DollarBill

Director of Sales - Financial Services

SaaS Startups -- What are Ent Account Execs doing to help their SDRs?

We have an institutional problem where SDRs are inflating their reported SQLs. We are getting maybe 1 SQL per BDR per month when you average it out.

What is the ratio of BDRs to AEs in your SaaS startups? Are the AEs educating the BDRs on messaging and giving direction on how to attack their territory?

Hoping to get some ideas here so we can better enable our team to bring in more outbound qualified leads to us.

Cheers, y'all.

$Bill

🔎 Prospecting

📳 SaaS

👨‍🌾 SDR

20 comments

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FinanceEngineer

Politicker

Sr Director, sales and partnerships

We have been doing training through our marketing team. The AE’s are on the training calls to help with the messaging. However, it is the BDRs job to get people on the phone for a meeting, and if they can’t do that, they need to change their script or their attack. I’m not sure how many calls/meetings the BDRs have, but just pump their top of funnel up to get to the end result.

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

I rarely hear from bdrs, but when I do it's mainly garbage.

Auracle

Executive

Enterprise Account Manager

How often do your BDRs hear from you?

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

When they reach out to me. We don't have certain ones assigned to us.

Auracle

Executive

Enterprise Account Manager

That’s a broken structure and is likely why you only get garbage.

Beans

Big Shot

Enterprise Account Executive

In Ent we're paired 2 AE's to 1 BD, same territory, we're working to get that to 1:1 but new talent is hard to both find and keep.

When it comes to punching Opps, we the paired AE's make the decision whether to accept or not, so you can't really fluff those, they need to be truly qualified.

I'm curious the process for counting an opp as qualified?

braintank

Politicker

Enterprise Account Executive

We're 1 SDR : 2 AEs at the moment. I did a lot of the heavy lifting for my SDR (researched contacts, wrote persona/industry specific messaging). Now I'm just waiting for fucking meetings!

Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

I've had many situations where I was 1:1 and 1:2 with BDRs. With assigned territories and heavy outbounding, we worked together on territory mapping, messaging, and dividing and conquering who would target which personas and with what message. In the past, my Enterprise BDRs were very well trained and competent, and so the "training" was having them shadow calls so they'd both know what next steps were in the process so they could manage prospect expectations and also get some insight into the AE role that most of them were ultimately going to transition into.

Currently working with some untrainable BDRs, so it's been a challenge. Marketing is in charge of them, but we were having them shadow us on initial calls, writing emails, messaging...I think none of it stuck, so I'll be very interested in what this year brings.

Diablo

Politicker

Sr. AE

We haven't used SDRs as of yet but just hired 2 for the Ent team 1:1. Lets see how it works.

NotCreativeEnough

Big Shot

Professional Day Ruiner

AE’s should pick some target accounts they want their SDR to hit and have weekly follow ups with both new target accounts and to see how the others are going. Get in a weekly cadence with your SDR to tell them the accounts you want them to be hitting the hardest

Upper_Class_SaaS

Politicker

Account Executive

Man, who is hiring these ppl lol 1 SQL a month 😂

AlexGG

Opinionated

Senior Enterprise AE

When I arrived at as a BDR at my current company our commission was mainly paid based on # of discovery calls booked as well as # of demos generated from the discos, which was problematic because :
1) it was easier for the mid-market/SMB BDRs to hit the targets which made that role sexier although the emphasis of the company at the time was Enterprise. This created a disconnect.
2) it was quantity over quality
I quickly became an AE and the BDs shifted to being incentivized based on the quality of the opportunity they bring to the table : basically if after the initial call I, as the AE, decide that it is indeed an op worth pursuing, I’d change the status in Salesforce and only then the BD would get paid.
As far as collaboration goes, I try to keep it as tight as possible with a structured weekly sync and very regular interactions over the phone or Slack. Happy for them to take part in all my sales calls, which is beneficial. We segment and target the portfolio together, work on messaging but I do like them to have a good level of autonomy as well.
I don’t usually take a disco call if the opportunity hasn’t been pre-qualified properly, and there is no incentive for the BD to waste time pushing calls that don’t have a chance of going anywhere so it’s a win-win structure.

DollarBill

Executive

Director of Sales - Financial Services

So we’re all in agreement then…. Unfortunately…

SalesBeast

Politicker

Sales Director

Auracle

Executive

Enterprise Account Manager

I’m a Large Enterprise ADR and support three Account Directors.

I sourced a deal that closed for $250k in Q3 that pushed one of them into accelerators and helped him get to President’s Club.

I sourced a separate deal for the same AE in Q4 that is in procurement and is closing for half of his $MM annual quota in Q1.

I’ve been in the trenches a long time and have no problem telling an AE to go fuck themselves and build their own pipeline if they think I work for them and not with them.

I get the vibe you’re the type of AE I’d have no problem leaving high and dry since you also seem to think ABM is a waste which would be a red flag if I were your VP.

