Companies spend shit loads of money trying to make SDRs more efficient. They buy Sales Engagement Platforms, Parallel Assisted Dialers and Linkedin Automation systems.
All in the hope that reps will conduct more activity, in the same amount of time.
But do you have a handle on how much activity can a rep complete without access to any of this stuff?
Afterall, if we buy all this tech, we should know what the baseline is. Without it how do we assess whether or not we’re actually getting a lift in productivity.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb, a rep should be able to make 15 dials and send 15 follow up emails (to people they don’t speak to) per hour… minimum. I don’t care if they have click to dial in their CRM or are calling off a spreadsheet on their iPhone.
So that means 30 activities per hour. Let’s say there are 6 prospecting hours per day (internal meetings, research, late funnel follow us etc), we’re at 180 activities.
A lot of the sales development teams I speak to have reps with 50-60-70-80 activities per day targets. It’s just not enough.
Here’s the cost per activity at those numbers (based on an all in cost of 100k per SDR per year):
This becomes even harder to look at if we generously assume 10% of those activities result in a conversation (more likely to be 5-7%):
So - reset the expectations around SDR productivity. You can easily do this if you have compensation structures that are aligned to higher productivity. It’s easy to show reps that more activity will lead to more meetings and therefore more money.
It also means you may not have to hire additional headcount to reach your sales goals. It’s much more cost effective (and better for everyone) if you can double the productivity of your existing team by paying them 50% more.
I’m thinking about doing a day in the life post. Showing you exactly how you can achieve this level of productivity in much less time than you think.
Open to seeing that?
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