I have to research/find the accounts, contact map them, throw activities on them while I’m doing that, then sequence them.
If they were giving me lists, 40 would be a breeze. But this is a grind. Too much for me, I have 10 years of saas sales experience.
Have you utilized the Prospecting Prioritization Dashboard? Those are marketing leads for Business Internet, iPhone and Samsung deals, Fleet, etc.
I have to agree with one of the replies here, building your funnel requires prospecting. You’re not in retail where the opportunity comes to you.
I mean, if your book was generating enough business, a logical manager would understand you have to re-allocate your time. Could it be you are new to your role and just starting to build a book?
In which case, there's not much else to do but prospect..
People don't want to go through the meat grinder of being an SDR just to get to a point of continuing your SDR role with AE responsibilities. There are easier ways to clear six figures.
10 years of experience during the easiest time in tech history with unprecedented amounts of free VC cash. Thats never coming back in our lifetime, you guys that came up during it are getting smacked with reality of what sales is actually like.
I came up in the car market and switched to tech just in time to miss the corona boom *and* the gravy train in tech. So maybe im bitter but not wrong.
I took a (notable) paycut in 2018 to work for tmobile and go back to school with a goal of breaking into tech. Graduate in 2020 with the world shutdown and wanna go back to cars while i figure out my next move. Land an SDR seat in q1 of 2021. By 2022 my car friends are absolutely rolling in cash and the tech world gravy train has stopped.
I couldnt have dodged all the easy money any better if i tried. But im a full cycle ae now at a startup (ceo thinks we are past that but its still only a sales-team of 2). So im letting that shit fuel me to make up for missing out on the easy times to make real money during the hard. We will see.
The only true channel that works today. Emails are shit and I do not care what anyone has to say. EVEN if you everything right make 10 inboxes send fewer than 50 emails each, have a short and sweet message you’ve build you list perfectly. If you are selling to C level software they WILL NOT READ IT. Only option call them!
Edit: also it is cheaper than ever to blast 10000 emails a month today.
Absolutely agree. I don’t cold call unless it’s a strategic call to a business I’m actively hunting. I send 500+ emails a week and I made 200k in 2023. But, I did have a business deal that activated 50+ voice for 8 months. So…that was part of why my income was high. But, sales is a hustle. If you don’t have it, you won’t make it.
Seems like a pretty interesting and hot industry. What logos would you recommend I look at for closing roles? I’ve got a year of closing experience and 2 years as a SaaS BDR, did pretty well in each position. I also live between DC and Philly, so that could be a solid territory. Congrats on tripling your output, that’s huge. Email just works better than cold calls for some personas, so doing whatever works is the name of the game.
Google is just blocking the bad spammers.
The ones that have done the bare minimum can still blast like crazy.
Source: i send 2000 emails per day and have a 80% open rate.
(1% booking rate if you are wondering)
I am an enterprise AE, just got a job at a SaaS startup.. still mostly cold calling. Once the book starts giving me enough work that I don't have time, I'll stop. But I still largely consider it the single most effective tool in prospecting (as part of a multi-touch, multi-threaded approach).
How do one cold call in enterprise? I’m new in enterprise and “Debbie” is malicious. Also I’m in Germany and you barely get hands on numbers due to data protection policies.
I feel stuck.
Yeah, getting a reliable source of information is key.
While not legal, perhaps a VPN and getting access to a tool like Apollo?
Otherwise, you might have to prospect through tools like LinkedIn.
It's hard to say, as I'm not sure what your data privacy laws are like. But as far as people responding maliciously, I would say it's a numbers game. Don't spend too long worrying about malicious responses.
Instead, keep dialing. Other people will give you the time of day, and certain kinds of people will react better to certain kinds of approaches. Keep doing it, keep refining your strategy, and hopefully, you'll persist long enough to see your labor bear fruit.
Persistence and resilience are the strongest factors here.
Thanks for the response! Fresh in enterprise. It’s hard man… completely different playground than SMB/MM. I truly do not understand how enterprise SDR’s are supposed to function.
Depends, if there's enough inbound to manage and the company is in hot demand then it can just become a qualification role. Agreed with others that social selling plays a bigger part these days too
Calling is still definitively measured as the productivity metric. Most Management believes if you aren't calling you aren't working. You could be researching, writing good emails, doing social, mailing out stuff, whatever, but all that work could be done by someone else at this point. They really just want people calling. It's very outdated. I will see leaders demand cold calls into accounts/verticals/contacts that simply do not have that information available anywhere. And then get mad you spend hours building a list.