Do you sell widgets or actual software?

Auracle

Executive

Enterprise Account Manager

You’re not wrong re: some SDR Managers not knowing what they’re doing, which is a huge contributing factor to the friction that can happen between SDR and AE.

That said, everything else you said is most certainly wrong and I’ll gladly tell you why. To start, you and I aren’t even reading the same book let alone on the same page if you’re at $500k TC and you’re the top seller in your org.

For reference, our top seller cleared $2MM and the ones who are just above average are around the $500k mark ($300k OTE is standard across the board with aggressive accelerators).
Why does this matter? Mindset and expectations.

Our average sales cycle is months long, so there’s never an expectation to close an SDR-sourced lead in the same quarter it was booked. AE and SDR work side-by-side to break into large enterprise accounts and the only expectation is that new contacts are sourced that the AE didn’t have previously in order to accelerate the sales cycle.

You, on the other hand, completely glossed over the fact that your SDR had delivered 8 outbound leads and instead chose to focus only on the one that closed.

I’m going to take a stab in the dark and assume your average sales cycle is a lot shorter and not as complex since you fully expect to close SDR-sources leads and if you don’t, they must suck.

It’s also statistically unlikely you’ve just-so-happened to not have come across a decent SDR over the span of 12 years and is more likely a product of poor mindset and/or expectations.

I’m not bitter in the slightest, and while I have no problem telling a disrespectful or lazy AE to build their own pipeline if they’re unwilling to collaborate and work together, that’s not saying I have in my current role.

I work very closely with the reps I support and have had success my entire career which is why I’m still in the role; I chose to be. I’m compensated higher than the average SMB AE, so I’d have to have a screw or two loose to be bitter about that.

All in all, there are a lot of SDRs who would gladly go above and beyond for supportive and collaborative AE’s, and is one of the things I love most about the role.

And then you have AE’s who either hit their number all on their own or come up short because their SDR sucked.

DollarBill

Executive

Director of Sales - Financial Services

Great info in here, thanks for your input and appreciate the perspective. The more I’ve dug into our bdr data it looks like there’s poor controls managing the approval process of an SQL which is when an the BDR gets paid. Currently the BDR controls the process and can convert a lead record to an SQL after an SD meets the prospect even if it isn’t qualified. We saw in our review of data many instances where the BDR converted the record without AE approval.
This leads to BDRs hitting their quotas without actually performing to expectations and likely taking their foot off the gas when they hit this mark. It makes me feel like AEs need to have approval authority for an SQL in SFDC to help ensure proper qualification much like how we need sales execs to approve our records before we close-won a deal.
I’m hoping just a procedural change like this will make an impact on this cause we are currently meeting with BDRs on strategy and coaching them on pitches regularly.

DollarBill

Executive

Director of Sales - Financial Services

Wish we had some ADRs of your caliber. I'm not sure what else we need to do to enable the team here. Today my ADR teammate just blew me off on our first territory strategy call for the year. Definitely not expecting them to be 100% of my outbound deals, I work plenty of outbound as well but I think our incentives or commissions might not be structured right to get the ADR team excited enough.

Kind of at a loss at this point.

Auracle

Executive

Enterprise Account Manager

Monster red flag and the source of the problem if a BDR can approve their own meetings. Not sure how that made it by any member of leadership without an objection.

An example you can raise to your leadership on how to solve the problem would be to establish an SLA for Account Executives to approve or reject a BDR-booked meeting within 24 hours of the meeting date.

The meeting date should be a required field in whatever record your BDRs are using now to create and log their meetings in SFDC and once that date passes, Account Executives have 24 hours to disposition it.

If they approve, BDR gets paid. If they don't, BDR kicks rocks.

Important caveat: in addition to the SLA, have a CRYSTAL CLEAR approval/rejection criteria for a meeting; none of this gut feeling bullshit that an unfortunate number of AEs use as a means of not accepting BDR-sourced meetings into their pipeline so that they aren't dinged if they fuck it up.

Auracle

Executive

Enterprise Account Manager

How is your ADR team incentivized currently?

DollarBill

Executive

Director of Sales - Financial Services

They get paid when they convert the lead record in SFDC to an opportunity and then they get paid again if the deal closes and it isn't comped differently depending on size which I disagree with. They should make more money if it is a larger deal.

We are selling to procurement so it is inherently complicated as everything is with procurement, unfortunately.

I think a lot of this is not giving the team the right tools to succeed. They currently are forced to use SalesLoft and 80% of their emails are ending up in spam (is there a sales tool that circumvents these filters better than SL?).

Also think putting the proper controls in place for converting the lead will help too. I personally want this team to succeed because if they do then it means we have a proven pipeline of talent to recruit from for new AEs as we continue expanding. We grew 3x this past year and are expecting to do so again this year.

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