#609 - How to Hire SDRs Who Are Actually Built for the Job | Sam Nelson

Sellers cold outbound socks for both you and your prospect. It takes an insane amount of effort. Reply rates are in the tank and you are fishing in the same pond as everybody else. I literally wrote a book on cold calling, but Sam McKenna, who's the CEO of #SamSales, completely changed my mind about what I thought social-selling and great outbound prospecting is. Sam literally has broken 13 national sales records. She was recruited by LinkedIn because she was so good at LinkedIn sales navigator and she built her business from scratch into a multi-million dollar business using exactly what she teaches in her social-selling course that she built in partnership with 30MPC. Go to 30MPC.com/Sam and her new course teaches you how to use relationship data and your network's network to get warm introductions into your dream accounts that would never answer your cold call, respond to your cold email or open the gift that you sent to their office. If you go to 30MPC.com/Sam, we are giving away all of Sam's favorite LinkedIn sales now, reports, alerts, and scripts that you can use to break into more accounts with less effort. When new SGRs would come in, we would set them down. I would give them a list of local businesses and a script and they would sell pizzas to these local businesses. And you realize in the most cold, awkward, cold calling session that you know that you'll ever have. It's actually not that bad. Even the most awkward one. We're not in this out of the way. I've never had any experience and it's not even that bad. I do this at Harvard Business School a couple times a year. Everyone, it always gives you the death glare, especially at Harvard, they're like, "Are you kidding me?" But then by the end, everyone's laughing, everyone realizes, "Hey, I can do this." Today, we are sitting down with Sam Nelson who is a multiple time president's club achieving SDR leader. To build the SDR function from scratch and outreach and now he runs SDRleater.com and his quite literally worked with SDR leaders at over 2,500 companies and today he's going to be taking us through a clinic on his learnings around hiring, onboarding and motivating SDRs. So Sam, welcome to the show. Let's start with the background that you need to look for when you are looking to hire SDRs. So there's one really great litmus test is you definitely want to look for someone who's come from something less pleasant than what they're going into. Actually, right out of college is pretty good. I mean, we look back fondly at college, but it's actually a lot of pressure, right? Like every test could take your scholarship or ruin your grade. It's actually SDRs have a lot more pressure than most other professions, but it's actually less than college in most cases. So new grad is actually fine for that. One who has done door to door is excellent, for example, someone who's been a waitress. Like one of the universal ones that in the SDRleater.com community that you'll bring up all the time as teachers, less pleasant job, a lot more stress, they come into this. It's an easier job. They make more money. Yeah. Are there other things you're looking for like other accolades, athletics backgrounds, music backgrounds, like parts of the country that they're from, what they majored in? Like, I feel like as an SDR leader, sometimes you don't have the benefit of hiring somebody with work experience. And so you kind of have to look at their pre-work experience as a proxy to figure out if they can do something really freaking hard. I mean, they're getting pounded with rejection day in and day out. Yeah, totally. Well, it's weird because, yeah, they either have SDR experience. And that is not necessarily always like a positive sign. Actually, like most of the time when someone has been an SDR before and they left for some reason and they want another SDR job. Most of the time that's a negative signal, people don't like when I say that, but it's true. It's not always the case, but it can be the case most of the time. So you need to really like if someone has had another job, you need to really dig into numbers, really understand why they left, really kind of verify why to see you understand. So if they have past experience, of course, you're digging to past experience, the thing is most of like the top performers in my experience have been people who have had no experience at all. And so how do you how do you vet that? There are a couple of things that I found to be extremely reliable for top performers. One is they've been in the top one percent of something before. So like you said, athletes, college athletes are a great example of that. If they're a college athlete, they're in the top one percent of that. You have to have a certain you have certain intangibles to get there. This isn't the only way you can do that. If someone is like, I don't know if they were like top in the state in robotics or they have like a top one percent elo rating in chess, it doesn't matter. But if someone has been able to write like the top one percent or something, usually they will be a top performer. So it's not relevant. A lot of people aren't that way. You want to figure out if they've been at least somewhat competitive. If