Cloud Software Association

Good question. The first thing you want to do is get an idea of what your outbound needs actually are and hire to that. Don't just blindly hire a few SDRs and expect they'll just automatically start bringing in pipeline. I always start with an analysis of the total contactable lead pool or account pool. If I have 10k accounts that match my ICP, and I estimate that a single SDR can reasonably target 300 accounts per month, that is very different from a situation where I have 1000 accounts in my total market. If you're just starting outbound, I'd start with 1-2 SDRs while you build out the strategy, then scale from there based on your AEs closing capacity.

It's always a balancing act where you don't want to over-hire for SDRs or AEs. Too many SDRs and you can end up with too much pipeline that you don't have enough ability to close (burning through your market). Too many AEs with no pipe and you're paying people to sit aroudn (although they should be doing their own prospecting ideally too).

Have you done any outbound so far?

No, I am setting up for CallHippo

Sometimes. Early on when we're just launching an outbound program, we usually keep it pretty open, only adding in territories when you start scaling, after you know more about what the market response is going to look like and you can set quotas effectively. Sometimes it's geographical territories, other times you might simply have a a target account list that you divide between your SDRs/AEs. This usually comes down to what your market looks like when you quantify it.

And depending on inbound leadflow, you can either have a dedicated inbound team (if it's warranted), or just give inbound leads to the team.

For context too, most of our customers are very early in their outbound strategy so territory strategy is usually not a problem they need to deal with yet.

How big is your current XDR team?

Very justified. First, you want to have a decent data cleansing process in place so you can filter out bad data (reducing bounces). Then you want to test your messages to make sure they aren't too spammy (and setup SPF and DKIM on your domain). https://www.mail-tester.com/ <-- this link helps. For sales emails, they key is to be as relevant to the target audience as possible. Get rid of HTML. If your email looks like a marketing newsletter, it's a bad sales email. You want the email to be as close to a personal email you might send to a friend or business partner as possible. And then, don't just spam out the same thing to thousands of people everyday. If you're targeting 1000 people in a month from one person, you don't just send out 1000 emails on day 1, you want to schedule those out so that every day you're contacting 50 new people a day. Keep your eye on bounce rates and open rates. If things start getting out of whack, take a step back to solve the problem before dumping more leads into the process. You also need to warm up new email addresses, making volume on any new campaign lower than when you're fully ramped.

If you're personalizing every email (meaning you have an SDR write personalization, NOT just inserting automated tags), then volume is rarely a problem.

The problems only start to happen when you have a rep who is basically just a button pusher.

Ask questions. Give value. Bring up potential objections early, don't put them off until later). Be honest and transparent about what you do and don't do. Your discovery process is absolutely crucial. A couple books I'd recommend - The New Strategic Selling and New Sales. Simplified. What kind of challenges do you have around closing?

People take demos but are not closing after that

What is the discovery process that you are referring to?

It's all about the relationship here. I don't have a ton of experience with this area to be honest but in general, the early conversations are much more exploratory, compared to sourcing sales leads where there's a clear goal. On the strategic partner side, quite often you don't know exactly what the best win-win outcome would be.

For sales reps, I'm big on advising that they avoid spending too much time with prospects who aren't qualified and can't/won't buy (figuring out who that is is a whole other topic). For strategic partners, you generally have to have much less of an outcome oriented focus. The best people at sourcing new strategic partners that I've known have all been highly creative people who are great at building a new partnership out of thin air. Less process-oriented than sales people usually.

Metrics you need to track: - Lead-to-meeting % - Account-to-meeting % - Meeting-to-sales accepted opportunity % - Opp to close % - Avg deal size At a more granular level, we track open, reply, positive reply and bounce rates. Activity levels: emails, personalized emails, templated emails, replies, calls, LinkedIn (hard to track this accurately) The common mistake is putting too much emphasis on certain metrics. You have to be strategic and have someone who understands the full funnel top-to-bottom. A high open rate can be great, but what if they aren't converting to meetings, pipeline, or deals? This isn't always on the SDR either. You could have a fantastic SDR, blowing through a meeting quota, but none of their deals end up closing due to the AE or even just the product/market fit.

