BDM/SDR "Guide"

Hi savages,

I am not very active here, but I thought it would make sense to post a little BDM guide for people who work in the enterprise space, given that I have worked as a BD for the last two years before making the jump into a closing role there might be some advice that could help someone out there.

I know that a lot here want to jump into an AE position as soon as possible and believe that the tedious BDM/SDR life will be over.....well let me tell you that life will only get more complex once you are an AE / Sales Manager and that you will have to create a pipeline for the rest of your life since the pipeline can never be big enough.

So what is my structure that allows me to create "consistently" a pipeline?

ICP / Account selection

I would advise you to start researching your ICP to understand what they do daily, their pains, current industry trends, etc., to understand how your product fits in and create value for them. Usually, that is what you will learn once you join the company.

Now the next step, and the most important one, is to figure out what sales triggers are out there in the market. A sales trigger can be defined as any event that could create an opening for contact with a prospect. In my job, there were a couple of things:

Triggers

• Job advertisement => Great way to learn about their software landscape, the direction the company wants to go, the job responsibilities etc. often, they also mention initiatives and projects that could be interesting for you.

• Company news => Funding round, winning an award/deal, publishing quarterly results etc. => gives you also insights into the company and is often a great way to learn what priorities they currently have.

• Job changes => New Head of XXX joining the company or someone getting a promotion => Often leads to change and could be a way for you to present your solution and get your foot in the door.

• Attending events conferences => Often, you can see what events your prospects attend on LinkedIn, or you can attend physical ones and get a list of all the participants, which can be used to approach them.

• LinkedIn posts => There are also some (few) prospects that are active on LinkedIn or other Social networks and post about current or relevant stuff for the company. In some rare cases, this can be used to start a conversation.

Now your next step is to figure out which accounts you want to target. In most cases, your AE should give you a list of those companies and then you would only have to screen them for those triggers, which can easily be done via LinkedIn, at least for job openings and Job changes. There are also websites that you can use to look for company news, like Google news etc.

If you don't get a list, I would advise you to look at your current customers, figure out their commonalities, and build a target list of companies that resemble those customers to be on the safe side (assuming you already established product market fit etc.).

Now that you have your target list and an understanding of the trigger, your next step is to approach those companies. How do you do that?

There are a lot of ways, and I believe that it's important to do this in a very structured and time-efficient way. Hence what I did was put together an outreach cadence with various different steps that I would follow for 2-3 weeks per Account.

To do so, I would batch my accounts together into several groups consisting of companies that were in the same industry or had the same problem that I could solve. After that, I would approach them in the following way:

Cadence

Week 1 - Steps:

Monday

1. Call them
2. Send them a mail
3. Send Connection Request via LinkedIn

Wednesday

1. Call them
2. Send them mail #2
3. If they accept my LI-Request send them a video or voice recording

Friday

1. Call them
2. Send them mail #3
3. If they accepted my LI-Request and did not reply to my message, I would try to bump my message up (send smth. relevant or even a meme if they seem to be chill)

Week 2 - Steps:

Tuesday

1. Call them
2. Send them mail #3

Friday

1. Call them
2. Send them mail #4 => "Breakup" Mail

In total, you would have 13 steps.

This is the structure, but how do you actually do it?

I am going to explain every part here according to the different channels (mail, phone, LinkedIn).

Phone

The phone is the most important weapon out there that you have. I know it is scary to call people, and I still have a specific call reluctance, but call them and try your best. Worst case, they say no, and that is it...in other countries, they have to dig in mines all day long to buy food. Hence calling can't be that bad. Alright, so how do you do it?

I get their number via a tool, most likely ZoomInfo, Lusha. Then I prepare myself before calling by looking at their LinkedIn profile, remembering their problem and the trigger, and how we can potentially help them.

Script:

Rrrring riiing

---

Prospect: Hi

Me: Hi XXX, here is XXX with COMPANY! Hello!......wait until he replies

Prospects: Ahhhh ok..hello XXX. (give him time to process your name)

---

Me: XXX I am calling you out of the blue because I saw TRIGGER (hired someone etc. - see above) and are looking into THEIR GOALS (that they shared somewhere - see above) and was curious whether, in this regard, you are also potentially looking into XXXX (what your solution can do)?

