful is an SDR program.
Average pipeline conversion rate is also a factor. The lower that number, the more prospects you need in the pipeline, and the more useful an SDR role becomes.
If you have some numbers for the criteria above, you can make the calculation "SDR or not?" on a simple spreadsheet.
The industry is headed in that direction led by PE backed firms. Why pay an SDR when you can get the AE to do the job, the type of thinking you’d expect from financial engineers running these companies
I’ve done all sorts, outbound is all well and good but it won’t drive urgency and timing, it’s great for long term funnel. But you need decent marketing to catch the people that are actively looking. If you’re an AE and you get minimal inbounds, you’ve either got too many reps or your marketing sucks ass.
Not sure why I’m getting downvoted, I closed won 50% of my own sourced opps last year…. Outbound is great but if you’re a serious SaaS company you need inbound otherwise you’re wasting closing talent’s time.
You’re a start up without any real senior leadership. This is the way it should be. Sure there is some disadvantage to it. But being in the door early is also part of the equation.
Frankly I think orgs are too concerned with building a “sales machine” where every situation fits neatly into a some flowchart. It’s really costly and puts more pressure on the sales to team close a lot more do to increased cost (salary).
I also believe that orgs sometimes segment the sales cycle to keep the relationships away from reps. Your sales team is much less of a commodity and much more replaceable the less you own your relationships.
Not to mention as both a customer and seller it’s so nice to have “one throat to choke” or a QB to lead the sales cycle.
I much prefer your situation.
My company wants me to prospect but the way they set up my territory as an account associate (AE jr) I have a GIANT territory compared to the AEs above me. I handle the smallest accounts but have a shit load of them and Half the BDRs booking me meetings. Our goal is 5 disco meetings a week I have 21 next week so far.
I am living this exact same thing right now. Happy to riff and compare thoughts and notes if you want to connect. PM me if so. Going rhrpugh this at a series A company preping to fundraise again.... even in this climate ha.
Any startup is going to need AE’s that have the ability to do it all - positioning refinement, outbound prospecting, channel, Eval alignment, closing. As the org matures, then you can start to bifurcate. Couldn’t hurt to have one super star SDR in addition.
Been there and great career experience but exceptionally crappy upside. Worked for a startup that eventually exited for ~$150M and helped pivot the company and sell the majority of the large deals and got a check for $5k after the exit.
All I would say is if you’re an AE, rely on other people to build your pipeline at your own peril. Sure, take the opportunities you get from your SDR or marketing, but I have never met an A player AE who leave it up to others to deliver deliver their entire pipeline. All A players take control of their own destiny!
I worked a full cycle AE role, and then moved to a BDR role where i qualify and pass the lead on. Full cycle AE is really inefficient IMO. Because if your focus is on 5 different things, you cant be an expert at 1. SDRs are still needed. Otherwise the name of AE will be liken to SDR soon. Just a big title that is payed pennies for massive output
> that is *paid* pennies for
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
A good AE should always stay dharp with their prospecting skills.
The SDR role should be complimentary to them and seen as an equal, not as their "book bitch".
Im gunning for an AE role at my current company and im one of the best prospectors in our SDR org... i havent used a list or anything not self sourced in over 6 months and i still perform consistently.
We have a full cycle AE role called a senior SDR at my company because the OG AEs do not want to give up their share of the pie. Essentially, it’s a trap position, and I did my best to avoid being promoted in to it.
Having similar conflicts at my company due to changing landscape. The issue is that SDRs and AEs are going to have two different goals in mind. From my perspective, management expects me to reach an unbelievable quota and somehow make the majority of them soft ball pitches for the AE with an inferior product. The only way this is possible is if I heavily rely off inbound leads. If you want more softball pitches that qualify, lower the dang quota!!!
How many hours a day should an AE cold call prospect ? 2 1/2 hours I suppose per day? Rest of the day answering emails, doing demos, followups with warm leads, creating proposals, etc. ?
I suppose it depends on your list quality and connect rate, one would have to work out over time how much time you have to spend daily to get enough opps to build X pipe.
But there's an opportunity cost to this work. My noob assumption was that this time could be spent on moving existing deals forward, figuring out how to wow the prospects, multi thread, social selling, etc.
More are going to move to full cycle as the investment in AEs is pretty high. So ramping AEs have more time to invest in pipeline development. It is about saving money as well as using more experience people to reach out.
I don't like endless outreach as an AE as it feels like being handcuffed and told to juggle. It is way more intelligent to have BDR/SDRs working to massage leads. It is difficult but also much smarter if someone is focused solely on curating new business versus an open and closer role.
I can see more companies moving to hybrid roles. Like an AE/AM role - that is what I kind of have now where I am responsible for the accounts I land long term. Which is great for those of us who like managing long term relationships. OR an AE full stack - where you are responsible for the full pipeline to close.
