Enterprise Sales Development with Jason Prindle
Speaker 2
0:00:00 - 0:00:27 Mhm Yeah. Hello everybody and welcome to the enterprise sales development podcast brought to you by science technologies. We interview outbound leaders at fast growth businesses to learn their secrets and bring you actionable insights. Thanks for joining us this week. Hey this is enterprise sales development. I'm eric wants from the CMO of Science Technologies
Speaker 3
0:00:27 - 0:00:30 and this is Harry Evans, the director of craft and strategy at Science Technologies
Speaker 2
0:00:31 - 0:00:42 Boy. Harry, we have got a great episode for the people today. We had the pleasure of speaking with Jason. Prindle who's the director of Inside Sales and global sales Development at big eyed and boy they're
Speaker 3
0:00:42 - 0:00:45 big, big idea, they're
Speaker 2
0:00:45 - 0:00:46 making some waves.
Speaker 3
0:00:46 - 0:00:50 Uh the way they've grown as a company. The amount of venture capital
Speaker 2
0:00:50 - 0:00:51 they've raised recently is just it's
Speaker 3
0:00:51 - 0:00:56 mind numbing. Uh and also seeing how the SDR teams internally have grown under Jason recently
Speaker 2
0:00:56 - 0:01:16 so quickly, Some of the numbers that jumped out off the page to me, the company's at about 350 headcount raised $250 million dollars of venture capital at north of a billion dollar valuation. So this truly is enterprise sales development and a key outbound sales motion that they've got going on over there. Yeah, it
Speaker 3
0:01:16 - 0:01:22 was a great conversation, Looking forward to playing the interview for everyone who's listening. The growth of the team was great and then also seeing how they
Speaker 2
0:01:22 - 0:01:24 actually led
Speaker 3
0:01:24 - 0:01:29 to all these changes and innovations. Hearing about their bar discussion, do you want to explain that?
Speaker 2
0:01:29 - 0:01:49 Er Yeah, Jason, you're gonna have to listen for this, this anecdote because it was a bar argument that led to a whole new role on their team between Jason and his CMO and you know, I took a little bit of umbrage because being a CMO myself, you always have to be very wary of when people don't love the messaging that you're producing
Speaker 3
0:01:49 - 0:01:50 well with
Speaker 2
0:01:50 - 0:01:52 that. I have so many
Speaker 3
0:01:52 - 0:01:53 other thoughts, but I'm sure everyone's here
Speaker 2
0:01:53 - 0:01:54 to listen to Jason.
Speaker 3
0:01:54 - 0:01:56 So let's jump right into
Speaker 2
0:01:56 - 0:02:06 the interview. Hey, we're here today with Jason. Prindle, talking about enterprise sales development. Jason, how you doing today?
Speaker 1
0:02:06 - 0:02:08 I'm doing great. Thank you. Eric how about yourself?
Speaker 2
0:02:08 - 0:02:18 Fantastic, Fantastic. We're really looking forward to this conversation. Jason tell us a little bit about the team that you have over a big eyed, which you've just joined kind of end of last
Speaker 1
0:02:18 - 0:03:04 year, about 10 months ago, I joined the team here at big eyed. So I inherited five sdrs that were kind of already up and running but lacked a lot of process, a lot of direction and direct leadership. So that's where they kind of went out looking for somebody like myself. Our goal was to grow it very, very fast and keep up with the growth of the company. So we started with those five, I've promoted all five of those people to different roles. Now, we're up to a team of about 20 sDRs, we have one SDR Manager that we've added and I've also spun up our inside sales team here. So we have three of those original five sdrs have been promoted to sales and we're working to launch some new products, some kind of mid market and a little lower investment from dollar and time standpoint products.
Speaker 2
0:03:04 - 0:03:08 That's fantastic, amazing forex growth to on the SDR front.
Speaker 1
0:03:08 - 0:03:12 Yeah. Yeah, it's been crazy but exciting at the same time.
Speaker 2
0:03:12 - 0:03:16 Seriously, tell me a little bit about big idea, in fact, give us your pitch.
Speaker 1
0:03:16 - 0:04:05 Okay. Sure. Yeah, big idea. We are a data security, data privacy data governance company. We start with our Discovery Foundation which really helps businesses find their P. I. P. I. And sensitive data that they have about their customers, employees, et cetera. And then we build from there. So we like to say like first you have to know where it is and a lot of large enterprises don't know where all that data is. So our Discovery Foundation with some Ai and machine learning helps them find that data faster and better than anybody else. And then on top of that we build out a marketplace of apps to allow companies to decide, you know, are they, are they looking to mature and the security pillar or the privacy pillar, governance pillar and really kind of pick their adventure from there. Right. So we start like I said with that with that base and then and then build from there.
Speaker 2
0:04:05 - 0:04:12 That's great. Tell me a little bit about your ideal, you know customer client profile, how you built that out.
Speaker 1
0:04:12 - 0:05:15 Sure. Yeah, Classic, classic, big eyed. Uh, and I say, classic. Because of, as I mentioned with the inside sales team, we've released some new products to address some new markets, but big idea enterprise or big idea at its core has been targeting really those global 2000 large enterprises names that you know, type of companies that have a ton of data. So obviously we play well or sensitive data, I should say. So obviously we play well in regulated industries as well as industries like retail, where you have large retailers who have millions upon millions of customers and that turns into billions of pieces of data on those customers. Some of our newer products that we've released, small, I'd write clever name and another one called big eyed dot me, which is more for the consumer side, those have been released and those were targeting towards the mid market or the commercial sized companies. So we've drawn that at the 100 to about 500 million in yearly revenue type companies. And that's where we're targeting those particular products as well.
Speaker 2
0:05:15 - 0:05:21 And how do you think about the kind of the title cluster of the folks that you're looking to start conversations
Speaker 3
0:05:21 - 0:05:22 with? Yeah,
Speaker 1
0:05:22 - 0:07:01 we look at them as heads of so we say, heads of privacy, heads of data, heads of security, you know, those titles can take on a bunch of different forms very similar to sdrs or business development reps or whatever, right? You call the same thing. Nine different things, depending on who you're talking to. So we really look at those heads of a lot of times in these larger organizations, their data team has matured a little bit. So you have your Chief data officers, Chief privacy officers, things like that. You know, a lot of, a lot of what we do and especially from the SDR workers were targeting these accounts is is first we kind of have to understand who are these groups and and are they siloed classically like we would think they are or do they have multiple responsibilities? And then what are the titles of of people that actually hold things and own these types of projects. You know, we find it I find it pretty funny and sometimes, you know, we could talk to a C. So and he's our big decision maker and he's the one we want to talk to other times. We talked to another see so and he or she really has nothing to do with the particular project. So a lot of it is we have to understand each, each company and and how they, how they address this because it is it is newer. Data has been around for a long time, but a focus on the security and privacy of that data is relatively new, as we can see by a lot of the regulations that are coming out are being talked about. So those organizations are new and they've kind of been built from within and so each one is a little bit unique and a little bit different. It's, you know, it's not like a sales order or you kind of have your STRS and your sales folks in your VPs and you're S V P and C R O. And you you kind of know what that map generally looks like
Speaker 3
0:07:01 - 0:07:14 when you're defining those groups and when you're defining the internal landscape of your targets, do you find that you get that information better through research in advance or are you having your SDRs make the calls and actually ask the questions to figure that out?
Speaker 1
0:07:14 - 0:08:05 Yeah. So we're right now we're having our SDRs make the calls and try to figure that out and ask a little bit about who's involved in these projects and what are the next steps and what does that decision process look like and things like that to try to map it out as early as we can. We are actually going to experiment with bringing on some research assistance which were actually in the middle of doing that right now. And those research assistants would then be in charge of doing that mapping whether they do it via tools like Lucia or zoom info and linkedin sales navigator or they do it through calls and emails or referrals or what have you. Right, So we're going to kind of task that team with a lot of that pre work so we understand who were trying to call in each organization and so are SDRs aren't wasting time targeting a couple of titles that may have nothing to do with what we want in that particular organization.
Speaker 2
0:08:05 - 0:08:21 So tell me a little bit more about kind of like the way in which you have your team mapped and and growing. I'm thinking that there's probably a case where now that you're supporting big I. D. Small ID, big idea that me does the sTR team have a footprint in all
Speaker 1
0:08:21 - 0:09:54 as of right now, we don't plans in the future are definitely to expand the SDR team into that mid market commercial team, it's a little too early and I say they don't have enough opportunities yet to really keep their day full so they can prospect as well for themselves. But the way we have the sales territories lined up our multiple tiers of alignment where we start with target accounts. We brought in a lot of sales reps that have experience in this industry and they have connections within certain accounts, then some vertical stuff. Right? So we have some health care, we have somethin serve, we have some kind of segmentation like that and then it kind of rolls down to a geographical territory as well. So with that, you know, the the idea behind hiring the sales team, the way that they've hired over the past year is to bring in those people with those relationships so we can get some quick wins and we can introduce what we've, what we're doing and, and you know, kind of kind of get in a little bit faster than a normal ramp of an enterprise sales rep would be with that. It comes with these dynamics where, you know, some people, we know some people over here and over here. So you can't just say, hey, you know, Minnesota is your territory. We have to be a little more, a little more flexible with that. So what we've done on the SDR team to match that is really just a line to a sales rep. Right, so an SDR team, we don't have a territory whatsoever. You know, one of my sdrs could get leads from California Healthcare and from Austin Enterprise, it's just based on who they're align to.
Speaker 1
0:09:54 - 0:11:02 Of course, we do our best to try to keep those alignments either within the same vertical or within the same geographical territory, make it a little bit easier for the SDR, but, you know, in a young company, like we are, everything can't be always perfect. So we have, you know, we have some, that's, that's a little all over the place, but that's what we're doing right now is just matching that 2 to 1 ratio that we're trying to keep of one SDR two to enterprise sales reps and as the team grows, we can simply hire another SDR plug them in to match with the two new sales reps and and continue to go that way looking towards the future, which I think, you know, we're obviously always having to do solve the problem now, but also solve the problem. 12 months from now is we would look to one, add some people to that commercial team and talking about those less expensive kind of lower market products and treat that almost like a junior SDR role. And then we could promote to the senior SDR role where they would align to enterprise and then, you know, like I said, we have the inside sales team as well, so now we can promote to that inside sales team um and really create that, I know this is a little off topic but create that career path for sdrs as well.
Speaker 2
0:11:02 - 0:11:10 That makes perfect sense actually. So tell me, how did you come about the ratios that that you've implemented now?
