I was nervous. It was my first day as an SDR and honestly one week earlier I couldn't even tell you what SDR stood for. All I knew was that I needed a job and had a quota to hit. How hard could sending emails be?
I very quickly found out it was harder than I could have imagined. Obviously not the sending email part, but writing them. I struggled to write things that resonated with people. And don't get me started about the prospecting. Searching for hours for any inkling of a personality gets boring real quick. I was combing through LinkedIn profiles and Facebook pages with more diligence than an NSA agent. I realized quickly that I was going to burn out if I didn't figure something out.
I learned that I needed to write in the same voice that your leads talk to themselves in. I started using less CorporateSpeak and more slang. I tried speaking directly to the heart of what a customer is thinking at that exact moment. I had some success with this, but I wanted to know how I stacked up against other SDRs.
I started at the company around the same time as a few other people my age.
Our team of SDRs who win big and stack checks on the court and in the office
Some of them were completely killing it! Others couldn't even get halfway through their quota in a day.
For weeks I sent my emails and pondered how this could be better. I experimented with more personalization, more volume, more time spent prospecting, changing headlines. I was a mad sales scientist, concocting experiments to find different ways to get attention from leads. But then I finally cracked the code.
I realized a counter-intuitive truth.
I couldn't get through to everyone.
The harsh reality was that there were honestly only certain people who I shared an interest with. I didn't have time to become an expert in dungeons & dragons. I was only able to write great emails when I shared an interest in what my prospect was interested in. I was the victim of what an AE would call "bad lead routing".
My tools didn’t fit my job
I realized I was ill equipped. All I had was a list of emails and a 20 year old sales tool. I had no way to organize the personalized scripts I was writing each day. Worse, I had no way of knowing how my scripts stacked up against my peers.
I talked to friends at other companies, founders in silicon valley, and even successful sales managers. All of them recognized the problem but admitted that they'd accepted the problem. They knew that being an SDR was a tough job with little help from others but felt like they couldn’t do anything about it.
I was confident there was a better way, but first I needed to figure out if my hard work would be worth anything.
The Math of Being an SDR
Despite coming in contact with the highest number of potential customers, most companies treat the work of SDRs as an afterthought.
If personalized emails using generic tags like “{{first.name}}” and “{{industry}}” already perform at over double the rate of generic emails, how would emails that have messaging that’s actually personal perform?
Some quick back of the napkin math led me to believe everyone was overlooking this opportunity. A typical SDR sends about 20 emails a day. At 100 emails a week, many SDRs might get one or two responses to schedule a demo. While closing rates on demos vary from 10-60%, it seems obvious that increasing the demo scheduling rate is probably the easiest way to sell more.
Boosting one SDRs performance by 25% would result in over $100K/year in new revenue
Testing My Theory
I quickly hacked together a prototype and shared it with my friends. The results were astonishing. One SDR who was struggling to send 10 emails a day completed her 20 email a day quota in just 2 hours!
SDRs began sending emails in literally half the time while boosting their response rates
I realized immediately this was the future of sales.
The Three Eras of Sales
To understand the future of sales, we have to understand the past. Sales before the internet was mostly limited to those in your local area. It was true word of mouth, Sales 0.0 was community based sales. The innovation of Sales 1.0 was handing you a tool whether it be cold calling, direct mail, or magazine flyers to reach people you couldn't meet in person. This was a revelation and made many people successful.
When the internet came along it created Sales 2.0. Computers could send email at 100x the rate of direct mail. Marketers were spraying and praying emails in mass quantities at anyone with an email address. Marketers went nuts!
We’re ushering in a new era. An era of sales focused on treating prospects like people. Understanding them as individuals, but not giving up on the scale of Sales 2.0.
Sales 3.0: Super-Targeted Sales at Scale
Spammy mass email is stuff of the 90's. The future of sales is extremely precise yet scalable email. Sales 3.0 turns your SDRs into a team of mind readers, able to reach deep into what a prospect truly cares about, and delivers them with messaging that means something. It’s not a CRM, it’s not an email blaster, it’s not an automated script.
Sales 3.0 is about identifying unique insights about your prospects based on existing information, developing these insights into relatable messaging, and collaborating across the sales stack to deliver highly-personalized messaging that makes customers feel unique.
The first tool in the arsenal of the SDRs of the future? GitSales. A tool built focused on increasing your entire sales team’s effectiveness at the source of highest contact, initial email outreach. Organize your sales team’s personalized content built for speed and collaboration. Share personalized scripts on a variety of interests across your team so SDRs can write great emails to anyone they find.
We’re on a Mission to Crush Quotas
We’re building the future of personalized email, so I want to invite you on a personal journey. We’re on a mission to eliminate spam, to empower entrepreneurs, and to crush quotas. Join us for unique sales tactics, ways to write email that prospects actually enjoy, and experience the fastest way to send personalized email at scale.
We’re building the tool for serious sales people who obsess over creating the perfect emails, getting results, and who are proud to be in sales. Subscribe to the newsletter, share it with your friends who are looking for an edge, and sign up for our private beta launching next month.