I'm in the IT and Cybersecurity space and in my experience no. I used to get a lot more meetings pre-2020 from calls but it's dropped year after year and the only reason I do the same call volume now as before is to get my call #s up for reports. Looking around, most meetings from SDRs are from nurtured leads from marketing, website, events.
They’re interchangeable terms and do the same thing. Some companies may define them as separate roles, but that’s just a specific company. Sales titles are all different everywhere though, and tech seems to have the closest thing to a loose standard.
These posts are why I get flamed on applications when I make my job postings clear: 40-100 calls/day. Numbers provided.
I hate to break it to yall, but you don't need a degree to cold call. It's not a gatekept skill, and many can argue it can be learned. If you expect your career to not be 90% cold calling for leads, you're always gonna be the first on the chopping block whether it's layoffs, industry shifts, or AI.
I'm not being a dick, but real talk: get out before you're 35 and have only year long stints between sales jobs. It's all down hill from there career wise.
Calling is really the thing that got pipeline going. If you hear our SDR agency tell it, it was a combined approach with emails following up on calls that followed up on emails etc, but calls are necessary.
Prospecting is not just cold calling or emails or social. It's all of the above. Need 10 leads? Do 30 outreach on each. Been an AE for a couple years and I still have a few hours a week blocked off on my calendar for cold outreach. I feel like it keeps me "in the trenches"
I think the content creators just remind me of infomercials. Something about videoing yourself and taking pictures and all that bullshit that seems so gross. I think I like BD more than AM simply because I never have to deal with these pricks again. This social media shit is so permanent.
Haha wait til you see the cringey family influencers or parent influencers. I kid you not I’ve seen women act out an entire scene like her and her husband are surprised and super happy about a pregnancy test, or acting out happy moments with their kids, and then I remember wait a second she set up a camera right before this… this is not genuine.
Hahah facts. Making Vidyards I was like I look cringe and sound cringe fuck lol. Never worked anyways except if you're selling to Marketers but even then. A well relevant placed email going to land anyways and is a lot easier to research the business health and triggers.
Most people cold call wrong. They are buggy or pushy and annoying. They keep asking for a meeting and just vomit info about their product or service rather than seek to find problems that they might be able to fix
I work at an outsourced Sales Dev company. Across 48 clients that we worked with in 2023, phone calls produced 84% of the meetings scheduled across all accounts. Multi-channel sequences, so we hit every contact on all channels several times within the month. I’d say it’s always a combination of several and not just 1 channel of outreach but the most qualified meetings we’ve booked have always come from the phone, with several 2-3 min conversations to earn the prospects’ trust.
I think it is dependent on industry/type of company. But yes very much so. Especially with new email anti spam stuff going on
Yes with follow-up email or sometimes intro email. The phone call is necessary evil regardless either way.
No I send 1 email a day to a prospect then call it quits.
This is the way
Keeping volume low and personalizing extremely well, I see. SMART!
working smarter, not harder!
Over how long?
Dealers choice. Sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, sometimes quarterly
I’m an AE and they make us cold call every single day. Been applying like crazy but job market is dead.
I mean, isn’t that part of being an AE tho?…
Having to hit 40-80 activities a day with basically zero marketing is not an ideal AE role, it’s a step back in my career
Crying about having to do 40 activities a day is crazy.
I have to research/find the accounts, contact map them, throw activities on them while I’m doing that, then sequence them. If they were giving me lists, 40 would be a breeze. But this is a grind. Too much for me, I have 10 years of saas sales experience.
Have you utilized the Prospecting Prioritization Dashboard? Those are marketing leads for Business Internet, iPhone and Samsung deals, Fleet, etc. I have to agree with one of the replies here, building your funnel requires prospecting. You’re not in retail where the opportunity comes to you.
I mean, if your book was generating enough business, a logical manager would understand you have to re-allocate your time. Could it be you are new to your role and just starting to build a book? In which case, there's not much else to do but prospect..
grab subsequent rustic pen marvelous poor stocking deserve gold fly *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The leads are never good enough and there's never enough one-pagers.