Speaker 1
0:11:10 - 0:12:12 Yeah, So we originally started with 3 to 1, which I think is kind of a classic, you know, 3 to 1 ratio and the SDR where else not reinventing the wheel there. But what we found out pretty early on was that we had a great problem to have, which was that marketing was generating a ton of inbound leads for us and at that 3 to 1 ratio, the sdrs really didn't have any time for that outbound prospecting, which I think is very, very important, You know you have to have a good balance and we didn't have that balance. So we kind of looked at the lead flow, you know how many leads were coming in per sales rep or per territory and then kind of taking a look at, okay, how many steps do we need to complete to engage with these people? How much time do we spend on it? So how much of our time is spent on inbound and we kind of came to a work hours type of figure and the math just worked that hey if we just simply added or lower that ratio by 1 to 1 to two that would give us that good 50 50 split of inbound, 50% of the time is on inbound and kind of the easy layups and then 50% of your time is spent on target out bounding
Speaker 2
0:12:12 - 0:12:19 and so you have that coverage going on where your sdrs are touching both inbound and outbound prospecting.
Speaker 1
0:12:19 - 0:13:57 Yeah we do. I think it's you know, I've I've toyed in the past with the idea of splitting those two up I think with what we do and and the market that we go after and I found this in my previous two places as well because it was kind of similar I C. P you know, is in kind of the same cybersecurity bubble ish. Right? So what we found with the with the split roles idea is that a lot of our outbound is really more on the demand gen side than it is uncovering open opportunities. You know, when we have an A. S. P around $300,000 and we have a sale cycle around 67 months as well as the infrastructure and the staffing requirements that are required to spin up a solution like ours, you don't trip into that or you can't, you can't really like throw a value statement and grab some interest and it converts into an opportunity right away on outbound. You're going to do that from time to time. But most of the time, the idea that we have is that we need to raise awareness of what we do and how we do it and why we do it better. So that when these conversations do start happening at that place, where were top of mind with that methodology, A lot of outbound work turns into inbound and so when we toyed with it a little bit at beyond trust, when I had a little bit bigger team and we kind of toyed with that separation of inbound and outbound reps, we found that we were running into a lot of conflicts with an inbound rep, getting, getting a lead, calling out booking the meeting, converting the opportunity, you know, getting paid for it and the outbound wrapped saying, hey, I prospected them six months ago or five months ago. You know, this should be mine and we were creating a lot of conflict where they didn't need to be?
Speaker 1
0:13:57 - 0:14:41 So I think from a philosophical standpoint, I kind of backed away from that separation and I think that, you know, if you get an SDR that is going to work in the role for about 18 months, it's about an 18 month job in my mind, you know, the first six months or first three months are going to be ramp and that can be covered by inbound. The next three months after that is inbound with a little bit outbound. Right? Some of those lucky ones you fall into or some of those people are willing to take a meeting and kick the tires a bit and then your, your second kind of or your second two thirds there. The hard work that you did on outbound starts paying paying you back and then you have a good flow of what you started when you were ramping coming back around as either inbound or they're engaging with you now or what have you.
Speaker 3
0:14:42 - 0:14:47 I'd love to ask a question about you talked about having SDRs assigned directly to sales reps and
Speaker 2
0:14:47 - 0:14:49 how they communicate with each
Speaker 1
0:14:49 - 0:14:50 other. And
Speaker 3
0:14:50 - 0:14:57 I hope to ask a little bit more about that. How do they communicate with each other? Are they having daily one on ones? Are they meeting about each account
Speaker 2
0:14:57 - 0:14:58 separately? Do they
Speaker 3
0:14:58 - 0:15:08 have shared documents? You know, communication between sales and SDRs is always a big question for a lot of our clients and the people that listen to these podcasts. So do you have any
Speaker 1
0:15:08 - 0:15:09 tips tricks?
Speaker 3
0:15:09 - 0:15:11 Home built processes?
Speaker 1
0:15:11 - 0:16:51 Yeah, yeah. You know to, I've been, I've been recently trying to find if there's like a software solution to this where, you know, everybody could come in and we could share information and kind of create tasks for each other and do this whole thing and there is nothing. And I've actually talked to a few people that joke like, hey, maybe you should, you should start something. And I'm like, well I have no idea how to code anything. So that's, that's not a great start for me. But yeah, what we're doing now that I think has worked really well as we have at least a minimum of a weekly one hour touch base between the SDR and their rep, we have target a countless which are unfortunately shared google sheets right now and we've set, I've said a specific agenda for those to say, okay, here's the things we need to go over, we need to go over the meetings that have happened over the last week. We need to see which of those can convert into opportunities. We need to see um you know, feedback on any of the meetings that didn't or why and kind of understand what the SDR did wrong and then we have to decide what are going to be the next targets for the next week or for the next 30 days part of what we're moving towards And what I'm implementing is account based sales development model which has been talked about a little bit out there you know in the forums and things like that. But it's really allowing us to to spend time in one of these agenda points is decide who you're going to target in the next 30 days, right? 10 to 15 cos you're going to have you know 10 15 20 contacts that you can go after that should fill up your 30 days. But then what do we know about those accounts and what intelligence can we get from the research team as well as what information or what intelligence does the sales rep know about those, the sales VPs.
Speaker 1
0:16:51 - 0:18:20 And then even some of our subject matter experts are R. C. So or Cso is also our security subject matter expert and bringing in the team into those to say, okay here's the targets now. What do we want to know? And I like three levels of customization or three levels of information there which is one just generically what do we know about that account? Right. What does Paypal or Nike or coca cola or whomever, what are they, what are they doing? What has there been? M and a activity have they have they had a breach lately? If you know what's the news about that company that we can understand then you know what we understand about those particular profiles or I. C. P. S. And then what do we know specifically about those people and a lot of time the connections that we have helps drive that conversation because our CSL might know there see so where our sales rep is sold to them in the past and they know this person and that person. So for the account based model I know this is a long way to get around to the answer but for that account based model we have to have that interaction. Otherwise the Sdrs don't have all the information they need to be as customized and be as personalized as we want them to be. So like I said boil it down very easy at least a weekly one on one with them. I've set an agenda that I give to the sales rep and that I give to the SDR to say these are the topics that you need to talk about. Um And then you know I come back around the other side and one on ones with the Sdrs and ask them how those conversations went and what information did they get and you know what what happened what was talked about all of that so I can continue to reinforce those things as well.
Speaker 1
0:18:20 - 0:18:47 It's not revolutionary you know it's kind of the same of of what's been done but I haven't found I haven't found anything that if I'm being honest that has worked any better than kind of the classic, just make sure that those meetings happen and make sure that you're telling them and you know, setting the expectation of what's going to be talked about. So everybody comes prepared and the time is well spent instead of just, you know, 20 minutes of, you know, Blah, Blah, Blah about the dog and the kids and, and then, you know, you don't get to what you wanted to get to.
Speaker 2
0:18:48 - 0:19:09 And, and how do you kind of pack that meeting itself to ensure that there is substance that you can credibly promise to the Csos or big titles, heads of that you're targeting, like the kind of messaging that you're sdrs are using around why it's going to be worth the Cso at Nike's time to sit down and learn more.
Speaker 1
0:19:09 - 0:19:43 Yeah. So through those, through those conversations in that pre work, we want to be able to have, like I said, those three levels of customization. So when we go out and we're sending a Cdo at Pepsi a message, we're putting something in there that has something specific about Pepsi, if we, if there's something in the news or something that we know about through one of our, one of our internal folks or something like that and we do that level of customization, like I said at the company level, at that title or that target level and then specific to that person and we're not talking about like, hey, knowing that the person likes to golf and saying, you know, something like
Speaker 2
0:19:43 - 0:19:45 that. I think,
Speaker 1
0:19:45 - 0:21:14 yeah, I think that level of personalization is honestly kind of played out and I don't know that it really works that well. But me personally, I get annoyed if someone says something about the school I went to or you know, I've got a quote from Yoda and my linkedin profile, like sometimes I kind of appreciate the effort, but it's like, and it's not really moving the needle. I want to know what you're doing for me in my role to make my life easier. And I think that's what's really important. So we're crafting those messages by one, determining what information we need to know and have that information to craft the messages. And then we're spinning up a content team. I've tasked my new SDR manager with this, we're creating a content team, which is something I had previously at Beyond Trust as well where we have a couple of people from marketing, a couple of SDRs and a couple of sales reps who come together and say, okay, you know, if we're talking to a cdo at a retail company or something like that, this is what's important to them and we have our subject matter expert there to say, yeah, this will resonate with me or this wouldn't, or I wouldn't read this or I do. So a lot of it is crafted amongst sales and marketing and sdrs to decide like, ok, here's a here's a good some bullet points we want to talk about and and and and here's some good stuff about our product and what matters to them. And then, you know, we slow down and we personalized based on that person, but then we also run that by our subject matter experts are smes to say, would you read this, would this be interesting to you or not, or are we missing here?
Speaker 1
0:21:14 - 0:21:44 And so that's kind of where we start and then with the content team as we continue to grow that and mature that process a little bit, obviously there will be a lot of going back and looking at what has the highest reply rates and click through rates and and where in the sequences that we run our people engaging with us, so we can look at what that content is or what that mixture was at that particular time of omni channel outreach to to really then start to tweak and make sure that we were hitting with the most impactful stuff at the right time.
Speaker 2
0:21:44 - 0:21:49 You mentioned the content team and it sounds like this is the second go
Speaker 1
0:21:49 - 0:21:49 round, thanks.
Speaker 2
0:21:49 - 0:21:51 Uh what an idea
Speaker 1
0:21:51 - 0:21:53 that by
Speaker 2
0:21:53 - 0:22:10 the sounds of it was very successful at beyond trust. Tell me a little bit about kind of what inspired you to arrange your organization in that manner and kind of like how you evolved that role, so that now you bring it to big eyed and are starting to introduce it in the exact same way?
Speaker 1
0:22:11 - 0:23:26 Sure. Yeah, so this was really born um it was born over a barroom argument with my chief marketing officer. So um we were at I I can't remember our s a black one of the big shows right? And we were sitting at a bar and we had an event coming up in like an hour but we were having a couple of pre drinks and just kind of you know shooting the stuff somehow it came up and talked about that you know we weren't using the emails that marketing put together and I turned around and I told them marketing emails are garbage for prospecting and you know we kind of looked at me and I was like listen you guys make it real pretty. I know right, sorry, sorry eric but you know the marketing emails are very pretty, they have lots of graphics and they have formatting that's kind of sometimes in the form of a jpeg or whatever, they don't get read there too long there too verbose, you know etcetera right? It doesn't work for prospecting. So I said to him, I said what I do is I take your emails or the marketing emails that I get, I'd usually chop them up into three or four emails that are good for prospecting and I strip out all the pretty I chop up some of the content add a little bit and I send it off and you know, he said well why don't instead of you doing that, why don't you? And a couple of people from the marketing team get together and just work
Speaker 3
0:23:26 - 0:23:27 on writing those
Speaker 1
0:23:27 - 0:24:59 together. So we're not wasting time writing something that you're not going to use and you're not wasting time having to redo what we do. And that was kind of the ah ha moment like you know what, that would be great. And so we we we had a couple of meetings and I said you know I should bring in some of the sales reps here because I was relatively new at beyond trust when this happened and previous to that I hadn't been in cybersecurity before, I kind of general technology type of sales. So I knew a lot about Acer monitors and hp printers and and office 3 65. But I didn't know cybersecurity very well. And so um I thought you know we've got a couple of reps at this company, they've been here like 10 years, you know, they're killing it, they're crushing quote all the time. You know, they know what their customers want, why don't we loop in a couple of those people and so we looped in a couple of sales reps and it just kind of organically grown, grew from there with people wanting to be a part of it because they were seeing what we were spitting out was a lot better than what they had seen in the past and they wanted their input, you know, and I think if you have the right type of sales team, it's really great to get that engagement. Like I want my sdrs to be better because they understand a better str means more money for them in the long run, so that's that's where it started. And we just continued to make little tweaks and and find out, you know, we actually had to cut some people out of the team because they, you know, they were going in a different direction or they were very, very like, you know, my ideas, right? And nobody else is is right. And so we had to cut some sales reps and cut some marketing people and fill in with some other people, but we just grew from there.
