Exec Summary

• SDR/Leader turnover is at an all-time high
• They have the toughest job in your company
• It’s also the most important one
  • Prospect connection
  • First impression
  • Feedback loops
  • Demand gateway
• When times are tough, don’t turn over
• You need strategy and infrastructure
• 3-Week Messaging Experiment
  • Iterating PMF/messaging
  • See instructions below
• Discovery Gap Experiment
  • Fine-tune opp criteria
  • See instructions below
• Support and innovate your SDR team
• Get help putting this into practice.

It’s tough skiing out there for sales development teams.

BDRs, SDRs, whatever you choose to call them, (let’s go with XDRs for today) have the toughest job in your company. And every other day an influencer posts about how AI will take their jobs.

XDR turnover and especially XDR Leader turnover is at an all-time high.

This function is really susceptible for a few reasons:

• Grueling pace
• Low tenure of reps
• Tons of daily, routine rejection
• No one is willing to get on the phone anymore
• Remote cultures impacted the camaraderie of an XDR desk

While the job is tough, it’s also the most important. Why?

• Often the first human touch for a prospect
• They provide the first impression of your business
• The most vital feedback loop for marketing to see what’s working
• The gate which allows demand in and out of the funnel via qualification

It’s hard to make this function work. When times are tough, we just turn the team over and start again.

XDR’s aren’t really broken, and you don’t really need to fire your XDR leader. You just need a lot of strategy and infrastructure to make this team worth it.

The best kept secret of Sales Development is that it makes the best testing ground.

Ensure Your Fundamentals are in Place

XDR leaders are often chosen based on their ability to generate pipeline, not on their operations experience and ability to build scalable, repeatable processes. If things aren’t working, it might not be an issue with the leader. It might be an issue with the process.

Here are some things to ask yourself:

• Do we have a clear definition of our ICP and Buyer Personas?
• Do we understand how many accounts our XDRs can prospect?
  • How many accounts they can work without skipping steps?
• Have we built tight target lists with the best accounts in their capacity?
  • If they can handle 200 accounts, did we identify the best 200?
• Have we segmented those lists by persona and company type/industry?
• Do we have relevant messaging designed for each one of those segments?
  • Or at least one clear segment where we focus all our energy?

In other words, do we have our XDRs focused on the absolute best accounts with the most relevant messaging possible?

More on this in our Modern Outbound Framework.

If the answer is yes, and things still aren’t working, here are some other things we can try.

The 3-Week Messaging Experiment

For anyone iterating on their product-market fit or messaging, asking XDR’s to deliver that message and record their results is one of the fastest feedback loops out there. We work with our clients to develop sales automation solutions to make this a more formal experiment (contact us to learn more).

• Week 1: Roll out new messaging in your cadence software (or just give the team your approved template with the words you want to use)
• Week 1: Train the team on this messaging and roll it out with your prospects, both inbound and outbound
• Weeks 2-3: Measure the reply rates, connect rates, and conversion rates of people getting this message
• Week 4: Refine the message and repeat for the new iteration

Boom – we just created a messaging experiment in 3 weeks. Not bad!

To keep things clear (and as simple as possible) I suggest a few tactical things for the team:

• Isolate to one test at a time
• Share the results of any tests with your teams
• Employ a campaign calendar to ensure team alignment
• If a cadence is no longer to be used, remove it from everyone’s view
• Use reports and dashboards to audit the uniformity of the process being used
• Frequently gather Sales Development feedback on prospect quality from various marketing efforts

Get help putting this into practice.

The Conversion Rate Experiment

Suppose you’re getting into a deal cycle and missing a key ingredient in discovery. Maybe some bad prospects are sneaking their way into the funnel that should have been qualified out. In this case, we want to quickly roll out a change to the list of criteria that the XDRs require to put in an opportunity.

We should make this adjustment, ensure uniformity, and then use the isolated test to see if our conversion rate improves.

The key in this scenario is having a system that supports tracking to this level of detail – and a team who understands that they’re helping you test. They have to understand the importance of doing the process the same way.

Check Processes Before Making Changes

Resist the knee-jerk instinct to fire the XDR leader, or change data providers, or swap out your email cadence software. Before you make any changes to Sales Development, first make sure you’re providing your team with a clean, uniform process to follow.

Isolate experiments to one thing at a time so that you can leverage the quick feedback available from the team on the front lines.

And remember, Sales Development spends a lot of their day hearing “No.”

Let’s support them and innovate their approach so they get to hear more “Yes!”