#77 - The Complete SDR Recruitment Framework

Chris what's going on ma'am or back. Yeah, we're back again. And this is going to be a complete guide on how to hire SDRs, whether you're a founder, business owner. And I would argue even if you're a sales rep looking to break in, just understanding how this process works is going to be immensely valuable. But it's one of the most common questions we get asked from a lot of founders that reach out to us through our higher levels community. And they need to hire. They can't find talent. They want to hire a ton of sales people all of the above. And by breaking this down step by step at quite literally every phase of this. Hopefully you can get a better understanding and do a better job attracting top SDRs. But Chris, any thoughts before we dive in? No, this will be a lengthy one. So let's just jump in. We're going to assume just for the sake of time in this one that you have applicants that you already have a pipeline of folks. So let's say that you have 50 people. How do we get from those 50 down to the one person? How do you do it tactfully? What do you look for? Let's just start with the first one. How do you vet candidates down from the 50 people that you have, the hundred people that you have, whatever your starting point is? What do you, what do you look for? Yeah. I think the biggest thing that stands out is you'd be amazed even though a lot of people want to show initiative. They don't reach out to you. So if anyone reaches out to you, my one ask is not that you blindly take them if the outreach is terrible. But if 10% or so of applicants actually direct message you, you should take the time to read every single one of those and investigate if they're a quality candidate. That alone sets them apart from a resume perspective as well. I think for me, it's like non-starters or simple typos, you know, am dashes. I'm like a little OCD with that one. But if I can tell you wrote your resume with AI, I get it from a time-saving perspective. But if you don't take the time to clean it up, that's another one. But I would really to say it simply, you know, you can get a mix of people that have sales experience that do not for SDR entry-level sales roles. But I really want to look for someone that can show that they have maybe not complete industry expertise, but they've gone really far with one or two major things. So certainly if they studied and got into like a good university, that's a good proxy. Doesn't mean they're going to be that great per se. Maybe they're an athlete and they played either high-level varsity like state championship level high school sports and or, you know, in college in some capacity to like D1, D2, maybe one awards, all Americans, something like that. Like obviously that's an extreme example. But even if they did something like that out of their way of just I went to school, I got a pretty average GPA. Sometimes those people will work out and they may be worth taking. But those are initial things, whether it's like a formal job that they did well. Do they have maybe they're coming from a different career altogether? Did they have any type of success in that? And also do they have a clear story as to why they're applying to an entry-level SDR role right now? All of those are probably the biggest categories that I look for and I think where a lot of people miss and you can fluff out like are they just trying to take a job right now and they're kind of applying to anything? Or do they have a very clear reason why they want to be an SDR and ideally an SDR at your company? So I can break that down more, but hopefully that's the stage. No, and same thing that I would say is I would look for energy and it's really all about who needs at least amount of time put in to get them ramped up, right? That's the ultimate test. That's what you want. So what do you look for? Well, to me, what you were referencing like has anybody taken the time to prospect? Like if somebody is understood or understands the tools that they would be using in role to find other people's contact information and you're doing the same with me, that's huge. Honestly, that completely removes the resume aspect or portion of it. I would want to talk to you if you've taken the time to find my contact information, send me a message that is not absolute bullshit with, you know, 15 M dashes in it. But even that, like I would say you definitely fast track your chances with me. If you do that, I want to have a conversation with you. And then from there, I think just work down like if they have previous experience, look at that experience. If you have a lot of people with the same experience, obviously depending on how hot your company is, if you're really fast growing, you have 200 candidates, you'll have to be a little bit more critical with that. So you don't want to have too few people either. So you don't want to like boil it down to just 10 people. You want to adjust for the fact that some people will drop off during the interview process. Some people will have other offers. And then naturally you just want to weed out and select certain folks throughout the process too. So yeah, I mean, everything that you said boil it down to who fits the build the best, who has the most experience that's reminiscent to what you're doing, what you're selling, previous prospecting. But I don't only look for experience and being an STR at the stage. Yeah. I look for energy. I look for what you were referencing, like, have they done any other cool things? Like, honestly, a lot of the times the best hires will be somebody coming straight out of doing something like, you know, even being in the army or doing something that requires a lot of dedication and effort and something that's hard. Yeah. Is the most important thing. No, completely. I'd say the last thing on that before we jump to is I would say a key part of that. If you distill it down to maybe 15, especially if you're at early stage and you have like good people applying, there's going to be at least a third that are going to a trip by the time they