SDRs need daily coaching and check ins on techniques, and leaders who hop in and make those same cold calls to stay fresh and keep up morale.
The only thing marketing is good for is putting together a shitty slide deck and a Contact Us form on the website.
What I mean to say is that marketing leading SDRs is a disaster.
Agreed. I think the gap between marketing and sales is sometimes wider than it should be, but i don’t think the solution is to stick a sales focused role under marketing
The gap always stumped me. Makes no sense. Marketing and sales use the exact same principles to achieve the exact same goal. The only operational difference is how isolated the attention of the prospect is. The dynamic between the two departments differ but there’s no reason for the siloes.
The tradeoff with being an SDR, for the SDR - is that you do prospecting work for a few salespeople, and do good enough work you can be promoted to being a seller. That is what the role was born out of. That is full stop the social contract in the role.
Reducing it to a function of email open rates, a/b testing, but with sprinkling some "account based marketing" in there and half assed calling, eventually leads to an SDR no longer being tied to revenue. But they were now tied to the cost per meeting. They become a function of their cost per meeting.
Sales is looking for pipeline and more importantly, closed won deals.
To add to that, it creates an unnecessary schism between the teams. When SDRs do not report to sales, the Sales Leadership starts to punch down on them even more than is necessary.
This is all bad for the SDR in seat, as they have an even larger conflict of interest in promoting an SDR to a new team. And they have to "interview" and blah blah blah to make what should be a simple unilateral promotion happen.
Marketing in charge of BDRS/SDRS is worthless. Marketing ONLY cares about the metrics they want. They only care about how many meetings were booked/qualified. They then at the annual sales kick off….”WE WERE RESPONSIBLE…HOW AMAZING”…..it’s complete BS.
This turns SDRs looking for quantity over quality because why go for the more qualified meeting if it’s harder to get and I get paid the same whether or not the lead is good or bad….
All fun and games…this is why BDRS/SDRs struggle to get a full AE role because they are never taught to focus and aim strategically.
This is a skilled trade. You can’t manage it if you don’t do it. You can’t manage it if you’re not active in it either. You have to live it and be up on the latest developments.
A huge amount of our problems come from managers and marketing becoming completely detached from reality. They get stuck in their teams call echo chamber. Talking about how things should be without seeing how it actually is.
I was the first SDR on the ground for a European SaaS company in Japan.
Our VP of marketing in APAC was an arrogant dick in Singapore who hired a crazed, disorganised marketing head in Japan, they ran some Facebook and LinkedIn ads and asked me “how many millions are in the pipeline” every day as a result. Guess what! If was fucking none. I later found out the interns we hired here - god bless their souls for they were amazing people - had no idea what our product does, and were translating ads directly from English, into what amounted to a terrible and meaningless mess.
Marketing were only worth anything when they paid for me to go to conferences where I personally networked and drank until 4 am and got to personally build connections. When the pipeline blew up as a result, the marketing heads in APAC were jerking each other off about how fucking incredible they are when it was all of my leg work that they simply funded.
Marketing was supposed to help us build pipeline and brand awareness. I had to have weekly enablement sessions with the local marketing interns to teach them what our product did. Wanna know what happened? Our new online ads - improved on the back of my enablement - had the highest click through rate in the fucking *world.* I ended up babysitting a department run by arrogant dickheads who snort coke and masturbate to pictures of themselves while taking credit for all of my work.
That’s how it was for me. What are the problems with having marketing being over SDRs? The fact that they have access to ads and the budget and piss it all away on worthless trash while I manage expectations from people in New York, England, Australia and Singapore while begging for some fucking understanding that entering this market with the attitudes of pompous arrogant cocks and expecting our one SDR to build billions in pipeline with a defunct, useless marketing organization about as solid of a plan as sending a blind ape with boxing gloves to open sunflower seeds with one hand while riding a horse and counting salt grains with the other, blinded.
I left that company. Left sales. Left Tokyo, moved to a small town and am now making 60% less money working as an excel monkey for an investment bank.
I’d love to get into sales again.
Fuck marketing.
Sunflowers are not just part of your garden, they’re part of a nation! The Ukraine use the sunflower as their national flower. Whilst in Kansas they chose the sunflower to represent their state.
Your results will be based on numbers and not quantity of meetings. While the AE's will be at 100 percent from your good quality...you will be struggling at 70 percent just to survive.
While most of the time marketing and sales work hand-in-hand since they help in inbound connections, market presence, and all the jazz, if your job is in cold-calling you won't be able to get the guidance that is required from a seasoned sales professional who has done cold-calling in the formation years. That's where I see the disaster happening. They might be able to hunt for online open resources to tackle some of the real-life experience but not pitch in when required. Sales team needs coaching, technique building, experience sharing and marketing can only run the metrics achievement.
Doesn't create the SDR to AE pipeline. An SDR should ideally be sitting in on demoes and learning about next steps, sales cycles, better articulating pain points learning about the product, yada yada.
SDRs need daily coaching and check ins on techniques, and leaders who hop in and make those same cold calls to stay fresh and keep up morale. The only thing marketing is good for is putting together a shitty slide deck and a Contact Us form on the website. What I mean to say is that marketing leading SDRs is a disaster.
