But it’s even crazier right now. This role is changing rapidly. AI is already acting as the largest force multiplier our profession has ever seen and the rules of outbound are in the middle of being rewritten. Some companies will catch this wave for explosive growth, while others will fall behind.

Pipeline Conference was designed to get SDR Leaders on the cutting edge of best practices, new technologies, and practical learnings from the top SDR Leader practitioners in the industry. The popularity of this conference has exploded over the last three years to become the largest SDR Leader networking opportunity. You get to rub shoulders with the top SDR Leaders in the industry in the largest gathering of SDR Leaders in the world.

Since discounted pricing ends in a few days, I wanted to share a quick letter others have used to get permission from their boss.

Get permission from your boss letter template

Some quick facts your boss may care about:

Who: SDR Leaders, and only SDR Leaders. The largest gathering of SDR Leaders in the world.

What: Pipeline Conference dedicated exclusively to SDR Leaders

When: Nov 5–7, 2025

Where: Dallas, Texas at the Renaissance by DFW

Register now!

Tickets: Available now at discounted price of $699, Price increases to $999 on 10/10.

Lodging: We still have a few spots on our hotel block for $229. These will sell out, but if you register soon you can get our highly discounted rate.

Profile of attendees: ~50% Full-time managers ~50% Director+ (Managing SDR Managers and above)

Company size represented: 0–50 4%, 51–200 16%, 201–500 21%, 501–1,000 24%, 1,000–5,000 25%, 5,000+ 10%.

Proof of value: Last years Net-Promoter Score (NPS): 90.6

Typical NPS for good corporate events is ~35, exceptional is ~55… 90.6 is absurd!

Register here!

While the most important part of this conference is the professional development, it is important to note that this is also the most fun group a conference can assemble. SDR Leaders are the fun aunts and uncles of every organization, and having hundreds of them together is an absolutely outrageous time! We take this rare opportunity seriously and invest significantly in our parties and networking events to make it preposterous to miss and unforgettable.

Register now!

Join the only conference exclusively for SDR Leaders! Launch Pricing for Pipeline Conference ends this Friday! Get a pass here!

I’m excited to see Actively AI’s breakout success and recent $22.5MM fundraise, but not at all surprised.

I’ve had the privilege of partnering with them since before they first started building their GTM Superintelligence product. Anshul Gupta and Mihir Garimella are both AI researchers from Stanford so they are both extremely bright and I’m inspired by how intense and gritty both of the founders are. Importantly, I really respect how focused they have been on the end user from the very beginning.

Actively AI has been a huge supporter of the SDR Leader community for a long time. They are Platinum sponsors of Pipeline Conference and signed up to sit down with hundreds of leaders at our SDRLeader.com dinners across the country last year. And every leader I speak to who uses them loves them!

Getting traction with the SDR Leader is hard. SDR Leaders are evaluated on their ability to generate net new pipeline in the short term and that’s it. There is very little BS tolerance, so it’s very hard to get traction sales development without proving your ability to do that. It’s no wonder their traction in this space is raising eyebrows.

I’m particularly excited about the area they chose to innovate in. As a consultant I worked with a lot of companies on their pipeline generation efforts and I would frequently find that most (literally more than 50%) of an outbound SDR team’s time was spent on prospects that could never become a real opportunity. It’s crazy! And it’s hard to overstate just how damaging that is. Bad opportunities that are dead from the start are worse than doing nothing since it wastes so much time downstream.

Misallocation of time, energy, resources to the wrong prospects plagues almost every GTM team and small improvements on this front lead to fast, potent productivity increases.

Anshul and Mihir had a vision to use AI to build a GTM Superintelligence that would give a brand new rep, on their first day, better instincts for who/what to prioritize and when than a seasoned rep could ever have. And it’s been fun to watch this come to life!

There are just limitations to human intelligence, especially in a role with so much turnover. I’ve thought this was one of the biggest GTM opportunities in AI for a long time and I’m so glad there are smart people innovating in this space!

Check out their announcement post here.

Huge congratulations to Actively AI!

Sam Nelson

SDR Leader in Europe? Come to Pipeline Conference Europe!

London, UK | June 26, 2025

Register here!

List of companies hiring for SDRs: Companies hiring

List of hundreds of people looking for an SDR Job will be posted in the next SDRLeader.com newsletter. Apply here.

Pipeline Conference, the conference exclusively for SDR Leaders, is expected to completely sell out in the next few days! You can get a pass here.

When I was an SDR Leader at Outreach, Outreach became one of the fastest-growing companies in America, through 89% cold outbound prospecting, primarily through the SDR Leader persona. This seemed to defy conventional sales logic since traditionally you would prospect to the “decision-maker” defined as “someone who can say yes when others say no”. But while a CRO/CMO can technically override the wishes of their SDR leader when it comes to technology the SDR Leader will be responsible for, they rarely do.

Smart CROs/CMOs trust their SDR Leaders when it comes to selecting their own technology stack. They do it for the same reasons the CEO doesn’t micromanage the tool stack of the CRO/CMO.

However, since the CRO/CMO tends to sign the check, sometimes companies selling this software assume they were who they should have been focusing on all along. I mean, I would have assumed that if I weren’t on the front lines of the pipeline generation team! Some of our competition missed this, which ended up helping us go to market through this extremely valuable persona even more quickly.

I eventually left Outreach to start SDRLeader.com. Since I had been creating content for SDR Leaders exclusively for the 5 prior years, most SDR Leaders already knew me and SDRLeader.com grew very quickly.