get to a final round interview because other offers, whatever it may be. So I think you're looking for maybe 10 to 15 in the pipeline, the first time, especially if this is the first time you're hiring. If it gets, you know, you get and refine your process, you can go narrower. But all I'd say on that point and then we can move to the next one is get a mix of people with experience and without really easy to fixate on, oh, there's been a lot of layoffs. I can find someone with a year or two of experience I can get on the cheap. A lot of times with that, there are habits that you're going to have to completely overcome or redo and rewire, which is harder than taking someone that has a lot of the intangibles you mentioned and training them up. No perfect answer, but make sure you get a mix of the two. So yeah, well said. And then the next step is really to get them on a call. So depending on the size of your company, typically if you are less than 15, you won't have a recruiter, but a recruiter will typically take that first call. And if you don't have a recruiter, then no, typically be the hiring manager. You'll just jump straight to that. On that call, you're really, I mean more than anything, making sure they're not a studio killer, or you know, something absolutely ridiculous. So just, I mean, behavioral stuff, like I would ask high-level questions, but also tailor it depending on their background experience. Like you don't want to grill them too hard, but let's say somebody has a background or they have a STR experience, I would want to probe into, you know, a lot of the times people will over-inflate what's actually the reality. So on their resume, if they call out numbers, which they should be doing if they're top performers, go a little bit deeper into that. Like talk to me about your territory, talk to me about how many meetings you have to set. If they can't answer those questions really confidently and on the spot, I like the hood that they're not being truthful about that. So that's the first asset test of what you want to smoke out is just, are they being truthful about their performance? Can they speak to what they've done, how they run their book of business? Do they actually have a process or are they just getting showered with inbound leads? And how reminiscent, again, is that to your environment, right? Like, does it fit well with what you're doing? If it does, great. If you're talking to somebody who doesn't have experience, I'd want to know more about what have you gone through that is similar to what you're going to be going through here. So if you've been an athlete, obviously you deal with injuries. Can you talk me through? You know, what happened when you had an injury? How did you deal with that? Like even just the way that they answer those questions, the critical thinking aptitude that you get from that will tell you a lot about how this person is going to do and how much effort have they put into your, or the interview, right? That's really the biggest thing that you can test for during this phase is, is there resume polished? Are they coming and understanding what they're getting into? Like, if they know what they're going to be doing every single day, if they've already taken the time to learn at a baseline, what the tools do, how to prospect, that to me tells me that they're ready to be an STR. Let me know your thoughts. Yeah, for sure. And I think it's a decision you need to make, whether you have an introductory call with all 15 or you go straight into more of what I would consider like a manager interview, you could do a 20 to 30 minute intro. If you want, maybe if you're at the scale, you have a recruiter. Hey, why do you want to, you know, tell me about yourself, why do you want to go into sales and why do you want to work at this company specifically? Is it a very good starting point? And on that 20 to 30 minute conversation to your point, ask maybe one or two intangible questions of, tell me about a time you overcame adversity, probe into their experience a little bit as well. So if you have a recruiter screener that can get you down to about 10 to 15 and maybe they can talk to 25 30, that's great. Or if you're a little bit scrappier, you want to get right into it and maybe only have two to three rounds and you're doing more of a deep dive, I just pull the thread and give more specific examples because we do this all the time for companies, by the way, we have people higher from our higher levels community and we actually vet talent for them and position them to meet with like top vetted talent. A lot of the things that I'm looking for when I'm interviewing an SDR and call it your manager round where you're really picking through their experience more than just tell me about yourself to your point. The high level things you mentioned, absolutely, hey, tell me about your day to day. What kind of quota did you hit? This is someone with experience. If they say, oh, yeah, I hit 120% of my quota and every day on typically calling, emailing, doing LinkedIn touches, maybe about 100 each a day and yeah, just, you know, yeah, happy to elaborate further or something like that. This is a huge opportunity, especially if you're that founder that doesn't have sales experience that you're going to miss and have a lot of people who are better at selling than you are or are better at talking in real time than you are and you don't know what to probe. So hopefully this gives you a lot to probe in. There's been so many times where I'm interviewing candidates for the companies we work with and they'll say something like that. I hit 120% of my number on XYZ. Okay, cool. tell me how you structure your day. I do calls emails and LinkedIn blah blah blah. Okay. Maybe give me a little bit more specifics like hour by hour roughly or every two hours. What do you do? Right? Okay. Cool. You said you hit 120% of your number. I'd love to break that down. How many of your leads are inbound versus outbound? Tell me about some of like the biggest opportunities that you sourced and how you were able to find