HUMBLE
First Things First…

This week saw two milestones for SDR Leaders of EMEA hit.

We ran our latest LinkedIn Live on Wednesday with 180 registrants and 120 attendees.

We have over 900 members of our community.

I’m genuinely floored by the reception our community has built.

But shows something so important.

People are straining to receive coaching, mentoring and a sanity check from their peers.

That’s what our community is giving to our people.

Want to be part of it? Drop me a message and lets chat!

SECONDLY
Whenever you’re ready, here are THREE ways I could help you

The new Community for European-based SDR leaders: SDR leaders of Europe

An ebook about SDR<> AE Alignment: Closing the Gap

2 Coaching slots are still available for the Spring/ Summer: Sign up here

STUFF ONLINE
Content of the week

• This outbound sequence WORKS

• 15 reasons why your GTM is broken

• Outbound sales will remain, but its changing

THOUGHTS
What am I seeing this Week: Is Signal-Based Sales Development adoption too late?

I love the conversations that GTM leaders such as Brendan Short are having on Signal-Based Sales Development, but my question is, are the late adopters making this concept mainstream too late?

But first, what is Signal-Based Sales Development?

For that, I’ll let Brendan explain in his own words:

It uses a combination of intent data, marketing qualified leads, job changes, etc., to create a highly curated list of people who are at the end of the buying journey and want to talk to a vendor NOW.

This is where Sales Development is going. We see this already going on at organisations like Snowflake, where Travis Henry, with Remington Rawlings, built something close to the perfect model.

But my concern is: Will other organisations recognise this and adopt these changes as soon as possible, or will they continue to use the same spray-and-pray approach that doesn’t work?

Also, once they do recognise this, will it be too late for them to take market share?

LinkedIn can be an echo chamber (ok, more than somewhat) with clickbait articles of functions dying off, etc. However, something must be said about not recognising where the market and your customers are going and not making the pivots needed in your GTM strategy and how you operationalise it.

Want to learn some quick, tactical wins for creating a Signal-Based Sales Development engine? Then come and join our next masterclass, which is on the 26th of April, Sponsored by UserGems. We will discuss how to use signals to outbound smarter, not harder.

For those new to the newsletter and like what you are seeing, please click on the subscribe button, and you’ll receive this top-quality newsletter in your inbox every Friday morning!

STAKKI
Overwhelmed by Sales Tools Options?

Sales tools often boast an alphabet soup of features.

Deciphering complicated technical jargon can be time-consuming and frustrating, leaving you confused and unsure if it will help with connection or conversion rates.

Meanwhile, researching, comparing, and evaluating sales tools can be highly time-consuming.

Diverting your focus from core business activities like closing deals and managing your team.

This is where we’ve built Stakki, your free sales tool calculator.

We mapped 176 tools and their integrations, minimum costs, feature overlaps and freemium options. 

Visit stakki.io to make the selection of sales tools easy for you. 

Or book your free consultation call and we’ll recommend the best three tools for whatever you are trying to achieve.

INTERVIEW
Five Questions of the Week: Jennifer Hicks

This week we have the incredible Jennifer Hicks, a SDR Manager and sales coach. Jennifer will discuss how she moved from security operations to SDR leadership and how she sees AI influencing the development of the SDR function.

Firstly, can you tell the newsletter a little bit about your journey? How did you end up at this point?

I fell into sales development because of my love of coaching. I worked in the security and ops field for many years before taking a career sidestep into Sales. As time passed, I became vocal about changes we could make to improve processes, coaching new reps coming onto the team and generally trying to improve our section of the business. My manager at the time then approached me and asked if I had considered getting into Sales Development. I was fortunate as I was part of the UK arm of a large American business,, which meant my manager and I got to wear lots of different hats. I then took that flexibility of experience to my subsequent roles.

What is it about your role that you love?

Sales Development is different every day. There is a misconception from the outside that it is just about call coaching and looking at KPIs. However, people are at the heart of every sales team, and finding the button that helps them hit their success is the thing that excites me. My favourite times have been when a whole team has clicked into place, and they are on fire, they feel good, and the energy is tangible. It all starts with good people coaching and grows from there.

When did you realise that leadership was the career path you wanted to follow, and how did you make it happen?

I never explicitly wanted to be in leadership; I just wanted to be the best coach I could be. Only as I progressed did I realise I could be a role model for other women who wanted to grow into management within a sales role. I find that if you are someone who has good advice and knows how to partner on problem-solving, folks will naturally gravitate to you. One thing I did action, however, was getting as many mentors as possible. This helped me lead and increase my experience.

Drawing on all your experiences so far, what advice would you give your younger self on their first day as a manager?

Slow down. It's easy to feel that you have changed everything at 100 miles an hour and will just end up crashing about. Take your time, observe and learn, and you will make wiser decisions.

With AI looking to disrupt the SDR space, what do you see as the role of SDR evolving in the next 36 months?

Amazing question! I think AI when used appropriately, will see us having more skilled SDRs who can transition into their next role faster and more prepared. AI can help us understand the customer’s space, their competitors and challenges more efficiently at a cursory level. This means the SDR can more easily have a peer-to-peer conversation and get to the heart of qualification faster. AI is great, but it will never replace the human element. We see more businesses than ever make bad purchasing decisions because they try to circumvent a sensible buying process. SDRs will always be key to getting under the skin of what the real challenge being faced is and getting prospects to the right person.

SDR HIRE
Cut SDR Hiring + Ramp time by 70%

The average time to hire an SDR/BDR is two months. Ramp takes another 2-3 months.

That’s five months of unrealized pipeline and revenue. At €30k ACV and ten meetings quota, that’s €1.5 million in pipe not generated.

SDR Hire cuts that by 70% by giving you access to a pool of vetted and experienced remote SDRs from Southeast Europe (Serbia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Greece, Bosnia etc). 

Sales leaders at companies like NES Health, Schoolyear, and Allwhere average 4-7 qualified interviews with near-to-native English speakers in the first 24 hours. Time-to-hire averages 3-4 weeks, while reps start performing within the first few weeks (as opposed to 60-90 days).

They work on a performance model, so you only pay if you end up hiring their SDRs.

Book a call with their founder Stefan and see if one of their remote SDRs would fit your culture.

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