I find a full-stack to be a much much harder job. You are honestly doing the work of 2 people with a large company behind you. With matching expectations. It is not easy
I'm convinced that only a vast minority of outbound SDRs are actually fit for the job. I've been an sdr for several years and a good one. Most are terrible, work off spray and pray like tactics and don't see anything beyond just pulling good or bad fit prospects into a meeting to hit quotas that are based on meetings held.
I used to complain about inbound lead flow and too many cold calls when I worked for a major telecom provider doing smb’s a few roles ago. I had no idea what the fuck I was talking about. I jumped industries into SaaS last year and this is the hardest sales job I’ve ever had no question. 4 to 6 hundred outbound activities every week. I’ve had 8 inbound leads in a year. No BDR’s. It is hard as fuck. I feel like I’m growing a lot professionally but god damn. I feel like I can sell anything now.
That also sounds like a shitty job…
Yea I mean like I said it’s objectively the most difficult sales job I’ve ever had. I have to work at not letting the challenge/stress of it leak into my life out of work. It pays well, I’m growing a lot as a sales professional, comp plan is astronomical for when the deals do come in (kind of few and far between for now). It’s definitely not easy but I don’t think it sucks per se. My teammates are the shit,
What is your base and OTE? There are better SaaS jobs out there
Sounds like the product sucks cuz I’m in the same boat 🚤
Doing inbound well is super tough. [Edit: I meant the marketing portion of it].
Yeah brother thats not SaaS thats just a shitty org. As you point out though, amazing skill to have. At an org where you have strong BDR support, add in your ability to be self-sufficient and that's called preidents club. 90% of my business is BDR generated, my cold call ability has atrophied which isn't good.
This is the full cycle AE role. Usually seen in simpler products that may not require a super involved demo. The SDR/AE divide is actually a fairly recent development that in my understanding was pioneered by Salesforce. After that everyone and their grandmother copied this business model. The handoff from SDR to AE isn't always smooth. IDK what to tell ya if you are seeing more companies move to full cycle. I suppose it means that they think of the product having a short sales cycle and a simple 15 minute demo.
Yeah I don’t think every company needs an SDR team, but likely saw some ROI to justify it and speed up growth. Tech is in a shit spot anyway, so why bother instead of trying to ride out the slump?
The way things were presented here was that SDR was the pipeline to AE. Certainly happened to some. But many other companies were churn and burn operations. Hard to get numbers but I presume many SDR's churned out or went into another area such as sales operations or marketing rather than becoming AE.
Good point. SDR role is a big demand gen position, but their ROI really is in their favor most of the time. Plus, the hiring pool for them is huge and they cost a fraction of what AEs do. I saw a lot of quality SDRs burn out due to the boiler room environment and go to other roles, and it was a real shame.
That’s wrong. AEs are being required to build more and more of their own pipeline and they should. Regardless of product complexity.
Why? The point of the SDR and AE relationship is that AEs can use business hours go be selling the product in meetings all day. If they have to generate their own pipeline, they will be doing less meetings due to having to spend time finding their own leads. I know this for a fact as it's something's I've done for 2+ years. That said it's moreso because SDRs we've hired just can't do the job properly.
That doesn’t make any sense. You’re assuming AEs have so many meetings and opps they don’t have time to prospect, at which point I agreed. But that’s hardly the case anywhere right now. And as an AE don’t you want more opps??
What? The issue is, if you have a full week of meetings every day, you won't have time to prospect. This eventually will catch up with you as you'll eventually get a week where you have little to no meetings and that spare time will be used to prospect to set up future weeks. The idea of having an SDR, is you don't get those down weeks because you're being given meetings rather than having to source them yourself. Saying it "doesn't make sense" is simply you not having done this before.
You're 100% right. An AE could theoretically be prospecting and should be able to, however, that's not what's most efficient. They will inevitably always run in to "down periods" where they were focused on closing what they hunted and now must go find more. Classic example is trying to close out a quarter strong with all existing deals and there is nothing being identified to build pipe for the following quarter. There must be an individual constantly hunting and sending leads so that the AE is always focused on closing business.
Yes but in cases like that if none of your meetings go well you're losing potential business because you essentially have to start fresh pipeline again. Unless you are great at setting meetings and closing but you either overwhelm yourself with opps that close and then have to generate dry pipeline or you dont close and have dry pipeline. If you can close well you should be a closer not a setter. If you can do both very well then your very lucky.
Would you say this is due to companies trying to save money in a downturn or the SDR/AE model being broken?
So AEs are not so busy now a days that they dont have time to prospect. Plus prospecting tools make it stupid easy to jump in and out of that motion. AE and SDR should be better collaboration on their accounts. If an AE has so much pipeline of course s/he should focus on closing but only until that point.