Prospect: Either yes or no

If yes: Take it from there and try to position yourself in the right way to get the meeting. This entirely depends on your product.

If no: No worries, I totally understand. Out of curiosity, do you believe this topic could become relevant in the next 1-2 years, given your GOAL/INITIATIVE?

----

If still no and they are happy: Great, move on to the next one. No need to waste time here. You need to know whether it can become a topic or not. If not, then you most likely have enough other contacts/accounts to approach, or you can call him again later before investing a ton of time.

Noteworthy is also your tonality. I would advise you to speak like you normally do or adjust your tone slightly to the tonality of your prospect. Being an overly joyous seller on the phone will often annoy people straightaway. As always, try a lot of different scripts but always lead with your research to show that you did your homework and that your not just calling like every other seller who is just calling a number on an endless excel sheet.

Mail

The second most powerful weapon is your mail. Overall what I can advise you is the following: Your mail should be between 50 - 100 words, the subject line between 1-2 words and the mail should follow the following structure:

----

Mail 1:

Subject line: 1-2 words (something that you would click on => hence not sales the more boring the better.

Hi XXX,

TRIGGER / FINDING (saw that you.....)

HOW TRIGGER RELATES TO A PROBLEM (Companies who are doing the same often have X/Y problems)

HOW YOU CAN SOLVE PROBLEM (Short and sweet maybe with sweet name-dropping)

CTA (Call to Action in an interest-based way => could this be of interest to your team?)

-----

This is the structure I always use for the first mail and is the only one I individualise. The other emails are often the followings.

Mail 2. => Reiteration where I outline the solution a bit more short and simple with a use case that I mentioned in the first mail (no PDF, just an outline of what problem they had and how they overcame it)

Mail 3. => I often just send here any thoughts?

Mail 4 => Mail where I convey that I understand that they are getting spammed daily and that I don't want to add to that. If they could send me a 1 (no interest),2 (currently too busy, I will get back to you), and 3 (I am interested) that would help me tremendously in furthering the discussion in the desired way.

This is obviously just a small recap; you always have to test and adjust your cadence to maximise your results and get the most out of it. You should follow Will Alred on LinkedIn. He posts a lot of very good value about this.

What you can also use is videos or personalised pictures in your email to stand out from the crowd and gain their attention. However, I would only do this for my A customer by using Vidyard.

Also an important part of your mail outreach is the timining. Make sure that your mails arrive between 6-7.30am, 12-1pm, or 4-5pm as those are the time slots when people come to work, return from lunch are done with all their meetings for the day ans then start skimming through their mails.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a powerful tool for looking for prospects and getting in touch with them. What I usually do is the following thing:

After my first mail, I sent them the following request: Hey XX, just sent you a mail regarding your TRIGGER. Wanted to give the name a face and wish you a great day. Kind regards :)!

This often works in my case around 30-40% as it is non-salesy and comes across as genuine. Furthermore, it allows me to pick up the conversation immediately because they already know why we connected.

Once accepted, I often send a video via the app where I just film myself thanking them for accepting the message and telling them that I would love to earn the right to speak with him down the line about topic XYZ. Often with a little joke at the end.

This humanises me and shows them that I care about them because I invested a little bit of time by myself and did not just spam them with some dumb shit.

So what are your numbers?

With this approach, I got an overall response rate of 30%. The total meetings booked then entirely depends on the industry that I am targeting. Sometimes, I would book almost 20% of those that text me back, hence 6 out of 100 or, in some cases, just 1-2 people out of 100 (hence around 3-5%).

With tools like LeadIQ, ZoomInfo, LinkedIn and Lemlist, I was able to automate almost all of those things that I mentioned above and get in touch with 100 contacts a week and book at least 1-2 meetings a week, which helped me to build a pipeline and advance my career.

Again there were also weeks where I booked 0 and some weeks where I booked way more. The numbers are not what matters, but you have an efficient approach and constantly improve it to get where you need to be.

I hope this post helps someone out there, and I wish you a successful hunt!