Driving Sales Success: Ronald David, Associate Inside Sales Manager

This is the IT Coffee Break podcast, bringing you your regular dose of IT news, insights and fun, powered by the foremost global digital transformation services provider, eBam Systems. My name is Julia Sivak and I am your host in the brand new iteration of the IT Coffee Break podcast. The tech industry is facing a variety of challenges in the wake of global economic and political turmoil. Many customers are grappling with issues of their own and IT companies need to find new ways to maintain existing relationships and build new ones. Today we will be talking about sales development, an emerging field of expertise that aims to combine the best of marketing and sales. Sales development representatives, or SPRs, are skilled professionals specialized in finding new opportunities and opening new doors which can boost business, especially in the field of tech sales, where the sales journey is typically very long and complex. But how does an SDR achieve this? What is the SDR pipeline like? And what is the business importance of this function? In today's episode, I am joined by Ronald David, global head of lead generation from Ecom Hungary. Ron has been in sales for more than 20 years and spent the last 10 of those in sales development. He is currently building a team of young and dedicated sales development representatives in Budapest, but we will discuss that later on. So, Ron, welcome to the studio. I am so glad that we finally managed to set the date and we are here and talking. Before we get started with the sales development, could you please tell me a little bit about yourself, your background? Sure. So, my name is Ronald David. People are close to me. Call me Ron. I was born and brought up in Sri Lanka. I finished my high school over there and I started working right after high school and I started working at a company that was actually selling pens and diaries to small to medium companies in the UK. The operation was actually head office in the UK and at that time it used to be called telemarketing. I don't know if we hear this kind of role nowadays. It has, nowadays it has this negative connotation about this telemarketing role, but that was my first job. So, I'm in sales and whenever I have an interview, especially in the sales job, you have this very famous question saying, "Could you sell me a pen?" And I actually did that. So, yeah, here I learned a lot around actually how to use your voice, your tone, your words. Someone who was just 19, 20 coming out of high school started talking to directors, managers, in companies in the UK. It was overwhelming at times, but I believe having to do this over and over again. I mean, nowadays if you think about it, it sounds so strange, but I had an actual telephone in front of me and probably people would not even know this. There is a directory called Compass. It's like Yellow Pages, but it's more around, you know, businesses like with their telephone numbers, contact details, addresses, their owners, directors, names. So we had this big book that was probably the size of a Bible or even bigger. And we would go through it and we were assigned different territories. In the UK, you had postcode, so we had a few people in the room, eight of us. We had our supervisor and our job was to contact these companies. Just, you know, keep going. I remember we had to make 300 calls a day, and we had to have at least 10 conversations with people. That would last about five to 10 minutes. And I remember my supervisor at that time was someone called Caroline. I think for me, what I learned around sales was probably a lot to do with that inspiration, that training that I got from her. And I learned the word "rapple," you know, how we can talk to people irrespective of their seniority, their age, what they do, how can you strike a conversation. And naturally, when I was in school, I felt like I'm not that outgoing. I would feel this fear of going in front of, you know, being in the debate team and, you know, debating in front of your fellow colleagues was an overwhelming feeling. But when I started doing this and talking to directors, managers, I really felt like it just came so easily. And you had to do this over and over again, so it kind of trains you. I got the opportunity to talk to many people, different industries, and I learned a lot. I wanted to try maybe something different than sales, so I moved to the hospitality industry. I worked with Hilton as a revenue manager, completely different. There was nothing to do with customer-facing roles. It was mostly about being in the back office, checking the numbers, and deciding how much you want to sell each hotel room. I learned a lot around, you know, analyzing forecasting during this time. And my general manager at that time said that I should maybe try to get into a program called the Elevator Program, which Hilton had, and for that, I needed to have a degree. It gives you a chance to, you know, be in five continents where Hilton is operating for five years and learn about different departments, different processes that a hotel has. And once you complete this, you become a general manager of a hotel. So I was really interested, and I decided I wanted to complete my studies. And all that money that I saved during that five, six years of being in tele-sales was really helpful, so I was able to enroll with the University of Wales in England. I moved there, completed my MBA, and also worked in the hotel industry in the UK. Then I met with a Hungarian woman who happens to be my wife now, and we decided we go back to Sri Lanka to experience it, because I really wanted to get back to, you know, why it all started to get into this