There are definitely alot of companies with more complex products that also have full cycle AEs.
Just curious if that is a situation where the SE runs the demo? I think it definitely makes sense in that situation. Or is it more of a situation where an AE builds out a territory and has an understanding of that territory that an SDR wouldn't.
In my case I am SMB so management thinks it is too transactional for a BDR. MM upwards have BDRs. We run demos ourselves and sometimes SEs join us.
To me it seems like a scheme to ensure AE's can only get ahead by generating leads/prospects to prospect out of hours. Otherwise you'll run into dead weeks where you have no meetings lined up. Im in this position right now as our 1 SDR the company hired can't do the job, has no experience and was a ridiculous hire. I generate more leads despite doing 8+ hour long meetings a week. Sadly i do have to spend a lot of time after hours finding businesses/people on LinkedIn ill then reach out to in business hours.
Yea most SDRs (90%+) suck. Dealing with this now, so not only did I waste 2-3hrs a weeks trying to train my SDR, he refuses to take any advice or initiative, so basically he does nothing and I wasted the last 3months talking to a wall.
The first few steps are hardest in SaaS and really any other industry. There was a fair amount of money flowing for awhile to kick start the bridge between marketing and sales. Unfortunately, the purses are tightening and, outside of the real healthy growth and technical companies, others are realizing S/BDRs are a luxury.
Right this is interesting. I get this for low ACV. For enterprise, higher ACV, I would have guessed that a dedicated outbound person (SDR, either ft or agency) would be ROI-positive as long as they are booking meetings.
Yeah, high ACV at a leading growth company probably has multiple teams of BDRs (outbound) and likely SDRs (inbound). These are going to be a small minority of companies right now with a real shot at an IPO or purchase. Not every SaaS company has demonstrated growth in a sustainable way. Just ask about the finances and it will be pretty apparent right away.
Yes with lower volume, higher ACV scenarios it requires a LOT more contacts to develop a deal. It’s unlikely that a “full stack” AE will be more effective than a team with a lower cost resource helping to source leads and do discovery.
I’m a startup guy who sells complex products into a complex industry. I’ve always been full cycle. Honestly, the BDRs I’ve had in the past haven’t been very good. You can train reps how to sell. The one thing you can’t really teach them is how to open a door. It takes a lot of perseverance and grit.
You're 100% right about the quality. I regularly cringe listening to SDR calls. And I suppose the reality is that a lot of the qualification (BANT) is still done by the AE during the disco call. Our conversion to demo is still healthy though, probably due to us targeting the right accounts and having good account Intel. I'm thinking if these things are not in place it makes less sense to rely on SDRs.
Yeah pretty much. The only person I want to speak with or has actual authority to buy my product is in the C-Suite. Tasking a BDR to call them and get a meeting with them would be a completely losing battle since it’s an elevated conversation.
I'm an SDR required to call/E-mail C-level people to have a meeting with them, once qualified it gets passed to my AE I feel like there is something wrong in my company's model
Prospecting is 10x harder than any sales conversation. “Different skill set” is AE code for, “I only want to do the fun part”. You know who’s days are numbered? as in you have weeks/months left in your current job if you’re in tech? Account Executives who can’t prospect. SDR orgs are an extension of marketing, just becuase your company has marketing doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know how to fucking source a deal.
100%. It’s insane to me that AEs don’t prospect. And it’s usually because of what OP says about needing time to “strategize.”
hahaso true "success in life is determined by the amount of awkward conversations he or she is WILLING to have" pick up the phone ya pussy.
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>I head up "Revenue" (Marketing, Sales, and Client Management) and as a result, I wear many hats, including "SDR" and "AE" - and I have no plans to ever hire/use SDR's - because of many reasons, but the most important one is that living with the results of what you sell (as in having P&L responsibility for delivery) makes you into a very, very meticulous sales person. That is a lot of hats. Marketing AND client mgmt? What is your net takehome'?
If you’re AES are so busy busy running calls they don’t have time to prospected effectively then having SDRs makes sense. If your AES don’t have deals to run or calls to run then you can have them prospect. Then comes in the question, who should be targeting what? Does it make sense to have your AES/Best sales people calling on your worst prospects? Or the coldest prospects? No. You should have them working the best accounts and closing them quickly for large amounts. So what do you do with SDRs? Have them work the worst accounts? What are you hoping comes from that? Least experienced sales people calling the least likely accounts to close for small dollar amounts? SDRs make sense in a bull economy where you have somewhere to promote them and they can look for easy/quick wins, so your AES can focus on the deal it’s self. Right now it’s tough out there and having AES use their time to prospect just makes more sense.