Today, most all SDR Leaders are members of SDRLeader.com. For this reason we are vendor-neutral. Our members use all of the different technologies and we invite all companies to support our community. I do however, want to give a special shout out to Nooks for their early dedication to the SDR Leader.

A little over a year ago, Nooks was introduced to me by one of our SDRLeader.com members. They were a seed stage company that I hadn’t heard of, but they were building tech for SDR Leaders and I was excited to meet with them. If I remember right, they were a virtual sales floor and adding a dialer at that point. Despite their limited resources, Nooks bet big on us and sponsored almost every dinner SDRLeader.com has hosted since the day I met them.

I was particularly impressed with Rohan Suri, the cofounder who first reached out to me. Like most Stanford CS grads I’ve met, he’s clearly very bright and very capable. But more importantly for Nooks, he’s also maniacally focused on face time with his users. I don’t think he’s an extrovert, but despite that and despite his busy schedule, he personally went to every possible dinner he could. Sometimes taking red eyes or getting on a 5:00 am flight. Speaking to and learning from their primary users seemed to be more important to him than anything else.

The benefits of sitting down to dinner with hundreds of SDR Leaders are obvious from a GTM perspective. But just as importantly (more importantly?) he spent a lot of time with his core users and had a powerful, direct connection between his engineering and executive team and the SDR Leaders who would be responsible for implementing their product.

In some industries, SaaS companies ignore the user responsible for implementing their product, and instead focus on building a product that demos well to the person above them. While that model is very popular, and successful in some scenarios, I do not expect that to be successful in the current AI renaissance in pipeline tech. Net new pipeline generation is too measurable, and an inability to deliver after the sale will quickly sink the reputations of companies that ignore those who will be using their product. The winners will be the companies that focus on improving productivity of their users.

It was fun to see the announcement of Nooks’ $43 million round last week. More than $65 million total since I met them a little over a year ago!

Huge congratulations to Nooks! It’s well deserved and it has been fun to work together with them. I’m delighted that they recently signed up to partner with us on 24 more SDRLeader.com events between now and the end of next year.

Sales pipeline growth is back in style and it’s exciting to see so much innovation happening in our space. Congratulations to Nooks and all the other companies doing awesome things in our space. This is going to be a fun year for the SDR Leader.

LET’S GROW!

Sam

Sponsored by:

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ZoomInfo Copilot, the new AI-driven solution from ZoomInfo, gives your teams an unfair advantage by allowing them to focus on the best accounts, spend more time selling, and win faster.

I can’t believe Pipeline Conference 2024 is less than 3 months away! The conference exclusively for SDR Leaders, is happening Nov. 13-15 in Austin Texas! 🙌

SDR Leader might be the most insane job in SaaS. They are held accountable for net new meetings—the bottleneck in every sales funnel—and asked to accomplish this with a team of junior employees who turn over every ~12 months.

Competition at the top of the sales funnel has increased. Prospecting channels are noisy and getting in front of prospects has become harder and harder. And the sales tech, which has become table stakes to compete, has gotten more complicated, not less.

Also… their bosses have rarely managed this process full-time. It’s a relatively new sales role. So they can feel alone on an island.

All of the best advice in the world is in the minds of other SDR Leader practitioners, which was the impetus behind SDRLeader.com.

SDR Leaders needed an opportunity to gather, regroup, and stay at the cutting edge with others just like them.

In 2023 we hosted our first Pipeline Conference. A small conference just for SDR Leaders as an experiment. We announced it a few months ahead of the event and set a stretch goal of 100 leaders…

Over 200 registered!

We actually had to cut off registration a few weeks before the event because our venue couldn’t accommodate anyone else.

Some had to stand in the back, but it was a full house! And it was fantastic!

An entire conference of workshops, keynotes, breakout sessions, and awesome networking opportunities with the best SDR Leader practitioners in the world made Pipeline Conference a rare, a potent resource for the community.

The speakers were incredible and freely shared rich, actionable content that attendees could bring back home.

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) Pipeline Conference 2023 received from attendees was 90.6. (Some context on how crazy this is here).

—

All of this was particularly potent for Director+ leaders (those who manage SDR managers) at larger companies where there are even fewer relevant resources and the stakes are so high.

A critical part of what makes the experience so amazing is quality of the attendees. Since everyone there was an SDR Leader, the entire community of people at the conference had traits you would expect to find in SDR Leaders: Collaborative, smart, down to earth, easy to be around, and FUN!

I’ve been to a lot of conferences, but boiling the attendees down to ONLY those who manage SDR teams was a one-of-a-kind energy!

There’s no event like like it…

On Nov. 13-15, the second annual Pipeline Conference is happening in Austin, TX.

This year will be three days, more than double the sessions, double the networking opportunities, and WAY more SDR Leaders! If you or someone you know is an SDR Leader, I highly encourage you to join.

It will be the biggest and best SDR Leader gathering of all time.

You can go ahead and register here 🙌

-Sam Nelson

PS. A HUGE thank you to our sponsors! Every company that sponsored our conference in 2023 not only renewed, but doubled down their investment. We were also able to add 11 other new companies before we ran out of space in our exhibit hall. 

The phrase “thank you to our sponsors” is said a frequently, but they are critical! We would not have been able to go so much bigger this year with the quality that attendees expect if it weren’t for all the amazing sponsors who are making this possible. If you are a leader I encourage you to check them out here.

100% make sure you meet with the companies that support our community in this way when evaluating tools!