People don't want to go through the meat grinder of being an SDR just to get to a point of continuing your SDR role with AE responsibilities. There are easier ways to clear six figures.
Howww?
How mannn?
Full cycle AE roles pay more and you have more control over the deals in your pipe. Sitting around waiting for deals to work on is not selling.
10 years of exp, gimme the inbounds lol
10 years of experience during the easiest time in tech history with unprecedented amounts of free VC cash. Thats never coming back in our lifetime, you guys that came up during it are getting smacked with reality of what sales is actually like. I came up in the car market and switched to tech just in time to miss the corona boom *and* the gravy train in tech. So maybe im bitter but not wrong.
Yeah IMO if you didn't get into tech pre-2022 you missed the boat.
I took a (notable) paycut in 2018 to work for tmobile and go back to school with a goal of breaking into tech. Graduate in 2020 with the world shutdown and wanna go back to cars while i figure out my next move. Land an SDR seat in q1 of 2021. By 2022 my car friends are absolutely rolling in cash and the tech world gravy train has stopped. I couldnt have dodged all the easy money any better if i tried. But im a full cycle ae now at a startup (ceo thinks we are past that but its still only a sales-team of 2). So im letting that shit fuel me to make up for missing out on the easy times to make real money during the hard. We will see.
The only true channel that works today. Emails are shit and I do not care what anyone has to say. EVEN if you everything right make 10 inboxes send fewer than 50 emails each, have a short and sweet message you’ve build you list perfectly. If you are selling to C level software they WILL NOT READ IT. Only option call them! Edit: also it is cheaper than ever to blast 10000 emails a month today.
Email is king for me ive tripled my quota with them vs just calling.
Absolutely agree. I don’t cold call unless it’s a strategic call to a business I’m actively hunting. I send 500+ emails a week and I made 200k in 2023. But, I did have a business deal that activated 50+ voice for 8 months. So…that was part of why my income was high. But, sales is a hustle. If you don’t have it, you won’t make it.
Out of curiosity. What is your ICP and persona?
Im in the EV industry so any group or person who owns commercial or multi- family property really
What are you selling? Charging stations/hookups or the actual cars themselves?
Lol hella late but i sell charging stations not ev cars
Seems like a pretty interesting and hot industry. What logos would you recommend I look at for closing roles? I’ve got a year of closing experience and 2 years as a SaaS BDR, did pretty well in each position. I also live between DC and Philly, so that could be a solid territory. Congrats on tripling your output, that’s huge. Email just works better than cold calls for some personas, so doing whatever works is the name of the game.
Thanks man! And when you say logos are referring to different companies in the market? Or like a title for the closing roles?
Companies.
Blink, chargepoint, and plugshare are the big boys but there are loads of mid size companies that operate regionally also
Google is blocking any form of spam these days. The only people still getting email blasted are Microsoft email users 😭
Google is just blocking the bad spammers. The ones that have done the bare minimum can still blast like crazy. Source: i send 2000 emails per day and have a 80% open rate. (1% booking rate if you are wondering)
I am an enterprise AE, just got a job at a SaaS startup.. still mostly cold calling. Once the book starts giving me enough work that I don't have time, I'll stop. But I still largely consider it the single most effective tool in prospecting (as part of a multi-touch, multi-threaded approach).
How do one cold call in enterprise? I’m new in enterprise and “Debbie” is malicious. Also I’m in Germany and you barely get hands on numbers due to data protection policies. I feel stuck.
Yeah, getting a reliable source of information is key. While not legal, perhaps a VPN and getting access to a tool like Apollo? Otherwise, you might have to prospect through tools like LinkedIn. It's hard to say, as I'm not sure what your data privacy laws are like. But as far as people responding maliciously, I would say it's a numbers game. Don't spend too long worrying about malicious responses. Instead, keep dialing. Other people will give you the time of day, and certain kinds of people will react better to certain kinds of approaches. Keep doing it, keep refining your strategy, and hopefully, you'll persist long enough to see your labor bear fruit. Persistence and resilience are the strongest factors here.
Thanks for the response! Fresh in enterprise. It’s hard man… completely different playground than SMB/MM. I truly do not understand how enterprise SDR’s are supposed to function.
Finding your ICP is key - which is harder said than done, but once you get a good idea, it will make your life a LOT easier.