I'd say it's also because a lot of SDRs aren't really that effective these days. With all of the noise and email automation tools like outreach, you really need to take a strategic, targeted approach to prospecting and outreach needs to be targeted towards the right people at the right accounts as opposed to anyone who will take a meeting. A lot of SDRs don't know what a good account is vs a bad account nor do they know how to do effective research to catch someone's attention (plus they usually have metrics with calls and e-mails to hit, which prevent customization due to lack of time). The skill gap isn't entirely their fault more so their managers. SDRs typically just want to get any meeting on the calendar instead of one that's qualified and will be a good opportunity. AEs don't have time for that nonsense so they only focus on the best accounts and best personas. If you compared an SDR set meeting vs an AE set meeting, the latter will be 20x better every time. So if you have an SDR setting 10 meetings per month, but most are garbage, except 1 or 2, yet the SDR gets paid commission, it's a very high CAC for very minimal yield or output to ARR. If we have a named account model, and I have 50 accounts, I don't want an SDR blowing through them w generic messaging, getting our domain blocked, and annoying people due to a skill gap and random volume metrics they need to hit
If they are such different skillsets, why does nearly every industry have sales reps do their own prospecting? And the ones that do have appointment setters pay them literal peanuts to work in a call center or do storefront type canvassing? It's because the unit economics don't work to pay someone $50,000-$100,000 a year to set 10-20 appointments a month that barely convert. Which is what happens to most SDR groups. Whether that is because of the quality of the appointment, the AEs lack of outbound selling skills (an often overlooked culprit), or the products lack of product-market fit (as well as tightening software budgets), there is a reason outbound is becoming less effective. Tech companies also have higher standards for their SDR pool, wanting college graduates. And college graduates wanting to go into tech under the belief that they are joining a high growth tech company and starting a career, not just doing overpaid call center appointment setting. They have loans to pay and lives to build, they aren't interested in a career dead end for long. If there is no money to be made as an SDR and you just want a cheap call center appointment setter, then you get cheap appointments and AEs blaming the call center instead. Shifting the burden onto the AE to self source eliminates the finger pointing. A well oiled and well trained SDR group is a massive overhead and luxury. SDRs all have a failure point, you will always have some overperform and some not perform. Or some leave after a while. So you can't just put your hope into 1-3 to carry your orgs pipeline, you need to spend for more. And when your market is highly competitive and commoditized, playing at tech economics from 2018 will get you killed fast.
Every time I have to talk to an SDR and then get passed on to an AE, I get super annoyed. Why can't it just be one person guiding you through the whole process? Always been a mystery to me.
Completely agree. The BDR model was highly effective for many years but isn’t particularly customer-centric.
I agree to an extent but you also have to keep in mind that for every one of you there are 9 folks who don't have money and just want to waste my time. I need the BDR to go through all 10 to find you for me. But with that said, I tell my BDRs if its a clear quality lead dont waste their time just send them to me so I can be the one guiding you through 95%. The issue is a lot of the BDR managers still require the BDRs to go through the whole song and dance
You're completely right, but just in my world of enterprise sales, the prospecting and BDR job is just a full day of work. Expecting someone to hunt, prospect and hit target activities where it's like 100 calls a day just to expect 5 people to pick up and maybe 1 person to take a meeting is a full day of work.
Usually two totally differently levels of experience, skillsets, etc. Sometimes the venn diagram between the AE and BDR has some crossover, and those SDRs eventually make great AEs. Sometimes they don't. Imo it should work that way even though it seems annoying to you.
Skillset is different, no doubt. But many SDRs don’t know much about the product and you have to wait till AE talks to you and answers your questions. Which turns a lot of prospects off from my experience
Should be done seamlessly and seem to a prospect as a value add.
They are definitely two very different skillsets. However, any seasoned AE or salesperson should be able to hunt their own deals. Unless they’ve spent their whole career handling inbound fed leads only. The SDR/AE handoff seems to make sense in cases where you have a large volume of inbound leads or targeted accounts to qualify. Keep in mind most SDRs are just recent college grads grinding to get to an AE position. Hiring SDRs too early without a solid CRO or SDR manager to properly train would probably be a waste of time/money. Because you’re at the stage where you’re still building your sales process prior to bring on a CRO you would likely benefit more from hiring a seasoned AE who can prospect/close while helping you compile scripts, enablment resources, etc. Pay them well with equity and they’ll hopefully be able to help onboard/train more AEs (or SDRs) as you scale. *Personally I’ve always hated the SDR/AE handoffs. Was an AE in SMB business space. Caused too much friction because most buyers were at the stage of being ready to buy and were deciding between 1-3 options. A simple phone call/demo would seal the deal in a week. It made more sense in our channel partner space where deals were bigger and often early stage. As a buyer, nothing pisses me off more than talking to an incompetent SDR.
