Is this the end of the SDRmy?
Here’s three charts to make you think:
This first one shows the percentage of AEs at Salesloft and Outreach hitting quota over the past five quarters.
Salesloft and Outreach are the two leading Sales engagement platforms, providing SDR teams with automated emails, sequences and nurturing to prospect into their customers.
Source: repvue.com
Both companies have reps reporting less than 40% of AEs hitting their target from highs of 60% before the downturn.
We can infer from this that fewer companies are investing in outbound prospecting technology.
This second chart shows the number of quality conversations had per day by SDRs over the last five years.
A quality conversation is defined as a connect with a customer that either moved the conversation forward, or closed it out as no opportunity.
It shows a similar decline from which we can infer that it is harder today to get in touch with buyers via traditional outbound techniques.
And in this third chart from Gartner -
Source: Gartner - B2B Buyer Journey
Buyers spend the majority of their buying process doing their own research, speaking to peers, discussing with analysts and collaborating internally.
They pick up the phone to or from a vendor when they are pretty certain they know they have a problem and how they want to solve it.
Outbound is not dead
Outbound is still the best way of getting immediate feedback from a customer, of requesting connections to the right people, of understanding the current priorities at a customer.
The most successful AEs prospect daily and build it into their routine.
However, the charts above lead me to consider the role of the SDR teams - the SDRmy as I call them, in our sales teams of the future.
We take our most junior sellers, those with the least experience in communicating with buyers, in our products and in our customer’s industry challenges, and give them high volume prospecting technology and wonder why they are seeing fewer and fewer returns.
The Garter chart shows that buyers are already educating themselves to a level beyond that of most SDRs before they put their hand up or accept the call.
When they do want to speak to someone, they want it to be the ‘expert’ that can answer their questions and connect them with the right people.
The SDR “qualification” call adds no value to the buyer, and delays their process by days or weeks while they get passed to the right person.
Do we return to the Marketing to AE model?
The SDR role was conceived in 2004 at Salesforce (read Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross for the back story). Prior to that marketing passed their leads to an AE who took that lead the entire way through the process.
With the rapid development of AI - might we see a return to this model, where a new breed of mar-tech platforms take anonymous visitors much further along the journey, before they are connected with a live human AE?
Junior sellers would come in, as they did in the 1990s, as an SMB AE and learn their craft taking customers the entire way through a sales cycle, before moving up to Mid-Market and then Enterprise as they wished.
What got us here won’t get us there
As you design your sales team, don’t just pick up your “Sales Orgs for Dummies” book and replicate what others have done over the last twenty years.
Instead, think about your customers, and the buyer experience they expect.
How can they get the most amount of value, education and guidance from your company - either self-serve or by speaking to a human.
You might not land on building your own SDRmy.
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