Predictable Prospecting
Benefits and Challenges of Separating Roles on the Sales Team
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Episode Highlights:
- Challenges with having more aware buyers
- Passing the baton from top of funnel, to sales, to close
- Working through the four categories of authority
- SDRs and BDRs
- The evolution of the 15 minute call
- How many opportunities can you really generate?
- Planning, testing, and executing
- Doing every role versus following a separation model: Pleasant’s experience
- Training and roleplaying
- Challenges, tips, and tricks to separating roles
Resources: Outreach.io Connect with Pleasant on Linkedin
Episode Transcript
Marylou: When I started working, there was no internet, there were no cellphones. When I was in sales, we were the trusted adviser because there was no way to get information really out in the world. We were the provider of information. Transitioning from that to where now the buyer is in control, just as if they know what they’re looking for. It’s a tougher world out there so I get it.I’m very interested in speaking with people like you specially from the standpoint of you’re the recipient of the work that I specialize in which is the top of funnel. It’s getting you a qualified op and how you take it from there. That’s why I’m really excited about you joining this call today. I think there is a lot of misinformation coming around about you guys and what you get. Pleasant: Do you feel that there is much more of a challenge with having more aware buyers? Marylou: I think there is two problems. One is, people are assuming that buyers know what to look for. In that sense, no, it’s the same it was when I was selling because buyers really don’t know. In a lot of cases, the why behind something is good for them to do. Why change? I think that is still the same. I think what happens though is you probably spend more time on teaching them of misnomers, of bad information, of implied sense of knowing about something because of what they research. There’s probably a lot more need to negotiate now than there was perhaps when I was in sales. Does that makes sense? Pleasant: Yeah, it completely does. I can see that we have the kind of sale and negotiations always comes in because when they’re doing apples to apples comparison, that’s the whole problem is that they do the research, they do an apple to apple comparison. Half the time, they’re not comparing apples to apples, they’re two different completely different things, completely structured or motivation for what they are trying to do and thinking of they can do more in something in. You have to work all around that just to get them in the right mindset to even begin in negotiation. Marylou: That’s right. That piece we really didn’t have to finesse when I was in sales because it was more about building rapport and trust. The buyer had to put a lot more trust in us that we knew what was best for them. Whereas now there is a level of trust still yes, but there’s also the having to back up like, “Let’s back up to this.” There’s a lot more of undoing, a lot more psychology that you have to deploy. That’s the sales professional I think in understanding the behavior a lot more earlier up in the cycle, earlier up in the pipeline. The other thing is there is also unfortunate incident of this whole thing is, there’s a teaching out there that buyers are of hire awareness, not only the apples to orange but that they know a lot more about things. I think we give them too much credit because sometimes they just don’t know what they don’t know. Pleasant: Right, I agree with that too and you within the specific industry, especially if you’re a salesperson that’s selling to different industries. There are some that are so much farther along than others and it’s poorly different sales from one vertical to another. Marylou: Yeah. I think it’s good to hear from the professionals that have the baton passed to them and that’s why I asked you to share with us your experiences as being the recipient of that baton because I talked about everything you need to do to prepare to pass the baton. Now that the baton is passed, what experiences have you encountered in trying to get that thing to close one? Pleasant: I think there’s a big challenge with that baton passing I think it resonate that when we talked before, I was thinking about this. There’s a whole line being drawn of when does it get passed, what qualifies to that being that passed from that top of the funnel into a sales person. I think that’s going to be different for every industry but I think the challenge is understanding the level of the SDRs or the CDRs and the people that are actually passing those leads over. Understanding and trusting them to be able to deliver valuable content or qualify really well. Marylou: Right. Pleasant: I’ve seen it both ways even within our own organization. It’s really easy to pass the baton with certain team members because you can trust their qualification skill level of knowledge that they have that’s truly qualified. You can pass it later on in the cycle if you want to immediately grab it. Marylou: Yeah, like when I was in the BDR role, we called them Business Developers in my world. This is pre predictable Revenue. I fed three account executive like yourself and we did a BANT process, Budget, Authority, Need, Timing. There