them. And these are the questions we want to keep pulling back. I'll maybe get your input because I don't want to just ramble. But this is where you're really going to find if someone knows what they're talking about or not. And if they don't have a good answer, I'll give you not trying to put anyone on blast. But someone I interviewed in the last six months said this exact thing. And I was like, cool. So, you know, you said you had 120% where do you rank kind of compared to the SDRs on your team? I think I'm like top three. It just depends sometimes. It's like, okay, cool. So like, I guess what would you say is like your process? You know, it's like, well, I get some inbound and outbound. So I make sure I optimize for the inbound leads. And like, because you know, they're higher priority. And I do some outbounding. Okay, cool. So give me an example of an email sequence or a call script that you use for an inbound lead. Let's start there. And then we'll touch on outbound. And very, very quickly, if they don't have this stuff on lock, if they're, if they're take a minute to think and collect their thoughts, that's one thing. But if they give you really short in vague answers, the further you go down, that is where you find out the people who present themselves, well, that actually lack depth versus the actually genuinely solid candidates who can answer that stuff pretty automatically, if they've prepared. So I'll pause. I have way more. But no, that's well said. Yeah, I agree with every single one of them. I mean, feel free to elaborate. One other thing I was going to add is also the questions that they're asking you. Like, you want to basically smoke out. Again, how much effort are they putting into this? How much do they care about you specifically? Yeah, because truth is they're probably interviewing with several other companies. So you want to figure out really, I mean, one, are these people a good fit for the SDR role specifically? Are they a good fit for your specific SDR role? And do they give a shit about you? Yeah, like where are you relative to all the other companies of all those three match up? I think you've got a pretty, pretty good combination. But to me, I mean, if they just ask me the top 10 most commonly, you know, asked interview questions for tech sales SDR role. Like I will know immediately that they just haven't put in too much effort. Like one thing that we're big on is asking tailored questions. Like if somebody comes to me and asks me or just shows me that they've gone to my LinkedIn, just spent like three minutes on like looking me up and just adding a little bit of context up front about, hey, I saw that, you know, for instance, most SDR managers will have been SDRs beforehand. So they just said, hey, I saw that you were an SDR or I saw that you were an AE then you went into being a SDR manager. I know a lot of the times that means that you typically take a take a pay cut. Why did you do that? Like I just want to understand that one that's a really, really good question gets them talking, but to it also shows that you've done research. It's going to make the other person feel better. So as a candidate, you're doing that for several reasons. You're doing it because you give a shit and to also make yourself look better. So just just one extra thing to add in there. Like that shows me that they want this that they're interested. Yeah. And maybe another way to illustrate this point before we move to the next one is I've given you an example of ways you can probe in further to someone's experience. Even if you're a founder or you don't have a ton of sales experience, those are really important things, not that there's a perfect answer. But if they can't even give you specifics on like I even asked a candidate who told me they were top of their team when they're their quarters and annual calendar year like a line like, hey, are you guys a January one fiscal year or January 31st? They literally said, I don't know, which is crazy. If you're the number one on the leaderboard for hitting 150% of your number, you are working against the clock and you should be seeing an active leaderboard and you know when the deadline is, whether it's end of like year, end of quarter, you know exactly when those are because those are clear targets you have to go after. So maybe just as an example, too, of not to say my answer is a golden standard, but the kind of depth of information you're looking for, whether it's in their first response or in follow-up questions, I haven't been an SDR for almost a decade and I can still tell you that every single morning without fail, I went into the office at 8 a.m. and I spent the first hour of the day combing through all of my inbound leads, organizing those, getting them in the right cadences because those are by far way more qualified than outbound. And then from nine to 10, I'm actioning all of those leads, making sure I prefer to send an email first, get them an email in their inbox. So when I call maybe in two to three hours, hopefully they remember that, it just helps lower that barrier. And then ultimately from there, you know, from nine to 10, that's when I'm sending my first emails, usually up till lunchtime, I'll make some dials and or follow up on some admin work and sales force, but I've typically found that making call calls from two to three p.m. and then also 430 to 530 p.m. and that individual specific time zone is where I got the best connect rates. That again, I'm just riffing off of my own experience. That is not like the golden answer that you should hear from a candidate, but if they can't go to that depth in terms of what their process is, how they structure their day, that is a big red flag that they're just kind of smoothing you and telling you XYZ. And it's difficult because especially the people with no sales experience, you don't have the luxury of having them walk you through their exact sales experience, but those should be some questions. Honestly, even if you use like obviously certainly this video, but even AI, hey, I'm interviewing someone that