program. Then we decided we wanted to come back to Hungary. And then I decided to go back to my original passion, which was in sales. So I worked with a conference production company in Hungary for three and a half years. After that, I moved to Robotics with a Danish company, used to sell robots across Europe, and following that, also had some work around software development. And then I moved to the last five years of my career, was with a full-service demand generation agency. This is where I realized the very niche segment of sales that really triggers me, which is sales development. And I was the director of that company's sales development team. We used to help companies in the tech industry build strategies and execute the go-to-market. We would help them with outsource sales development representatives when they were not able to find people in a quick and fast way. This company would help them integrate this external team into their existing team. And so I had to dive deeper into this topic, and I saw a lot of young people joining this company, being really great at talking to prospects, opening doors for sales managers. And for me, the biggest rewarding factor in this career is to see someone who just comes out of university and learns quite a lot of things. You can be an accountant, you can be a lawyer, you will be really focused in that area. As a sales developer or even a salesperson, you kind of have a 360-degree view. And at that early age, to actually have that experience firsthand was quite rewarding for them. Or the passion called firing the belly. They want to prove themselves. They want to keep learning and growing and become someone. And when that actually happens, that feeling of I was a part of that journey was the most rewarding thing for me. So at that moment, I decided this is the goal for me. This is what I want to establish my career with. And last year in September, I joined E-Pam, exactly to do that. So let's discuss what is it that you actually do with E-Pam? What is sales development? So sales development is actually a role that has been very prominent in the tech sector, companies that are in SaaS or cloud technologies or software development. It's probably come into the limelight in the last 10 to 20 years. In 2011, it had a big impact with Salesforce coming up with this book called Predictable Revenue. I mean, anyone in sales or sales development, I think that's something that they should really read. It's a really interesting take on how the world of sales is changing. If you even consider '60s, '70s, we had radio advertising, we had TV advertising, then came the phone. We used the phone as a tool to actually find people. '90s, we saw worldwide web coming into the picture, emails, then 2000, social media. So there has been a lot of changes, and it's constantly changing even now. So it actually talks about why is it important to have this sometimes complex with technology companies. What is important to understand is that they don't sell a product which is 1,000 euros or $1,000. Most often, their products are really high value. We're talking six digits, and it's very long there for the sales cycle, and there are multiple stakeholders involved. That's not just the IT officer. We're talking about users like operations. We're talking about legal who's checking NDAs because there's data involved. We're talking about procurement. We're talking about technology buyers. So there's quite a lot of people involved. It's a long journey, and it's complex. Believe me, the people who are actually salespeople in these companies are highly qualified. They get paid a lot, and most of the studies show that they would spend 80% of their time finding customers, and 20% of their time actually selling. This seemed to be counterproductive to a lot of companies because their talent is to actually sell, negotiate, fight objections. And then this whole concept of a person who is helping the sales manager find the right people with a potential need that company can solve came into the picture. People used to call it different names, SDR, as you said, sales development representative. Probably a more long lasting name that has been in the market, but then some people started calling it BDR, business development representative. Then we saw improvements coming in, even ADR, account development representative, LDR, lead development representative. But no matter what term that is used, it kind of means that this person is helping the sales manager open doors, find the right people in those strategic companies that we want to penetrate. So yeah, that is sales development in a nutshell. What does an SDR do in practice? What are the necessary skills that you need if you work in sales development? How do you work your magic? Firing the belly is one word to actually explain this. I don't necessarily think you need to have a whole lot of very specific educational or professional background. Are you someone who is not scared to talk to someone, irrespective of their title or where they're from? Can you actually communicate? Do you have that feeling that I am not scared to walk up to someone and strike a conversation? That's that firing the belly. And are you someone who want to, you know, win, who want to grow as an individual? That's firing the belly. I think these are the most important skills that I see over the last seven to eight years, having interviewed, having, you know, seen a lot of sales developers, SDRs. These are two things that I look for in a candidate. And if you have this irrespective of what your background is, how long you've worked or not worked, I think that builds that success in SDRs. Yeah, in addition to that, I mean, if you have an interest to learn