We have spent the past few weeks preparing BTD for 2022. Writing posts, preparing tools and scripts, and creating the resource we wish we had earlier in our sales career.
We are going to continue building out this substack as a directory on all things you need to succeed in sales, from the start of your career all the way up. As part of this, we spent the first 6 months speaking about how to break into the industry and maximize your income, then laying the foundation on skills required to succeed. Plus if you’re a paying subscriber you will have used that first quarter or two in the industry building out your SDR forecaster so that you are starting this new year with a major headstart on your target and your competition.
Moving into this new year, we are ready to start digging deeper into the micro with some more advanced thoughts on day-to-day tasks and taking a look at the macro from a more strategic standpoint in terms of planning your career.
In this first post, we’re going to talk about how to plan for a new quarter in sales as an SDR to make sure you hit your target and prepare for what is coming.
WARNING: If you show your sales manager what you prepare in this post, they may fall in love with you.
The best and worst thing about sales is that everything resets. You spend 30 days or 3 months working on your target, throwing everything you have at it, then the next day it isn’t 31, it is day 1. You aren’t behind on your target anymore, you aren’t going to miss. You’re not the rep who hit target a month early either.
A new quarter is the great equalizer, top and bottom performing reps have to start again from the same place - sales is equal opportunity unequal results in practice.
Because of this you had better get good at starting again. Let’s talk about how to do that. How to walk into a new Q, start at zero and dominate.
A good plan, taking into account your own personal skill and performance, makes hitting target a lot easier. We aren’t average reps here at BTD, we want each and every one of you to be above average, and that doesn’t happen by accident.
Your first task is to look at the targets that management has set you for this new quarter. If you are unlucky and they haven’t already been given to you, move on to the next step for now, but they will be required for what we’re doing today. The sooner you have access to your targets, the better! We will be using meetings booked and revenue generated targets as we work through an example. Whatever your KPIs are, modify what we do slightly to fit.
Keep these in your mind as you look at your results for Q4. They will put the work required for Q1 into perspective.
Once you understand what is ahead of you, let’s take some time to look back. This is the most important part. We’re going to look at your performance from the previous quarter. In this case, it is Q4 - historically this is the worst quarter for the majority of SaaS sales teams due to the Christmas holidays, that is okay. Comparing your results for a bad Q will set you up to blow out our quota for the coming Q.
Let’s go through an example with some made-up numbers that would be used to plan ahead for the example targets we set above. These are a set of realistic Mid-Market SDR metrics.
Best Vertical: Construction
Best Persona: Operations Manager
Okay, these are your bread and butter, if you’re able, keep at least 30% of your new business prospecting to these. As an SDR focusing on low-hanging fruit will get you paid handsomely.
What were our metrics?
Best Email: Example outreach email #1 (Go into outreach.io/salesloft or whatever sales enablement tool you have and look at the data for this. If you do not have software that tracks this, take some time to get some rough numbers and figure out each step, it will be worth it. And use software to track this for Q1, even if the company won’t invest, find a free one.)
New Account Touched to booking made: 5%
Email response rate: 40%
Email response to booking rate: 10%
Call connect rate (% Of dials that connected with your prospect): 20%
Connect to booking rate: 20%
Booking show up rate: 80%
Demos Held per signed contract (Close rate): 15%
Average Selling Price (ASP): $1300 MRR
What is left in your pipeline?
You’ll likely still have a few meetings floating around that either had to push back their demo date or got too busy and wanted to talk after Christmas, you need to solidify these. This will be your springboard so that you’re not starting on absolute zero. My SDRs usually have around 3-4 demos that had to reschedule at the end of Q, so lets say month 1, your 16 meetings goal is actually 12.
What reconnects do you have coming up?
Take a look in your salesforce reconnect report (If you do not have one, get one! Run a report on accounts/contacts that want to reconnect on a certain date. Make sure you’re leaving reconnect activities or using some other way to track this throughout each quarter) or if you’re a paid subscriber using our SDR forecaster to do this in a more advanced way break that out. Take a look at when over the next 3 months you have reconnects, and factor them into your numbers, it is likely around 80% accurate if you have disqualified time-wasters correct and you’re only looking at contacts who will legitimately be within their buying window. We will for this exercise assume we’re the least lucky SDR and there are no reconnects from the previous Q coming up this Q.
* Other metrics to consider - if you have time or the software to do it for you, look at optimum touch points per account, the best time of day to call, optimum pitches and opening lines, etc. You are going to want to tighten every aspect of your cold outreach until you’re at peak possible performance.
It’s time to start planning how you’re going to hit your new targets!
Looking at our numbers, the heavy-hitting outreach tactic for this fictional SDR is cold calling. It will be this way for the majority of SDRs who are making real calls (Looking at you lazy reps who are faking numbers.. quickest way to fail out of sales, NGMI behavior).
If there are 16 meetings held required per month, the math might look a little bit like this:
What you’re looking at is essentially 500*0.2*0.2*0.8 giving you 16 meetings per month. Assuming an average work month of 20 business days, that’ll leave you with a required 25 calls per month.
With an ASP of 1300, you’ll easily hit the 4000MRR target set based on these numbers alone.
But it isn’t all about the number of calls - if you call your mum 25 times per day you aren’t going to hit target. If you have a 5% booking rate - meaning for every 100 new accounts you try and contact, you book 5, you’ll need to prospect into 320 new accounts per month (Try and do better than this). Meaning you’ll also need to be finding and creating 80 new accounts to contact per week.
So now you know what you need to do in a rough, macro sense. For our fantasy SDR it is to create 80 new accounts per week and make 25 calls per day to the correct personas.
Taking into consideration our thoughts on How To Structure Your Day you need to now build a system that you will follow religiously.
Start time blocking in your calendar. Not for all of your day like MCMB style your manager will likely suggest - see previously linked post - but look at how you can efficiently do every action you need to, and put it in your calendar.
*Tip: Don’t put it in your company work calendar if you’re taking our structure advice, you’ll end up having to explain why you’re not working half of the day
When your calendar is ready, We find it also useful to have a daily/weekly/monthly checklist. We build them for ourselves at BTD. Every day we come in, tick off our major required tasks 1 by 1 until they are done, and then our work for the day is finished. We then do a weekly review on Friday to ensure everything is going as planned and pivot/change numbers and projections based on where we are tracking towards target, and again on a larger scale monthly. This gives us a lot of time to make changes ensuring we never miss our target. Your weekly and monthly personal review is extremely important, no matter how much data you have on past performance, things change. If you’re trailing behind, you’ll need to reevaluate what you’re doing fast.
This week for paid subscribers along with the interview we promised, we will be releasing all of this as templates you can plug and play with examples of exactly how we have used them in the past to hit target.
Best,
BTD
Recommended Tools:
Apollo.io - We are happy to say we’re partnered with Apollo! This is a tool we personally pay for a subscription to and use in every sales role. Search, engage and convert over 250 million contacts at over 60 million companies with Apollo’s sales intelligence and engagement platform.
Hypefury - Manage your Twitter like a professional! Start your personal brand and earn online.
Want to make money with BowTiedDingo?
Get 20% off all sales made through your link...