Eliminating Call Reluctance

Almost every new SDR comes in nervous to cold call. We call it “call reluctance.” Cold calling opens you up to more rejection than you are used to, and your instincts want you to avoid discomfort. But if you take a step back, the actual practical downside to cold calling compared to the upside is ridiculously low. SDRs usually know this intellectually, but still avoid doing it.

Your brain is extremely good at tricking you into an irrational fear as long as you don’t actually call! When you actually call, it becomes clear that your fear was overhyped.

As a manager, I would illustrate this to brand new SDRs on their first day with the “Agoge Pizza Challenge.” All new SDRs were given a list of prospects to call, and a script where they would use our cold calling framework to sell pizzas to random strangers.

It was a memorable first activity as an SDR :)

By giving them exposure to the most awkward cold calling experience they will ever have on the first day, SDRs can see first hand that.. 

It’s actually not that bad!

Even in the most awkward case.

Whether you come to this realization through a pizza challenge or simply making yourself make cold calls. I’ve never met an SDR who couldn’t get over their fear of cold calling by simply making the calls.

While easier said than done, the most efficient antidote to call reluctance is “just do it.”

 A few insights/tips I’ve found that make to it easier to “just do it.”

1. Know that no one cares if they hear you mess up. 

Sometimes when SDRs are in the office, and sitting next to others, they wonder what the other SDRs next to them might be thinking about their cold call. Maybe they are harshly judging you! In reality, people don’t really care.

2. Sounding like a newbie can actually cause prospects to be more nice to you.

If you listen to a top SDR cold call, you will often notice that they intentionally often gravitate to an “aw shucks” type of tone because of the positive reaction it gets from prospects. Embrace it. having this type of tone naturally is an advantage.

3. Develop conviction.

You can’t convince prospects beyond your own conviction. Being genuinely excited about the product or service you are promoting is extremely important to your effectiveness on the phone, but also to your mindset. When you are genuinely excited about what you are calling about, it’s easier to feel that the prospect is rejecting the product and not you.

4. Awkward rejections are the goal!

If you are genuine and kind on a cold call, getting hung up on will be more awkward. And that’s ok! Excellent cold callers make it awkward to hang up on them. Don’t be embarrassed when you fall flat on your face.

5. Use a script

Not using a script makes your cold calls more complicated and requires you to spend unnecessary energy and focus on having to figure out what to say next. It is much better to allocate that energy to listening.

As a bonus, having a script reduces the friction to getting started considerably. It also does a good job at eliminating the odds that you lose your place on the call.

But all of that being said, the most important thing is simply doing it. Anything you can do to trick yourself into simply making the first call will do.

Just do it :) 

-Sam

Thank you to our sponsor Regie.ai!

Generative AI has taken the world by storm these past few months, but these rapid advancements have left many SDR teams questioning where to even start. The team over at Regie.ai just wrote The Definitive Guide to Generative AI for B2B Sales to help you get started.

Introducing The Pipeline Pipeline!

In April, SDRLeader.com officially kicked off our inaugural conference: The Pipeline Pipeline. The greatest possible name for a conference focused specifically on the stewards of new pipeline at their company: The SDR Leader 🙌

There will finally be an in-person conference specifically for those leading SDR Teams.

Register for The Pipeline Pipeline!

The Journey of SDRLeader.com

Nine months ago SDRLeader.com was born to create a supportive network exclusively for SDR Leader practitioners. Despite being one of the most niche B2B communities out there, membership has quickly grown to over 3,000 full-time manager+ members across the world and the collaboration has been amazing!

SDR Management is a unique role. You specialize in the hardest part of the sales cycle, leveraging the least experienced employees in the company, leading them through stressful/emotionally draining work, leveraging complicated tools, in a constantly changing landscape.

Oh, and by the way, more pipeline can compensate of almost any other problem on the revenue team so the pressure is always on :)

It’s challenging.

Enablement for this critical position is lacking, and it’s not necessarily the company’s fault. So much of what makes SDR Leaders successful today is completely new, and managers simply need to figure it out.

SDRLeader.com has become the place for SDR Leaders to learn from each other.

This network has now hosted thousands of discussions among our members between our online forums, virtual meetups, and in-person gatherings to help each other out.

This community deserves a conference!

October 19th we are going to bring the wide range of SDR Leadership experiences in our community to one physical location, at one time, to learn from each other in person.

We will have workshops, panels, and speakers covering everything SDR Leadership: The latest in:

• The latest in hiring, recruiting, and compensation

• Onboarding, SDR operations, and career paths

• Leading and motivating your team

• Generative AI and staying ahead of all the exciting changes in this fast-moving field

This conference is dedicated to helping SDR Leaders stay ahead of all of the exciting changes in this fast-moving field.

Register for The Pipeline Pipeline!

Details and Registration

The Pipeline Pipeline will take place at The Line Hotel in Austin TX on October 19th 2023.

It will go from 9:00 am to 4:30 pm with a social hour at The P6 Lounge from 4:30 to 6:30.

Registration is available now! Our Launch Special discount will be available until May 12; you can see the full discount schedule here.

SDR Leaders have deserved something like this for a long time, and I’m thrilled that SDRLeader.com is bringing it to life!

Register at pipelinepipeline.com!

Feel free to ping me with any questions you have at conference@sdrleader.com.

See you there!

-Sam

A few areas I expect will improve significantly with AI:

Prioritizing accounts and prospects within them!

One thing that continues to be abundantly clear to me as I advise companies on their outbound strategy is that SDRs spend an incredible amount of time prospecting the wrong people. This is a huge problem in prospecting and it doesn’t seem like any sales tech solution provider has really nailed a solution to it.