they haven't done anything competitive, it's a disqualifier, but within the top one percent or something, it's a pretty good indicator. I actually want to go back to what you said about the former SDR piece. You talked about you like you've really got to dig in on their numbers. I actually think this might actually take us now to the interview itself. So it sounds like my big proxy that I'm using to figure out if I should take an interview with somebody is I feel good about them. If they've done something really crappy in the past, they've done a very unpleasant, challenging job. I get on the interview itself. Let's actually just talk about the interview. I've got a 30 minute interview. I'm an SDR leader. I'm assuming we've already passed like the basic recruiter screen. But this is the first time that I might be meeting this person. Can you just start with like high level? How do you recommend an SDR leader run that 30 minute interview? And then let's get into some of the questions that you have them ask. Yeah. You want to like start off kind of put the minis at the very beginning because they've got nerves. And that doesn't necessarily get you like the most accurate indicators. So it's a really excited talk to you. A background looks really cool. Just try to figure out what, what, why they applied. Another thing, another important part of that is just kind of asking why they applied is it's really hard to overcome them not wanting to be in sales. Like sometimes people will apply because they just, the other things didn't work out. So there's this one person that I interviewed that was like Valley Dictorian at this time up at his in college or extremely bright, extremely, you know, he could be extremely successful, but he just wasn't excited about it and didn't work out. They need to be genuinely excited about so you need to get them to why they're excited about going into sales. Yeah. Okay. So step one, warm them up a little bit, help them get the nerves out. This is cool. Step two, why did you apply in the first place? Do you actually want to be here or did you just spam apply a bunch of jobs? Where do I take things from there? You kind of want to like pull on that thread a little bit more, figure out what they're excited about, what they want to do. One thing that I like to do at some point in the interview is understand how goal oriented they are. So I like to start by asking, do you have goals? Yes. Then we talk about their goals. What do they want to do? This also kind of helps you understand whether this actually fits into the puzzle or whether they're just saying they like sales. They ask if they have written goals. They have written goals and this fits into their written goals. They correlate extremely strongly with top performance. I'm surprised by how few people have written goals and I'm also surprised by how well it correlates with top performance. Now, it's very easy to lie about that and so you have to use like interrogator tricks to figure out if it's actually true. So someone says they have written goals, say, "Oh, interesting, do you write them down or put them on your computer?" They say they write them down. If you've written them down like, like, why, and where do you put them? Why do you put them there? How often do you look at it? If you ask really specific questions about their written goals, it becomes very clear to you as the interviewer if they're telling the truth or not. Because it's very easy to know what the right answer is. It's very hard to stand it to scrutiny if you dig in that way. Where do I take the call from here? Because up to this point, it seems mostly behavioral. Are you doing anything related to screening for the ability to do the job itself? Doing a mock cold call on the call is still very effective. So we'll send them a script ahead of time and just let them know that we'll be doing a cold call on the call. And then just run through the call with them. And then as soon as they make a mistake, cut them off and just say, "Okay, so this is actually a little bit better. If you do this, it's for this reason. Let's run it back from the beginning." They go again. We do the same thing three times. And I've never met someone who just executed perfectly without three corrections. But by doing it that way, you kind of get a feel of like what the ping pong is when you go back and forth with this person. You kind of get a vibe for like, "What would it be like to coach this person? Are they, you know, do they get flustered or do they take feedback well?" And so that's the way I like to do a roleplay. Give them the stuff ahead of time and just have it be a collaborative back and forth things. You get a sense of what it's like to coach this person. What will you send them in the script in advance? What is the actual script look like? I'm sure we have some people listening that are like, "I don't really have a good script for an SDR cold call." I mean, we just did the script that we used at the company. Yeah. So like whatever your other SDRs are using, just send them that exact thing and then we're just going to run through it because you're really used to coaching for your own company. Yeah. You know, I used to do just like, "Hey, to sell me what you sold before, I've ground it to be much