about industries, especially, you know, the ever-changing world of technology, this role is quite prominent in the technology company. So you don't, you may not find this in an oil and gas company or a pharmaceutical company necessarily, because maybe it's more transaction of their sales process. So you actually learn about IT technology, and therefore, of course, different industries. So if you have this passion to learn, passion to grow, and to keep winning, and you have that fire in the belly to actually keep proving yourself, I think this is something great. Once you have that passion, and once you have your goals, how do you achieve them? What is the pipeline like? In 2010, or maybe even early 2000s, there was this concept that came into the picture called account-based sales development. That's Nielsen, some call him the father of account-based sales development. He is vice president of global sales development for a company called Snowflake. And he's actually one of my role models. I really follow him, what he's doing. And there's a lot of interesting articles that he has written around this. One very important thing is that a lot of companies misjudge this, that a sales development representative, an SDR should be getting the same trainings and onboarding as a salesperson that is probably not correct. Because a salesperson's job is to communicate, introduce, create that very good first impression about the company, and get a prospect interested to talk to the sales manager so that the sales manager can decide if this prospect is worth my time, worth my energy, and therefore go through the sales journey. So it requires a different set of, let's say, skills and training. At E-Pam, we've established a one-month training for our SDRs who are joining. This really entails a lot about E-Pam. I mean, E-Pam is a global company with more than 50,000 employees, and we work with many different industries. So we are industry agnostic, and we also work with hundreds of partners who have pioneered, who have implemented, invented different tools and technologies that many companies are using, from cloud to cybersecurity to e-commerce, which means that we are also solution agnostic. We are not just selling one product or one service. Therefore, this information that an SDR needs to learn is so broad, but of course, we don't expect an SDR to learn everything that E-Pam is doing, every industry that E-Pam is working with. So we've established certain industries that are really priorities for us, certain solution areas that are trending at the moment, and we kind of give them the knowledge about E-Pam, those industries, those solutions. So that's, let's say, the first part of their onboarding. The second part of their onboarding is learning about sales development, where we talk about neuro-linguistic programming, what can you say, what shouldn't you say, how do you say it, how do you use your voice, your tone, your words, how do you use your body language. And we also talk about some very new concepts, like social selling, how do you utilize tools that are available, like LinkedIn's sales navigator platform, or different databases that you can acquire information about, companies, let's say, priorities for this year, the coming years, what were their challenges in the past, how can you solve them, because we cannot expect an SDR to be making 300 calls like I used to do 20 years ago. Data has changed, data privacy is a huge topic, GDPR, bulk emailing, all these things are happening at the moment, and the biggest change that the SDRs are doing right now is creating this really hyper-personalized outreach, hyper-personalized experience to the prospects, so that they feel like, I'm not just another person on their calling list, on their emailing list, so we put a lot of attention on how you can personalize your email, your call, your LinkedIn message to those prospects, what kind of tools can be used to find information available in abundance online, so they learn about sales development, they learn about ePAM, and the second month, we actually assign them to a buddy who's been in this job for a while, so that they can see how it's actually done, and then start doing it by themselves, so I always say, if you want to learn, you just need to jump into the pool and start swimming, and get that experience, because you've got nothing to lose, the third month, they are able to actually do it by themselves, so there are these milestones that we've developed in the first three months, and then from the fourth month, we kind of expect them to be ramped up, and they should be able to have, my theory or my strategy is always creating bite-sized goals, you have a big goal that you want to achieve at the end of the month, break that into small portions, make it a weekly goal, make that a daily goal, and then make that even an hourly goal, and keep achieving these small goals, which also triggers a satisfaction internally, if you want to achieve 10 meetings at the end of the month, and if you, on the first week of the month, and you just see you've achieved two or three meetings, you are just going to keep putting this sometimes negative pressure, and therefore creating these bite-sized goals give you the feeling of winning every time, and that's also another really interesting factor about this role, that you always feel happy and content doing what you're doing, so we've developed these bite-sized goals that is easy for them to achieve, so this hour you need to make 10 calls, it doesn't sound unrealistic, dial out, you need to send five emails this hour, so it's easy for them to achieve that, and of course we've given them the templates, it's not really a copy-paste, we always talk about 60%, 