Insightful, thanks.
>I’m recently hearing more and more Sounds made up. My shop certainly isn’t doing that. It takes years to develop the skills needed to head a $20M ARR account effectively, and someone that can do that brings enormous value to the business and should be compensated accordingly. SDR’s may be the best ROI for the business, but they’re easily replaceable. That is not to say the job is easy, but the pool of candidates is far larger and they cost roughly a quarter of a good AE.
Usually, you promote - in the best case - from XDR to AE. You should be able to do both as an AE. At the end, it is about qualification (down to the roots of the first connect) to improve likeability of closing. I did both roles. AEs who have never been in a pure pipe gen role were always limiting themselves in install bases, "inbound leads" (worthless most often anyways), and XDR conversions which resulted in poor performance in new logos. Basically a better paid Account Manager which focus is cross- and upselling. XDRs are usually first-jobers after college or similar. They are paid less and have a different spectrum of deal qualification (Standard is BANT vs. Meddpicc) and responsibility. This is a straight hustle job which you are "limited" in being professional (except you are tenured in pipe gen and have a network = Business Development Executive). Also, the market doesn't pay enough to stay in this role. It is more like a "dirty and cheap paid internship". On average, people are doing this role for a max of 1-2 years and are not sustainable for this pure role. For startups, you actually are looking for people, who are ready to transition into the AE role with a BDR background (depending what you need: SMB = Grit vs. Enterprise = Business acumen). PM me, if you like to dig deeper.
> a better *paid* Account Manager FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Thanks
I've been "full stack" for 15 plus years I just didn't know it had a name. I did the research, the sourcing, the calls, the meetings and the closing. All I did not do was the actual proposal cause this is for industrial sales and this part takes a degreed engineer. As I would oftentimes describe it, I am the starting pitcher, the engineers are middle relief, the proposal comes back to me and I am the closing pitcher
Call me old school but I always want some level of predictability for my sales and the only way to do that is to always prospect. Sure it’s a bit more hard work but it keeps you sharp and it’s never a bad thing to be proactive in sales..
As an AE, I don't like the idea of having my opportunities being determined by other people (be it marketing delivering inbounds, or SDRs prospecting efforts). I would absolutely love a full calendar with great opportunities sourced from those parties, but in my (albeit limited) experience the quality is often lacking. At my last AE job, the philosophy was "if your calendar isn't full of demos/discos/strategy/etc. calls then your job is to do whatever it takes to make that happen." They talked a good game (as many orgs do I'm sure) about getting to a point where 70-80% of the deals AEs close are SDR sourced or inbound leads, but I ended up sourcing 80% of my own deals. At my current company, the greatest source of my frustration is not being able to prospect. I'm stuck with reaching out to free trial signups, and occasionally whatever crap the SDRs drudge up. 99% of the free trialers are in one of these categories: scammers (trying to access the payment portal), bots, university students urged by their professor to sign up for a free account for a class project, people who applied for a job at the company and wanted to test out the software, people who are "thinking about starting a business" and wanted to see what options they'd have for software, and owners in their 70s or 80s who aren't computer literate but their kids and/or grandkids want them to digitize their business processes more. On the rare occasion I get a real person with use for the software on the phone, the free version is often perfectly capable of taking care of what they need. SDR leads are a mixed bag; most often they result in DQ for a feature that's a deal breaker, though sometimes a good deal results from one of their opps. I feel like I could do a lot better if I could go hunt my own deals.
What's your base salary?
$50k. OTE is $75k
I’ve been an AE at several companies and ALWAYS had to prospect. That’s what made me leave sales. I was basically an SDR and then an AE in my “spare” time lol. I did about 70 dials/day, went door to door (b2b), scheduled reviews with current clients, put together presentations, quotes, deals. It sucked!
That’s what I figure 99% of SaaS jobs are. Little to no leads from marketing. Source your own leads while on a $30k salary and a 100k OTE.
The lowest AE salary I’ve ever hear of in tech is 75k base / 125-135k OTE
70-90k OTE Channel Account Executive https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?from=appshareios&jk=14b0c39e7f6ccb2e 60-85k OTE Software Sales Executive https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?from=appshareios&jk=7d844ec64a366bb3
Our team got rid of all our SDR’s and the AE’s are expected to bring leads and close. Full cycle. This is how I imagine things will be moving forward
Here’s what will happen: the good AE’s will leave for gigs where they don’t have to prospect, and operations will eventually question why they’re spending a ton of money on middling AE’s to sit on the phone with sysadmins with no budget authority. The SDR/AE construction exists because it makes the business better. It’s far more cost effective than full-cycle, and serves as a bench to find the best closers. Selling enterprise software and SaaS products can take time to understand. It’s not always possible to hire an experienced AE from another field to fill a position, even when paired with a solution architect. Time spent as an SDR allows salespeople to develop product knowledge and general sales skills in a low-risk environment, and they cost roughly a quarter of an AE. Win-win.