better, just like give them a cheat sheet ahead of time." Yeah. Then we can just kind of get into what the coaching is actually going to be like. They don't need to be great at it. I'm testing them for the coach ability, more than their ability to execute this. After the mock cold call, which I'm not running once, I'm not running twice, I'm literally running it three times, not with the intent to see did they get it perfect? But with the intent to see like how they take feedback can they roll with the punches I Assume you do something if you feel good about this candidate where you like you try to sell them on the opportunity to an extent because if you've got Someone that you don't feel good about. Okay, fine. You're probably gonna push them away What do you do in terms of like if you're like this? This is someone who's good and I want to like start to go from I'm interviewing them Shoot they might be looking at other places. I need to make sure I land this person Yeah, this depends a lot on the company, right? So it depends on what you have to offer so and that's another reason that you ask them kind of what they're what they're motivated by Why they want to do this because you kind of have in your back of your mind before you get to this point in the call Like what they are excited about and why they want to land so figuring out what their motivations are and then aligning what you do to that I do like asking people if they're money motivated on the call It's not obvious to them what the ants the correct answer that I'm looking for is yeah But as someone is money motivated that has never been a bad thing in my experience ever If they're not money motivated that can be okay, too I mean for me like I genuinely I was like an entrepreneur before I was an STR leader and I was like Building pipelines the most important skill I can develop. That's why I wanted to be an SDR I would have been an SDR for free. Honestly, I would have that's how much I want to do So not that they have to be really money motivated, but asking that question helps get a sense for it What they're motivated by do you set expectations for how hard the job is going to be in the interview itself? Well, one thing that we would do before H.R. Shut it down is at the end of an interview No matter how well they did We would say hey like I really like you you are clearly going to be successful in in something you do someday I'm not quite sure This is going to be a fit. It's a hard job. It's I don't know if this is exactly what is if this is exactly going to be for you Okay, and then you pass and you see how they respond This is another one of those things that is Kind of like what I was talking about with like people with written goals like it's extremely accurate indicator of how successful They're going to be my experience in doing this is people who will fight back at you on that Are extremely likely to be top performers. Yeah, people that say ah You're okay. I'm sorry. Like maybe you're right Are very unlikely to be top performers now again as controversial we were asked to stop doing it But I found that that has been that that was very very accurate. Let's talk about onboarding So before we get into all of the different things you do onboarding wise Can you just orient me on onboarding structure? I'm thinking like how much time I know you have a philosophy around like cohorts What does onboarding look like high-level and then let's go into some of the principles that matter to you and SDR onboarding Well, I think a good frame for this is that onboarding SDRs during their first couple of months It's so different than managing a ramp to SDR that you could almost consider to different job In fact when I was at outreach we segmented that we segmented those roles If we had enough onboarding new SDRs that my first management job was everyone who is new they came in through me I specialized in only ramping everyone came through me and then we would pass them off to other leaders It was much more efficient that way And so we you mentioned cohorts if you are bringing new SDRs in it is much easier to bring in for at one time Then it is to bring in one a month or One a week like because everyone is a kind of at a different place. You're answering a lot of the same questions It is no much harder to onboard five at the same time Compared to one if you have other SDRs that are ramped Today's show is brought to you by Full Enrich which compiles 20 plus premium data vendors in one place to dramatically improve your call Connect rate when you're cold calling you have to make sure you're not showing up as spam likely on your prospects And and one way to do this is to stop calling bad numbers over and over again Mark your disconnected or fax lines or wrong numbers so you know not to dial them again Or even better make sure your data provider only gives you verified numbers to start with we partnered with Full Enrich on a Guide of nine ways to improve your call connect rate and get it for free in the show notes Today's show is brought to you by pipe drives easy to use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence My favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you They're focused on a b or c Which is it for you now a b and c