has an engineering background that wants to go into sales. How can I probe into their work that shows that they actually really knew what they were doing and talking about as opposed to them being horrible at their job? So hopefully again, just pulling that further, maybe we go to the next one. I don't want to spend too much time here, but last one I just totally forgot about and yeah, the one we're moving on is bonus points for closing the interview, just asking for reservations at the end. I feel like that's just very, very standard. If they don't do that, then that's kind of a big, it's not necessarily going to make me disqualify that person immediately, but it's like I would say negative 25% points from me. Totally. So, but yeah, moving on to the next one, assuming that they make it through recruiter and behavioral hiring manager interview, you move to a prospecting exercise typically, and that'll be, you know, you giving them some context, some information, an account. I like to pair them up. So, after that, you would have a cool call exercise. I like to pair them up so that they would basically be calling the person that they're sending the cold email to. But give them some context, tell them about the account, have them. What you're really testing for here is, are they able to find the relevant people inside of this account? Like, do they know who your ICP is? Cool. You can decide how much relevance you want to add if you're selling something super, super technical. Maybe you had a little bit of context to adjust for the people who have no, you know, software experience. And then second, you want to see, are they able to find a relevant trigger? Like, they might not have to tailor every single email because it's not the most efficient thing to do once they're in seat, but that's what you're testing for here is, in these situations, where they have to do those things, are they able to find that winning combination of the right person, the right trigger, the right message, right CTA, to book enough interest for our meeting. Yeah, completely. And just to give you sense too, if you're just now hiring SDRs for the first time, the exercise interview itself is typically about 45 minutes. To Chris's point, you give them a write up beforehand. So they pass the first interview, we give them a write up with about a week at most time to get this done. And what we typically do is we have people submit that initial email beforehand. So 20 at the, at the latest 24 hours before their interview, you want them to submit the email. That way you can review it, even if for five minutes in the morning before the interview, just make sure you have a sense of where they're at. And what you're looking for here is not the perfect answer to everything. It's really understanding the depth of how much they thought about it. And can they at least, even if they don't get it perfectly right, do they have a strong reason and thought process and kind of logic of how they win about this exercise? Because if it's not, you know, if it's totally wrong and it's really bad, yeah, okay, you don't have to hire them. But if they at least have a strong thought process and they're coachable, then if they missed it by 20%, it's easy to coach that gap and fill that gap. So by the time you actually get on this interview, what you want to, I, you know, five minutes of back and forth, if there's other questions or things, maybe in the meantime that you want to dive into first, use the first five to 10 minutes of the interview to catch up on anything you missed all of that. And then dive right into the email exercise. And again, we just walk us through this process. How did you find this person or these three people? Why are they the people that you would reach out to? Why did you structure the email this way? And as an example, throw a curve ball, make them think on the spot of like, Hey, this email was great. What would you do if they didn't respond? What would the next email be? Or what would your next touch point be? Whatever it may be, just see how they react to that. Give them enough to know. But then throw one or two things to ask on the top of that. That's probably another 15 to 20 minutes right there. And then another 10 minutes of simulating a call call to the exact person in that email. There's lots of things we could break down there and then close it with the last five. But that should hopefully give you at least a bit more structure aside from the theory of what you're looking for, of how to run that exact process. So yeah, and sometimes people will separate these. So we like to combine them. Yeah, because then you walk through and what I really look for more than anything else is effort. Like I want to see even the little things like if I send out a PowerPoint presentation template, like did they use that? Did they just respond back in an email? Like did they take the time to do research? They write up like their process? Well, really what I'm looking for here is also explain to me why you did this. Explain to me where your mind went to find these things that you didn't just go to clot and be like, Hey, here's my exercise. Fill it out for me. Like that can honestly get you pretty far like even today. But where they really will stumble if they've done that is they can't walk through. through. Why did I target this specific person? Yeah. And most of the time, if you are creating this exercise, I would actually create it with an actual deal that you've closed in the past, because then you could reference the exact personas that you got that were part of that deal that we're engaged with. Obviously, you want to make sure it's actually reminiscent of your typical process, so you don't want it to be something crazy, or it's just completely different ICP. But something that resembles your typical sales process, that'll be a really good indicator of is this person able to just jump in on day one. I have to spend the least amount of time on coaching them. Yeah. So maybe I'm a little bit deeper. I think the prospecting exercise we went through, if