were two AE’s who wanted me to quantify the budget to the point where they wouldn’t touch it if there wasn’t substantial reason for them to go after a lead that might be able to get budget. Then I had another AE that said, “Don’t even bother with budget, Marylou, because I will be able to help them find money.” She was more confident in her ability to create a sense of urgency around putting this product or service in and she was confident that the organization would find the money because they would see the value. To what you just said, it really depends on the STRs capability. It also depends on who the STR is passing the baton to and what they’re willing to take. But then overlaying that are the sales manager’s desires of what he wants to see in order to be able to forecast that opportunity as a high percentage, low percentage, medium percentage, however they do that. A lot of times what I see is we work through a BANT or ANUM authority need or money, whatever. We decide based on the product we’re selling, there maybe three or four products too that were selling as a BDR or SDR. What we do is we create a matrix of, “Okay, here’s the four categories of authority. There is need and sense of urgency. There is timing or time frame, or somewhere in the initiative, is the initiative is going to be sometime this year or whatever.” Then there is this budget money, can I find it column. What we do is we create a matrix saying for this product, here is what we’re going to attempt to get as an SDR and for the next product it may be beefier. Why we need to know that is because we want to be able to understand the talk time of how much conversation we need to have at top of funnel in order to get from initial conversation to a qualified opportunity. Why we want to know that is because that determines our pipeline velocity. Then, once we give it to the account executive like you, Pleasant, then what your job is to do within a certain period of time 24, 48 hours, 72 hours, decide if that lead is of quality to take it the rest of the way. Meaning that you’re putting your stamp of approval on it and you’re going to accept it. We have an actual metric that we track and as part of our matrix to look at sales qualified leads and then sales accepted leads from the AE. We strive for 90% or higher ratio of for every ten leads I send Pleasant, she’ll accept nine at least. That’s the goal. Then what happens is once you accept then we analyze it and say, “Okay, the AEs are accepting these types of leads. Here’s how far we got into the qualification process.” Then we start training the SDR saying, “Look, everybody has to get at least this minimum.” Pleasant: With your SDRs, you were calling them BDRs before, correct? Marylou: Yeah. Pleasant: I think that’s a difference and there has become this vision with BDRs and SDRs and how people are saying that. I see a lot more of like for example our SDRs, they’re not doing a lot of deep discovery, qualification. Their whole goal is to get a meeting set for their AE and then the AE’s baton to pass it on to take it to do the discovery simply because for us we look at the SDR, their KPIs are around getting meetings that are getting those conversations started with the AEs. The AEs know to do a deep guide discovery and are able to discover those piece of information. We have certain qualification things, specific pieces that they have to have, tools that they have to have. They have to be a user of SalesForce, simple things like that. We know that if we don’t have those in place, they’re not going to be successful. Our SDRs don’t really do a huge escape level of discovery with the prospects. Their whole first call, their first goal is, “Let me set up an introductory meeting,” and they bring on the AEs for that initial meeting. Marylou: Okay. Pleasant: We also have a BDR though with our more enterprise teams. The big start there will actually do more discovery qualification for the prospects and they’re working to lead further into the funnel enclosure to the pipeline before they’re passing it off. Marylou: Interesting. A lot of people don’t remember this but the Predictable Revenue book released in 2011 talked about a three hour 15 process. By definition in today’s world, that three hour 15 process is describing the BDR role, not the SDR role, which is kind of interesting. Really what it boiled down to is a 15 minute AWAF call which is the are we a fit, for you we were talking about they had to have SalesForce. It’s your top level qualifiers that if they don’t have these three things, then it’s not worth the time to even go through a qualification process because the AE is not going to be able to convert that very easily, Then once we do the 15 minute call of the three 15, the hour was to actually do maybe a little bit of a demo or discovery call with one of the decision makers, followed by a two hour call with the team. The decision maker and his indirect influencers. By definition, you’re doing a lot more discovery and that role is the role that was describe in Predictable Revenue as an SDR role. Since then, we’ve discovered and learned that companies like Outreach like your company are actually creating tiers of accounts that have certain levels of priority. People who were doing the business development in those different tiers are called different things. You