Speaker 1
0:24:59 - 0:26:42 And what we were finding was significant upticks in the engagement rates that we had on everything, right? And we were using this team, not just to create like full emails, but even little snippets, we could inject into emails, call scripts, linkedin scripts, all of the ways that we try to reach our customers, even video scripts, you know, that we would use before we would cut a video, we had that team together and then the latest iteration of that was bringing in those people that within our company would be the targets that we would be going out to. So speaking to the Cto and the C. I. O. And those types of people and saying, hey with this, with this resonate with you. And we found that that again, kind of gave us another big jump because our best laid plans, you know, the C. So read it and said like, no, I wouldn't even pay attention to this. Okay, so let's go back to the drawing board, what do you think is wrong with it? Why not understanding what's what's motivating them and what's important to them? And then go back and rewrite those things. And we got into a pretty good rhythm where we were able to shoot out a good amount of content. And, you know, we started with our baseline like this persona with this product type of stuff. And by the end we had expanded it to even new webinars that were coming up invite or I'm sorry, event invites and things like that. Where we had this well oiled machine where even if we only had a couple of days before an event was happening, we knew we could put together some content very, very quickly by calling together the team, you know, blowing the, blowing the horn, getting the team together and saying, okay, here's some ideas, let's patch it up, let's get back together, compare contrast, take the best of everything and then ship it out. So
Speaker 3
0:26:42 - 0:26:43 you essentially built a team that allows
Speaker 2
0:26:43 - 0:26:44 you to
Speaker 3
0:26:44 - 0:26:47 kind of crowdsource copy and content almost.
Speaker 1
0:26:47 - 0:28:20 Exactly, Exactly. Yeah, it is. And then, and then we also have an internal team to test it as well. So we've got a we've got a crowd like you said, crowdsource group to create the content and then we have a group to to test it against as well. So we're not relying on waiting the actual prospects to not engage or to engage. And you know, we have, we have that kind of started already, which, which again, you know, we've seen, I won't even say incremental results. We've seen huge jumps in the results that we get there because we're putting a lot of thought behind what we send and we're testing it against the people that we would send it to. And by the time it's actually shown to the customer or the prospect, it's it's already been through a bunch of edits and and a bunch of a bunch of testing. So we know that it's solid. And if you do that across all your channels, then you're going to have a good solid message wherever the customer or the prospect wants to engage with you, right? You fight them on the battlefield of their choosing. And I think that's why we still leave voicemails and and linked in and we try text message and we try video because we need to engage them where they want to engage and we don't know that until they actually do, right? I answer my phone. I never respond to emails. That's that's how it is. But you know I know for for every other director person in my type of role it's going to be completely different. Some of them like linked in some of them like emails, you know uh some of them get attracted to watching a video. I don't, you know, so but we know everybody's different. So we expanded that to not just email templates. Like I said we expand that across all the ways we try to engage with our prospects.
Speaker 2
0:28:20 - 0:28:49 I'm really curious to to learn with this multi channel strategy what you regard as kind of key KPI s that you're constantly watching. Obviously there's the end goal of setting an appointment but the instrumentation if you will around getting to that outcome. What are the numbers in the benchmarks that you pay attention to and maybe even share some of the uptick that you saw at getting messaging right before and after.
Speaker 1
0:28:50 - 0:30:33 You know, first part first just the KPI as I look at. So I may be different than a lot of people in the sense that I work backwards from results. So if somebody is hitting their numbers and they're doing 20 activities a day, great. They hit their numbers let's talk about how you can do 40 activities a day because hopefully that will then double your results. Whereas if someone's not hitting their numbers and they're doing 120 activities, 150 activities a day, you know then we need to go back and look at the activities. So I've never been a guy that looks at those daily KPI s unless it's the root cause of a of a problem or or a success. I share this story a lot with with my sdrs and I think back to when I first started an Inside sales and I was given a list of accounts in an Excel spreadsheet in a phone, right? And it was go find people to sell to and I had a manage. Yeah, yeah exactly. It was like here go. I mean I'm updating myself but we didn't even have zoom info or anything or discover Oregon was referenced. Usa which basically had to have a library card to get access to. Eric's laughing because he remembers that Harry has no idea what I'm talking about but I had reference usa a spreadsheet in a phone and then that was it and start going, I had a manager who demanded that we made 100 calls per day and in that particular inside sales role that was a cradle to grave type of role. So I was prospecting as well as account management and closing deals by the time I got ramped up, You know, I would hit those numbers easily when I was prospecting, 200 calls a day, whatever right you do what you gotta do to get get some prospects. But once you start with everything else, I still have this manager is like 100 calls a day, 100 calls a day, 100 calls a day. And if I'm being honest with you, I was hitting numbers right?
Speaker 1
0:30:33 - 0:31:46 I've, I've been promoted. So there's a fair assumption that more times than not I hit my quota and was successful, but I rarely would be able to get 100 calls a day when you're talking to customers, you're negotiating deals and you're speaking out different things with them and whatnot. So I had about 15 to 25 numbers that I knew would never answer and they were legitimate businesses, but it always either went into like a phone tree loop or something like that. And if he crawled up my but that day I would make 15 to 20 fake calls just to placate my manager. So when I get into the role of leading, I'm like, you know what if I did it, I'd have to expect other people would do it. And of those 15 to 20 calls that was wasted time. It didn't, it didn't work to my quote, it was just to shut my manager up. So I swore when I went into management, I wouldn't be, how many things are you doing a day type of guy? Just blindly looking at the KPI S. So what I do is I like to look at the results and then move backwards from there and figure out, and I look at the very end result, which is opportunities and pipelines. So we can't really control pipeline because the deal is the deal right at SDR does the same amount of work for a $300,000 deal as they do for $3 million deal. Um, you know, that's based on spec and everything.
Speaker 1
0:31:46 - 0:33:05 So I look at the number of opportunities, the conversion rates, you know, from meeting to opportunities, you're going backwards here, that conversion rate of those, the conversion rate of their of their leads to their meetings and then how many activities are they doing in between and then listening to those calls and looking at those emails and figuring out trying to dissect where along that process there is a problem and it becomes very easy to coach and to help your sdrs be better if you look at it in that sense because if someone's not hanging their numbers and I just say do more activities, but they're doing horrible activities, we're not gonna, we're not going to change anything, we're going to spend 30 60 days wondering why did more activities not work. So I like to look at those, at those steps from, from the back end, you know, all the way to the front to say where is the problem, where does the coaching really need to, to, to be and what's going to affect a positive change and you can very easily see that right. If the conversion rate of meeting to opportunity is significantly less than the rest of the team or what you expect then you know that they're setting bad meetings. Okay great. Now let's listen to the meetings. Let's listen to your qualification. Let's understand why the sales rap is not converting those and and let's dig into that section of the process to understand what the problem is and fix it. Then we'll look at the results again and then we'll go fix the next thing you're
Speaker 3
0:33:05 - 0:33:12 data driven to diagnose the situation and to decide how to coach how to make improvements rather than data driven from the front
Speaker 2
0:33:12 - 0:33:13 end of
Speaker 1
0:33:13 - 0:33:14 here are the numbers
Speaker 3
0:33:14 - 0:33:20 we made the decision in advance. Go hit him. We assume it will work out. You're constantly iterating based on the data.
Speaker 1
0:33:20 - 0:34:32 Exactly. Yeah exactly. I want to look at it. I want to look at and diagnose where the problem is use things like KPI S and quotas and results as the the issue. But what is the root cause I think of it like a doctor right you go into the doctor and like I've got this cough that won't go away. Okay. Well what's causing that cough? Is it, is it allergies? Is that emphysema? Is that lung cancer? You know it could be something from very very uh you know nothing like allergies all the way up to something big and the doctor isn't just going to say oh you've got a cough, go take some robot isn't right. They're going to do some tests to see what is exactly wrong with you. I use that example because I think of it the same way. Okay we've got this problem. But what's the root cause of that problem? Very very rarely. Is it the number of activities that they're doing? It's usually the types of activities or what they're saying on their voice mails or phone calls, how they qualify the content of their emails, who they're targeting. Are we using personalization in the right way? You know, do we have a bum sales rap who just says no to everything, you know, whatever it happens to be along the way there's usually a root problem. And for me what I found and again like I said I think I might be an outlier with this mentality but it rarely boils down to you just need to do more every day.
Speaker 2
0:34:33 - 0:34:38 Well it's flying in the face of the thing that is not in abundant supply which is time.
Speaker 1
0:34:38 - 0:34:41 So
Speaker 2
0:34:41 - 0:35:08 Tell me this though because it sounds to me 10 months into your tenure at big eyed it sounds to me like you've already kind of established a cohort norm. watch your KPI S and relevant conversion rates and given that you forex the team total team size. My guess is that you found those cohort norms somewhat normalized. Is that a fair read?
Speaker 1
0:35:08 - 0:36:47 It's getting it's getting normalized I would say. I think you know, we we were able to my so I report into marketing at this particular company and I know str leaders like there's always the report to marketing or sales and I say it was, I report to both. I have one on ones with R C R O and R C M O every week. So the CMO technically approves my time off. Other than that, I have two bosses. So we're making incremental changes. I don't think we've normalized to a point where we can say this is the conversion rate we want or that we think is right, we're more doing it across the team, right is it? And maybe this is what you meant by the core cohort normalization, right? Is the team all kind of converting within within a certain number of degrees or percentages and and uh and all along the way. And so we have, we're getting very, very close to that. A lot of these, you know, I've been here 10 months, the team is now 20 and none of them are the ones I I inherited. So everyone is eight months ish or less. So we still have a lot of people that are ramping and we still have a lot of new sales reps that, you know, we have some process degradation or some breakdowns because they don't understand it yet. So we have a lot of these things that kind of throw flies in the ointment as we go, but we're able to at least identify the outliers, whether it be on the way positive side. Around the way negative side and then use that to say, okay, what are the other people doing? Let's take a look at, let's take a look at that and compare these particular things. And usually it's, especially with newer SDRs is pretty obvious, right? Somebody doing really, really good is sending out great emails and what the emails going out from the new person or not. That great qualification and pitching big idea and what we do.
