Official thread

Bad Sales Advice? First Day Prospecting

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Once upon a time, in the land of sales, there was a new SDR named Timmy. After a month-long training, Timmy went live and hit the sales floor. On his first day of prospecting, he remembered what the sales enablement team told him - “Dial 100 calls and you’ll get success”.

And so, Timmy started dialing - 1..2..3.. A 100 dials! But nothing happened. The HR folks on the other side kept banging their phones on poor Timmy. His manager suggested that he should make more calls. A month went by. Timmy was discouraged and close to quitting. Then one night, he had a dream…

A wise and old sales wizard with a giant beard, and hair as black as Timmy’s pipeline, appeared. The wizard knew what was happening. He wrote something on a piece of paper, handed it over to Timmy, and vanished in thin air...

The next day, Timmy’s entire strategy had changed. Instead of mindless dials, he started his research, built a persona of the VPs of HR, and joined the War Room to learn more. By day's end, Timmy spoke to 6 HR folks from 30 dials and booked meetings with 3.

“Timmy. How did you manage to get 3 meetings in a single day?” asked his manager.

“I followed a strategy”. Said Timmy

“What strategy?”

Timmy took out the piece of paper on which were written a 3 words:

KNOW THY PROSPECT

And so, Timmy prospected happily ever after...

PS: Do check out other videos from Bad Sales Advice series:

🔎 Prospecting

18

19 comments

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ZVRK

Politicker

4

Enterprise Account Executive

Worst advice ever, always harmful. Here`s how it played out at my previous employer: new hires had to reach 3 hours of call time per day, what these guys and gals did (the new batch of sales reps was around 15), was they created a whaptsapp group where they exchanged, daily, lists of switchboard, customer service numbers with automated secretaries etc.. so they can all hit their "quota" for the day..

Eventually, they were found out and commission got ct etc... so, no winners there.

Set up irrelevant KPIs, you get fake performance..

Gasty

Notable Contributor

4

War Room Community Manager

I blame the SDR managers here. 99/100 are in the wrong role. Would do anything to show activity numbers on the dashboard. Ugh !

ThatNewAE

Big Shot

1

Account Executive - Mid enterprise

The JDs too are designed that way, unfortunately. So the SDR managers do not know that they are in the wrong role.

ZVRK

Politicker

0

Enterprise Account Executive

Yess, it’s like no one knows any better in some companies. Call time and number of email and your good, jeez…

Kosta_Konfucius

Politicker

3

Sales Rep

Worst advice given for prospecting is “Just up the dials” this solely causes burn out and hardly leads to more pipeline

Gasty

Notable Contributor

4

War Room Community Manager

Most dashboard managers peddle this as "strategy".

Kosta_Konfucius

Politicker

0

Sales Rep

Or just say is the part of the company value of “Grit”

TennisandSales

Politicker

0

Head Of Sales

“Dashboard managers” love it!

TennisandSales

Politicker

2

Head Of Sales

And this is why SOOOO many SDRs and SDR teams will fail going forward. It’s almost impossible for SDRs (the way it’s set up now) to become experts like Sahil mentions. And even if they DO, they have NO credibility because they are just 22 year old kids.

CuriousFox

WR Officer

0

🦊

Vicious cycle.

PapaRo

Fire Starter

2

President

So many managers/people forget that the one of the true foundations to successful calling is a good database of records. Just like the story shows. Support your SDR’s…either give them a quality database of ideal targets to call or include sourcing contacts in their KPI’s and adjust the call volume KPI to make it fair.

Gasty

Notable Contributor

3

War Room Community Manager

@PapaRo: When I was hired as an Outbound SDR, a wise wizard told me the magic formula which I followed religiously to become a top performer :

”say right things to the right people at the right time, that’s all what Outbound prospecting is about”

GDO

Politicker

1

BDM

yeah, volume as only input sucks!

antiASKHOLE

Tycoon

1

Bravado's Resident Asshole

It's silly when people think that is the only way to "do more"

GingerBarbarian

Opinionated

1

Lead Sales

Can we finally move away from KPI Factory managers who only care about number of dials rather than quality of conversation

ZVRK

Politicker

0

Enterprise Account Executive

This☝🏻 but how do achieve this..

1

Account Executive

The way I see it, a new SDR is not going to have the experience to identify the best prospects well. I think it is incumbent on the organization to either supply good prospects or have as much prepared in advance for the new SDR as possible. Of course, it's the job nobody wants to do, so it gets pushed down to the new guy, who's not qualified. And we wonder why so many sales organizations struggle and fail.

Pachacuti

Politicker

0

They call me Daddy, Sales Daddy

Very true.

celestine

0

accountant

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