Realistically stack ranking accounts and prospects within those accounts seems like something that AI can solve. Like, it doesn’t even need to be that good to reduce hours of wasted time per day per rep. This may actually be one of the most important unlocks for SDR efficiency.

Personalization at scale

Most of the attention on LinkedIn seems to be focused on how AI can change email writing. And the hype is real. There are already tools out there that fit right into your saas tools that make the research/personalization phase of an outbound email 10x faster. One of the companies I advise, Regie.ai, does this extremely well. AI can speed up the process of sequence creation and copywriting significantly.

The ways you will be able to personalize will improve as well. Another company I advise, Studeo made a tool for their own outbound prospecting that literally makes a personalized mockup of the product they sell, digital storytelling, using the prospect’s own photos and information. And they attach it to the outbound email as a GIF. Automatically!

There will be an explosion of different ways we will be able to personalize experiences for prospects AI gets better and better.

Doing repeatable tasks for you

You will be able to ask AI to do stuff for you. The other day one of my friends, Kyle Corbitt, made a browser extension that can literally execute tasks in your browser by telling it what you want to get done. It’s a two-day old prototype, but really impressive.

One example he gave was setting a meeting. You can see from the demo how easy it would be to get invites sent to prospects instantly during a cold call so you can ask them to confirm while they are on the phone with you. (Getting the prospect to click “confirm” while on the cold call is an effective tactic for increasing hold rates, but it often isn’t executed because it’s hard to do in the middle of a cold call).

But of course the implications of having a tool like this available are much more significant than that simple use case. Tools like this will decrease the number of clicks and time spent on repetitive tasks significantly.

I welcome this. The SDR job requires way too much clicking right now!

How do I prepare for changes?

Stay current, and use new technologies as much as you can. Regie and other AI tools for salespeople are free to try. Definitely get a ChatGPT account if you haven’t yet and play around with different use cases. This field is moving fast but we are still early!

Like any advance in sales tech, the earliest adopters of productivity increasing software get the strongest advantage.

Be an early adopter!

Subscribe now

p.s: Did you know you can add me to your team as an advisor for your outbound strategy?

Regie’s database of performant content and AI allows you to build persona-based sequences in just minutes based on industry-wide best practices. Try Regie for free today.

A common mistake I see SDRs make is the use of discovery call strategies while trying to execute a cold call. While discovery call strategies work well in a discovery call setting, they will get you hung up on in a cold call.

There is a major difference between someone voluntarily showing up to talk for 30 minutes (discovery call), and someone who accidentally picked up your call that interrupted their day. In most cold calls, you will not get 30 seconds!

The fundamental goal of a cold call is to get a prospect to agree to a meeting before they hang up and these are often only 2 minutes long. So you need to approach them differently.

Let’s dive into strategy. Seconds count in cold calls so we need to be concise while also generating interest. Here is a great base script to get you started:

1. Open by introducing yourself and asking, “Did I catch you at a bad time?” Whether they answer yes or no, your answer will be, “Okay I’ll be brief.” 

Most openers, executed well, will get you to the next part of the call. This one is nice because it is easy to execute well. They will usually say “yes” and you respond with “ok, I’ll be brief.” But if they say “no” you still respond with “ok, I’ll be brief.” 

There are no extra points for unnecessary complexity.

2. Tell them why you are calling, if you have sent personalized an email to them, you can often leverage customization from your first email. That will sound like “We help (prospect title) like you overcome (challenge) by (value statement).”

3. Ask them for a meeting directly after you offer your value statement. Don’t pause. Continue with the following, “The purpose of me reaching out is to set up a brief introductory call. What is your availability?” Now you pause. Don’t say anything else after this question! Wait for them to respond.

Asking for their availability early will usually get a “no” as a response, but it’s almost always followed with a reason why.

Getting that reason upfront makes it much easier to focus your attention on the right thing. 

Asking for the meeting is the easiest way to find what is standing between the prospect and taking a meeting early in the call. 

4. Prepare to handle objections, it’s easier if you have some common objections in front of you. Some of these objection types include “not interested”, or “I don’t have a budget” or “I’m not the right person”. You should be ready with answers to these common objections and immediately ask for the meeting again once handling them. 

5. Set the meeting. Once you have a meeting set, it is then you can ask qualifying questions. This transition can sound like, “Just a few quick questions to make sure we make the most of our call.” People hardly ever hang up here, no matter how rushed they said they were at the beginning of the call. Once they say yes to the meeting, they will be interested in making sure that meeting is productive.

And if you find out they aren’t qualified? Then just cancel the meeting. It’s much easier to do that than try to work qualification questions upfront and lose the prospect to a hang up.

If you get a mean cold call, don’t let it stew! We all have these moments no matter how good you become at sales. When this happens, get back on the phone as quickly as possible. Race to get to the next call. If you stop at this point, it will be twice as hard to pick up the phone next time. Don’t let a mean cold call ruin your momentum. 

Happy hunting!

Sam

Subscribe now

Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are both known for wearing the same outfit every day. This allows them to eliminate a few small decisions for that day.

Barack Obama did the same thing. He explained to Vanity Fair:

“You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” [Obama] said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.

Barack Obama to Vanity Fair

Obviously, if you can run the world’s largest companies, or become President of the United States, you are more than capable of deciding what to wear or eat! But they chose not to in order to free up headspace for more important things.

Call scripts accomplish this same purpose. The more on-the-spot decision making you can eliminate in the cold call, the more energy you can put into focusing on the prospect. And the more energy you have to focus on the prospect, the more personal you can be!

