6 Critical Factors For SDR Success
We analyzed what drives SDR success after coaching 100+ reps and discovered 6 critical levers plus 1 amplifier that make the difference between crushing it and flopping.
In this video, I'll share exactly what separates high-performing SDRs from the rest so you can guarantee results in your business.
Welcome to Repeatable Revenue, hosted by strategic growth advisor , Ray J. Green.
About Ray:
→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.
→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.
→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com
→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world’s largest IT business mastermind.
→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com
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Transcript
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We've onboarded and coached more than 100 stars for mSRP alone.
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we've seen the gamut rally.
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We've seen people who have absolutely crushed it. We've seen people that have flopped. And it's interesting because same industry, similar service, very similar types of markets,
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but wildly different outcomes.
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we did a deep dive. We wanted to know what is it that is driving the results like the SDR of course, but are there other factors like our, you know, in terms of what the company is doing or how they're setting things up?
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And we wanted to answer one question.
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What is it that truly drives results? And
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in this video I'm going to share what we found. Let's dive in.
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So I'm Ray green, founder of Mssp Sales Partners, where we help companies
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build high performance sales teams and systems. And
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one of the offers that we have in our business is the SDR accelerator. And this program helps, you know, IT companies find, recruit,
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train and then manage and coach stars in their business
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so that they can fill their calendar without having to outsource to a third party or, you know, feel like a full time sales manager.
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Because most of the people that we work with, our
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technical founders don't have a sales background. So we help do that and install that function in the business. And by doing that, we've seen
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a lot of stars. We've seen more than 100 that have come through.
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And by doing that, we've had the opportunity to really understand what the companies are doing, how they're doing it, and then see the results, because we've managed more than 100 SDR. So we can actually look at this and say, hey, there's some significant patterns or there's some significant differences in what people who are crushing it are doing and people who are not.
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I wanted to know, what is it?
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because I wanted to build a better program. Right? So I wanted to say,
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what is it specifically that is leading these companies to get phenomenal results, these companies to not get as good a results,
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And then these companies to kind of sit in the middle.
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and what I discovered were there are six primary levers that are affecting performance
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of the SDR. When you when you hire and manage a rep in your business.
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And then there's one amplifier that makes everything easy and turbocharge is everything. And
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this is in theory, right? This is actionable. Like, this is what we are actually seeing. Boots on the ground, appointments on calendar, real businesses right now.
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So here are the six things, plus the one amplifier that I found. Make all of the difference here. So if you have these things in place, you all but guarantee that your SDR is going to crush it.
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And the first one is the data. It's having a good list in place.
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we have actually seen people are like, hey, I'm ready to hire an SDR. We go, okay, excellent. Like, do you have some, you know, do you have enough lead flow that they're going to be full time following up on inbound? No.
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So we're going to be doing some outbound.
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Yes. What are they going to be calling on. We don't have a list
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So we've seen everything from don't have a list to yes we've got a list. And it's a list that we have curated that we have you know had validated that we've, you know, use some enrichment program. We've had somebody scrub it or clean that list.
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Right. And make sure that the information is correct. Make sure that it's relatively qualified
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it's even segmented, you know, like we can break it down and do these little mini campaigns by industry or something like that.
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And then we've seen everything in between. And what I can tell you is
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if you want your SDR to have
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excellent results, then you've got to give them an excellent list,
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if you have them calling on something that's just raw data, right? Like so you go to a third party vendor and you say, hey, give me, give me a thousand companies in this zip code or a thousand companies in this area, or in this, you know, whatever.
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Name your name, Amy, or your criteria.
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Despite what the vendors tell you, I promise you, it's not 95% accurate, right? Like that. That's just not the case. We see it all the time. So your SDR is going to basically be cleaning that list as they go through and make their calls
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even a good SDR is going to have performance throttled
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because they're going to be calling stuff that isn't the right information.
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They're going to be calling wrong numbers. They're going to be asking for people who are dead. They're going to be like, it's going to be like, they're going to be like, oh, okay. So, you know, 20, 30, 40% of the data we've seen a lot of times is just not right. If you're getting raw data from a third party
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and that obviously is going to affect performance relative to an SDR who gets handed something that has been cleaned, right, like they've gotten that maybe that list from a third party,
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but they've put it through a list cleaning process.