you want to combine them, that's great. Some people also separate them, so they'll actually do the email exercise, send it over, and then some companies will send over, okay, cool, you've moved to the next round. There's not even really a step there. We like to combine them. That's the best process for us. Moving on to the co-call exercise, which is the second portion of that. So to your point, if sent out the email person didn't respond, now you're jumping on a co-call, and you're basically simulating, you would be, the hiring manager would typically be the person that they would be calling, they would act as your SDR, and you're just mock creating a scenario where they're trying to book a meeting with you. What would you look for during that co-call? Yeah, I would say this is going to be the hardest version of this. You don't have to, but I recommend it because there's two things I'm looking for, which is how much did they prepare for this? That's both just from a sales, fundamentals, but also research about your company, your industry, etc. But also, I like to get someone in a position where I'm going to make them stumble, and I don't want someone, or I'm not expecting someone is another way to say that, to be perfect throughout. How do they handle a situation when I hit them with a question that there's no way they're going to know the answer to? Can they navigate that? And how do they survive that? Or in some cases, unfortunately, well, I hate this for the candidates I interview. Sometimes I ask them a question so difficult, and they freeze up, and they don't know how to get around that. So just elaborating on that further on one hand, with their opener, with how they position themselves, when how they talk to the client, are you on the roleplay? They at least position themselves well. They show some basic sales acumen, and they also have a question or start the conversation that's like industry-specific. That's solid. I'm going to give them maybe a little bit of information here or there. I'm not going to give everything, be like, oh, this is interesting. We do this, but before I take the time, I just want to know, what do you guys even do? Put the ball in their court. How do they handle that situation? Because it's also not about them just saying, oh, great, we do XYZ. They should really be able to ask and understand the pains and challenges of the type of person that your company sells to. We can elaborate on that further if you want, but my point being is we're going to do that for a little bit. Make it hard. You know, only open up if they ask a couple of good questions, and then as they're pulling that thread, be like, you know what? This is actually really interesting, because we actually looked at Kafka a while back for our Kubernetes deployment. That's in the EU and New Zealand specifically, and we really had some challenges with our globally distributed architecture. So how do you guys fit into that? And so I'm going to give them intentionally, excuse my language, but shitty question like that. Because in a good sales process, an SCR under the gun is there's no way no one's going to have your engineers don't even know the answer to that question offhand. But can they take that? And in the moment of not knowing what to say, can they at least say, why is that important to you? That's interesting. Tell me a little bit more about that to make sure I understand the full breadth of what you're asking. Those are the types of things I want to see an SDR handle in real time. And if they stumble a little bit, that's okay. But can they get through that moment of not knowing and then ultimately provide like, hey, help me understand that. Let me get a full picture of what you mean. And then as one example of many, I'll take that context as an SDR and say, this is really great. I honestly think with something this complex, if you have 30 minutes available, we can dive in and get you a really thorough answer. How's Tuesday at 3 p.m.? Right? So hopefully that long tangent was not too much. But those are really some of the key things that I think someone with out sales experience, if you're doing your mock call call, you'll probably just give them the like, I'm busy. Can you send me an email? And someone will give you a good response and you'll be like, all right, like, what do I know? Hopefully that gives you a better idea of how to really test them in real time and get a sense for top performers. Yeah. So yeah, I'm looking for less like perfection and like the perfect answer is like, even if there's a certain way, like, obviously, broke it down really perfectly. Like, I don't expect an SDR to come in with no experience with the they lock up. Yeah. Do they keep going? Like, I don't expect them to overcome every single little thing or maybe even to know to use the next meeting as the interest for answering those quite like the average person who hasn't done this before wouldn't know that. But do they at least try? Yeah. Right? If they're trying, you're 75% of the way there. The little things on the back end, that's what you can coach. That's what you'll teach them. And obviously, it's a ranking too. Like, you'll have some people who if they have previous SDR experience, they'll just come in and be super polished. And there you have your ranking, right? So yeah, definitely 100%. From there, you're moving to the last step, which is the final call. Typically, this will be with a senior leader. So this isn't going to be like exercise and you have different degrees of this. But it's just another element of making sure they can perform under pressure. So a lot of the time, this will be, if you're a smaller company, it'll be a founder. If it's a bigger company, it'll be like a director or like a VP. And yeah, actually, I want to get your thoughts. How would you grill or what would you say or maybe maybe also curve balls? Because this is typically where that these leaders will throw a curve ball to see how they do. And I think it's really important to deviate from the typical process. Because if if you're just following