have SDRs that maybe just do the 15 minute AWAF call and set the meeting and then the AE is responsible to take it the rest of the way. Then you have BDRs, Business Development Reps, or ADRs, Account Development Reps, that actually go through the discovery process and actually meet with the team, and the AE comes in on that last call to take the baton. Pleasant: Yeah, I actually think just from my background which thinking about education, and teaching, and even from going from being a sale reps, from inside AE, and it seems like that’s a process that’s working really because you can have a very strategic processes in place that are perfected on. It made them really well, our SDRs, I was with our SDRs yesterday and the day before and they are so good on the phone.When they get people on the phone, they have perfected their methodology of their research, of their initial introductions of getting people to elicit those responses of, “Yeah, let’s get on a call.” They are so good with it. I even know it myself, if I were to do that I would be very inefficient because I would go to my notes and I’ll be re-practicing my things and it makes it to where we can chunk it down into those specialized role and compensate well for them whether it’s very top of the funnel or closing the deals. It makes it to being much more fluid motion when moving people through the sales cycle. Marylou: Yeah but like anything, the more that you push on the AE in this SDR AE combo where they’re getting the meetings and the AE is taking it the rest of the way. If you have a very complex sale, that’s going to bug down the AE at some point. They won’t be able to take that many opportunities per month. That’s why I was able to feed three as a BDR because our average deal size was 150,000 and up and it was a recurring revenue. It wasn’t a SAAS offering, it was a service offering. But because I needed to only generate eight opportunities a month for three AEs because that’s all they could work, the sales cycles were longer. When you’re starting to think about what Pleasant and I are talking about with this SDR role splitting or the Business Development role splitting is thinking through the talk time or conversation time. Sales conversation time is a good parameter to call it of how long they are going to be working with a prospect before the handoff takes place. By definition and the math, if the SDR is set to create meetings, then their talk times are shorter which means they should be able to generate more of those meetings per month. If they are going through the qualification process and only handing off to the AE after there is this two hour discovery/common vision meeting, whatever you want to call it, they’re not going to be able to generate as many of those per month. That’s another consideration when you’re working on how many opportunities can we actually generate. The talk time or sales conversation time is a big factor in that. Pleasant: Absolutely. We did experience some of exactly what you’re talking about. Several months ago, we transitioned and we tested out that methodology of how do we want our AEs to work and our SDRs to work? We actually tried. We’ve always consistently done, SDRs are setting the qualification in which assets to be take in. We transitioned it to more the SDRs are gonna do more of the research on the account. They’re going to be doing the qualification calls and they’re going to be pushing the meetings up today when they’re actually qualified and they’ve talked more and done that initial discovery. Now what we found for our business was that we were not generating enough meetings. We saw a huge dip because for us we need more meetings on the calendar with our AEs working them because our deal cycles are a little bit more accelerated. That was what we needed from the SDR once they get a product to that level. Marylou: For those of you listening to this, testing is a big component of this because you may go in thinking this is the perfect structure, this is the perfect handoff methodology that would work with our product or service. Planning is always very important, but when you start executing like Pleasant was saying, they had metrics that they knew they didn’t meet certain numbers that they were going to be suffering as the opportunity moved further into the active pipeline. They essentially course corrected. Would that be fair to say? They course corrected and went to a more hybrid model where the SDRs is not necessarily diving into the active pipeline as deeply. Pleasant: Absolutely, absolutely. Very quickly,we start to think projected numbers. Very quickly. Marylou: Okay. Tell us what have been the experience? A lot people are, they’re embracing separation of roles, some people are, “Oh wow that’s tough to be able to pull a new role into my company that’s just as business development.” Not everybody is ready for that. What have your experiences been? Have you done all roles in a prior life? What is the difference between you doing everything like a solo entrepreneur who has the prospect, close, and service versus the separated model where you’re focusing mostly on closing? Tell us about what your experience has been. Pleasant: I have done all of the roles. My very first sales role was doing everything from prospecting to closing, even implementing the product solution for the