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They've, you know, use the enrichment functions within, you know, a lot of softwares. They have used AI to clean that thing up.
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or next level is like I said, you segment that list and say, you know what we're going to do?
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We're going to we're going to call lawyers or we're going to call this particular segment or this size a company or whatever that particular niche is going to be for that campaign, and then they can tailor everything else accordingly. Going to have a huge impact on your results,
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the second thing that you want to have in place is a good offer.
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no, your your SDR is not necessarily asking for money. They aren't closing that deal. But in a consultative sales process,
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every step is a sale, right? Like you have a series of micro steps that lead to a proposal that lead to a closed deal.
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the micro sale that you're SDR is making is they are offering something in exchange for time, right. Like there's some value proposition that they are offering in exchange for the prospect, the person that they're talking to, investing their time.
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The more time that they are asking for, the higher the price tag. Right? So if you call me at the blue and you say, hey, Ray, you know, like we have XYZ solution, I go, okay, we need 90 minutes to go through, okay.
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Like that's that's not going to happen. We need 15 minutes to give you a run through okay. Cheaper price.
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So the threshold is going to be a lot lower if you're asking for a lower price. So that's one way to make your offer better is lower the price.
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now a better way to improve your offer is offer something of more value, meaning you can call and, you know, add the blue and say, hey, we solve these three problems.
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Would you like a, you know, price comparison? We need to hop on a call for 15 minutes
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and there's some value associated with that. That is an offer.
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Some really good offers that I've seen lately are hey, we'll do some, you know, education with your team on on phishing attacks, right. Like we'll help you, you know, avoid the next phishing, you know, scam.
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hey, we're going to offer, a block of ours to take a look at your, you know, your network and solve a few of the, you know, the low hanging fruit, the really pesky issues that you have, and go in and see if we can, you know, basically help you out, offer some value, demonstrate our, you know, our, our capabilities or our service.
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And we've got our foot in the door,
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Another is doing a, like, an eye assessment, like, hey, we know AI is like all the rage these days, but most companies, just aren't sure how to how to really leverage it and how to how to use it. So what we're doing is offering a free assessment of your tech stack and your tools today. And you know, your your general processes.
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And we can give you some recommendations on how I might be something that you can you can leverage in your business that if you're using like AI functions,
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point being, you want to offer something of value in exchange for the time. The more value that you offer and the more value your SDR is able to sell, then the better the conversion rate is going to be.
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The lower the price, the better the conversion rate is going to be.
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Now the third thing that you're going to want to go along with that offer is going to be a good script,
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And you can go to to GPT and you can say, you know, or Claude or whatever AI tool of copilot, probably, and say,
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hey, write me, bring me a cold call script for, you know, my SDR, right?
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And you will get something fairly generic.
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I can tell you, after listening to hundreds of scripts, there are good scripts and then there are generic scripts. Now, if you at least have a generic script, you're you're doing better than not having a script at all, because we've seen that too. So don't make that mistake.
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But if you're going to go through the trouble of saying, hey, this is the talk track that I want you to use, this is the framework that I want you to use.
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Make it good. Right. And what do I mean by good? Do you have something in the first
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10s that interrupt somebody's pattern, that gets their attention, that makes them chuckle, that like, create some degree of interest that separates you from
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the 50 other phone calls that they're potentially going to get, throughout the day. Right, as a, as a business owner, because that's one of the biggest challenges you have as a, as an SDR, or business with SDR as one of the biggest challenges that you have is
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it's a B2B sales process, which means by design, most of them have some form of like gatekeeping mechanism that's in place.
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The person that answers the phone that says, now, like we we're we're not going to let everybody through or add some form of automation, some system, whatever that is.
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getting through to the decision maker and then getting the decision maker to give you the times. Those are the toughest tasks.
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a good script is going to take those things into account.
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It's going to ensure
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right out of the gates that I've captured your attention and you're going to, you're going to give me a little bit of more time.