If you want to be as personal and in-tune with your prospect as possible on the phone, you need to create processes everywhere you possibly can.

This is often counterintuitive to new SDRs. Having “a script” can feel like something managers use because they don’t trust the SDRs ability. But it has nothing to do with that. Getting someone who had no initial interest in talking to you, to agree to learn more about your company is insanely hard. Especially since so much of what a prospect tells a cold caller won’t literally be true! It takes an enormous amount of focus to keep the prospect on the line and somehow get them excited enough to agree to meet for a longer meeting.

Scripts help you allocate focus to the areas of the cold call that are most important for success.

Listening and reacting.

Scripts make you more personal :)

(Here’s a link to the script I used if you are interested!)

-Sam

What is the most popular non-AE career path for SDRs at your company?

SDRs: How many sequences has a prospect typically gone through when you finally book a meeting with them?

How long has the leader of your sales org been in that position?

When SDRs are promoted to AE at your company, do they tend to be more or less successful than outside hires in their segment?

SDRs: Do you work accounts or leads?

SDRs: What percentage of the meetings you set were initiated by your cold outbound activity (not inbound)?

SDRs: How many days out do you typically set initial meetings from cold calls?

SDRs: How many different AEs do you set meetings for?

SDRs: Do you know what “SEP” stands for?

SDRs: How long has your manager been an SDR Manager?

SDRs: How many companies did you interview with before you got a job offer?

SDRs: Is the company you work for SaaS (software as a service) or non-SaaS?

SDRs: How many different metrics is your quota based on?

SDRs: How many prospects do you put into sequence per week?

SDRs: How many hours do you spend in meetings per day on average? (huddles, all hands, team meetings, 1:1s, etc.)

SDRs: Does your company have you create an opportunity in your CRM when you set an initial meeting?

“Because of what you did as SDR, I will never buy your company’s product.”

If you are an SDR, there is a good chance you will receive some version of this response at some point in your career. Maybe the prospect didn’t like the way you reached out or maybe you made a legitimate mistake.

It is important to think clearly about messages like this before making emotional or irrational adjustments. [1]

It is usually not literally true.

People who say this are often not actually decision makers

We sell primarily to sales leaders. When an SDR tells me they get a message like this I’ll smile and say: 

“Good news, I am a psychic and I predict that this person is not actually a qualified decision maker.”

And sure enough, the person who said something like, “I will never buy software from a rep who uses an emoji in an email” is usually an AE. [2]

I am sure at some point I will say that and be wrong but so far it hasn’t happened. 

How can I be so sure?

Well, for sales leaders, making absolute judgments about a software solution based on how the SDR reaches out (even if the SDR made a legitimate mistake) is unlikely to lead you to the optimal software.

And even though buying suboptimal software alone might not sink this sales leader, that type of irrational/emotional decision often indicates that other irrational/emotional decisions are being made.

For sales leaders, the consequences of poor decision-making are immediate, measurable, and visible. And visible to a lot of people whose monthly finances depend on those results.

In sales, poor decision makers do not spend much time in those roles.

Maybe in other departments it is easier to make poor decisions and fly under the radar unless something tragic happens. I just have a hard time believing it’s common.

Consequences for other departments might not be immediately visible in the same way as sales, but they can be very severe. Other departments (hopefully!) have different, but reliable ways to hold leaders without a revenue number accountable in the short term.

You will often find that the person who said this is not actually the right person to reach out to.

When a decision maker says this, they might not mean it literally

Sometimes, I’ll hear about this, or see someone on LinkedIn say something like this who is definitely a decision maker.

It’s possible that they said this without it literally being true.

• They may feel that way in the moment, but not long term. E.g., I occasionally tell myself and others that I’m not drinking diet coke again, but the long-term version of myself tends to disagree.

• They may be trying to make a point, and phrasing it this way is a good way to get attention. [3]

• You may have annoyed them, and they want to annoy you in return. Not to alarm you, but yes, SDR work sometimes annoys people.

Why am I pointing this out?

Since receiving these types of responses can be emotional for SDRs, they will sometimes make irrational adjustments based on them without digging into:

1. Is this an actual buyer?

2. Is this literally true?

3. Is this (sample size of 1) is part of a broader trend that warrants adjustment?

If an SDR makes adjustments based on their emotional response to this type of message, without considering the previous three questions, it can do a much more harm than good.

There is often valuable info in these responses from prospects, but you need to think about it clearly before making adjustments.

I am going to do a livestream next week on “How to Think About Rejection as an SDR”. You can subscribe to Sam Nelson Live with this button.

Subscribe to Sam Nelson Live

[1] Especially when it could be an excuse not to do work that you don’t particularly enjoy doing.

[2] Or a sales trainer. Sales trainers are unlikely to be decision makers for enough potential seats to justify cold outbound. But, even though they shouldn’t be in sequence in the first place, they will respond this way so often that it ends up being a high percentage of these types of responses. 

[3] If you are a decision maker, you can reliably go viral on LinkedIn with the following script: “If you do [sales best practice], I will never buy software from you.”

Sam Nelson Live is coming back! It will start July 22 at 11:00 PT and the first episode will be on: Cold Calling Tone. Tone is fun because it’s super important, and if you need to improve it there are a couple things you can do to make it WAY better really fast. You can now subscribe with the button below!

Subscribe to Sam Nelson Live

Candid Thought:

Before covid I was proud of never taking a sick day.

Isn't that crazy? I would actually say that and people didn't laugh at me!

Here's my logic:

• Going to work during when I was sick was hard.