Speaker 1
0:36:47 - 0:38:17 You know, we hire a whole other conversation of our hiring strategy, but I hire people that don't necessarily have experience in this area. And so learning data privacy is something that can be very, very difficult and you're talking to people that have been doing this for 2030 40 years, right. By the time they reach that sea level or that c minus one level, they're very, very versed in it. And so for a new SDR can be difficult. We continue to train them and teach them so as they ramp, they can kind of fake it till they make it. And then they can actually understand and have a conversation around it. But you know, but but we find that, you know, a lot of the, a lot of the outliers generally it's so far, I've been around just kind of the tenure of the person? It's definitely, you know, we've got some system changes, some technology changes that I have. So we can better measure these things and these conversion percentages and things like that and really start to build out that baseline. So like I knew the percentages that beyond trust, right? We were mature enough to say. I knew that our mpls would convert to meetings at 25%. We would expect our meetings for the opportunities at 80% and I expect, you know, so on and so forth. Right? So I knew those numbers. They're just don't have them quite at big ideas. So what I've been doing is again looking at the outliers and then kind of using what I knew in the past because keep drawing comparisons to beyond trust because it's a similar I. C. P. It's a similar type of sale cycle and A. S. P. And all of those things. So we can kind of draw some conclusions to say, hey, we should we should see things kind of in the same way
Speaker 3
0:38:17 - 0:38:19 when you talk about educating
Speaker 1
0:38:19 - 0:38:20 your Sdrs
Speaker 3
0:38:20 - 0:38:23 and I'm slowly learning over time about your space about your
Speaker 2
0:38:23 - 0:38:24 industry. It's
Speaker 3
0:38:24 - 0:38:33 an interesting balance. And I wonder what you think about this very often SDR leaders talk about their Sdrs plateau going after 8 to 12 months sometimes because they actually know too
Speaker 2
0:38:33 - 0:38:34 much. They start
Speaker 3
0:38:34 - 0:38:39 actually selling on the phone and answering all the questions and the person goes great, thanks no
Speaker 1
0:38:39 - 0:38:40 need for a meeting. How
Speaker 3
0:38:40 - 0:38:45 much is too much? How much is too little? How do you decide how much they need to know to do their job.
Speaker 1
0:38:45 - 0:40:03 Right. Yeah. Yeah, I think, you know, and we ran into this with some of the people that I inherited that had been with the company for like two years and, and, and have been, you know, kind of lone wolves and doing their own thing that they were starting to do a lot of that discovery that the sales rep should be doing. A matter of fact, I had one SDR who would set the meeting for the sales rap sales would show up and then the SDR would run discovery and you know, it was completely, it was completely wrong. So yeah, I think, you know, I get a little bit lucky in the fact that I don't know that they can plateau in that short of a time with with this particular industry. But we also, you know, I also encourage some of that. So I don't think there is going too far to be honest. I look at Sdrs, the SDR role is a means to an end. Being an SDR is a great career move and it's a very terrible job. Like if you're doing SDR work just to fill the time and to get a paycheck, go do something else because it's horrific, right? We get yelled at, we get called names. It's constant rejection. You go days where you don't even speak to another human because nobody's replying to anything. You know, it's not a it's not a fulfilling job if that's just what you're going to do. So I look at it as a means to an end and I like to ask people where do they want to go and You know, 80% of the time at sales, right? The sales development, they want to go into a closing role.
Speaker 1
0:40:03 - 0:41:29 So I actually encourage them to continue to learn and continue to take that discovery further down the road because they're never going to be able to complete discovery um at any point or write a sales rep doesn't complete discovery basically tell the PIO is signed in my mind but they're never going to be able to complete it and they always have the easy out of okay great, let's set you know, let's set a meeting. Let me get you in touch with my et cetera. So I encourage them to try to take it as far down the road as they can because it's a good training ground for that next step. You know, the the handoff from SDR two E is, you know, it's a discovery call it's it's further discovery and and the first thing you have to learn is a good sales rep is discovery and how to continue to do more discovery. So like I said, I encourage them to keep going as much as they can and ask more questions and make themselves uncomfortable. And I use the iceberg analogy a lot that everybody does and I say, you know, I can hire anybody that can get the easy stuff to see above the water line. I want the people who can get down 10 m 20 m 30 m underwater and start understanding the real breath of what we're with, the breath of what we're dealing with here. So, so yeah, so they don't, we don't really run into that problem of them selling too much on the phone because we're encouraging it and and to be honest to situate the product and the and the solution is so complex that unless I've got a three or four year SDR, they're probably not going to get to that level of knowledge where it's going too far, they're butting right up into the demo or something like that. There's always
Speaker 3
0:41:29 - 0:41:30 more questions in your space.
Speaker 1
0:41:30 - 0:42:03 Yeah, there's always, I mean, there's always more and and and we sell down three different pillars to so that you can always expand from a security conversation over to a governance conversation if you really want to go that direction, if you've got a person that's interested in that as well. So there's so, so much to learn and so much to know and so many different directions that could go based on what they want to do. Like I was talking earlier about all the different apps to kind of pick your own adventure, that most str is just not going to get that knowledge level in their in their year and a half or even two years of being an SDR here. So
Speaker 2
0:42:03 - 0:42:21 Jason, it's pretty evident in our conversation that you're pretty big believer in specialization of roles and kind of even experimenting with things like, you know, the research roll, attaching the content role that kind of sits not exactly a marketing, not exactly in, you know, in
Speaker 1
0:42:21 - 0:42:22 sales. If we're
Speaker 2
0:42:22 - 0:42:23 Talking again in 12
Speaker 3
0:42:23 - 0:42:25 months, what will
Speaker 2
0:42:25 - 0:42:33 it change with sales development? Where do you see trends kind of going, is it towards the directions that you pointed out and found success with?
Speaker 1
0:42:34 - 0:42:54 Yeah, I think, you know, I think the days of the days of the generic this is what my company does. Can we, can I get 15 minutes on your calendar type of messaging is dead. I mean 80% of the emails I get are exactly that format. So it's sad that there's so many SDR teams and leaders that allow that to be the norm.
Speaker 2
0:42:54 - 0:42:55 But I think that
Speaker 1
0:42:56 - 0:44:30 yeah, slow to die. Exactly. So I think that's gone. I think the hyper personalization and this account based models where things are going to go, I've done a couple presentations to our executives about it and and I like it to the hare and the tortoise right? The tortoise wins the race, but he's very, very slow and you're not going to see that immediately cloud of dust. And I've told that to my Ceo, if we move to this account based model with hyper personalization and hyper customization, it's going to be slow, but I think it's going to pay more dividends in the end. So we have to kind of trust that process a little bit. So I think, you know, I think that's a big thing. I really think we need to get back to that personalized messaging and allowing our SDRs to move slower. We have enough technology that we can make up for a lot of that inefficiency and technology as well. So that's something that I'm focusing on right now is saying, okay, an SDR using a bunch of templates and that 80 20 model that we've used, they can spit out this many activities But if I want him to do 50, 50 customization or 40, 60 or something like that, then I need to I need to fix it in technology. So I think another thing in 12 months, I think hopefully we'll see a lot more integration of the technologies that SDR is used instead of having like 12 different tabs open with all this fun little cool stuff. You know, I want them to have one or two tabs that has all of that stuff right there for them. So technology efficiencies slower and more deliberate and then I'll be honest with you have plugged for science. I love what you guys do with the personalization of the or the separation of the roles where you have your social media expert and you have your phone expert and have your email experts. So we're bringing in the research assistance.
Speaker 1
0:44:30 - 0:45:53 Like you said, I had a conversation yesterday, we might try out a social media person who's just going to be in charge of running linked in and warming up the prospects that we're going to prospect 30 days from now as I have, the SDR is kind of planning out their next 30 60 days. We can give that target to the research assistant. Research assistant can get all the info we want, we handed off to the social media person. They can warm it up through linked in, get the connection done, get some messages out there and then the SDR can pick that up at that point if they haven't engaged yet. Obviously if they have engaged anywhere along the way, we get that right over to the SDR. So I think that's something that's going to be a little more prevalent in the market or in the SDR role as well as really deciding what are people really good at. I had a long conversation with john your Ceo once and, and he was talking about that and I was like, you know, after five minutes, I'm like, I'm bought in. That makes sense because I write terrible emails. Get me on the phone. I'm great. I, I don't care. You can throw whatever you want at me, water off a duck's back. I refereed hockey for a while. So I'm used to getting screamed at all the time. Right? So that's fine. But my emails aren't great and my linked in game is, you know, average at best. But you know, so if I were to join an SDR T now and say, hey, put me on the phone and just let me do that. So, you know, seeing if we're, if we can grow large enough to do that, I think you also have to have a very large organization and you have to have enough activities to spread around enough people as well as the R. O. I to convince your CFO to give you that headcount to do that.
Speaker 1
0:45:53 - 0:46:08 But I think that would be something that we would look into as well as we continue to specialize and continue to customize and make sure that every message that goes out is completely relevant. We're not sending just old boilerplate nonsense.
Speaker 3
0:46:08 - 0:46:11 Well, Jason, I think we could probably fire
Speaker 1
0:46:11 - 0:46:13 Questions at you for another two or 3 hours. You're
Speaker 3
0:46:13 - 0:46:28 feeding us gold. Really appreciate your time. You've got a lot of great insights and especially in the enterprise space. It's clear that you put a lot of time and thought into how you're doing things seem a little more innovative than the average program out there. So we appreciate all these insights. I know our listeners
Speaker 2
0:46:28 - 0:46:28 do as well.
Speaker 3
0:46:29 - 0:46:31 Thank you so much for being a part of this. Would you
Speaker 1
0:46:31 - 0:46:32 like to give a quick pitch for
Speaker 2
0:46:32 - 0:46:33 what you guys do? I
Speaker 1
0:46:33 - 0:47:16 mean I did a quick but I did a quick pitch about it but yeah, big eyed, right know your data action, your data and get value from your data. So every company out there has personal information of employees or their customers that they need to protect. More regulations are coming all the time to to protect my information and your information and we help you, you know, not just check a box to solve that, but to really grow a data maturity program or a data program and work with you through the maturity so we can start by finding what you have and then grow from there down the down the path of security, privacy and governance. So if you have any interest reach out to me on linkedin, Jason. Prindle very easy to find out their big I'd and I'll get you in touch with the right folks to tell you about what we do
Speaker 3
0:47:16 - 0:47:27 Well you guys know your stuff and enterprise sales development, I'm sure you know your stuff in that space as well. So thank you so much for being part of this and have a great long weekend for July four coming up. Great thank you you as
Speaker 2
0:47:27 - 0:47:37 well. Harry and uh mhm
Speaker 2
0:00:00 - 0:00:27 Mhm Yeah. Hello everybody and welcome to the enterprise sales development podcast brought to you by science technologies. We interview outbound leaders at fast growth businesses to learn their secrets and bring you actionable insights. Thanks for joining us this week. Hey this is enterprise sales development. I'm eric wants from the CMO of Science Technologies
Speaker 3
0:00:27 - 0:00:30 and this is Harry Evans, the director of craft and strategy at Science Technologies
Speaker 2
0:00:31 - 0:00:42 Boy. Harry, we have got a great episode for the people today. We had the pleasure of speaking with Jason. Prindle who's the director of Inside Sales and global sales Development at big eyed and boy they're
Speaker 3
0:00:42 - 0:00:45 big, big idea, they're
Speaker 2
0:00:45 - 0:00:46 making some waves.