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We've got plenty of content on that, I can tell you.
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Like, one of the things that we're seeing work really well right now is,
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It's going to have that good hook, right. It's going to capture attention, make up like a pattern interrupt you're going to on the next 30 to 45 seconds in the first five.
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Right. The first five to 10s you're going to earn the next 45. So you've got to have something right out of the gates. Then you've got to like hit on relevance
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and differentiate very quickly. Okay. So the best scripts that we're seeing people make is when they don't say it if it's not true. But like there's somebody that only works with law firms.
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like one of the second or third sentences out of their mouth is
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we only work with law firms to solve these specific issues. Okay. Now you've made this more relevant than almost everybody else is calling. If that's not you, like if you're not in a specific vertical, it's fine. Chances are you have something that makes you unique.
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If you don't, then you've got to take a step back and say,
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hey, like strategically, what are our unique selling points? We have content on that too.
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you want to say, hey, how do we make ourselves relevant? How do we differentiate? And then what are the three primary pain points that people buy your services for,
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you want to go back and look at your best customers, look at the latest sales that you have. What are the things that they're telling you are the most important factors in becoming a customer of yours, right.
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And be really careful that you're not projecting.
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I think that security should be the big issue. So we're going to say security. If security is not the reason that people are coming to you, and security is not the reason that people are buying, and security is not the symptom that they are telling you in the sales process is the most important thing that I wouldn't use it.
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No matter how important you know it is, use the things that they think are important. Right? So you've got a hook then in the body it's like, this is why we're different here. The three primary pain points that we're solving. Are any of these familiar with you. So you can you can frame that script in a way that's that's really relevant, that stands out, that earns a little bit more time.
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And in my view, like build some credibility, right. Like I okay, now this is now this is relevant. All right. And the offer gets even better. So you want to have a good script in place.
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Now the fourth thing that you want, it seems really obvious, but you want a good SDR. All right. There are a lot of companies that say,
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you know what we want. We want this SDR role. We want this person to set a ton of appointments. We we know that, you know, a client to us or a customer to us is worth a lot of money when we look at the LTV.
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But what we're going to do on this SDR roll is we are going to go as cheap as possible, and we are just going to hire anyone with a pulse, right? Because as long as as long as they can read this script, they should be fine.
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if you are looking for script readers, I is your best option, right?
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Because at that point, like you're shopping for for for low level talent, you're paying bare minimum. You're not going to get consistency. You're not going to get reliability, you're not going to get the execution. And frankly, you're not going to get results.
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You aren't with outbound eye calls at this moment either. Right? Unless you are like doing mass volume and you're willing to accept a significant trade off in like the efficiency of the calls.
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The same thing is true if you go get anybody with a pulse who can't do this job, who has no experience, who you aren't screening for the right characteristics, who is afraid to be making phone calls, doesn't even want to make phone calls.
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So you want a good SDR. And here's what I can tell you definitively.
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The difference between an okay SDR and a phenomenal SDR is not 10%. It is ten x, right. Like it is massive.
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if you take the time to screen for the right person, if you take the time to ensure like, hey, we're going to we're going to look for very specific characteristics. We're going to look to make sure that, hey, have you done this job before?
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Or a similar type of job, or is the experience that you have in some way relevant, or are you demonstrating if you even if you don't have the experience, are you demonstrating something like within your within your personality, within your background, within your general work ethic, your hobbies, something that tells me you're going to be good on the phone, not just be willing to make the phone calls again, massive difference.
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Now, the fifth thing that you want to have in place is a really good training plan for that SDR. And I was actually talking to somebody the other day and they said, well, Ray, I followed your advice.
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I went and found a good SDR. They had a couple of years of experience, so I didn't think I had to do much in terms of training. Like I thought, well, they've done the job before. Like basically, here's a different list and you're you're off to the races
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you're like crossing your fingers if that's the case.
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Like even if you hire somebody who has experience, I don't know how they've been trained. I don't know what they've been told. They haven't used my systems, they haven't used my processes. They don't know my company. They don't know my unique selling points. I mean, they know some basic stuff. Even if they've been at another MSP for several years, they might know the industry, they might know some of the terminology, but they don't know my company.