40%, 60% being personalization, and 40% being templates, so that they also need to be creative, they also need to start thinking about how am I approaching this person, so we've developed these KPIs, these bite-sized goals, and yeah, we evaluate them on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis to see, okay, do you need help in a specific area because maybe you are not able to achieve these goals, and help them keep growing. And how has your experience been building the team in Budapest specifically? So that's a very good question, which brings me to another question, why a global company that is head office in the US trading in the New York Stock Exchange like E-Pam decided to work in Budapest, thankfully I had the experience with my previous job doing exactly this, and I realized that especially for a global company where we want to support sales managers, our account managers with finding people, finding prospects or leads that they can nurture, that they can engage with, and go through the sales journey, you need to have sometimes also an understanding of the cultures that you're reaching out, it's completely different in the way that you might be doing business in Japan to Germany, of course you need also to understand the common language spoken. So I realized that it was very easy to find very different profiles in Budapest especially. It's a city that is very much known for brain jobs, meaning in, I think in last year or early this year, there was a research done where in Europe, Budapest was listed as the top one destination for brain jobs, meaning that really highly skilled people are coming out of the university, and is able to join the workforce, and we've seen that probably maybe even more than 10 years ago, many companies, many global companies are establishing their shat services centers here in Budapest, which kind of also created an attraction for people around Hungary, as well as people even outside of Europe, it's also a great destination for people to come and study, learn, and it's also relatively cheap, so it creates this really easygoing environment around Budapest that people really connects to, just like me. If anybody asked me today, you lived in Sri Lanka, you lived in the UK, you lived in Hungary, what would you choose? Really, without a doubt Hungary, Budapest, and because I just feel home, it's a really interesting feeling being, and I feel that having worked with many expats in my life here in Hungary, I also feel the very same, that I don't see anyone saying, "Oh, I need to get out of Hungary or Budapest," and therefore, it was very easy for my previous company to actually find people, even from Germany to Italy to South America to China to Japan to Korea, and establish these SBR teams for clients, and therefore, it was a very easy decision on why we should choose Budapest, and of course, E-Pam has a really good presence in Hungary with three officers, and we have a really great office space, and why not, and yeah, it's been really successful so far. So having talked about your experience of building a team, a local team with the global reach in Budapest, I would also like to ask you about your experience of working in the tech sector now. There has been so many discussions around how the tech industry is changing. What is your view? How can SBR play a role, SBR's play a role in this very quickly changing tech landscape? Digital transformation has been a huge topic for many years in many companies, in many industries. If you look at some of the studies done with CEO priorities, you would see digital transformation as one of the top three, probably for the last 10 years or so, you still see a lot of emphasis on topics like cyber security, artificial intelligence, adapting to cloud. These are still really hot topics that are being discussed, and irrespective of the current state that we are in, technology companies need to find or maybe even replace the customers that they lost, and there is definitely a, let's say, curve where you would see from acquisition of a new customer to retaining that customer, and there is definitely going to be a point where they probably exit. You need to keep finding new companies who can take over that curve that is going down. Any technology company irrespective of what is happening around the world need to keep that new business acquisition ongoing. You might be having 80, 90% of your revenue coming from existing customers, but what is the guarantee that those existing customers will be there forever? The SDR is the perfect role to keep pumping these new customers, new people into the sales pipeline, and we don't work in a company for 10, 20 years, which means that even if you have an existing customer, sometimes your main stakeholder might be leaving that company. Are you able to create relationships with additional stakeholders in the company? And again, this is where an SDR come into the picture. So it's not only about acquiring new logos, but also expanding your reach within your existing customers, and some of the studies show that companies that have this SDR function have more than 40% of their leads converted into qualified leads because of having an SDR function, and sometimes even contributing to about 20% of the revenue that the companies are having because they have this additional function called SDRs. Thank you very much, and thank you so much for being here with us today. Thank you. It was my pleasure. Thank you so much to Ronald David, Global Head of Lead Generation from E-Pump Hungary, and thank you so much for the lovely listeners for being here with us today. Stay tuned for other episodes of the I Think Offer Big Podcast, and follow us on your favorite podcast provider. Bye! you