Speaker 3
0:00:46 - 0:00:50 Uh the way they've grown as a company. The amount of venture capital
Speaker 2
0:00:50 - 0:00:51 they've raised recently is just it's
Speaker 3
0:00:51 - 0:00:56 mind numbing. Uh and also seeing how the SDR teams internally have grown under Jason recently
Speaker 2
0:00:56 - 0:01:16 so quickly, Some of the numbers that jumped out off the page to me, the company's at about 350 headcount raised $250 million dollars of venture capital at north of a billion dollar valuation. So this truly is enterprise sales development and a key outbound sales motion that they've got going on over there. Yeah, it
Speaker 3
0:01:16 - 0:01:22 was a great conversation, Looking forward to playing the interview for everyone who's listening. The growth of the team was great and then also seeing how they
Speaker 2
0:01:22 - 0:01:24 actually led
Speaker 3
0:01:24 - 0:01:29 to all these changes and innovations. Hearing about their bar discussion, do you want to explain that?
Speaker 2
0:01:29 - 0:01:49 Er Yeah, Jason, you're gonna have to listen for this, this anecdote because it was a bar argument that led to a whole new role on their team between Jason and his CMO and you know, I took a little bit of umbrage because being a CMO myself, you always have to be very wary of when people don't love the messaging that you're producing
Speaker 3
0:01:49 - 0:01:50 well with
Speaker 2
0:01:50 - 0:01:52 that. I have so many
Speaker 3
0:01:52 - 0:01:53 other thoughts, but I'm sure everyone's here
Speaker 2
0:01:53 - 0:01:54 to listen to Jason.
Speaker 3
0:01:54 - 0:01:56 So let's jump right into
Speaker 2
0:01:56 - 0:02:06 the interview. Hey, we're here today with Jason. Prindle, talking about enterprise sales development. Jason, how you doing today?
Speaker 1
0:02:06 - 0:02:08 I'm doing great. Thank you. Eric how about yourself?
Speaker 2
0:02:08 - 0:02:18 Fantastic, Fantastic. We're really looking forward to this conversation. Jason tell us a little bit about the team that you have over a big eyed, which you've just joined kind of end of last
Speaker 1
0:02:18 - 0:03:04 year, about 10 months ago, I joined the team here at big eyed. So I inherited five sdrs that were kind of already up and running but lacked a lot of process, a lot of direction and direct leadership. So that's where they kind of went out looking for somebody like myself. Our goal was to grow it very, very fast and keep up with the growth of the company. So we started with those five, I've promoted all five of those people to different roles. Now, we're up to a team of about 20 sDRs, we have one SDR Manager that we've added and I've also spun up our inside sales team here. So we have three of those original five sdrs have been promoted to sales and we're working to launch some new products, some kind of mid market and a little lower investment from dollar and time standpoint products.
Speaker 2
0:03:04 - 0:03:08 That's fantastic, amazing forex growth to on the SDR front.
Speaker 1
0:03:08 - 0:03:12 Yeah. Yeah, it's been crazy but exciting at the same time.
Speaker 2
0:03:12 - 0:03:16 Seriously, tell me a little bit about big idea, in fact, give us your pitch.
Speaker 1
0:03:16 - 0:04:05 Okay. Sure. Yeah, big idea. We are a data security, data privacy data governance company. We start with our Discovery Foundation which really helps businesses find their P. I. P. I. And sensitive data that they have about their customers, employees, et cetera. And then we build from there. So we like to say like first you have to know where it is and a lot of large enterprises don't know where all that data is. So our Discovery Foundation with some Ai and machine learning helps them find that data faster and better than anybody else. And then on top of that we build out a marketplace of apps to allow companies to decide, you know, are they, are they looking to mature and the security pillar or the privacy pillar, governance pillar and really kind of pick their adventure from there. Right. So we start like I said with that with that base and then and then build from there.
Speaker 2
0:04:05 - 0:04:12 That's great. Tell me a little bit about your ideal, you know customer client profile, how you built that out.
Speaker 1
0:04:12 - 0:05:15 Sure. Yeah, Classic, classic, big eyed. Uh, and I say, classic. Because of, as I mentioned with the inside sales team, we've released some new products to address some new markets, but big idea enterprise or big idea at its core has been targeting really those global 2000 large enterprises names that you know, type of companies that have a ton of data. So obviously we play well or sensitive data, I should say. So obviously we play well in regulated industries as well as industries like retail, where you have large retailers who have millions upon millions of customers and that turns into billions of pieces of data on those customers. Some of our newer products that we've released, small, I'd write clever name and another one called big eyed dot me, which is more for the consumer side, those have been released and those were targeting towards the mid market or the commercial sized companies. So we've drawn that at the 100 to about 500 million in yearly revenue type companies. And that's where we're targeting those particular products as well.
Speaker 2
0:05:15 - 0:05:21 And how do you think about the kind of the title cluster of the folks that you're looking to start conversations
Speaker 3
0:05:21 - 0:05:22 with? Yeah,
Speaker 1
0:05:22 - 0:07:01 we look at them as heads of so we say, heads of privacy, heads of data, heads of security, you know, those titles can take on a bunch of different forms very similar to sdrs or business development reps or whatever, right? You call the same thing. Nine different things, depending on who you're talking to. So we really look at those heads of a lot of times in these larger organizations, their data team has matured a little bit. So you have your Chief data officers, Chief privacy officers, things like that. You know, a lot of, a lot of what we do and especially from the SDR workers were targeting these accounts is is first we kind of have to understand who are these groups and and are they siloed classically like we would think they are or do they have multiple responsibilities? And then what are the titles of of people that actually hold things and own these types of projects. You know, we find it I find it pretty funny and sometimes, you know, we could talk to a C. So and he's our big decision maker and he's the one we want to talk to other times. We talked to another see so and he or she really has nothing to do with the particular project. So a lot of it is we have to understand each, each company and and how they, how they address this because it is it is newer. Data has been around for a long time, but a focus on the security and privacy of that data is relatively new, as we can see by a lot of the regulations that are coming out are being talked about. So those organizations are new and they've kind of been built from within and so each one is a little bit unique and a little bit different. It's, you know, it's not like a sales order or you kind of have your STRS and your sales folks in your VPs and you're S V P and C R O. And you you kind of know what that map generally looks like
Speaker 3
0:07:01 - 0:07:14 when you're defining those groups and when you're defining the internal landscape of your targets, do you find that you get that information better through research in advance or are you having your SDRs make the calls and actually ask the questions to figure that out?
Speaker 1
0:07:14 - 0:08:05 Yeah. So we're right now we're having our SDRs make the calls and try to figure that out and ask a little bit about who's involved in these projects and what are the next steps and what does that decision process look like and things like that to try to map it out as early as we can. We are actually going to experiment with bringing on some research assistance which were actually in the middle of doing that right now. And those research assistants would then be in charge of doing that mapping whether they do it via tools like Lucia or zoom info and linkedin sales navigator or they do it through calls and emails or referrals or what have you. Right, So we're going to kind of task that team with a lot of that pre work so we understand who were trying to call in each organization and so are SDRs aren't wasting time targeting a couple of titles that may have nothing to do with what we want in that particular organization.
Speaker 2
0:08:05 - 0:08:21 So tell me a little bit more about kind of like the way in which you have your team mapped and and growing. I'm thinking that there's probably a case where now that you're supporting big I. D. Small ID, big idea that me does the sTR team have a footprint in all
Speaker 1
0:08:21 - 0:09:54 as of right now, we don't plans in the future are definitely to expand the SDR team into that mid market commercial team, it's a little too early and I say they don't have enough opportunities yet to really keep their day full so they can prospect as well for themselves. But the way we have the sales territories lined up our multiple tiers of alignment where we start with target accounts. We brought in a lot of sales reps that have experience in this industry and they have connections within certain accounts, then some vertical stuff. Right? So we have some health care, we have somethin serve, we have some kind of segmentation like that and then it kind of rolls down to a geographical territory as well. So with that, you know, the the idea behind hiring the sales team, the way that they've hired over the past year is to bring in those people with those relationships so we can get some quick wins and we can introduce what we've, what we're doing and, and you know, kind of kind of get in a little bit faster than a normal ramp of an enterprise sales rep would be with that. It comes with these dynamics where, you know, some people, we know some people over here and over here. So you can't just say, hey, you know, Minnesota is your territory. We have to be a little more, a little more flexible with that. So what we've done on the SDR team to match that is really just a line to a sales rep. Right, so an SDR team, we don't have a territory whatsoever. You know, one of my sdrs could get leads from California Healthcare and from Austin Enterprise, it's just based on who they're align to.
Speaker 1
0:09:54 - 0:11:02 Of course, we do our best to try to keep those alignments either within the same vertical or within the same geographical territory, make it a little bit easier for the SDR, but, you know, in a young company, like we are, everything can't be always perfect. So we have, you know, we have some, that's, that's a little all over the place, but that's what we're doing right now is just matching that 2 to 1 ratio that we're trying to keep of one SDR two to enterprise sales reps and as the team grows, we can simply hire another SDR plug them in to match with the two new sales reps and and continue to go that way looking towards the future, which I think, you know, we're obviously always having to do solve the problem now, but also solve the problem. 12 months from now is we would look to one, add some people to that commercial team and talking about those less expensive kind of lower market products and treat that almost like a junior SDR role. And then we could promote to the senior SDR role where they would align to enterprise and then, you know, like I said, we have the inside sales team as well, so now we can promote to that inside sales team um and really create that, I know this is a little off topic but create that career path for sdrs as well.
Speaker 2
0:11:02 - 0:11:10 That makes perfect sense actually. So tell me, how did you come about the ratios that that you've implemented now?