• I like to think of myself as someone who is willing to do hard things to be successful.

• I went to work when I was sick.

But here's the problem:

• I would have gotten more done if I had stayed home.

• Staying at home would probably help me recover faster.

• Going to work sick also can make other people sick.

Staying home was literally better myself, my boss, my coworkers and my company. Pain was literally the only redeeming quality 🤦‍♂️

This seems silly now that covid has made us all hyper-focused on the effectiveness of WFH and the externalities of being sick. But before that my logic was as superficial as: "Staying home would be positive for me, it must come at the expense of someone else."

Asking for something that is good for you, is not necessarily bad for someone else.

This includes SDRs asking prospects for the meeting.

The idea that asking a prospect for a meeting is coming at the expense of the prospect is dangerous. It is irrational, untrue, and it can limit an SDR’s potential and make them feel miserable.

Asking for a meeting isn’t taking money out of their bank account.

Maybe the prospect ends up finding out that purchasing the software has a 10x ROI and they purchase because they decide purchasing would be extremely positive for them!

But even if they decide it's not a fit, getting a 1:1 private demo of a cutting edge technology in their space from an expert… can be productive professionally and enjoyable for your prospect.

Things and be good for you and good for someone else too 🙌

Happy Hunting!

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Sam Nelson Live is coming back! It will start July 22 at 11:00 PT and the first episode will be on: Cold Calling Tone. Tone is fun because it’s super important, and if you need to improve it there are a couple things you can do to make it WAY better really fast.

Subscribe to Sam Nelson Live here!

Candid Thought:

"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it."

-Jeff Bezos

When I hear that a sales decision, idea, or method is “based on data” my mind wants to equate it with the same validity as scientific studies. [1]

But that isn’t true.

• CRM data isn’t always perfectly clean. 

• Sales Managers aren’t academic researchers using perfect methodologies.

• Hypergrowth SaaS companies aren’t easy places to do controlled studies.

And even small errors in data cleanliness or methodology can give a completely false impression.

Interpreting anything “based on data” as absolute truth puts you at a high risk of having a high degree of confidence in a lot of bad ideas. [2]

When you hear “based on data” it might be better to translate it to “based on non-scientific research” in your head.

Non-scientific research can still be helpful. But don’t ignore your instincts when something “based on data” seems off.

You instincts might be better.

LI post on this here

[1] Actually, even scientific studies often don’t even get it right. Look into the replication crisis if you haven’t heard of it 😳

[2] You probably encounter bad ideas that are “based on data” a lot because they are much more likely to be shared. This is even true in academia. An interesting part of the replication crisis is that non-replicable research is shared more than ones that replicate. Actually 153 times more often according to this analysis.

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5 Learnings From Crossing 50K Business Followers

TLDR: Learnings from crossing 50,000 followers

1) I have been very lucky

Being at the right place at the right time helped... a lot. My following wouldn't be nearly the size it is right now without my experience as an SDR/SDR Leader at the company that made the SEP everyone uses.

Don't get me wrong, I work hard and think I do good work. But a lot of my popularity has been possible because of my unique background at Outreach.

2) Being really niche and growing a large following aren't mutually exclusive

I've noticed that my most popular content pieces are about the smallest things: Selling Pizzas for SDR Onboarding, The Agoge Sequence, Making a 30/60/90 Plan for SDR Teams.

Because of my background at Outreach, it is relatively easy for me to create popular content for: Outbound SDR Management for account-based SaaS companies that use a Sales Engagement Platform (SEP).

Even though that is a tiny fraction of sales overall, it is a huge number of people if you add them up worldwide.

Just make something that some people will love. It's pretty hard to go too niche imho.

3) Pretty much all that matters for building a loyal following is: “Do people implement what you share in real life, and do they see positive results afterward?”

There is a MASSIVE difference between the credibility you gain from someone listening to you and passively agreeing vs. someone actually implementing your content and see positive real world results.

Easily 1000x difference.

If you can do that, it creates enthusiastic fans who then tell others about their first hand experience seeing results from your content. And that makes a big difference over time.

So if you make content: (1) Make sure it actually works (2) Do everything you can to reduce friction between learning and implementation.

4) Content can scale the productivity of human labor like software

The way content can scale value provided is really incredible when you think about it.

If you do an hour-long class and have 1,000 people hop on, you cover a lot of ground really fast.

It would take a full-time worker 25 weeks of back-to-back meetings to have that same amount of face time with individuals.

If you can do scalable work consistently, you can multiply the value you provide in an unprecedented way.

5) You really love the people who support you

You may wonder if a person who gets hundreds of likes even notices individual support. They probably do! I certainly do. It seems like a small thing, but if you create content you know that those are the people who make what you do possible.

If you have supported me in any way in my content creation, thank you so, so much!

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What do top SDRs make?

TLDR: What the top SDR Makes at Outreach

A little while ago I did a poll asking what the top SDR made at their company.

(Link to poll)

I was surprised by how many companies had top performers that made under $60k. $60k is not necessarily a bad salary, especially if the SDR is a new grad, but lower than I would expect. The fact that a top performer could make more than twice as much by simply starting at a different company is worth noting when you are looking for SDR jobs. [1]

By the way, if you are applying for an SDR position, “How much did the top performer make last year” is a good question to ask during the interview. Asking about salary might go against the advice you got from your college career counselor, but in sales this is totally above board. Managers at companies that pay salespeople well are very happy to talk about it, and being labeled as a “money-motivated” candidate won’t work against you. [2] Also, managers are always looking for someone with their sights on being the top performer and this question is a good question to imply that ;)

On the other side, about 1/3 of the people who responded said the top performer made over $100,000! Which is pretty cool. Since many companies are bringing new grads into the SDR position, there are a lot of people making six-figures out of college.