different client. I was in a little bit of everything and each position has been a little bit different. I think worst thing to trend where this is something even with our larger companies that have been more established traditionally, maybe they’re farmers, and they’re more order takers, they had their sales pick that are doing a little bit of everything to be part of more strategic territories which mean a big shift in this division of role. I think people are really starting to take notice of the data when it comes to getting sales acceleration tools. Everyone is getting those types of things, having more meetings and getting more into the pipeline and it is so competitive. I think that we’re seeing a lot more companies start to breakaway and get specific people to do the meeting setting, the prospecting and try to implement the pipeline while they’re getting the sales team member focus more on closing. I personally found it to be a challenge doing everything within the role. Salespeople love to close and we love to put out fires and we love to hop on the things that are in front of us. There’s a very low percentage of salespeople that are very targeted in what they do within their prospecting, part of the day they’re doing. There’s a very low percentage of people that are actually very strategic with how they plan their days out to make sure that their pipelines are constantly filled. That’s where you can see that up and down wave. We see that all the time and I think that’s the challenge, it’s being able to joggle. Multitasking is common place in every company but it’s never the most effective thing to do. Like I said, I found that a personal challenge. I would be on the road a lot especially with sales reps. We see a lot of companies that still have field rats that are very responsible for dealing their pipeline. It becomes a great challenge because they’re going to client meetings, especially when you’re in geographic territories. You’re typically more in front of people if it is in outside road or more in front of people on the road doing meetings and more complex field. It becomes a challenge when it comes to pipeline filling and that’s where you see most people lagging behind, is the pipeline going to sufficiently meet the expectation of their quota? Marylou: Right. I think a lot of it is the juggling the fact that people are horrible at multitasking. As humans, we’re just really not good at it. Very few people can do it well. The other thing is from a psychology point of view and habit point of view, we’re kind of wired to do certain roles anyway. I am definitely a business developer at heart because I liken it to duty dating. I love to date. Just so everybody knows, I’ve been married forever. I’m 59, I’ve been married. I’ve married my college sweetheart so I have a longevity there. But from the standpoint of working with prospects and things, I definitely like to have conversations and start conversations and then love them and leave them to the AEs and go on to the next one. Whereas Pleasant is probably the kind of person who loves the engagement, who loves getting engaged and going the rest of the way with getting married, having kids, the whole thing. I think a lot of it is we have to really look at who we are as people. For asking a salesperson to do all the roles is extremely difficult. To do them all well and to do them all consistently so that you can scale your business if that’s what you want to do. The first opportunity you have to separate the sales roles is when you should go for it. I agree with you, Pleasant. Pleasant: I’ll give you another couple of examples too is one of the big terms that we hear a lot is repeatability. How do you repeat it and scale it? When you have sales teams that are doing from start to close, the end to end prospecting and closing, it is almost near impossible to repeat a process. Almost all of them are individual because their days are so broken up by all different kinds of things that they’re putting out. They’re doing meetings, they’re doing this, they’re doing this, to actually put that into a process and to even train. Here’s how you can bring on new people, here’s how you’re going to do this. Everything from start to finish is an exhaustive list. I was thinking about, I always bring myself back to teaching because that’s my root. I taught for four years, I taught it in middle school and I taught history. I was the 2nd highest scoring in the division, in the district with our scores. Everybody’s score based and I love data and I’m pretty competitive so I was very excited about it. I was second only to the teacher that taught all gifted courses within the district though. I was very good at my craft, very good, high scoring kids because I taught them really well and always had wonderful years. I took a year off and I went back into teaching after a year off and the position that I took was a 5th grade teaching position and it was every single subject. Marylou: Wow. Pleasant: My day changed and my outlook on teaching actually completely shifted just by making that change in elementary education because I now had to plan, instead of four, one subject with modification for three different classes. I was planning for seven subjects include all that spelling and all that seven different lessons I had subject for all of my different learners