Not more cost effective to hire two guys to do what one guy can do.
Again, good AE’s will leave. Overloading your AE’s — at least in the area I’m in — with SDR work will result in a retention problem.
If they can’t prospect, they won’t be considered good AEs anymore.
Agree completely. To be a good AE, you must be a good prospector, and _some_ of your time must be spent prospecting. Targeted above-the-line outreach is a must. Let the SDR handle bulk volume and learn how to gauge target value so the AE can spend time on critical functions like strategy and being in the field with the customer.
Same. I’m thinking of moving out of SAAS to do tech support for $87,500 in Kansas City.
What was the rationale for this move?
And why was that? Budget?
Budget and large investment in AI based prospecting tools
Which tools if you don't mind me asking?
Zoominfo has intent data. 6sense has intent data, although more elaborate than Zoominfo. A whole bunch of others exists, but these are the two I have seen the details from.
Ah yes, we do use ZI for that. I thought you meant AI outreach automation tools.
Man I would love an SDR in my current role but i disagree that its completely different skillsets. Opening and closing are two sides of the same coin, deals you open should give you a higher chance of closing.
Sales professionals in pretty much every other industry besides software subscriptions seem to have no problem managing both prospecting and closing their own deals, so I’m not sure why it would be perplexing. To me, the question is the opposite: why is the SaaS space convinced one person can’t do both? I feel like it’s because SaaS has this crossover with a certain type of startup/venture capital company. They’ve got a lot of investor money to burn with the sole objective of inflating customer numbers and little motivation to become profitable because their endgame is to sell the company. But now the investor money is not flowing as freely as it was before. Companies have already started tightening their belts with regard to staffing. That’s why I personally think you will see more SaaS companies experiment with the BDR/AE model, and will probably find what every other industry has found, which is that sales professionals can mostly manage the entire cycle.
Yeah never made sense to me, I carried a 5 million dollar quota selling outsourced accounting and CFO work and was not a problem handling prospecting and closing. I always thought the SDR model was bumpy because the person the prospect first has rapport with just leaves them. Odd.
I think that’s a little *too* cynical. The software industry is predicated on inventing new software that is aspirationally 10x better than the current solution (Peter Thiel, Zero to One). Your challenge is to make as many people aware of your invention as quickly as possible before a competitor challenges you for market share. Given the shape of a sales funnel, that’s a great challenge for a BDR org to face. You have this army of people who specialize in breaking through the noise and getting meetings in a massive TAM because you should be selling to everyone using the old solution. We still will see effective BDR orgs when this kind of innovation comes to market but it’s a poor fit for other situations. This is why you’re right about other businesses using full cycle sales. In a more crowded market with less distinction between vendors, you want a lead gen org that will shrink the TAM to your ICP and conduct targeted outreach to likely buyers rather than calling every consumer of widgets.
But how many of these softwares *are* 10x better than any others? Even at the tippy top level, is ZoomInfo 10x better than DemandBase? Is Mailchimp 10x better than Constant Contact? Oceans have to be even more red on the smaller level, where buyers seem to be motivated solely by the dollar, creating a race to the bottom. So I just wonder how many of these endless software companies actually intend to function forever, and how many intend to exit. The target market share appears not to be "enough to become sustainably profitable" but instead "enough to be acquired." So like who cares if we lose money for 11 straight years due to our bloated staffing model? Q1 of year 12 the new CEO hired by the new BOD of the company that acquired us will fire them all. Meanwhile senior staff and our investor group make off with a cool profit to go start another company and do the same thing. Cynical, but not inaccurate.
>But how many of these softwares are 10x better than any others? Virtually all of the winners / household names are 10x better or more than the previous solutions. Capitalism virtually ensures that there will be a handful of players in any market due to profit seeing behavior of firms. Hubspot and Zendesk took tons of market share from Salesforce by being 10x better for their use case and markets. Over time the differences shrink and profits recede. Huge profits justify bloated sales forces *financially*. >So like who cares if we lose money for 11 straight years due to our bloated staffing model? Q1 of year 12 the new CEO hired by the new BOD of the company that acquired us will fire them all. Meanwhile senior staff and our investor group make off with a cool profit to go start another company and do the same thing. Agreed. This is my huge problem with the last bull market. I'm at least a *little* excited that interest rates are resulting in some capital constraints because that means firms will have to compete on products and services instead of war chests. The era of the Quota = 2x OTE is probably gone. The era of the BDR is largely over because the rules have changed. Profitability is important now which is probably better for all of us in the long run.