What does Outreach pay their top SDR?

The burning question on everybody’s mind in the comments was how much the top performer made at Outreach.

The top performing SDR at Outreach made over $150,000 last year.

It seems like a lot, but our SDR team drives a lot of pipeline and we get a strong return for money spent. Sequences multiply the productivity of an SDR, so their work is becoming more valuable.

We also know that having a reputation for being the best company in the world to be a top performing SDR is a recruiting advantage.

Which is something that is important to us, especially right now, because we are hiring SDRs like crazy. So if you are looking for a very good remote position, feel free to apply :)

Happy hunting!!

-Sam

[1] Of course, there is more to consider than salary when starting a job, but salary is definitely worth considering.

[2] If the manager is offended by the question, it is a red flag

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My Work:

Spoke about Leveraging a Personal Brand in B2B for the Demand Generation Summit.

Hosted a special Sales Hacker Webinar sponsored by LinkedIn: How to Put Your Buyer First for More Meaningful Connections

My Unleash 2021 session is Official! Hunting in Packs: Next Level SDR/AE Collaboration. Our VP of Sales Mark Kosoglow and I will present together.

Candid Thought:

If you haven’t heard of the Lean Startup, I recommend you check it out. It has become an extremely influential methodology for building a startup company and the principles apply to cold calls.

In a way-too-brief summary:

Old way to build company: Spend tons of time, energy, and money on making a complete product based on your guesses. Bring it to market and hope customers want it.

New way to build company: Spend a little time, energy, and money making an incomplete “minimum viable product" (MVP) and bring it to market. Then watch how customers respond and adjust product based on feedback. (Repeat.)

Getting feedback right away, you get more realistic information and you get it much earlier. It helps avoid time and resources wasted on things that aren’t relevant to customers in real life.

You can use the same principle in cold calls:

Instead of waiting to ask for the meeting until later in the call, describe a “minimum viable value prop,” then ask for the meeting right away.

The answer will almost always be no, but it will usually be followed up with exactly what stands between them and a meeting (“no, I’m not the right person”, “no, we already have a solution”, etc.)

So you can focus on what is standing between the prospect and the meeting right away instead wasting time on your own guesses.

TLDR in my LinkedIn post this morning

Good News

I saw this video the other day about a guy finding out he’s getting a new lung.

I typically take the benefits of things like my lungs from granted but this video got me thinking…

How much I would pay for all my different body parts if I didn’t have them anymore?

Kind of a weird exercise, but it made me feel pretty rich.

Happy Hunting!

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My work:

• My response to Kevin Dorsey beating me in LeadIQ’s Sales influencer popularity contest.

• My Prospecting Through Sequences course started last week! You can still join the 1,500+ who have registered so far. The past classes are recorded and will be available for a limited time. This cohort is FREE for all Outreach customers. Click here to sign up!

• On April 28 I will be presenting on Leveraging a Personal Brand at the ChatFunnels Summit. It’s free to join: Click here to sign up!

• On May 11, I will present on Next Level SDR/AE Teamwork with Outreach VP of Sales Mark Kosoglow: Click here to sign up!

Candid Thought:

According to my poll below I have a contrarian opinion so I’m going to make it the subject of this week’s newsletter :)

I’ve got to respond to a couple things that people kept saying over and over in the comments:

“Top performers often don’t know what it is that makes them successful.”

Sure, but do average performers know why they were average? Why didn’t they stop doing those things? Often, mediocre performance happens when very well-intentioned reps are sure about strategies that don’t end up being effective in practice. If they become teachers, this can lead to a scary situation where someone teaches bad ideas that sound like good ideas.

Bad ideas that sound like good ideas are quickly implemented and hard to root out once they become the status quo on a team.

It can be a very bad thing if these ideas are persuasively and excellently taught.

“What makes top performers successful often can’t be replicated.”

This is true, but you can learn to discern which strategies would and wouldn’t work for you. It takes some critical thinking, and maybe some trial and error, but it is very possible to figure out which strategies can be replicated by you and which cannot.

I’ve always enjoyed learning from top performers because I’ve noticed they tend to be more candid when answers are controversial, embarrassing, or sound like bad ideas at face value. This is important because the best ideas are good ideas that sound like bad ideas. I’m not sure if candor is just a common quality of top performers, or if top performance makes people less afraid of going against the grain. But it definitely seems to be a common trait.

First-hand experience achieving what you want to achieve + honesty is a powerful combination. By becoming better a good detective, you can learn from people even if they are not particularly good at teaching. This is a pretty important skill in this job! After all, you are definitely going to have to learn from prospects who are not great at relaying information :)

Even if someone is not a good teacher, you can still get to the truth.

Some good detective strategies for learning from top performers who aren’t good teachers:

1. Listen to them first hand. Call recording software makes this easier than ever if you have it.

2. Look at their workflow first hand. There is a LOT you can learn but looking at how they use Outreach.

3. Explain an approach of yours to them and see what they think. Some version of Cunningham’s law seems to apply to opinionated sales reps. Even if they don’t particularly like to teach, Sales reps can’t help hearing a bogus idea go unchallenged.

4. When you find yourself making decision/tradeoffs, make a note of the decision you made and why and get the perspective of a top performer. You can learn a lot from people really fast by understanding how they look at tradeoffs.