the playbook that everybody talks about online on Google, on LinkedIn, on even some of the things that we talk about, it's important that you add some element of surprise here as a final test. I'm on mine. Yeah, for sure. And just kind of recapping where we're at too is you'll typically, let's say you took 15 in that first round, maybe wouldle it down to five to seven for the exercise so you don't waste a ton of time. And then from there, really, this final round should hopefully be within a week or less after this. And ideally, three candidates, maybe again, just trying to protect your time, but also really make sure you can tighten that gap between the exercise and the final round. Because these people probably have other great offers or are in process with other companies and the longer you wait, the more risk there is at losing them. So as you're at this final round, I think to your point, it's you've got to decide what you're looking for. If you're early stage, you need a scrappy SDR. I like to keep it casual anyway in a final round. Like I don't want to put like the pressure on them, but I'm going to ask the more questions of how they handled situations where it was completely ambiguous. They had no clear directive and they were able to get an outcome. Whatever that may be, it doesn't have to be work. It could be out of work. Ideally, maybe some of both. But how did they handle, you know, difficult feedback? What's an example of a project where they had no clear directives and were able to be very successful? What's an example of a time where like they worked with a team similar type of premise of like you had different personalities, but you had to get some type of outcome that really lends itself well to earlier stage companies. As you get more mature, you're maybe a mid stage. You've got hundreds of employees and beyond. There's an element more that's more about process. How did they optimize something? How did they come in like an athlete as well? Like it's great. You want awards. Tell me about how you prepared or if they're in a different career entirely. Like I was an engineer before I was in sales. Tell me about like how you handled working with your biggest customers because I did a lot of customer facing work, et cetera, et cetera. But that I would say is even more so about structured procedural thinking, whereas the early stage person who handles handels ambiguity, like we'll get there. But sometimes I need someone who can just deal with like, hey, figure this out and we'll optimize it later. So I can peel that back further, but that's hopefully a good overview for us. That's great. Yeah. And typically we also deal with higher level questions here. So like more of a broader outlook on like, where do you want to be two to five years from now? Again, it's all about like, do they know what they're getting themselves into? If their answer is just going to be well, I just want to be the best SDR possible. The top performer and be, you know, like to me, I would like it's really positive if somebody comes to me and says, well, you know, even mapping it out like in year one to two, 18 months to 24 months, you know, I want to be a top performer. I want to get promoted to AE from there. Obviously, I can't predict the future, but I just want to be the best rep that I can possibly be. I want to go into software sales to become an executive to be a closer from there. Ideally, if everything goes according to plan, move into a different segment, move into it's not necessarily about this path and journey about because nobody really knows where they're going to be in five years. That's the reality. But it shows me that they've done the research and understand how the internal structure works. What the path looks like again, do they know what they're getting themselves into? If they can answer those questions back to back to back and without making it sound like too crazy, just like intelligent questions or intelligent answers to these questions, I just show that they know what they're doing or what they're getting into so they don't they don't turn or leave the company after three months once they have to pick up the phone and call somebody and get told to fuck off. Yeah, completely. I would say to, like, last thing on this this final round is you may be in a situation where you've got someone that has a year or two of experience that you're probably logically going to be leaning towards. But if you have a really good feeling and the person that has no sales experience but really wants this job in like the right way, not a desperate way, you know, that's a difficult decision to make. I'd be curious your thoughts on it as well. But I think always consider those trade-offs where the person that has a year or so of experience twofold. They may have bad habits or they may be selling to a way more established customer base that a brand brand name and coming to a new fast growing company with no recognition. You probably think you got a great company and I'm sure you do, but you may not have the tools. The brand recognition, everything, the processes, the assets that they can use, the case studies, little things like that. You may be getting into a situation where they can't perform. But the other side too is you have this rep that wants to take a chance on the startup, but they come to your company and it's not what they thought. They're going to get dejected way more than the person that has no experience that quite frankly is a little bit more thankful to have their first sales job that will gut it out for nine to 12 to 18 months. Again, assuming it's not like a horrible setup. But those are some of the things I would consider too when you're narrowing it down between those final candidates. So I'm curious if you have a way to think about it. But yeah. No, I think that's great. I mean, maybe you say going into okay, you've narrowed it down, right? And we can definitely talk about what you do when you have like two or three candidates that are really, really strong. But I think the most important thing here is that