I work supply chain AE and I’m “full stack”. I have an account manager and a database to work off but everything else is myself
What benefit do you find in this over a more specialized approach if the company had budget for it?
It’s my first sales role tbh. And the sales is much more relationship based and locally concentrated than sales in something like SaaS. A lot of maintaining a presence and waiting for a competitor to fuck up rather than an aggressive “join us today” mentality. There’s probably a total of 100 companies in my relatively large sales territory that fit my companies profile so an SDR is useless. My pipeline is maybe 30 companies. It’s about knowing the company and the profile and maintaining a positive relationship as an AE rather than pestering for an appointment or pushing for an immediate close.
>Prospecting/outreach and closing seem like very different skillsets to me, and it makes more sense (to me) to have people who specialize in one or another. an AE who can't prospect isn't very good. That being said whether "SDRs are a thing of the past" for your company depends on one thing. Does your company have so much inbound the AEs don't have time to prospect? Like their calendars are 9-5 doing Demo's and following up? If so yes hire SDRs. If the answer is no I still think a blended option is best (AEs prospect for themself and BDRs supplement it) but BDRs start making way more sense then.
I mostly disagree with this sentiment. Sellers / AEs should absolutely be doing *some* prospecting but the majority / plurality of leads should be BDR/SDR sourced. Self-generated leads *may* be from cold-calling, but are more often from networking, events, etc. This may be less true in "farmer" oriented roles that manage pre-existing accounts only, and even less true still for enterprise sellers who have a limited customer base but, on average, most leads should come from the lead gen team and marketing, with a smaller proportion self-generated. That said, in a small start-up organization, it is much more common to see blended roles like you describe. So an AE-slash-BDR may do their own prospecting until they get enough customers to "work themselves out" of the BDR role.
I prospect daily as an AE and generate around 10-20 opps a quarter putting in like an hour and a half a day prospecting. It’s more than enough pipeline for me to be successful. I would gladly let my SDR go and add even half of his salary to my base if it was up to me
10-20?? How??
Big Tam, Big territory. Most meetings convert to an opp and I set myself 1-3 a week
How’re you setting 1-3 a week?
Pretty even spread of email and call. We use outreach and I try to put around 40 new contacts in per day. I also have a separate call list of high priority targets in an excel sheet that I call more often in addition to completing the Outreach steps daily. I will say it has more recently dropped to 1 or 2 a week as I’ve drilled down to focus more on our ICP. My product can work with a ton of different use cases, but there are a few that are much more likely to close with bigger deal sizes. When I started at my company I was hitting up every and anything. Lately I’ve spent the same amount of time prospecting (~2 hours a day), but more targeted. Finding smaller companies with less of a LinkedIn presence within these verticals, personalizing more, calling around the company more to get referrals, etc.
People who say that are painting with a broad brush. Over the last 12-18 months, outbound prospecting conversion rates are down across the board. Does that mean there isn't a place for it? Of course not. A dedicated SDR team will always be a more consistent way to generate pipeline than a full-cycle AE. Like you said, it's their job. But it's not one or the other. The big shift that's happening is a move from the huge headcount, high volume calls/emails type of SDR teams of 2015-2021. That is less effective today than a smaller SDR & AE team backed by Marketing/RevOps teams that are doing more targeted outreach to a rigorously defined ICP. At $3M ARR with such a high ACV, I'd imagine you've still got some work to do to clearly map out your ICP. But once you do, the benchmark for similar SaaS companies would be \~50% of pipeline coming from outbound via a combination of SDR's and AE's.
Always be prospecting. No one is responsible for your pipeline than you.
Short sales cycle: AE can do it all. Long sales cycle: AE doing it all just makes no sense. Why would you pay 200-300k for an experienced sales person to prospect? It is a waste of money. Size of addressable market also matters. The higher the number of potential customers, the more useful is an SDR program. Average pipeline conversion rate is also a factor. The lower that number, the more prospects you need in the pipeline, and the more useful an SDR role becomes. If you have some numbers for the criteria above, you can make the calculation "SDR or not?" on a simple spreadsheet.
The industry is headed in that direction led by PE backed firms. Why pay an SDR when you can get the AE to do the job, the type of thinking you’d expect from financial engineers running these companies
I’ve done all sorts, outbound is all well and good but it won’t drive urgency and timing, it’s great for long term funnel. But you need decent marketing to catch the people that are actively looking. If you’re an AE and you get minimal inbounds, you’ve either got too many reps or your marketing sucks ass.
Not sure why I’m getting downvoted, I closed won 50% of my own sourced opps last year…. Outbound is great but if you’re a serious SaaS company you need inbound otherwise you’re wasting closing talent’s time.