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And I don't know that they know how to represent my company. I don't know that they know how to pitch this part of the service.
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every rep, like no matter how experienced they are, every rep should walk into your company and have at minimum a 30 day very detailed checklist. Right? Or play by play on what the training and onboarding is going to look like.
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part of that 30 day plan can be hey, by X date, you know, week, week two. You know, you are you're making some calls under like, you know, close supervision. We're going to be coaching.
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We're going to be giving you some feedback. But you know, we're we're going to be doing some orientation and some onboarding. And then you know we're going to give you some general background on the company.
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like here's, you know, high level what the what the offer that you're using is. And then we're gonna introduce the script, we're gonna do a little role play, then we're going to get you fired up on on the calls.
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We're going to give you some feedback on the calls and then like, and, you know, along the way you can have like, there's some sales training and here's some stuff on objections
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I can tell you this, because I've seen the difference between the SDR who gets just thrown on the phone, right?
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Like, hey, you know, welcome to the company here that here's, here's the phone, here's the list, and here's a script CEO and the person who's has something invested in them for 30 days. There's a big difference. In the outcome, not just in terms of the appointments that they set.
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It's in terms of retention. Right? Because we we actually have a training program that we, we built within the accelerator.
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So we can just give our customers this training program, be like, hey, here's here's the 30 day checklist. Feel free to customize it to your company. We gave this to to somebody. They just recently started implementing it. The SDR told us that. They told me this this morning. The SDR told us I have never this is their their fourth or fifth role.
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I have never started a company and been given this much support at the onset. Like this is phenomenal. Now think about that.
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The impression that this person gets of that company much higher than, hey, you barely know our name. Start making some calls.
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sixth thing
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do you have the right management and coaching rhythm in place
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this is one where a lot of our small midsize MSP is going to fall off. Because they do the legwork on the front end. They get somebody in the door. They get that flywheel in motion.
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But they don't do the ongoing coaching right. They don't do the ongoing management. They aren't running a weekly sales meeting. They aren't consistently reviewing calls. They aren't running a huddle here and there. Right. Like, you know, periodically, you know, getting the team to do some drills or do some additional role play or, you know, let's watch some some training videos.
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Let's do something to keep the sales focus rolling.
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And without that even good reps flatline. Because even me like I mean if I'm sitting there, if I'm making calls or I'm done running my sales calls for my business or whatever it is, even though I have a process, I wrote the damn process, I will still drift, right?
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It's all it's almost natural because we start tinkering with something or we get bored, right? Like we get tired of saying the same stuff, especially because it's a shorter pitch,
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you know, within a couple of weeks they may just get bored of saying the same thing. But the thing is, that script or that talk track was written for a reason, and it's the first time that the other person is going to be hearing it.
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So when the rep gets bored of it and they start to drift, what they start doing is losing a lot of the best practices that we need them to maintain. How do you keep that in track?
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coaching? Right. Like you're listening to calls every week.
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You're giving feedback. The other thing that you're doing when you're coaching calls is as a business owner, it's awesome. Research and development okay. Like there's there is no better R&D for your company than listening to the early stages of sales calls. Like if you're listening to the appointment setting calls and you're listening to the discovery calls, you're getting mountains of information on how to tailor your messaging, right.
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So as you're coaching, you're also listening and you're learning and you're going, hey, you know what? We should tweak this or we should change this. So it's an opportunity for you to improve the process.
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So those are the six core things. Those are the levers that we've seen. We go you know if you have these things in place
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right.
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Like if you've got a good list, if you've got a good offer, if you've got a good script, if you've got a good SDR and you train them properly and you coach them,
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damn, it's hard not to succeed right now. The seventh thing is, and it's an amplifier because it's not. We've seen success without it. So it's not absolutely essential, but it is absolutely
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an amplifier to the effect.
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And that is good marketing.