you need to close them. Because if they're strong candidates, they're not going to wait around forever. And we've had a lot of engagements where you have these companies that are just dragging their feet because they think the candidates will just be there. And they lose them. They lose like two of them and then there's no longer a conversation. But then it's like their third pick that's ultimately left. Not that it's a bad pick. But you've got to close the deal. Yeah. Like if you know that these are the people make a decision swiftly, you can talk about the criteria here in the second. But how do you do that? Well, you pick up the phone, you call them, you confirm start date, give them an offer, give them your OT, maybe you've talked about it throughout the process for alignment and what not. If they give you the verbal, you want to send out the offer letter ASAP. And I would also make a contingent upon execution or signature within 24 or 40 hours, especially if you have several candidates that are waiting. Yeah. And you want to spoke this out. I mean, ideally you'll want to feel out whether or not these other candidates have other ongoing processes. Like you can either ask the question early on, typically that's a recruiter thing or during the first round and you want to adjust everything based on that. So but maybe we talk also about the criteria, like what do you do when you have three people that are really strong, that all are good, like how do you window it down? Yeah. I mean, I think the highest level is prioritize them. However you decide, make that decision quickly. Don't think for like three to five days on it and then say, okay, this is our number one. This is our number two. This is our number three. That decision as quickly as possible because yeah, number one may take an offer from Snowflake and now you've got to go to number two. And if you're not ready for that, not only that, but hey, you finally get that offered a number one five days later, they don't take it. Now it's been seven days and you give it to number two who also just had two other third round interviews with other companies in the meantime. So just something to keep in mind. And in terms of like, yeah, I think prioritize it as quickly as possible, give it to them and ask them, hey, can you get us an answer in two days at the latest? It seems like a reasonable ask, not too much pressure. And then really, yeah, when you decide between the three, I mean, yeah, we could dive into this. I feel like infinitely, but ultimately at the end of the day, I really think that final round is specifically for culture. You definitely want to check the box. You definitely want to make sure they don't say any, like if they get too comfortable or they let their guard down and really bomb the third round, that shows you they're the kind of person that can present well, but when it really gets into it, they, they don't keep that standard up. But honestly, I would say if you, if you whittled it down to three, it's kind of kind of gut. I mean, at that point, because you've done so much of the heavy lifting already, like who gives you the best sense, especially for an SDR entry level, I'm not here to say that they're dispensable. I think quite frankly, the opposite, like a good SDR is worth their weight in gold. But if you feel like you have three really good ones, just pick and then let's get the offer out as soon as possible when we go down from there. So curious if you have any more thoughts on it, but yeah, no, I agree. I mean, you should trust your gut. Typically you'll have one person that's better or that you feel better about, get it out there. ASAP. Like don't sit around on it. Don't wait for it. If you have people that generally are right on par with each other, I think you can create your own qualifying criteria, but I agree with the gut. I think that's very, very important. I think finding somebody who's coachable, finding somebody who you would enjoy working with. I think that's very, very important if you're the hiring manager. That's what you want to look for is you don't want a team of just people who can do the job. You want a team of people who you would enjoy having on your team. So that's a little bit more of like now we're getting into cultural stuff and different elements. But yeah, I think also just house rules, like don't tell all your candidates know, like you want to keep, like even if once you've extended the offer to that one person, we've seen cases where they're like, they just think by default they're going to sign the offer and then they've told the other people know. And you can't just go back and undo that. So make sure that you keep your pipeline healthy. Make sure that you have those three candidates at the end, that they're strong prospects. And also, I would say this, don't feel like you have to rush into a decision either. If you are looking to hire like several reps, obviously that's if you're looking for just one. If you're looking to hire like two or three reps, your pipeline should magnify by the proportion to three people or two people or whatever else. So if you want three SDRs, you probably want to have like nine people or maybe seven to nine. But yeah, like don't feel like you have to hire if they're truly is not a good match. And there's definitely, you also don't be sitting on it for too long. You don't be sitting for six months and just looking for SDRs. So it's also relative to the market. But if you truly don't feel like that there is a good fit, it's okay to pause. It's okay to like extrapolate the process a little bit or even, you know, expedite other people. That comes in super lay in the process that's just an absolute killer. Sometimes you have to push them forward. Sometimes you have to skip a step. You can do those things. You don't have to be so rigid that this entire thing that we've ran through. This is the perfect ideal scenario that if everybody just came at the same time with nothing is perfect. Like you never know who's going to want to leave their job tomorrow or who comes last second into