that were within one classroom. I was really good at planning history but I was really terrible at the new math standard, really, really terrible. I say this quite honestly, I felt like I did a disservice to the kids that year because I just was not a skilled math teacher nor was I a skilled basic reading teacher either. Those were my biggest areas of weakness and I struggled all year long with those and I was constantly having to work after hours to figure out how to get these lesson plans structured to be effective. It was a really rough year for me. Marylou: Right. Pleasant: I always think about it within sales too because people love certain aspects. I do love the close. I love taking those close skills and going through with them and I’m very good at them. When it comes to the other parts of it, your heart’s not necessarily in it. I think when you have those specialized roles, you can find people that fit really well that excel in those positions and nurture them, help them in lesson, be coaches to others that are coming on. You’re going to see a much higher success. Marylou: Like you said, the top of funnel is more of a numbers portion of the framework of the pipeline because we’re dealing with hundreds and thousands of contact records. We’re squeezing those into accounts and people who want to continue conversation with us. We have a lot of numbers to help us get to where we want to go and we also have the ability to leverage technology to get us there faster with more quality. I think a lot of times, if you’re the type of person like I am who is more numbers driven and process driven, you enjoy this constant habit of getting up everyday, looking at your numbers, knowing that you’re going to have a two hour block time of phone calls, and looking forward to that, looking forward to all those conversations because you’re dwindling, you’re trying to get people out of your active pipeline as fast as possible. I find that very challenging whereas some people would prefer to take an opportunity where you’re building rapport, you’re building that relationship in a deep way and guiding them towards a purchase decision that’s going to help their career. That’s a very different way of looking a things. I think the biggest news coming out of all these books that I’ve been fortunate to be a part of is that we need to respect the fact that salespeople should have separate roles and let the person really excel at that role and dive into it deeply with continual education. I think that’s one of the things where I know people when they hear the term sales trainers, a lot of these companies just their eyes glaze over but we definitely see an improvement the longer that people practice. I remember speaking with Mark who’s your counterpart over as a sales director over there. What they do is when they’re getting ready for this block time which is this two hour or so, hour and a half, whatever it is of call time, they kind of warm up the voice by roleplaying. They’re training how many times a week now? Is it every time they do block time that they’re training people? Pleasant: Yeah. Marylou: It’s a constant training and I think the beauty of what you guys are doing over there is that you not only train on the voice side but you’re training on the writing side. They write emails together as a team. They critique them. Everybody’s just getting better and better and better. It also means that the pipeline velocity is getting faster and faster and the lag is shrinking. That’s really what we want because we take those metrics along the active pipeline and work really hard to get a formula for Predictable Revenue which is the goal. Especially if you want to scale your business, it’s definitely where we’re working towards and separating the roles is a big way to get there. What else Pleasant do you think that our audience would want to know or that you can share with them as things you’ve learned, mistakes you’ve made or things that you’ve discovered along the way that would be helpful for people who are considering the separation? Pleasant: I think that one of the challenges that we have with the separation of role is the misconception and the de-valuing of specific roles within the sales organization. There are typically SDR are the de-glorified position. When people get calls from SDRs, it’s all of this is just the lower person on the caller. There are those misconceptions and we see those all the time that they’re not highly valued. We really strive and we’ve seen some companies that do this really, really well. You literally have career SDRs or ADMs or BDRs, whatever you want to call them, simply because they are really positioned as a high commodity within the organization because they are the first line of contact for those new accounts and new divisions that you’re trying to get into. They’re going to be that first point of contact and your very first phase of the company. It’s really important when you are separating the roles because this is a highly valued position. I know conversation is a big deal, it’s always a faux pas to talk about but that’s an important piece to it. It’s making sure that those meetings are valuable. That to the SDRs or to the BDRs, whoever you’re passing it to, to make sure they know this is the valuable thing that we take seriously and we want you to get us and pass us the