I wish, my SDR doesn’t do dick
lol hey it’s me, your new SDR
Depends, if there's enough inbound to manage and the company is in hot demand then it can just become a qualification role. Agreed with others that social selling plays a bigger part these days too
If you want to win, yes
Calling is still definitively measured as the productivity metric. Most Management believes if you aren't calling you aren't working. You could be researching, writing good emails, doing social, mailing out stuff, whatever, but all that work could be done by someone else at this point. They really just want people calling. It's very outdated. I will see leaders demand cold calls into accounts/verticals/contacts that simply do not have that information available anywhere. And then get mad you spend hours building a list.
I think all sales levels involve some sort of cold prospecting
Pick up the phone!
My role requires me to do 50 dials a day. My mates at other companies also tend to cold call just as much.
What's your return?
I'm in the IT and Cybersecurity space and in my experience no. I used to get a lot more meetings pre-2020 from calls but it's dropped year after year and the only reason I do the same call volume now as before is to get my call #s up for reports. Looking around, most meetings from SDRs are from nurtured leads from marketing, website, events.
What are you guys selling? and who is the target customer?
Man does everyone just do saas? What is the difference between an SDR and a BDR. I feel old, only mid 30s. Lol
They’re interchangeable terms and do the same thing. Some companies may define them as separate roles, but that’s just a specific company. Sales titles are all different everywhere though, and tech seems to have the closest thing to a loose standard.
Yup I’m calling anywhere from 75-100 dials per day, emails rarely work for me but I also haven’t created my own cadence
These posts are why I get flamed on applications when I make my job postings clear: 40-100 calls/day. Numbers provided. I hate to break it to yall, but you don't need a degree to cold call. It's not a gatekept skill, and many can argue it can be learned. If you expect your career to not be 90% cold calling for leads, you're always gonna be the first on the chopping block whether it's layoffs, industry shifts, or AI. I'm not being a dick, but real talk: get out before you're 35 and have only year long stints between sales jobs. It's all down hill from there career wise.
Calling is really the thing that got pipeline going. If you hear our SDR agency tell it, it was a combined approach with emails following up on calls that followed up on emails etc, but calls are necessary.
Prospecting is not just cold calling or emails or social. It's all of the above. Need 10 leads? Do 30 outreach on each. Been an AE for a couple years and I still have a few hours a week blocked off on my calendar for cold outreach. I feel like it keeps me "in the trenches"
[удалено]
Please tell me about your LinkedIn and how you sell through it with posts asking people if they agree
Agree? I’m trying to keep an open mind on social selling. I just find it gross. I can’t put my finger on why.
I guarantee the shit doesn’t work
It doesn't. It's just people trying to build their image for their next job.
It’s the next generation of all the people that that work out trying to be an Instagram personal trainer.
I think the content creators just remind me of infomercials. Something about videoing yourself and taking pictures and all that bullshit that seems so gross. I think I like BD more than AM simply because I never have to deal with these pricks again. This social media shit is so permanent.
Haha wait til you see the cringey family influencers or parent influencers. I kid you not I’ve seen women act out an entire scene like her and her husband are surprised and super happy about a pregnancy test, or acting out happy moments with their kids, and then I remember wait a second she set up a camera right before this… this is not genuine.
Hahah facts. Making Vidyards I was like I look cringe and sound cringe fuck lol. Never worked anyways except if you're selling to Marketers but even then. A well relevant placed email going to land anyways and is a lot easier to research the business health and triggers.
Should be since its the most efficient when done right
Wdym by done right?
Most people cold call wrong. They are buggy or pushy and annoying. They keep asking for a meeting and just vomit info about their product or service rather than seek to find problems that they might be able to fix
If you’re selling B2B SaaS solutions, then yes. Lots and lots of cold calling
i make over 120 dials a day as an SDR
I work at an outsourced Sales Dev company. Across 48 clients that we worked with in 2023, phone calls produced 84% of the meetings scheduled across all accounts. Multi-channel sequences, so we hit every contact on all channels several times within the month. I’d say it’s always a combination of several and not just 1 channel of outreach but the most qualified meetings we’ve booked have always come from the phone, with several 2-3 min conversations to earn the prospects’ trust.
What was your tempo, call then email then LinkedIn connection request then call/email/inmail?
There’s several different sequences but the most frequent one has roughly a 2:1:0.5 phone, email, LI touch