Speaker 1
0:11:10 - 0:12:12 Yeah, So we originally started with 3 to 1, which I think is kind of a classic, you know, 3 to 1 ratio and the SDR where else not reinventing the wheel there. But what we found out pretty early on was that we had a great problem to have, which was that marketing was generating a ton of inbound leads for us and at that 3 to 1 ratio, the sdrs really didn't have any time for that outbound prospecting, which I think is very, very important, You know you have to have a good balance and we didn't have that balance. So we kind of looked at the lead flow, you know how many leads were coming in per sales rep or per territory and then kind of taking a look at, okay, how many steps do we need to complete to engage with these people? How much time do we spend on it? So how much of our time is spent on inbound and we kind of came to a work hours type of figure and the math just worked that hey if we just simply added or lower that ratio by 1 to 1 to two that would give us that good 50 50 split of inbound, 50% of the time is on inbound and kind of the easy layups and then 50% of your time is spent on target out bounding
Speaker 2
0:12:12 - 0:12:19 and so you have that coverage going on where your sdrs are touching both inbound and outbound prospecting.
Speaker 1
0:12:19 - 0:13:57 Yeah we do. I think it's you know, I've I've toyed in the past with the idea of splitting those two up I think with what we do and and the market that we go after and I found this in my previous two places as well because it was kind of similar I C. P you know, is in kind of the same cybersecurity bubble ish. Right? So what we found with the with the split roles idea is that a lot of our outbound is really more on the demand gen side than it is uncovering open opportunities. You know, when we have an A. S. P around $300,000 and we have a sale cycle around 67 months as well as the infrastructure and the staffing requirements that are required to spin up a solution like ours, you don't trip into that or you can't, you can't really like throw a value statement and grab some interest and it converts into an opportunity right away on outbound. You're going to do that from time to time. But most of the time, the idea that we have is that we need to raise awareness of what we do and how we do it and why we do it better. So that when these conversations do start happening at that place, where were top of mind with that methodology, A lot of outbound work turns into inbound and so when we toyed with it a little bit at beyond trust, when I had a little bit bigger team and we kind of toyed with that separation of inbound and outbound reps, we found that we were running into a lot of conflicts with an inbound rep, getting, getting a lead, calling out booking the meeting, converting the opportunity, you know, getting paid for it and the outbound wrapped saying, hey, I prospected them six months ago or five months ago. You know, this should be mine and we were creating a lot of conflict where they didn't need to be?
Speaker 1
0:13:57 - 0:14:41 So I think from a philosophical standpoint, I kind of backed away from that separation and I think that, you know, if you get an SDR that is going to work in the role for about 18 months, it's about an 18 month job in my mind, you know, the first six months or first three months are going to be ramp and that can be covered by inbound. The next three months after that is inbound with a little bit outbound. Right? Some of those lucky ones you fall into or some of those people are willing to take a meeting and kick the tires a bit and then your, your second kind of or your second two thirds there. The hard work that you did on outbound starts paying paying you back and then you have a good flow of what you started when you were ramping coming back around as either inbound or they're engaging with you now or what have you.
Speaker 3
0:14:42 - 0:14:47 I'd love to ask a question about you talked about having SDRs assigned directly to sales reps and
Speaker 2
0:14:47 - 0:14:49 how they communicate with each
Speaker 1
0:14:49 - 0:14:50 other. And
Speaker 3
0:14:50 - 0:14:57 I hope to ask a little bit more about that. How do they communicate with each other? Are they having daily one on ones? Are they meeting about each account
Speaker 2
0:14:57 - 0:14:58 separately? Do they
Speaker 3
0:14:58 - 0:15:08 have shared documents? You know, communication between sales and SDRs is always a big question for a lot of our clients and the people that listen to these podcasts. So do you have any
Speaker 1
0:15:08 - 0:15:09 tips tricks?
Speaker 3
0:15:09 - 0:15:11 Home built processes?
Speaker 1
0:15:11 - 0:16:51 Yeah, yeah. You know to, I've been, I've been recently trying to find if there's like a software solution to this where, you know, everybody could come in and we could share information and kind of create tasks for each other and do this whole thing and there is nothing. And I've actually talked to a few people that joke like, hey, maybe you should, you should start something. And I'm like, well I have no idea how to code anything. So that's, that's not a great start for me. But yeah, what we're doing now that I think has worked really well as we have at least a minimum of a weekly one hour touch base between the SDR and their rep, we have target a countless which are unfortunately shared google sheets right now and we've set, I've said a specific agenda for those to say, okay, here's the things we need to go over, we need to go over the meetings that have happened over the last week. We need to see which of those can convert into opportunities. We need to see um you know, feedback on any of the meetings that didn't or why and kind of understand what the SDR did wrong and then we have to decide what are going to be the next targets for the next week or for the next 30 days part of what we're moving towards And what I'm implementing is account based sales development model which has been talked about a little bit out there you know in the forums and things like that. But it's really allowing us to to spend time in one of these agenda points is decide who you're going to target in the next 30 days, right? 10 to 15 cos you're going to have you know 10 15 20 contacts that you can go after that should fill up your 30 days. But then what do we know about those accounts and what intelligence can we get from the research team as well as what information or what intelligence does the sales rep know about those, the sales VPs.
Speaker 1
0:16:51 - 0:18:20 And then even some of our subject matter experts are R. C. So or Cso is also our security subject matter expert and bringing in the team into those to say, okay here's the targets now. What do we want to know? And I like three levels of customization or three levels of information there which is one just generically what do we know about that account? Right. What does Paypal or Nike or coca cola or whomever, what are they, what are they doing? What has there been? M and a activity have they have they had a breach lately? If you know what's the news about that company that we can understand then you know what we understand about those particular profiles or I. C. P. S. And then what do we know specifically about those people and a lot of time the connections that we have helps drive that conversation because our CSL might know there see so where our sales rep is sold to them in the past and they know this person and that person. So for the account based model I know this is a long way to get around to the answer but for that account based model we have to have that interaction. Otherwise the Sdrs don't have all the information they need to be as customized and be as personalized as we want them to be. So like I said boil it down very easy at least a weekly one on one with them. I've set an agenda that I give to the sales rep and that I give to the SDR to say these are the topics that you need to talk about. Um And then you know I come back around the other side and one on ones with the Sdrs and ask them how those conversations went and what information did they get and you know what what happened what was talked about all of that so I can continue to reinforce those things as well.
Speaker 1
0:18:20 - 0:18:47 It's not revolutionary you know it's kind of the same of of what's been done but I haven't found I haven't found anything that if I'm being honest that has worked any better than kind of the classic, just make sure that those meetings happen and make sure that you're telling them and you know, setting the expectation of what's going to be talked about. So everybody comes prepared and the time is well spent instead of just, you know, 20 minutes of, you know, Blah, Blah, Blah about the dog and the kids and, and then, you know, you don't get to what you wanted to get to.
Speaker 2
0:18:48 - 0:19:09 And, and how do you kind of pack that meeting itself to ensure that there is substance that you can credibly promise to the Csos or big titles, heads of that you're targeting, like the kind of messaging that you're sdrs are using around why it's going to be worth the Cso at Nike's time to sit down and learn more.
Speaker 1
0:19:09 - 0:19:43 Yeah. So through those, through those conversations in that pre work, we want to be able to have, like I said, those three levels of customization. So when we go out and we're sending a Cdo at Pepsi a message, we're putting something in there that has something specific about Pepsi, if we, if there's something in the news or something that we know about through one of our, one of our internal folks or something like that and we do that level of customization, like I said at the company level, at that title or that target level and then specific to that person and we're not talking about like, hey, knowing that the person likes to golf and saying, you know, something like
Speaker 2
0:19:43 - 0:19:45 that. I think,
Speaker 1
0:19:45 - 0:21:14 yeah, I think that level of personalization is honestly kind of played out and I don't know that it really works that well. But me personally, I get annoyed if someone says something about the school I went to or you know, I've got a quote from Yoda and my linkedin profile, like sometimes I kind of appreciate the effort, but it's like, and it's not really moving the needle. I want to know what you're doing for me in my role to make my life easier. And I think that's what's really important. So we're crafting those messages by one, determining what information we need to know and have that information to craft the messages. And then we're spinning up a content team. I've tasked my new SDR manager with this, we're creating a content team, which is something I had previously at Beyond Trust as well where we have a couple of people from marketing, a couple of SDRs and a couple of sales reps who come together and say, okay, you know, if we're talking to a cdo at a retail company or something like that, this is what's important to them and we have our subject matter expert there to say, yeah, this will resonate with me or this wouldn't, or I wouldn't read this or I do. So a lot of it is crafted amongst sales and marketing and sdrs to decide like, ok, here's a here's a good some bullet points we want to talk about and and and and here's some good stuff about our product and what matters to them. And then, you know, we slow down and we personalized based on that person, but then we also run that by our subject matter experts are smes to say, would you read this, would this be interesting to you or not, or are we missing here?
Speaker 1
0:21:14 - 0:21:44 And so that's kind of where we start and then with the content team as we continue to grow that and mature that process a little bit, obviously there will be a lot of going back and looking at what has the highest reply rates and click through rates and and where in the sequences that we run our people engaging with us, so we can look at what that content is or what that mixture was at that particular time of omni channel outreach to to really then start to tweak and make sure that we were hitting with the most impactful stuff at the right time.
Speaker 2
0:21:44 - 0:21:49 You mentioned the content team and it sounds like this is the second go
Speaker 1
0:21:49 - 0:21:49 round, thanks.
Speaker 2
0:21:49 - 0:21:51 Uh what an idea
Speaker 1
0:21:51 - 0:21:53 that by
Speaker 2
0:21:53 - 0:22:10 the sounds of it was very successful at beyond trust. Tell me a little bit about kind of what inspired you to arrange your organization in that manner and kind of like how you evolved that role, so that now you bring it to big eyed and are starting to introduce it in the exact same way?
Speaker 1
0:22:11 - 0:23:26 Sure. Yeah, so this was really born um it was born over a barroom argument with my chief marketing officer. So um we were at I I can't remember our s a black one of the big shows right? And we were sitting at a bar and we had an event coming up in like an hour but we were having a couple of pre drinks and just kind of you know shooting the stuff somehow it came up and talked about that you know we weren't using the emails that marketing put together and I turned around and I told them marketing emails are garbage for prospecting and you know we kind of looked at me and I was like listen you guys make it real pretty. I know right, sorry, sorry eric but you know the marketing emails are very pretty, they have lots of graphics and they have formatting that's kind of sometimes in the form of a jpeg or whatever, they don't get read there too long there too verbose, you know etcetera right? It doesn't work for prospecting. So I said to him, I said what I do is I take your emails or the marketing emails that I get, I'd usually chop them up into three or four emails that are good for prospecting and I strip out all the pretty I chop up some of the content add a little bit and I send it off and you know, he said well why don't instead of you doing that, why don't you? And a couple of people from the marketing team get together and just work
Speaker 3
0:23:26 - 0:23:27 on writing those
Speaker 1
0:23:27 - 0:24:59 together. So we're not wasting time writing something that you're not going to use and you're not wasting time having to redo what we do. And that was kind of the ah ha moment like you know what, that would be great. And so we we we had a couple of meetings and I said you know I should bring in some of the sales reps here because I was relatively new at beyond trust when this happened and previous to that I hadn't been in cybersecurity before, I kind of general technology type of sales. So I knew a lot about Acer monitors and hp printers and and office 3 65. But I didn't know cybersecurity very well. And so um I thought you know we've got a couple of reps at this company, they've been here like 10 years, you know, they're killing it, they're crushing quote all the time. You know, they know what their customers want, why don't we loop in a couple of those people and so we looped in a couple of sales reps and it just kind of organically grown, grew from there with people wanting to be a part of it because they were seeing what we were spitting out was a lot better than what they had seen in the past and they wanted their input, you know, and I think if you have the right type of sales team, it's really great to get that engagement. Like I want my sdrs to be better because they understand a better str means more money for them in the long run, so that's that's where it started. And we just continued to make little tweaks and and find out, you know, we actually had to cut some people out of the team because they, you know, they were going in a different direction or they were very, very like, you know, my ideas, right? And nobody else is is right. And so we had to cut some sales reps and cut some marketing people and fill in with some other people, but we just grew from there.