have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the Direction of places you can help them now pipe drives built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question Not on scrambling to take live notes and we will take full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30 NPC closures hub There's a link in the show notes today shows brought to you by consensus which helps your demo keep selling even when you're not in the room Before I show a demo, I set it up like it might have to work without me I include these three slides before I drop in number one the biggest problems I learned in discovery number two How we solve those problems and number three a what does success look like today slide? You can steal that exact 30 NPC Demo deck template powered by consensus go check it out in the show notes How long do you ramp an SDR before you put them on full quota or exit them from the ramp program? And then let's talk about what goes into the ramp program. Okay, so we actually just did a big benchmark survey an SDR leader calm about this amazing And it is three months no matter how you slice it big companies small companies everywhere is pretty much Three months. The other thing that was interesting in the benchmark report was like very few people said it was Said it was like tools and stuff. It was all like processing structure So what we're we're talking about this, but like yeah like three months and three months is what we did back when I was ramping Yeah, yeah, so three months is a good time frame unit pro performers We don't always always know if they're gonna be top performers by that second month kind of that first full month So let's go week over week over week over week. Let's talk about when we start on morning What are some of the principles we have to follow? What are the first sessions we run, et cetera? Well, okay first of all you treat everyone the same another thing about like Brand fresh SDRs for people who've been an SDR before the other thing we saw in our benchmark survey was like people with experience as SDRs had no decrease in ramp time Everyone everyone is on level footing. So we bring everybody in The first thing I like to do was Not a not a hazing ritual, but like we make a pretty strong statement that we are a cold-cold calling culture so One thing that I am famous for is when new SDRs would come in the first thing that they would do is we would sit them down I would give them a list of local businesses in a script and they would sell pizzas To these local businesses. We wanted to get the most awkward cold-cold calling session They would ever have out of the way when they first got there So number one, they don't forget it everyone's terrified You know like use your first job. You're in there. What's going to happen? They have the most awkward cold-cold calling experience that they will ever have so we have themself pieces for a couple of reasons One is it's so different than anything anyone has done before that is very easy to kind of like drill a new framework without them falling into their old habit So that's one piece of it. The other piece is is just extremely awkward and Everyone's kind of doing it and you realize in the most cold awkward cold-cold calling session that you know that you'll ever have It's actually not that bad like even the most awkward one like we're knocking this out of the way I've never had any experience and it's not even that bad and so like we would always do this I do this at Harvard Business School a couple times a year. I do the prospecting class over there and Everyone it always like gives you the death glare, especially on Harvard They're like are you kidding me, but then by the end everyone's laughing everyone realizes hey, like I can do this So we make a statement everyone kind of feels a little bit relieved afterward even though it's tense at the beginning Yeah, I could do this when I think about SDR on boarding There's three big buckets that I'm thinking about that I think lead them being successful or not I feel like you need to get them ramped on minimum viable sales skills I feel like they need to know something about the product they can't know nothing about what you're selling and then I feel like the tack that they use is a really important part of the job Like if they don't know how to use outreach and your working sequences They're gonna have a tough time sequencing enough people and working enough people you can challenge me on that frame of those three buckets But I guess I'm curious about like Where you think you should be allocating your onboarding calories with SDRs knowing that you can't get them up to a hundred percent on everything in their first 90 days, yeah Okay, so the first thing you need to do is really simplify the job during the first couple months as much as you possibly can So for example like we can sell to the SDR leader persona at outreach We can sell the sells nailing we can sell the sells odds we can sell the marketing we can sell the CRLs we can do all of those things But it is much easier to say this is the most important persona. This is where we get most of our meetings SDR leaders in that case We are just going to focus only on this for now. They got a lot of new things they got to figure out so simplify the role a lot