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good marketing comes in a lot of shapes and forms okay. Like that. Good marketing can be you know, sending out, you know, physical like snail mail, direct mail before you start calling on a campaign. Right. Like I've got this list that I'm gonna call, we're going to send them something, you know, physical that maybe captures their attention.
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The SDR is going to follow up on that thing. That could work. We've seen email, right. Like doing cold email and and doing the follow up after that. We've seen social, you know, where you're doing, like omnichannel stuff. You know, where you're like hitting them on, you know, LinkedIn and doing something else. So there's not just one form,
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but when you give the SDR additional resources like additional ways to essentially like increase the awareness of who you are.
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And so kind of like, hey, you know, saw posts from them consciously or unconsciously, like just recently,
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So when you integrate marketing into the SDR strategy, what you're going to see is multiples more on the same outcome. Right? Like you're gonna look at the performance of a particular list, for example. And you're going to say, hey, you know what? You know, we've we averaged you'll call it four calls per, per record on this particular campaign with marketing and without marketing.
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With marketing, you're going to see a better return
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It's a really solid way of improving conversion on all the effort in the investment and everything else that you're making in the SDR.
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So I'm sharing this because when I, when I'm talking to business owners, I'm talking to MSPs. And they tell me, well, SDR just didn't work for us, or I've got an SDR who isn't who isn't doing well right now.
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and we assume that that is because, you know, that individual SDR isn't good.
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Or because there's something about your market or something about your business or something about, you know, you likes the old snowflake type of deal, like it doesn't work for you.
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and it's not the case, right? It's the system. And every time that I've gone through a situation where, you know, it's like the SDR didn't work right or it isn't performing and you go through this.
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Okay,
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All right. What are they calling on? Well, just raw data that we that we download. Okay, cool. What do they what are they pitching? Well, you know, an hour with me, the CEO, and. Okay. Is there anything. Okay. Nope. Just just just an hour.
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Okay. And what's the, what's the script that they're using?
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well, they don't have, like, one way of doing it depends on what we're on. Okay. Got it. Where do you get the SDR? Like, what's, you know, where the do they have experience? Like the. You know, all that. How did you train them?
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Cool. How often you coaching them? Okay. Are you giving them any marketing? And you go through and you go, hey, you know what? I have yet to have somebody nail all 6 or 7 of these things and say, Holy shit, we're not crushing it
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that doesn't happen because it's it's a proven system.
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Right. And I've got plenty of data to back that up.
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it's not necessarily about effort. It's about environment. And by the way, this isn't true of just of stars. This is true of anyone you hire in sales. Is that the environment that you bring them into, the system that you bring them into is going to have as big, if not a bigger impact on their ability to get you results and get you the ROI that you're looking for.
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Then the raw talent that they're bringing themselves or the work ethic that they're bringing themselves. Although those those things matter.
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this becomes our roadmap. And the SDR accelerator, what we're effectively doing is I'm looking at a whiteboard. This is exactly what we're doing to help with list building and list cleaning. This is exactly what we're doing to help with the the offer creation.
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We are rewriting the scripts.
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we've already created, like I was mentioning A4, like point by point, like day by day on the first week. This is exactly what to do. These are the videos to watch. And we created the videos for them like, hey, this is the importance of the role of the SDR.
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This is why KPIs matter. This is how to handle objections. This is, you know, basically what an offer is and how to think about your offer. And you know, so we've got all of these things like completely ironed out and we're just installing them into the program. That's how strongly I feel about these factors. And I say that so that,
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hey, you know what?
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Like even if you want to do this on your own, these are the things, I, I'm putting my money where my mouth is on the program, and we're investing into adding all of these things into the program, because I'm not sure that's what it takes to get results. So
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hope this has been helpful. If it has subscribe to the channel and feel free to check out the SDR accelerator. There's a link below. Or if you just want some more free stuff, you can get lifetime access to the MSP Sales toolbox, which is a place where we put resources in every month.
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checklist we put in, you know, templates and playbooks. Objection. Handling playbooks,
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not just for SDR, like for every part of the sales process, that we're doing. So, you can grab access to that at MSP sales toolbox.com.
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Otherwise I'll see you in the next video. Adios.
::Unknown
You.