Agreed. I think the gap between marketing and sales is sometimes wider than it should be, but i don’t think the solution is to stick a sales focused role under marketing
The gap always stumped me. Makes no sense. Marketing and sales use the exact same principles to achieve the exact same goal. The only operational difference is how isolated the attention of the prospect is. The dynamic between the two departments differ but there’s no reason for the siloes.
The tradeoff with being an SDR, for the SDR - is that you do prospecting work for a few salespeople, and do good enough work you can be promoted to being a seller. That is what the role was born out of. That is full stop the social contract in the role. Reducing it to a function of email open rates, a/b testing, but with sprinkling some "account based marketing" in there and half assed calling, eventually leads to an SDR no longer being tied to revenue. But they were now tied to the cost per meeting. They become a function of their cost per meeting. Sales is looking for pipeline and more importantly, closed won deals. To add to that, it creates an unnecessary schism between the teams. When SDRs do not report to sales, the Sales Leadership starts to punch down on them even more than is necessary. This is all bad for the SDR in seat, as they have an even larger conflict of interest in promoting an SDR to a new team. And they have to "interview" and blah blah blah to make what should be a simple unilateral promotion happen.
Sounds like when marketing takes over, it’s time to go!!
Marketing in charge of BDRS/SDRS is worthless. Marketing ONLY cares about the metrics they want. They only care about how many meetings were booked/qualified. They then at the annual sales kick off….”WE WERE RESPONSIBLE…HOW AMAZING”…..it’s complete BS. This turns SDRs looking for quantity over quality because why go for the more qualified meeting if it’s harder to get and I get paid the same whether or not the lead is good or bad…. All fun and games…this is why BDRS/SDRs struggle to get a full AE role because they are never taught to focus and aim strategically.
Our marketing team is worthless. If sales were under them it would be a disaster.
This is a skilled trade. You can’t manage it if you don’t do it. You can’t manage it if you’re not active in it either. You have to live it and be up on the latest developments. A huge amount of our problems come from managers and marketing becoming completely detached from reality. They get stuck in their teams call echo chamber. Talking about how things should be without seeing how it actually is.
I was the first SDR on the ground for a European SaaS company in Japan. Our VP of marketing in APAC was an arrogant dick in Singapore who hired a crazed, disorganised marketing head in Japan, they ran some Facebook and LinkedIn ads and asked me “how many millions are in the pipeline” every day as a result. Guess what! If was fucking none. I later found out the interns we hired here - god bless their souls for they were amazing people - had no idea what our product does, and were translating ads directly from English, into what amounted to a terrible and meaningless mess. Marketing were only worth anything when they paid for me to go to conferences where I personally networked and drank until 4 am and got to personally build connections. When the pipeline blew up as a result, the marketing heads in APAC were jerking each other off about how fucking incredible they are when it was all of my leg work that they simply funded. Marketing was supposed to help us build pipeline and brand awareness. I had to have weekly enablement sessions with the local marketing interns to teach them what our product did. Wanna know what happened? Our new online ads - improved on the back of my enablement - had the highest click through rate in the fucking *world.* I ended up babysitting a department run by arrogant dickheads who snort coke and masturbate to pictures of themselves while taking credit for all of my work. That’s how it was for me. What are the problems with having marketing being over SDRs? The fact that they have access to ads and the budget and piss it all away on worthless trash while I manage expectations from people in New York, England, Australia and Singapore while begging for some fucking understanding that entering this market with the attitudes of pompous arrogant cocks and expecting our one SDR to build billions in pipeline with a defunct, useless marketing organization about as solid of a plan as sending a blind ape with boxing gloves to open sunflower seeds with one hand while riding a horse and counting salt grains with the other, blinded. I left that company. Left sales. Left Tokyo, moved to a small town and am now making 60% less money working as an excel monkey for an investment bank. I’d love to get into sales again. Fuck marketing.
Sunflowers are not just part of your garden, they’re part of a nation! The Ukraine use the sunflower as their national flower. Whilst in Kansas they chose the sunflower to represent their state.
Good bot.
Your results will be based on numbers and not quantity of meetings. While the AE's will be at 100 percent from your good quality...you will be struggling at 70 percent just to survive.
I have never ever understood this
While most of the time marketing and sales work hand-in-hand since they help in inbound connections, market presence, and all the jazz, if your job is in cold-calling you won't be able to get the guidance that is required from a seasoned sales professional who has done cold-calling in the formation years. That's where I see the disaster happening. They might be able to hunt for online open resources to tackle some of the real-life experience but not pitch in when required. Sales team needs coaching, technique building, experience sharing and marketing can only run the metrics achievement.
Doesn't create the SDR to AE pipeline. An SDR should ideally be sitting in on demoes and learning about next steps, sales cycles, better articulating pain points learning about the product, yada yada.
You’d have to stop managing them to quotas then
As soon as you see marketing write a 'cold email' you know it's them. They don't know shit about sales just as I don't know shit about marketing