Start with one product of your multi-products company start with one persona let them master that then you can figure out other Personas when you try to tons of personas, it just like and multiplies the confusion. - Yeah. - And so you wanna do it, you kinda wanna go over everything, but keep the job as simple as possible when they start out. - Yeah, I mean, I think back to when I was an SDR, I remember what really tripping up was what you just said, which was we could sell to the C-suite, I could sell to marketing, I could sell to the CFO, I could sell, I was selling like the sports ticketing product, I could sell to like the ticket admin at the company and every different persona had a different value proposition. And dude, I didn't even know an opener to open my cold calls. I was asking people, sir, did I catch you at a bad time? And then I'm like looking at my script, I didn't even have scripts, I'm like looking at our value proposition guide on my other screen about like, oh, what does CFO care about? And I, like I've lost them. Like I would never, my calls went terribly. And so what I'm hearing from you is like, I wanna make things as linear as possible, where it's like, I'm selling one product to one persona. And then once I've mastered that, maybe I add another persona or I add another product, but actually throwing too much, you have to dose the complexity of the scripting that you give to them. - Yeah, one product, one persona, 'cause they're learn, like everything else is new. Let's let them get that down, then you can expand the complexity there. - Okay, great. - What next? - So that's important. So we'll do a pretty short bootcamp, like one week. And we'll spend one day on one thing, right? One day on cold calling, one day on research and emails, one day on sequencing, you try to kind of like, go really deep as much as you can on one day. And then after a week, we would say, all right, let's go. We will put them on the phones doing the entire job after that week. Now, through classroom lectures for four days, are they good enough to do it without questions? Absolutely not. But that was really important for us to improve our onboarding program over time. So we would do the best we could in that first week, and then we would get them on the phones. We said, any questions you have, I know like we've only talked about things once, it's okay if you have questions, put them in this one Slack channel. We also get a read out of exactly where the gaps were or what things weren't sticking in our bootcamp. So that was really, really important. So if we're getting a lot of questions about like, okay, how do we handle this part of the cold call? We would know that we need to refine that. So that's one way that we could refine that over time. That's really good. With AI, you can really just like take all of those questions and really get a good idea of just how you could refine those over time. I would love that. If you just give them all the information they need and say go run and you never check to see how they are doing, they're going to deviate or drift or not know what they're doing. And what you're doing is you are actually putting them on the phones before they are ready as a way to figure out where there were gaps in their onboarding. And that is so much better than doing three weeks of onboarding and saying does everybody get it? And of course they're all going to say yes. When you actually go make them do the job, that is what exposes what they missed. - And I think one more thing I would say like to make this easier, right? 'Cause it is stressful to just kind of jump in is there are multiple different ways to cold call that are successful, right? You've probably talked to a lot of people, a lot of very different opinions. There are top performers that will do all kinds of different openers, all kinds of different ways they approach cold calls. Unless there is a really dramatic difference in outcomes, you need to have a bias to the simplest one that works. - Mm-hmm. - And lots of different ways that works, some are simpler than others. Have a bias to simplicity. - Where is your bias? What opener do you, what opener do you feel like is most accessible, but also still performing? - Well, most people don't like it when I say this, but did I get you at a bad time? And here's the reason why. You said did I get you at a bad time? There are only two things that they can say. Usually they'll say yes, you got me at a bad time. Got that other way. Okay, I'll be briefs. If they say no, this is not a bad time, you say okay, I'll be brief. It just really minimizes the things that they have to think about when they're on the phone because when you're on the phone, like that will get you to the next part, like within a rounding error of other things, it's just a lot more simple. And then you can allocate that headspace too, listening to them and figuring out how you react next. And so I would just say, look, there's a lot of different openers that can work. People love to talk about the different openers and the one that you've never heard about before that you should do tomorrow. - Yes. - Let's do the simplest one. - Yes, it worked just as well. And then you can fit. It's been your time focusing on other