the process. I have actually seen a lot of hires happen where there's a really strong candidate that comes in at the end. And then you push them forward to the most important part, which is the exercise. And they just absolutely crush it. Take the offer and then being top performers. So that was a lot. No, for sure. I just say last thing to that, like one thing that we haven't touched on, but I think it's an appropriate time to bring up is top performers are going to negotiate period. So there's a couple of ways you can handle that throughout this process. I think first and foremost, on that first round interview, you should be transparent about what the OTE is. You don't have to say hardball like, hey, we're ADK OTE, we don't negotiate period. Let's set tables like table stakes. Our compensation is 50,000 base, 30,000 commission for a total of AD OTE. There's a lot more that goes into it. But I wanted to check with you, Chris, before we get too far, how does that land with you? I think take the lead on that. Like just be fully transparent about that with the person. And if they get weird about it or they don't have a great answer, that's a sign. It's not like you kick them out immediately, but you got to be ready for that. Also, I'll tell you selfishly, I mean, we've literally coached like 9,000 plus reps at this point that are broken in. We teach this exact way to negotiate and you should expect that. Not even to say, like, don't do it, but just be ready for this, right? Let's say you give an ADK offer. Someone's going to come to you, they'll say, hey, thanks for the verbal if they're doing this right. And the way we coach it, quite frankly, is they'll say, hey, Chris, I really appreciate this offer. Yeah, let me take those two days. I'll get you an answer by Friday at the latest. They call you on Friday and they say, hey, I'm final round with someone else right now. I really love your company. They are coming in at a bit higher, but if you can meet me at 90K and that would be 55 base, 35 OTE, I'd be ready to sign today. And I think a lot of people get caught up in, again, if you don't want to negotiate, just make that clear. Just make that clear when you give the verbal offer of, hey, Chris, this is the offer. I'll be completely honest with you, like, we are locked in at that salary band. So just being transparent with you, like, we can't negotiate or anything like that. You don't even necessarily have to say that, but I would just say, hey, ADK firm offer, that's like standard for what we do here. And kind of set that expectation that there's no negotiation if you don't want to. But on the flip side, if this is your number one person, and they make a reasonable ask of increase in both base and variable, if they come in and they say, I just want more base, and they don't care about their variable, that could be a red flag. But if they're coming in and in this example, you've got 50,000 base, 30K OTE is your offer or ADK total, and they come in and they ask for 55 and 35 for a total of 90 OTE. I've seen founders like get weirded out by that. And at the end of the day, we're talking, I mean, again, money's money. But it's like $5,000 over the course of a year. We are looking at less than $500 a month to get a top performer, your number one pick on your team, literally less than $500 a month. And so, again, also, that's probably a sign of a good rep, a good SDR that is ambitious within moderation and isn't asking anything crazy. My whole point being is hopefully that walks you through of how to expect that and also not react one way or the other. If you don't want to negotiate, if you're a founder and your numbers firm, that's fine. Just make it clear. But if you are willing to negotiate, don't get tripped up in the fact that they ask you for $5,000 more base salary when it's literally $500 a month. So my two cents on that. No, that's great. That's really important to call out because if you haven't hired for a sales role before, I know that there's a negative connotation to doing that in other aspects, you know, if just corporate. So, yeah, if you've never hired for a sales role before, just know that that's a positive thing. Like, you want, like, there's literally companies when I went to Vanta, which was a very, very fast growing company, they literally after I got hired were like, it is a massive red flag to them. If somebody doesn't negotiate because that's how stacked the interview processes, that's the level and caliber of person that they expect. So they put their OTE and adjust it for people coming back and negotiating because that's a level of talent that they want. So somebody does that to you, just know that you have a good candidate. It's not that you're dealing with somebody who is an asshole who doesn't want to work for you. It is just that they know what they're doing and that's probably what you want in your team. Yeah. Of course, you got to adjust like if they, if they didn't do well in the interview process And it's one of those were. like you're tapering and you just need talent in place immediately. You can also say that. Yeah. So, but I think that was very, very in depth. She endless plug, obviously at higher levels. We help with all of this stuff. We help tailor it. We help create this process, run it for companies that are early stage all the way up to enterprise. So if you're in this situation, if you need help, check out the link below. This is what we do. And just to be clear too, we also connect companies with talent. So we've been training sales reps for over five years. We have over 9,000 people in our community. So early stage, mid stage companies that are looking for SDRs. If that's a place where this process is great, but you're really struggling to even get talent knocking on your door. That's where we do help a lot. And yeah, there's anything we can help with. Comment below. Check out the link if that is something you want to look into further. But yeah, anything else while we're here? There's a good episode. Get out there. Start hiring some talent. Thanks, everybody. He's guys.