The New SDR: Commander of a Robot Army

It’s a familiar story: an entry level SDR copy-pastes emails. It’s all the same copy, swapping in new first names and companies to make it feel personal. They do this anywhere from 50 to 300 times a day. It’s a rite of passage. They show grit and commitment. And a year or two later, after they’ve booked enough meetings, they’re allowed to start closing deals — the real work.

That model is going to die.

SDRs shouldn’t be machines. They should command machines. Everything I just described can and should be automated. Once an SDR presses “go,” their outbound campaign should run itself until they get a meaningful reply. We still need SDRs — picking prospect companies and fielding replies takes a human touch. But everything else we can give to the machines.

In other words, the new SDR isn’t a foot soldier. He’s a general, focusing on strategy and key contacts while his robot army does the grunt work.

Fine in theory. But how does the workflow actually look?

1. Buy contact info for companies that fit your customer profile
2. Software segments prospects by key differentiators (core tech, job title, company)
3. SDR creates email templates for prospect segment
4. Software launches a drip campaign, auto-personalized for each segment
5. Non-replies are automatically bumped, replies are unsubscribed and land in the SDR’s inbox
6. SDR fields replies and launches new campaigns if needed
7. SDR books the meeting

This isn’t some pipe-dream future. This workflow is possible right now, with tools that already exist. Here’s how it might look.

1. Use Datanyze to generate prospect list for your market (companies of a certain size, industry)
2. Import prospect list to Sendbloom
3. Sendbloom segments your prospect list
4. Assign email template for each segment
5. Sendbloom launches personalized drip campaigns
6. Once replies start coming in, use a scheduler/follow-up reminder to keep up the nurture (Yesware, Boomerang, and SalesforceIQ all do this from your inbox)
7. Book the meeting!

With the right segmentation and email templates, your campaigns can be laser-targeted at scale. One SDR can manage dozens of simultaneous campaigns, schedule hundreds and hundreds of emails per day. Once you find companies with shared problems and triggers, you can run identical campaigns for all of them, or tweak and customize for critical prospect segments (run metrics later to make sure it’s worth your time!).

After several campaigns you’ll start to see what works for you. Then the SDR can simply press “go” for each new list of prospects.

SDRs get to spend more time learning to respond, connect, and close. Companies get a more efficient and predictable outbound process. Win-win!

But how big of a win? Let’s talk metrics.

Immediate impact

I learned to prospect at Sendbloom, so I don’t have personal experience with the bad old days. But our customers do. On average, switching to a Sendbloom-based workflow results in triple the qualified leads per rep. And for top performers — reps who really know how to leverage automation and talk to prospects — we’ve seen over 5x increase in qualified leads.

We haven’t measured the impact of using lead lists and lead filtering tools, but if you have metrics on it we’d love to see them. We’re a very small company, so it’s harder to justify the cost of tools like Datanyze (the larger the sales team, the more sense it makes, since it only takes one seat to generate your leads). For now I’m using Email Hunter, toofr, and Bulk Email Checker to guess and check email lists.

Even with list tools, it’s good practice to use an email validator. List making is a messy game, and every tool I’ve seen returns a lot of bad info. If you have a list generator you love, let us know.

Future impact

A lot of companies already share email copy internally (if you don’t, you should). A lot of companies have scripts and templates, often built off the work of an early top performer, but without any process to iterate and improve. Some companies have done A/B tests and optimized language. That’s great. That’s mandatory.

But there’s a next step, a step only accessible once outbound is standardized and automated. A step nobody is doing yet. That step is to measure which copy, campaign length, and timing works best for each prospect segment, extracted from millions of emails sent to thousands of companies. Do VPs prefer shorter emails than directors? Do women prefer warmer language than men? Is it better to bump a conversation or change the subject line? Which metrics matter more to tech companies vs ad companies?

That’s the direction outbound marketing has been going for B2C. It’s time for outbound B2B sales to catch up. Outbound sales has always been a low-percentage game, with connects and replies ranging from 1–15% and SQLs many times lower than that. There is a huge amount of room for improvement, and standardized automation and metrics is the best way to do it.

The door-to-door salesman is dead.

The copy-pasting SDR is next.

Long live the data-driven SDR, commander of an invisible robot army.

Originally published at blog.sendbloom.com on October 12, 2015.