Speaker 1
0:24:59 - 0:26:42 And what we were finding was significant upticks in the engagement rates that we had on everything, right? And we were using this team, not just to create like full emails, but even little snippets, we could inject into emails, call scripts, linkedin scripts, all of the ways that we try to reach our customers, even video scripts, you know, that we would use before we would cut a video, we had that team together and then the latest iteration of that was bringing in those people that within our company would be the targets that we would be going out to. So speaking to the Cto and the C. I. O. And those types of people and saying, hey with this, with this resonate with you. And we found that that again, kind of gave us another big jump because our best laid plans, you know, the C. So read it and said like, no, I wouldn't even pay attention to this. Okay, so let's go back to the drawing board, what do you think is wrong with it? Why not understanding what's what's motivating them and what's important to them? And then go back and rewrite those things. And we got into a pretty good rhythm where we were able to shoot out a good amount of content. And, you know, we started with our baseline like this persona with this product type of stuff. And by the end we had expanded it to even new webinars that were coming up invite or I'm sorry, event invites and things like that. Where we had this well oiled machine where even if we only had a couple of days before an event was happening, we knew we could put together some content very, very quickly by calling together the team, you know, blowing the, blowing the horn, getting the team together and saying, okay, here's some ideas, let's patch it up, let's get back together, compare contrast, take the best of everything and then ship it out. So
Speaker 3
0:26:42 - 0:26:43 you essentially built a team that allows
Speaker 2
0:26:43 - 0:26:44 you to
Speaker 3
0:26:44 - 0:26:47 kind of crowdsource copy and content almost.
Speaker 1
0:26:47 - 0:28:20 Exactly, Exactly. Yeah, it is. And then, and then we also have an internal team to test it as well. So we've got a we've got a crowd like you said, crowdsource group to create the content and then we have a group to to test it against as well. So we're not relying on waiting the actual prospects to not engage or to engage. And you know, we have, we have that kind of started already, which, which again, you know, we've seen, I won't even say incremental results. We've seen huge jumps in the results that we get there because we're putting a lot of thought behind what we send and we're testing it against the people that we would send it to. And by the time it's actually shown to the customer or the prospect, it's it's already been through a bunch of edits and and a bunch of a bunch of testing. So we know that it's solid. And if you do that across all your channels, then you're going to have a good solid message wherever the customer or the prospect wants to engage with you, right? You fight them on the battlefield of their choosing. And I think that's why we still leave voicemails and and linked in and we try text message and we try video because we need to engage them where they want to engage and we don't know that until they actually do, right? I answer my phone. I never respond to emails. That's that's how it is. But you know I know for for every other director person in my type of role it's going to be completely different. Some of them like linked in some of them like emails, you know uh some of them get attracted to watching a video. I don't, you know, so but we know everybody's different. So we expanded that to not just email templates. Like I said we expand that across all the ways we try to engage with our prospects.
Speaker 2
0:28:20 - 0:28:49 I'm really curious to to learn with this multi channel strategy what you regard as kind of key KPI s that you're constantly watching. Obviously there's the end goal of setting an appointment but the instrumentation if you will around getting to that outcome. What are the numbers in the benchmarks that you pay attention to and maybe even share some of the uptick that you saw at getting messaging right before and after.
Speaker 1
0:28:50 - 0:30:33 You know, first part first just the KPI as I look at. So I may be different than a lot of people in the sense that I work backwards from results. So if somebody is hitting their numbers and they're doing 20 activities a day, great. They hit their numbers let's talk about how you can do 40 activities a day because hopefully that will then double your results. Whereas if someone's not hitting their numbers and they're doing 120 activities, 150 activities a day, you know then we need to go back and look at the activities. So I've never been a guy that looks at those daily KPI s unless it's the root cause of a of a problem or or a success. I share this story a lot with with my sdrs and I think back to when I first started an Inside sales and I was given a list of accounts in an Excel spreadsheet in a phone, right? And it was go find people to sell to and I had a manage. Yeah, yeah exactly. It was like here go. I mean I'm updating myself but we didn't even have zoom info or anything or discover Oregon was referenced. Usa which basically had to have a library card to get access to. Eric's laughing because he remembers that Harry has no idea what I'm talking about but I had reference usa a spreadsheet in a phone and then that was it and start going, I had a manager who demanded that we made 100 calls per day and in that particular inside sales role that was a cradle to grave type of role. So I was prospecting as well as account management and closing deals by the time I got ramped up, You know, I would hit those numbers easily when I was prospecting, 200 calls a day, whatever right you do what you gotta do to get get some prospects. But once you start with everything else, I still have this manager is like 100 calls a day, 100 calls a day, 100 calls a day. And if I'm being honest with you, I was hitting numbers right?
Speaker 1
0:30:33 - 0:31:46 I've, I've been promoted. So there's a fair assumption that more times than not I hit my quota and was successful, but I rarely would be able to get 100 calls a day when you're talking to customers, you're negotiating deals and you're speaking out different things with them and whatnot. So I had about 15 to 25 numbers that I knew would never answer and they were legitimate businesses, but it always either went into like a phone tree loop or something like that. And if he crawled up my but that day I would make 15 to 20 fake calls just to placate my manager. So when I get into the role of leading, I'm like, you know what if I did it, I'd have to expect other people would do it. And of those 15 to 20 calls that was wasted time. It didn't, it didn't work to my quote, it was just to shut my manager up. So I swore when I went into management, I wouldn't be, how many things are you doing a day type of guy? Just blindly looking at the KPI S. So what I do is I like to look at the results and then move backwards from there and figure out, and I look at the very end result, which is opportunities and pipelines. So we can't really control pipeline because the deal is the deal right at SDR does the same amount of work for a $300,000 deal as they do for $3 million deal. Um, you know, that's based on spec and everything.
Speaker 1
0:31:46 - 0:33:05 So I look at the number of opportunities, the conversion rates, you know, from meeting to opportunities, you're going backwards here, that conversion rate of those, the conversion rate of their of their leads to their meetings and then how many activities are they doing in between and then listening to those calls and looking at those emails and figuring out trying to dissect where along that process there is a problem and it becomes very easy to coach and to help your sdrs be better if you look at it in that sense because if someone's not hanging their numbers and I just say do more activities, but they're doing horrible activities, we're not gonna, we're not going to change anything, we're going to spend 30 60 days wondering why did more activities not work. So I like to look at those, at those steps from, from the back end, you know, all the way to the front to say where is the problem, where does the coaching really need to, to, to be and what's going to affect a positive change and you can very easily see that right. If the conversion rate of meeting to opportunity is significantly less than the rest of the team or what you expect then you know that they're setting bad meetings. Okay great. Now let's listen to the meetings. Let's listen to your qualification. Let's understand why the sales rap is not converting those and and let's dig into that section of the process to understand what the problem is and fix it. Then we'll look at the results again and then we'll go fix the next thing you're
Speaker 3
0:33:05 - 0:33:12 data driven to diagnose the situation and to decide how to coach how to make improvements rather than data driven from the front
Speaker 2
0:33:12 - 0:33:13 end of
Speaker 1
0:33:13 - 0:33:14 here are the numbers
Speaker 3
0:33:14 - 0:33:20 we made the decision in advance. Go hit him. We assume it will work out. You're constantly iterating based on the data.
Speaker 1
0:33:20 - 0:34:32 Exactly. Yeah exactly. I want to look at it. I want to look at and diagnose where the problem is use things like KPI S and quotas and results as the the issue. But what is the root cause I think of it like a doctor right you go into the doctor and like I've got this cough that won't go away. Okay. Well what's causing that cough? Is it, is it allergies? Is that emphysema? Is that lung cancer? You know it could be something from very very uh you know nothing like allergies all the way up to something big and the doctor isn't just going to say oh you've got a cough, go take some robot isn't right. They're going to do some tests to see what is exactly wrong with you. I use that example because I think of it the same way. Okay we've got this problem. But what's the root cause of that problem? Very very rarely. Is it the number of activities that they're doing? It's usually the types of activities or what they're saying on their voice mails or phone calls, how they qualify the content of their emails, who they're targeting. Are we using personalization in the right way? You know, do we have a bum sales rap who just says no to everything, you know, whatever it happens to be along the way there's usually a root problem. And for me what I found and again like I said I think I might be an outlier with this mentality but it rarely boils down to you just need to do more every day.
Speaker 2
0:34:33 - 0:34:38 Well it's flying in the face of the thing that is not in abundant supply which is time.
Speaker 1
0:34:38 - 0:34:41 So
Speaker 2
0:34:41 - 0:35:08 Tell me this though because it sounds to me 10 months into your tenure at big eyed it sounds to me like you've already kind of established a cohort norm. watch your KPI S and relevant conversion rates and given that you forex the team total team size. My guess is that you found those cohort norms somewhat normalized. Is that a fair read?
Speaker 1
0:35:08 - 0:36:47 It's getting it's getting normalized I would say. I think you know, we we were able to my so I report into marketing at this particular company and I know str leaders like there's always the report to marketing or sales and I say it was, I report to both. I have one on ones with R C R O and R C M O every week. So the CMO technically approves my time off. Other than that, I have two bosses. So we're making incremental changes. I don't think we've normalized to a point where we can say this is the conversion rate we want or that we think is right, we're more doing it across the team, right is it? And maybe this is what you meant by the core cohort normalization, right? Is the team all kind of converting within within a certain number of degrees or percentages and and uh and all along the way. And so we have, we're getting very, very close to that. A lot of these, you know, I've been here 10 months, the team is now 20 and none of them are the ones I I inherited. So everyone is eight months ish or less. So we still have a lot of people that are ramping and we still have a lot of new sales reps that, you know, we have some process degradation or some breakdowns because they don't understand it yet. So we have a lot of these things that kind of throw flies in the ointment as we go, but we're able to at least identify the outliers, whether it be on the way positive side. Around the way negative side and then use that to say, okay, what are the other people doing? Let's take a look at, let's take a look at that and compare these particular things. And usually it's, especially with newer SDRs is pretty obvious, right? Somebody doing really, really good is sending out great emails and what the emails going out from the new person or not. That great qualification and pitching big idea and what we do.
