Coffeesforclosers

Director Sales and Market Development

AE Prospecting

Does your company have AEs prospecting or only handling leads passed by SDR? Or mixture of both?

Mine currently has AEs prospecting and handling all SDR leads. However the AEs control the next stage or reject with no scrutiny until it hits pipe from management.

My last place the SDRs were the only source of leads for AEs and there was a rigorous qualify in or qualify out process of leads passed.

I think the rigorous process was better, what do you all have and do you like it or hate it?

AEs Prospecting

Attached poll

AEs do all their prospecting AEs only work SDR/Mktg leads passed AEs and Sdrs both prospect

*Voting in this poll no longer yields commission.

🔎 Prospecting

👑 Sales Strategy

🧢 Sales Management

20 comments

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rekled

Opinionated

Strategic Account Executive

I view it as a partnership where AEs provide strategy (targets / prospects to pursue) and SDRs carryout tactics (qualify / set discovery calls with targets / prospects). We meet weekly to review past week activities (that include any salesloft cadences), and discuss activities and targets for the following week.

For marketing qualified leads, we take a similar approach: AE identifies priority targets / pursuits and SDRs qualify / set meetings.

AE lead Discovery session(s) (SDR attendance is optional) then decides whether to create an opp.

Coffeesforclosers

Notable Contributor

Director Sales and Market Development

Does SDR get paid per opp or pr discovery call? Thanks for reply. Looks like a good partnership.

rekled

Opinionated

Strategic Account Executive

For the opp, they receive 5% of the close. For each set, they have a set amount of points they accrue (cold set pays higher than a warm set from an inbound lead like a website inquiry or collateral download).

Beans

Big Shot

Enterprise Account Executive

We're about an 80/20 split.

If you want to crush targets you can't rely solely on your BD's.

Coffeesforclosers

Notable Contributor

Director Sales and Market Development

Sad but true. Thanks

Salespreuner

Big Shot

Regional Sales Director

Hard truth

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

https://bravado.co/war-room/posts/do-your-bdr-s-do-a-short-demo-discovery-call-or-do-the-ae-s-take-it-right-away-once-booked?comment_id=30226

Some tidbits in there discussing SDR and AE roles.

Coffeesforclosers

Notable Contributor

Director Sales and Market Development

So you get nothing from the SDR, that's shitty. When/if you do, what do you have to do to reject that lead? Can you reject it with no management level meeting or email required?

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

I can mark it as invalid and then have the SDR mgr and the SDR up my ass even though my mgr told me to. Very sensitive. 🤷‍♀️

Coffeesforclosers

Notable Contributor

Director Sales and Market Development

I've had it both ways, and both ways fail. Hoping a shining knight rides into this thread with the silver bullet process that makes me sleep better. 💤

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

That or the ambien kicks in first 🤣

ARRyouReadyKids

Politicker

Enterprise Account Executive

Follow up Q:
How many dials/how much prospecting are your most successful AE's actually doing?

At my company, there's a huge push for prospecting because lead flow is lower than ever. Yet our most successful reps do the least prospecting YoY

Coffeesforclosers

Notable Contributor

Director Sales and Market Development

SDRs are 40 calls a day, AEs do what they can each day but we have a pipeline generation day once a week where all we do is prospect and expected to hit 60 calls

DizzyRascal

Opinionated

BizDev

All the best AEs and the AEs that are consistently top-performing are always doing some outreach/ prospecting themselves.

Salespreuner

Big Shot

Regional Sales Director

True that. Agree

MMMGood

Celebrated Contributor

Senior Account Executive

SDRs handle all marketing-generated leads and I work with mine to do focused/targeted outbound campaigns within my account list based on a variety of indicators across multiple platforms.

Likewise I also do my own personal prospecting that’s more network based as well as leveraging my channel partners and their relationships and networks. But I’m never to shy to cold outreach, I’d the situation warrants it.

Coffeesforclosers

Notable Contributor

Director Sales and Market Development

Yeah that's an ideal setup. Sdr partnership on ABM, you leveraging channels and field relationships, and SDr working all that ground and air cover. What about getting out of an sdr passed lead. Do you have to meet with management on it or can you reject as you see fit?

MMMGood

Celebrated Contributor

Senior Account Executive

If my SDR has “qualified” a lead and setup a call with the prospect I will almost always create the opportunity. Where I have discretion is the stage it’s set as: Sales Quailified or Discovery. Sales qualified essentially means they found the contact and qualified interest but it still needs some time to cook. Generally the SDR will maintain ownership of that contact and keep in contact til they’re ready to actually begin a technical evaluation or whatever. Discovery stage means, it’s ready to go and I take over. The SDR has main metrics for any Sales Qualifies ops and additional “bonuses” for getting them to Discovery. Those two stages represent 5-10% of the sales cycle.

Blackwargreymon

Politicker

MDR

If you want to crush targets you can't rely solely on your BD's.

OMG_It_has_a_watermark

Good Citizen

Head of Sales

This one always gets me and has been a constant problem in my org.

Unless your organization receives hundreds of inbounds that need to be qualified for sales, how would anyone expect one of the most junior roles to be solely responsible for generating an AE's pipeline?