And higher activity levels aren't always a positive. Markets aren't unlimited so need to be efficient. Going back to Sunir's questions too - you can't just spam your entire market. Sure, it's high activity, and you might get a sales bump short term, but you're really burning through your market, making it so you can't go back for at least a few months.

Not every rep needs to know every metric either. Sometimes, oversharing certain details with reps can actually make it harder for them to focus on their main priorities.

We've experimented with automation, and still do with different tools but in general, I'm a fan of being highly conservative in this area.

It is almost just as easy for a rep to send out semi-personalized connect requests for 50 people a day as it is to get a tool to do it.

I can't actually recommend any tools because that landscape changes pretty quick but some rules of thumb: Don't send more than 80-100 connect requests per day. Don't spam out a sales pitch to everyone. Genuinely focus on building a network with like-minded people.

When you send out invites, add a message that gives some relevancy. "Hey Sunir, ran across your profile. I'm connecting with other founders in the cloud space so thought I'd reach out. Let's stay connected." <- If I am targeting correctly, I could send that message out to hundreds of people, taking just a few seconds at a time to change the name, and it would be relevant to everyone I send it too.

Then when someone accepts the request, I can go back to their profile, see if they are a decent fit, and start a conversation.

But network growth is also beneficial to putting out content on your feed so I'm an advocate of building a large network of people that are broadly in your space so that you have more people to see that thought leadership content (which drives more leads through your LinkedIn profile).

Don't treat LinkedIn like email though <-- That's important.

Thanks; this really helped me visualize what I am supposed to be doing. I was busy writing an action plan and forgot I was running an AMA.

Agree with you @Darren Carter in the content/value-first strategy. That said, we use automation in this way by only sharing invites to events we know they'd be interested in, group invites, white papers etc...

And we used Orca for a while, but they got bought by meetalfred.com so now we're on that for linkedin automation.

@Jake Wallace What kind of partners do you mean here? I have different communication cadences that all really depend on the nature of the relationship. Unofficail referral partners, maybe once every couple months or more often if they are active in sending us referrals. For more strategic partners, cadence is usually dicated by the partnership and project we're working on.

And in this case, I'm talking about personal communications, not including touchpoints with our general brand, which can happen much more often.

Strategic partners, where there is some sort of rev share/reseller agreement...

I haven't been a part of too many reseller strategies to be honest but the ones that I have been involved in, it is usually dictated by how much revenue the partner is bringing in. If they are sending you business, then they get a much higher priority than someone who isn't. But staying top-of-mind is key here because you want resellers to think of you. Prioritization is key, and it's usually dictated by the relationship and how much revenue they are sending (or have the potential to send).

This is a great question! Having a well-thought out SLA, that the whole team buys in to is key here. Your reps at the ground-level are usually the ones who are most in tune with where these conflicts are going to happen so you need to have henst conversations with them before and after you build the SLA. Nobody wants to lose out on commissions for an opp they worked on so communication within your team is key. Not sure that I've seen anything particularly innovative here but I've seen some teams that, instead of blaming the reps for this conflict, the management team works with them to make sure everyone gets a somewhat fair outcome, even if it wasn't the most ideal outcome for anyone.

Part of this also comes down to sales managers having a really good grasp of what their reps pipeline looks like.

And then having a culture where nobody is afraid to surface issues as early as possible.

I've seen some companies where everyone knew that if they brought up the issue early, it reflected poorly on them (this is cultural), but they knew if they waited, they could get a commission on it because they could show how much work they did on it, even though they should have stopped working the opp ages ago.

Great feedback @Darren Carter. Thank you!

Thanks for sharing @Kevin Van Gundy - is the variable comp unlocked based on revenue ($) numbers?

I'm not sure I follow, what do you mean by unlocked? I.e., no cap to earnings?

Ah, that's what I was saying below. I tried a lot of different variable plans. Sometimes it was a straight dollar amount (works great for mature channels) other times it's been new logos, opportunities created, etc.

just saw that after i hit enter and i assume that applies to you too?

Yeah, I have all targets for my team roll up to me.

The teams that manage integrations are goaled on public references of use with a customer (case studies, etc.)...so I carry a quota for those too