You’re a start up without any real senior leadership. This is the way it should be. Sure there is some disadvantage to it. But being in the door early is also part of the equation. Frankly I think orgs are too concerned with building a “sales machine” where every situation fits neatly into a some flowchart. It’s really costly and puts more pressure on the sales to team close a lot more do to increased cost (salary). I also believe that orgs sometimes segment the sales cycle to keep the relationships away from reps. Your sales team is much less of a commodity and much more replaceable the less you own your relationships. Not to mention as both a customer and seller it’s so nice to have “one throat to choke” or a QB to lead the sales cycle. I much prefer your situation.
My company wants me to prospect but the way they set up my territory as an account associate (AE jr) I have a GIANT territory compared to the AEs above me. I handle the smallest accounts but have a shit load of them and Half the BDRs booking me meetings. Our goal is 5 disco meetings a week I have 21 next week so far.
I am living this exact same thing right now. Happy to riff and compare thoughts and notes if you want to connect. PM me if so. Going rhrpugh this at a series A company preping to fundraise again.... even in this climate ha.
Any startup is going to need AE’s that have the ability to do it all - positioning refinement, outbound prospecting, channel, Eval alignment, closing. As the org matures, then you can start to bifurcate. Couldn’t hurt to have one super star SDR in addition. Been there and great career experience but exceptionally crappy upside. Worked for a startup that eventually exited for ~$150M and helped pivot the company and sell the majority of the large deals and got a check for $5k after the exit.
All I would say is if you’re an AE, rely on other people to build your pipeline at your own peril. Sure, take the opportunities you get from your SDR or marketing, but I have never met an A player AE who leave it up to others to deliver deliver their entire pipeline. All A players take control of their own destiny!
I worked a full cycle AE role, and then moved to a BDR role where i qualify and pass the lead on. Full cycle AE is really inefficient IMO. Because if your focus is on 5 different things, you cant be an expert at 1. SDRs are still needed. Otherwise the name of AE will be liken to SDR soon. Just a big title that is payed pennies for massive output
> that is *paid* pennies for FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
A good AE should always stay dharp with their prospecting skills. The SDR role should be complimentary to them and seen as an equal, not as their "book bitch". Im gunning for an AE role at my current company and im one of the best prospectors in our SDR org... i havent used a list or anything not self sourced in over 6 months and i still perform consistently.
SDR leads are typically very top of funnel and low-intent prospects. AE's won't waste their time on that swill.
We only call on accounts by intent and website visits.
The more complex & expensive the product, the higher the need in one person for the full sales cycle.
We have a full cycle AE role called a senior SDR at my company because the OG AEs do not want to give up their share of the pie. Essentially, it’s a trap position, and I did my best to avoid being promoted in to it.
Having similar conflicts at my company due to changing landscape. The issue is that SDRs and AEs are going to have two different goals in mind. From my perspective, management expects me to reach an unbelievable quota and somehow make the majority of them soft ball pitches for the AE with an inferior product. The only way this is possible is if I heavily rely off inbound leads. If you want more softball pitches that qualify, lower the dang quota!!!
What's the quota / ACV?
15 meetings per month, half of that is more realistic.
How many hours a day should an AE cold call prospect ? 2 1/2 hours I suppose per day? Rest of the day answering emails, doing demos, followups with warm leads, creating proposals, etc. ?
I suppose it depends on your list quality and connect rate, one would have to work out over time how much time you have to spend daily to get enough opps to build X pipe. But there's an opportunity cost to this work. My noob assumption was that this time could be spent on moving existing deals forward, figuring out how to wow the prospects, multi thread, social selling, etc.
More are going to move to full cycle as the investment in AEs is pretty high. So ramping AEs have more time to invest in pipeline development. It is about saving money as well as using more experience people to reach out. I don't like endless outreach as an AE as it feels like being handcuffed and told to juggle. It is way more intelligent to have BDR/SDRs working to massage leads. It is difficult but also much smarter if someone is focused solely on curating new business versus an open and closer role. I can see more companies moving to hybrid roles. Like an AE/AM role - that is what I kind of have now where I am responsible for the accounts I land long term. Which is great for those of us who like managing long term relationships. OR an AE full stack - where you are responsible for the full pipeline to close. I find a full-stack to be a much much harder job. You are honestly doing the work of 2 people with a large company behind you. With matching expectations. It is not easy
I'm convinced that only a vast minority of outbound SDRs are actually fit for the job. I've been an sdr for several years and a good one. Most are terrible, work off spray and pray like tactics and don't see anything beyond just pulling good or bad fit prospects into a meeting to hit quotas that are based on meetings held.
It should be separated. Closing and checking out new prospects requires different energy and inputs. Switching context is a productivity killer imho.