things. - Amazing, awesome. Okay, let's round this thing out, Sam. I want to do a rapid fire on. We've got the right people hired. We've got them onboarded. The reality of the SDR job is you're taking rejection day after day, hour after hour. And it is really easy to lose your motivation as an SDR part of your job and as an SDR leader is to keep your reps motivated. And so you listed out, I don't know, like eight or nine ways that you've seen SDR leaders motivate their teams. And I'm wondering if you'd be so generous as to publicly recognize some of those ideas. - Oh yeah. Okay, so it's a big part of the job. This job is a grind, right? So one thing, and this maybe kind of is related to onboarding too, is like matching a mentor that's a top performer with a new rep is actually extremely effective for making them successful. Some people have like the old guard, if they're a top performer, that's good. If they're a moderate performer, it can be really bad. So that's one thing that you can do to have like someone in the game with you. Public recognition, you want to have leader boards everywhere. Everyone should always know where they rank relatives to their team at all times. It's free, it's extremely motivating when you have competitive people. Celebrate wins in every channel that you can. In Slack, you do the gong, you bring it up in the morning meetings. It's very hard to overdo it on public recognition. Another one that a lot of teams don't do that is extremely potent is send some wins to the CRO or CEO to shout people out in Slack or in some kind of morning meeting or any kind of public forum. Slack's a really easy 30 second way for them to do it. Recognition from the CEO or CRO goes extremely long way. And if you make it easy for them to do, they are more than happy to do it. They love doing stuff like that, right? They love to dull out good news when they can't. So yeah, public recognition everywhere, especially the CEO or CRO, they're happy to do it. Let's talk about spits because I've seen them go well. I've seen them go not so well. What's your take on spits? And then if you are pro spits, what is your recommendation for spits to run? - Yeah, okay, so there are a couple things that have been successful. One that was really successful was, what we call the fast start bonus, where if they were ahead of quota halfway through the month, they would get a spiff. What this did, one is like, they would work harder earlier in the month and that was good, but it also really leveled out when the meetings were coming. Because the default was like, people would really, really hustle at the end of the month. When the AES are trying to close deals, right? And it's the hardest time to kind of get new meetings. Like if they're getting all their new meetings, when they're trying to get things over the line to hit our number, it wasn't really optimal. And so when we did that, the SDRs are excited about it, 'cause it's like extra money, the AES loved it. And so this is one of those things where it's very easy to get approval for an experiment. And that experiment is very likely to continue to get approval. It's just because it's just a win-win for everyone. If you can smooth out when those meetings come. - Yeah. - Love it. - Okay, if you are going to spend money, I have found that giving just like extra money is good. It kind of goes to the people that are going to do good anyway. And so that's kind of the downside. I have found that doing tangible things that are things that no one would justify spending the money on. And in some ways, our more motivating than giving them that money itself. Little weird, but like if it's like, this is probably the only chance in your life to win a $400 chocolate bar for example. - Yeah. - No one making $150,000 is going to spend $400 on chocolate bars. - Just not going to spend that much on a chocolate bar. I'm a freak out of any time my wife wants to eat an air one. So it like, but it toes on and like FOMO in a different way than the money does. Like your complaint can recover the money motivation. So it's just like this other layer. So you've got like recognition, which is one layer. You've got the money motivation. You've got, if I don't hit it this month, there's an experience that I'll never have in my life. So you can stack up these different motivations and they can kind of layer on top of each other. - Today's show is brought to you by Full and Rich, which compiles 20 plus premium data vendors in one place to dramatically improve your call connect rate. When you're cold calling, you have to make sure you're not showing up as spam likely on your prospects end. And one way to do this is to stop calling bad numbers over and over again. Mark your disconnected or fax lines or wrong numbers so you know not to dial them again. Or even better, make sure your data provider only gives you verified numbers to start with. We partnered with Full and Rich on a guide of nine ways to improve your call connect rate. Get it for free in the show notes. Today's show was brought to you by Pipe Drives, easy to use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question, which sounds like typically, when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C, which is it for you. Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, Pipe Drives built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes. And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC Closers hub. There's a link in the show notes. - Today's show is brought to you by Consensus, which helps your demo keep selling even when you're not in the room. Before I show a demo, I set it up like it might have to work. without me. I include these three slides before I drop in. Number one, the biggest problems I learned in discovery. Number two, how we solve those problems. And number three, what does success look like today slide? You can steal that exact 30-MPC demo deck template powered by consensus. Go check it out on the show notes. I have one question on this one, which is like, as an SDR leader, if you threw me into an SDR leader job today, like I wouldn't necessarily know how to go to my leadership and ask for money for a spiff. Do you have any guidance on how, as a leader, I should be making those asks to management? Yeah, I mean, the easiest thing is tied to what their needs are. But you ever kind of know what the big problems are on the AE side. And if you can tie it to that, like, hey, look, like, here's something we can do to kind of juice the numbers here in the segment or something like that. Like, you know, it's fiffer, and the certain number of enterprise deals or something this month is pretty easy to get a approval if you're attaching it to the biggest pain. Yeah, the CRO or the CEO. Yeah, killer. Okay. You have one other that I want to ask about, which is travel, which is really interesting. This is not sending them on an all-expenses trip to Costa Rica. This is a different type of travel you use to motivate them. We would do trade shows and things like that in the course of business. And usually that's done by marketing people, right? They understand a lot of the marketing things well. Are they the best sharks to have at the booth? Not always. Yeah. The AE's, they demo really well. Are they really motivated to go and get opportunities for their other sales reps that can be against sometimes? Mm-hmm. However, SDRs are the best people to have there. And a lot of companies do not do that. Okay. So getting approval to send SDRs just as an experiment to do just kind of be at the booths that one of these conferences that you're already doing is a pretty light lift. And then once they do it, it's usually I perform everyone else and it becomes a thing. But as a bonus, like doing a competition to figure out who gets to go to that thing is surprisingly motivating, right? Like in my job, I fly like 100,000 miles to Meskie a year like Travis work travels lots a little bit at romance. When you're new in a job, I think some people forget like that is extremely motivating. And there's a lot of FOMO attached to that. And you end up selecting for the right person to go to this thing. So just again stacking a completely different motivation. And it also will almost certainly turn it into a huge win for your org too. Because SDR, SDRs, if you send them to a conference and they're good, we'll almost always be more motivated to get meetings and we'll be bold enough to get those meetings set there than the other people they usually default to. I will never forget how excited I was the first time I got to book a flight from LAX to DFW to go stand at a booth for 12. I mean, it actually gets you so excited when you're an SDR. Oh, dude. And conferences too. Like when I went to Black Hat, I didn't know conference before I was just like, what is this? Dude, this has been a freaking clinic. We literally covered how to interview, how to onboard and how to motivate SDRs. I got one last question for you, which is I don't think there is anybody out there who knows SDR leadership better than you do because you quite literally run a community of hundreds, thousands of SDR leaders. Like, and you get these people together sharing best practices. I am curious about the top three ways that you are seeing the SDR job change and have seen a change over the last call it three years. Interesting. I will say that AI, I mean, everyone's thinking about AI right now and it really is, it really is a jump ball. I mean, everyone's kind of doing stuff. It's really unclear to me, like which tools are going to win, like how that's going to affect certain things. Certain things that it has not affected or is, is cult calling is the number one way that meetings are set right now. And that has become more true in the age of AI. Like proof of human is more important than it has ever been before. So that is a trend. The calls have been indisputably. They're kind of indisputably the number one way that meetings are set right now, especially throughout bound. Yes. Yeah, email is email is email is tricky. I think like it there's some there's some useful things there, but it's it's not like deliverability is making it more and more challenging now. But it's yeah, it's also like I think you can detect AI with a 99.9 percent rate randomly all of a sudden. And so like spam filters are considering it. There's a lot that's up in the air right now. Yeah. But I predict phone anything where you have proof of human is really valuable phone in person. There's a lot of often in person. Also pipeline is not going out of