Hiring SDRs Nearly Killed My Business

"Just hire more SDRs", I thought.

Have you ever thought this is the way to get more sales?

I have, and a couple of years ago it nearly killed my business.

Our sales team was in chaos. Our cold outreach campaigns were underperforming.

Hiring more sales reps seemed logical. (More calls, more meetings, more client success… right?)

So I built a team of 10 SDRs and thought, "We'll just place them as callers on all our client accounts… this is going to work great."

Here's what happened (this might be the same for you right now):

The SDRs struggled to book meetings.

They called thousands of prospects saying, "Hey, do you want this? Let's have a meeting." And nothing came of it...

We were burning through prospect data like crazy, and the numbers weren’t adding up. What’s worse, every month at payroll time, the SDRs’ paychecks were burning a painful hole in the agency’s war chest.

The truth is, my more SDRs = more sales idea was failing badly.

The new team of callers wasn’t making us or our clients money.

They were COSTING us money.

All of them, that is, except for one of them.

One sales rep was quietly smashing it out of the park week after week, month after month. I noticed he was often booking over 15 sales calls a month for a single client.

And the crazy thing was, he was making no phone calls at all.

Literally ZERO calls...

(The guy next to him was doing like 2,000 calls, and not getting anywhere near his results.)

I asked, "What the hell are you doing?"

His reply is one of the reasons we pivoted the entire business. We now use a totally different process to fill clients' pipelines and sales calendars that takes a lot less effort than calling, whilst having a lot more fun with it.

Here’s what he was doing:

• Messaging prospects on LinkedIn WITHOUT requesting a meeting

• Offering them a free guide to do the thing that qualified them as an ideal prospect

• Following up with more helpful resources and chatty conversations around their pain points and goals

• Only when it made sense to, invite them to connect on a call to offer more help

While the rest of my entire staff were pulling their hair out making calls all day, getting rejection after rejection, this guy was having fun and helpful DM chats and booking 10-15 sales calls a month.

Shortly after, my business numbers reached a crisis. I made the difficult choice to downsize my company to a third of what it had been. Now, we focus all our strategies around the principle in this story:

• Lead with value

• Build trust and relationships

• Then (and only then), invite someone to talk on a call

It might sound “slow” compared to all the LinkedIn bros promising 100 closed deals within 19 minutes if you like and comment on their post…

But as ex-US Navy Seal Jocko Willink says:

“Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”

Now, we help clients by helping them create that value-first outreach strategy, testing it and dialling it in, and then automating most of the process.

If you’re interested in hearing how it works, hit reply to this email and let me know.

Best regards,

Alex Sardinha,

Founder of INONDA