things that our sales team can work because we’ll treat you well for that. I think that’s a very important thing to keep in mind with the separation. Marylou: I remember going back to my BDR days, I changed my title to Chief Conversation Starter because essentially that’s what I was, the chief of starting conversations. Pleasant: I love that title. Marylou: It’s funny because I’ve seen some people since I wrote Predictable Revenue, I think I mentioned it in the book and I see some people when I get emails that use that term or Chief Door Opener. It’s good, it really is a difficult role and it’s one that should be embraced as part of the team just like when you’re running a relay. Every leg of the relay is important, it’s not just coming home. It’s starting. I think if we look at a relay team and think of ourselves as members of that team, each one has a very important role in making sure that the prospect is taken care of from beginning all the way to end and then beyond when they become a client, definitely. Pleasant: I think another important thing with what you just said with the prospect taken care from the beginning to end. I think it’s a very important exercise to take a look at how the prospect is taken care of when they are being passed on. One of the risks that you have with the separations of roles is the number of contacts and then points of contacts that that person has to go through throughout their sales cycle. It can get a little frustrating and overwhelming if it’s a really poor handoff between the different departments or the people within the sales team especially if you have, like for us we have a solution consultants and we have customer success manager that come on and sometimes we’re introducing security and then we’ve got our SDRs. There are multiple players, especially the more complex your sale becomes, the more people that are going to be brought into that conversation. Just keeping that in mind of really being able to smoothly the transition and to do it in a way that makes the clients feel like they are of value. I tell our team when they pass it over, I want the SDR on the first call with me. I want them to introduce and the way they always introduce is I really respect your time. I want to make sure that I bought on a person that has worked with a company just like you so that way we can make the most of our time. This is so and so who I’m bringing on for you and let’s start the conversation that way. I think it’s really important to think about that handoff because you can have a really poor handoff and leave the prospect very confused. Marylou: Yes, most definitely. I think the other thing is like you said you have to make it clear early on that you’re going to be taking them to a certain point. I used to actually kid people that you and I are going to go down a path together, down the road together, and then once we both think we’re ready I’m going to have you meet the rest of my family. Essentially the resources that we’re going to bring in in order to be able to understand the business requirements. Now granted, we had a very complex sale. We did just a lot of work in solution with solution consultants and things because we had to put together a plan. We would bring in resources as the opportunity rouse in priority on the forecast. We wanted to make sure that we weren’t wasting our internal resources as well but the clients, the prospects, knew the different levels of when people are coming in and why they’re coming in and how that’s going to benefit them and also help them to prepare because they needed to bring their people in, etc. etc. We made sure that each of those handoff points were well communicated. We gave them enough time to digest them but we also gave them that back door that they can get a hold of us in a pinch if they had difficulty in getting information or whatever. We always left a backdoor key for them if they needed to do that. Very rarely that they exercised utilizing that but they knew that we cared about them even though we’re now handing them off to the other family members. It was a good process, I really enjoyed it, I really enjoyed it a lot. Pleasant, we’re at the end of our call. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you sharing your expertise with our audience. I think what I really want the audience to understand is that separation of roles is a very flexible concept and it really depends on what you’re selling, how long it takes you to sell what you’re selling, and who’s involved in what you’re selling in order to figure out the path that’s going to work best for you. As Pleasant said before, you may go down the path and then change it only to realize that the change wasn’t effective. Embracing change, embracing testing, and pivoting if you need to are all very common things that happen when you separate roles. The last thing she said too is that the handoff is very important to keep the communication flowing to your prospects so they’re not confused. They’re not basically lost in where they are, where they should be, where they’re going. The communication has to be very, very intelligent and timely so that they know exactly what’s going to happen to them as they go through this process with you. Thanks again for your time, really appreciate you talking with me today. Pleasant: Thank you Marylou, it’s a pleasure.