style, right? Like people want more pipeline than their competitors. And the SDR leader profession is stronger than it's ever been. People say that we're going to die in six months. They've been saying that since I started to that reach. And it's stronger than it's been in my 10 years of doing this. People need pipeline. If they're doing poorly, they need pipeline. If they're doing excellent, they really need pipeline. Is this evergreen thing where you always need more than your competitors? And the ones with great high performing SDR teams are the ones who edge out their competitors. All right, it's time for the 60 second recap on this episode on hiring, onboarding and motivating your SDRs. Let's start with hiring. Sam talked about looking for the right background you're looking for people that have had unpleasant jobs in their background. You're looking for teachers, ex entrepreneurs, people that have been door to door sales, people that have worked in restaurants. Those people have dealt with hard stuff. And the SDR job is not easy. Sam talks about them in the interview is interview structure. Step one, put them at ease. They're going to be nervous and warm up a little bit from there. Figure out why did you apply to you actually want to work in sales? Or did you just spam apply? From there, you want to ask how goal oriented they are. They're always going to say yes. But then you're going to ask them about, do you have written goals? And you're going to dig in then too. Are you writing in a notebook on your computer? How often do you look at them? You get in the details to see if they're telling you the truth. From there, you're going to run a cold call role play three times, given the script in advance, just to see how coachable they are. And then at the end, you're going to push away. This was controversial, but he says, I don't know if you're going to be able to be up for this hard work or rejection or grit. And you want to see if they push back. Now, this was banned by HR at his company, but if you like it, give it a shot. From there, let's talk about onboarding. Sam talks about onboarding in cohorts, just like you might do batch laundry. Don't wash one shirt at a time. Don't onboard one SDR at a time if you can help it. From there, he talked about getting the people cold calling literally on day one by having them call your local mechanic to try to sell them a pizza. It's awkward. It's weird, but it gets them used to rejection and sets the tone for we are going to do hard things at this company. From there, he talked about the three different buckets. We talked about product, tech, and sales skills stuff. His frame on this is you want to give them a one week bootcamp and then get them doing the job before they are ready as a way to expose where there were gaps in your boot camp, where you're going to need to revisit things. From there, let's finish off and let's talk about the different types of motivation Sam talked about. So he talked about public recognition, which is a leaderboard visible everywhere. Your CEO or CRO giving people a shout out in Slack. We talked about spifts. So we got the fast start to the month bonus as a way to incentivize people for loading the month with meetings, which is going to make your AES who are focused on closing in the backhouse of the month happier. He talked about the $400 chocolate bar as opposed to giving $10, $40 Starbucks gift cards because that is novel and most people are never going to spend $400 bucks on a chocolate bar themselves. We also talked about travel as a way to motivate people. So let the SCR who hits a number go to the next conference in Dallas or DC or Seattle. Most SCRs are at a point in their career. I know I was where they are very excited by travel and it hasn't worn them down like it has hurt me at this point in my career. So this was a killer episode. Folks, if you want, we have put together an entire SDR leader pack in the show notes of this episode. We've got call scripts. We've got Monday morning meeting templates to track activity. We've taken a lot of our best 30 NPC SDR leadership resources. They're entirely free. Check them out in the description of this episode. Thank you for watching. We'll see you next week on the show. Today's show is brought to you by Fullenridge, which compiles 20 plus premium data vendors in one place to dramatically improve your call connect rate. We partnered with Fullenridge on a guide of nine ways to improve your call connect rate. Today's show was brought to you by Pipe Drives easy to use and customizable CRM with built in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question, which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B or C, which is it for you. Now A, B and C have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now Pipe Drives built in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes. And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30 MPC Closers hub. Today's show is brought to you by Consensus, which helps your demo keep selling even when you're not in the room. Before I show a demo, I set it up like it might have to work without me. Number two, how we solve the those problems. And number three, a what does success look like today slide? Go check it out on the show notes.