Speaker 1
0:36:47 - 0:38:17 You know, we hire a whole other conversation of our hiring strategy, but I hire people that don't necessarily have experience in this area. And so learning data privacy is something that can be very, very difficult and you're talking to people that have been doing this for 2030 40 years, right. By the time they reach that sea level or that c minus one level, they're very, very versed in it. And so for a new SDR can be difficult. We continue to train them and teach them so as they ramp, they can kind of fake it till they make it. And then they can actually understand and have a conversation around it. But you know, but but we find that, you know, a lot of the, a lot of the outliers generally it's so far, I've been around just kind of the tenure of the person? It's definitely, you know, we've got some system changes, some technology changes that I have. So we can better measure these things and these conversion percentages and things like that and really start to build out that baseline. So like I knew the percentages that beyond trust, right? We were mature enough to say. I knew that our mpls would convert to meetings at 25%. We would expect our meetings for the opportunities at 80% and I expect, you know, so on and so forth. Right? So I knew those numbers. They're just don't have them quite at big ideas. So what I've been doing is again looking at the outliers and then kind of using what I knew in the past because keep drawing comparisons to beyond trust because it's a similar I. C. P. It's a similar type of sale cycle and A. S. P. And all of those things. So we can kind of draw some conclusions to say, hey, we should we should see things kind of in the same way
Speaker 3
0:38:17 - 0:38:19 when you talk about educating
Speaker 1
0:38:19 - 0:38:20 your Sdrs
Speaker 3
0:38:20 - 0:38:23 and I'm slowly learning over time about your space about your
Speaker 2
0:38:23 - 0:38:24 industry. It's
Speaker 3
0:38:24 - 0:38:33 an interesting balance. And I wonder what you think about this very often SDR leaders talk about their Sdrs plateau going after 8 to 12 months sometimes because they actually know too
Speaker 2
0:38:33 - 0:38:34 much. They start
Speaker 3
0:38:34 - 0:38:39 actually selling on the phone and answering all the questions and the person goes great, thanks no
Speaker 1
0:38:39 - 0:38:40 need for a meeting. How
Speaker 3
0:38:40 - 0:38:45 much is too much? How much is too little? How do you decide how much they need to know to do their job.
Speaker 1
0:38:45 - 0:40:03 Right. Yeah. Yeah, I think, you know, and we ran into this with some of the people that I inherited that had been with the company for like two years and, and, and have been, you know, kind of lone wolves and doing their own thing that they were starting to do a lot of that discovery that the sales rep should be doing. A matter of fact, I had one SDR who would set the meeting for the sales rap sales would show up and then the SDR would run discovery and you know, it was completely, it was completely wrong. So yeah, I think, you know, I get a little bit lucky in the fact that I don't know that they can plateau in that short of a time with with this particular industry. But we also, you know, I also encourage some of that. So I don't think there is going too far to be honest. I look at Sdrs, the SDR role is a means to an end. Being an SDR is a great career move and it's a very terrible job. Like if you're doing SDR work just to fill the time and to get a paycheck, go do something else because it's horrific, right? We get yelled at, we get called names. It's constant rejection. You go days where you don't even speak to another human because nobody's replying to anything. You know, it's not a it's not a fulfilling job if that's just what you're going to do. So I look at it as a means to an end and I like to ask people where do they want to go and You know, 80% of the time at sales, right? The sales development, they want to go into a closing role.
Speaker 1
0:40:03 - 0:41:29 So I actually encourage them to continue to learn and continue to take that discovery further down the road because they're never going to be able to complete discovery um at any point or write a sales rep doesn't complete discovery basically tell the PIO is signed in my mind but they're never going to be able to complete it and they always have the easy out of okay great, let's set you know, let's set a meeting. Let me get you in touch with my et cetera. So I encourage them to try to take it as far down the road as they can because it's a good training ground for that next step. You know, the the handoff from SDR two E is, you know, it's a discovery call it's it's further discovery and and the first thing you have to learn is a good sales rep is discovery and how to continue to do more discovery. So like I said, I encourage them to keep going as much as they can and ask more questions and make themselves uncomfortable. And I use the iceberg analogy a lot that everybody does and I say, you know, I can hire anybody that can get the easy stuff to see above the water line. I want the people who can get down 10 m 20 m 30 m underwater and start understanding the real breath of what we're with, the breath of what we're dealing with here. So, so yeah, so they don't, we don't really run into that problem of them selling too much on the phone because we're encouraging it and and to be honest to situate the product and the and the solution is so complex that unless I've got a three or four year SDR, they're probably not going to get to that level of knowledge where it's going too far, they're butting right up into the demo or something like that. There's always
Speaker 3
0:41:29 - 0:41:30 more questions in your space.
Speaker 1
0:41:30 - 0:42:03 Yeah, there's always, I mean, there's always more and and and we sell down three different pillars to so that you can always expand from a security conversation over to a governance conversation if you really want to go that direction, if you've got a person that's interested in that as well. So there's so, so much to learn and so much to know and so many different directions that could go based on what they want to do. Like I was talking earlier about all the different apps to kind of pick your own adventure, that most str is just not going to get that knowledge level in their in their year and a half or even two years of being an SDR here. So
Speaker 2
0:42:03 - 0:42:21 Jason, it's pretty evident in our conversation that you're pretty big believer in specialization of roles and kind of even experimenting with things like, you know, the research roll, attaching the content role that kind of sits not exactly a marketing, not exactly in, you know, in
Speaker 1
0:42:21 - 0:42:22 sales. If we're
Speaker 2
0:42:22 - 0:42:23 Talking again in 12
Speaker 3
0:42:23 - 0:42:25 months, what will
Speaker 2
0:42:25 - 0:42:33 it change with sales development? Where do you see trends kind of going, is it towards the directions that you pointed out and found success with?
Speaker 1
0:42:34 - 0:42:54 Yeah, I think, you know, I think the days of the days of the generic this is what my company does. Can we, can I get 15 minutes on your calendar type of messaging is dead. I mean 80% of the emails I get are exactly that format. So it's sad that there's so many SDR teams and leaders that allow that to be the norm.
Speaker 2
0:42:54 - 0:42:55 But I think that
Speaker 1
0:42:56 - 0:44:30 yeah, slow to die. Exactly. So I think that's gone. I think the hyper personalization and this account based models where things are going to go, I've done a couple presentations to our executives about it and and I like it to the hare and the tortoise right? The tortoise wins the race, but he's very, very slow and you're not going to see that immediately cloud of dust. And I've told that to my Ceo, if we move to this account based model with hyper personalization and hyper customization, it's going to be slow, but I think it's going to pay more dividends in the end. So we have to kind of trust that process a little bit. So I think, you know, I think that's a big thing. I really think we need to get back to that personalized messaging and allowing our SDRs to move slower. We have enough technology that we can make up for a lot of that inefficiency and technology as well. So that's something that I'm focusing on right now is saying, okay, an SDR using a bunch of templates and that 80 20 model that we've used, they can spit out this many activities But if I want him to do 50, 50 customization or 40, 60 or something like that, then I need to I need to fix it in technology. So I think another thing in 12 months, I think hopefully we'll see a lot more integration of the technologies that SDR is used instead of having like 12 different tabs open with all this fun little cool stuff. You know, I want them to have one or two tabs that has all of that stuff right there for them. So technology efficiencies slower and more deliberate and then I'll be honest with you have plugged for science. I love what you guys do with the personalization of the or the separation of the roles where you have your social media expert and you have your phone expert and have your email experts. So we're bringing in the research assistance.
Speaker 1
0:44:30 - 0:45:53 Like you said, I had a conversation yesterday, we might try out a social media person who's just going to be in charge of running linked in and warming up the prospects that we're going to prospect 30 days from now as I have, the SDR is kind of planning out their next 30 60 days. We can give that target to the research assistant. Research assistant can get all the info we want, we handed off to the social media person. They can warm it up through linked in, get the connection done, get some messages out there and then the SDR can pick that up at that point if they haven't engaged yet. Obviously if they have engaged anywhere along the way, we get that right over to the SDR. So I think that's something that's going to be a little more prevalent in the market or in the SDR role as well as really deciding what are people really good at. I had a long conversation with john your Ceo once and, and he was talking about that and I was like, you know, after five minutes, I'm like, I'm bought in. That makes sense because I write terrible emails. Get me on the phone. I'm great. I, I don't care. You can throw whatever you want at me, water off a duck's back. I refereed hockey for a while. So I'm used to getting screamed at all the time. Right? So that's fine. But my emails aren't great and my linked in game is, you know, average at best. But you know, so if I were to join an SDR T now and say, hey, put me on the phone and just let me do that. So, you know, seeing if we're, if we can grow large enough to do that, I think you also have to have a very large organization and you have to have enough activities to spread around enough people as well as the R. O. I to convince your CFO to give you that headcount to do that.
Speaker 1
0:45:53 - 0:46:08 But I think that would be something that we would look into as well as we continue to specialize and continue to customize and make sure that every message that goes out is completely relevant. We're not sending just old boilerplate nonsense.
Speaker 3
0:46:08 - 0:46:11 Well, Jason, I think we could probably fire
Speaker 1
0:46:11 - 0:46:13 Questions at you for another two or 3 hours. You're
Speaker 3
0:46:13 - 0:46:28 feeding us gold. Really appreciate your time. You've got a lot of great insights and especially in the enterprise space. It's clear that you put a lot of time and thought into how you're doing things seem a little more innovative than the average program out there. So we appreciate all these insights. I know our listeners
Speaker 2
0:46:28 - 0:46:28 do as well.
Speaker 3
0:46:29 - 0:46:31 Thank you so much for being a part of this. Would you
Speaker 1
0:46:31 - 0:46:32 like to give a quick pitch for
Speaker 2
0:46:32 - 0:46:33 what you guys do? I
Speaker 1
0:46:33 - 0:47:16 mean I did a quick but I did a quick pitch about it but yeah, big eyed, right know your data action, your data and get value from your data. So every company out there has personal information of employees or their customers that they need to protect. More regulations are coming all the time to to protect my information and your information and we help you, you know, not just check a box to solve that, but to really grow a data maturity program or a data program and work with you through the maturity so we can start by finding what you have and then grow from there down the down the path of security, privacy and governance. So if you have any interest reach out to me on linkedin, Jason. Prindle very easy to find out their big I'd and I'll get you in touch with the right folks to tell you about what we do
Speaker 3
0:47:16 - 0:47:27 Well you guys know your stuff and enterprise sales development, I'm sure you know your stuff in that space as well. So thank you so much for being part of this and have a great long weekend for July four coming up. Great thank you you as
Speaker 2
0:47:27 - 0:47:37 well. Harry and uh mhm