5. Listen when they tell stories and give specific examples. This can be better than vague, high level advice because you context can give you clues about which things will or will not apply to you.

Happy Hunting!

-Sam

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My Work

• My Prospecting Through Sequences course starts today! Join the 1,108 who have registered so far. This cohort is FREE for all Outreach customers. Click here to sign up!

• On April 28 I will be presenting on How to Draw a Virtual Audience at the ChatFunnels Summit. It’s free to join: Click here to sign up!

Candid Thoughts:

I did a poll last week about how salespeople like to learn and the results were pretty interesting! This week I’m going to share some thoughts about making the most out of learning from colleagues and content creators.

Learning from Colleagues

The fact that colleagues was the most popular preferred resource doesn’t surprise me at all. Ideally a playbook would be the ultimate source of truth at a company, but that doesn’t always happen in real life. Often companies don’t have one at all, and if they do, they don’t always have the best information. [1]

Learning from other colleagues is a popular alternative. If you go that route, I highly recommend you focus on the top performers.

There were a couple different ways of doing this that worked well for me:

1. Talk to the top performers and figure out what they are doing.

2. Research what the top performers are doing yourself.

If you schedule time to chat with a top performer, have specific questions. My strategy was to make a note on a running list every time I was curious how a top performer would approach a situation. Then when I had an opportunity I would go through that list. Get specific. Vague questions will get you vague answers, specific questions will get you specific answers.

The second one, researching what the top performers are doing, has become much easier with sales technology. If you have Outreach and a call recording software, you can see exactly what a given person is doing to become successful.

There are a million different things you can learn/look for. But if you are new, start with these three:

• Look at which sequences they are using.

• Filter down to the prospects within each sequence to figure out with prospects are being reached out to in which way.

• Isolate the calls that went from connect to meeting set and listen to those calls.

If the team is using sequences correctly, copying the workflows of the top SDR can be as simple as switching over to their sequences/email templates. Then use call recording software to get a first hand account of what actually works in someone’s cold calls. A lot of the most important takeaways can get lost when they are explained second-hand, check out what success looks like first hand if you can.

Learning from Content Creators

32% of people prefer to learn from content creators! The popularity of this method has increased a lot recently in the SDR world. When I started sharing content about outbound prospecting ~3 years ago I was one of the only ones doing it. The amount of content available has exploded and I expect that it will continue.

On one hand, it’s pretty amazing. It is so easy to create and share content, that a top performing sales person could produce and distribute content on the side. Of course, bad content can spread just as easily.

The abundance of content is a blessing or a curse depending on how good an SDR is at discerning between good and bad content. There is probably a content piece with a huge amount of social validation for pretty much any prospecting idea you can think of. But of course, not all ideas end up working in real life.

My advice:

Look for content creators who have done what you want to do. And then find their content about doing those things well. Be careful with content creators who become popular for their theories, but have not been successful as a practitioner.

You also need to get good at discerning what parts of a content creators process might be specific to their industry, or if success with a strategy requires a skill that is difficult for you to replicate. [2]

If you can master this though… There is a lot of wisdom out there. Finding effective strategies can be a huge competitive advantage.

Happy Hunting!!

-Sam Nelson

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[1] The person with the bandwidth to make the playbook might not have been the person with the most accurate idea of what makes someone successful. And then even if they were, SaaS companies grow so fast that good advice can get outdated quickly.

[2] Many strategies that work for content creators work in part because of their brand. If they are talking about what is working for them now, consider how their brand is influences the success of a particular strategy.

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My work:

My live “Prospecting Through Sequences” course with SIA starts 4/12 and is free for all Outreach customers! Click here to sign up.

Candid thought:

SDRs have a pretty good idea of which subject lines work because data in Sales Engagement Platforms make it obvious. They are also usually willing to be more candid than institutions about sharing good ideas that sound like bad ideas since there is little downside to sharing them publicly.

Last week I asked SDRs what their top performing subject lines were and put them below for you to look through. You certainly won’t want to use all of them, but I always find it interesting to see what is working best for other companies. The responses are in no particular order and I kept capitalization the same as their response.

Here is the unfiltered list:

1. Hi from your “<company>” partner

2. Since we last spoke

3. Open to a call?

4. <prospect colleague’s name> sent me your way

5. <prospects name>, can you help me with <xyz>?

6. Meeting Next Week?

7. Got some time for a crazy salesperson?

8. <prospect name> is there a better way to connect?

9. Chat next week?

10. Meet on <date option #1> or <date option #2>?

11. Your 2021 rep - intro

12. Quick Question for <prospect name>

13. Quick Question about <company name>

14. Idea for you

15. SaaS security?

16. Helping <company name>

17. Re: <prospect first name>, <pain they may be having>

18. Missed you over the phone

19. Can We Connect?

20. Time To Talk?

21. <prospect first name> - Looking to help

22. Rolling the Dice With this Cold Email

23. <target meeting date> <prospect’s initials> <sender’s company name>

24. Question about your blog that was forwarded to me

25. Evaluating chat?

26. Using <insert competitor>?

27. <their company> <> <your company? | ex. Microsoft <> Pied Piper

28. <prospect first name> + idea for <problem you solve>

29. <prospect first name>, quick video with idea

30. Let’s reconnect

31. Any interest

32. growth

33. Hi <prospect first name>

34. <prospect first name> - you know that feeling at <business name> when…

35. <prospect name>, permission to close your file?

36. <prospect name>, found you through LinkedIn

37. <prospect first name>, sometimes an idea is all it takes

Free karma for forwarding this to a colleague who would benefit from it 😉

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