David Dulany, Founder & CEO of Tenbound, had a surprising amount of fun setting up his internal SDR team. During the process, David gained insights on the art and science of sales that have helped him refine his relationship to the discipline.
Together, David and Jeremey discuss optimal sales channels, the sweet spot of message personalization, and why discipline is the key to taking on new opportunities.
Listen here and keep reading for highlights from this episode!
Jeremey: You guys have been advising people either directly through your work or through the amazing Tenbound Conference on how to run effective sales development organizations and now you have to do it on your own. There is an outsourced SDR sales development industry– how did you go about the buy-versus-build decision?
David: One of the burgeoning industries in sales development is the outsource sales development solution sets. And there’s a ton of them who you know, the biggest quadrant on the market map right now, for us, we have used that in the past and especially for large-scale outreach that doesn’t necessarily have to be customized, that can be effective in reaching people with a simple message that has a simple call to action.
We’ve had success, you know, using those firms for just letting people know about the conference or letting people know that we do public seminars or we have webinars coming up and things like that. That works, to some extent.
But really, when it comes down to knowing the customer, being able to be in their shoes and understand their pain points and be empathetic, we just had to bring it in-house because it’s such a specialty.
Our ICP is mainly software and service, you know, mainly in the Bay Area, because that’s where we’re from, you know, we need to be talking to every director and manager and VP of Sales Development at all the different SaaS companies. And we can’t afford to drop the ball with that, so we’ve really had to bring it in house and focus on it.
Jeremey: What’s the next step for you and how you think about setting up your own – and how you have set up your own team?
David: There’s kind of two sides of the business. So we started to have to think about who do we need to affect on either side of the business to get them interested and get those conversations started? And is there any crossover?
So we do consult and training for companies that are trying to improve the performance of their sales development programs, and then also we have these events, we do digital events and the live events.
So there’s a lot of crossovers there and the main one is that that manager, director, VP of Sales Development, you know, specifically at a SaaS company. Okay, so we know that we need to have a conversation about that, but it really depends on what time of year it is and what we can provide them that would be useful to when we reach out. Because, right now, we just came off of SKO season, and so it was a question of reaching out, talking with them about what their plans are for SKO, what are they doing as far as training, and do they need some help there, right?
And so, from a campaign perspective, I mean, we’ll go into the classic sales development motion, okay, so we had to find the people that are involved in the decision-making, get their contact information, make sure that they’re from one of our top accounts, and then put together messaging that’s relevant at the time and you know, is personalized, getting that strategy together.
As I said, we had to have folks in-house so we started with one person who was the researcher in charge of gathering the information and finding the right people finding the contact information, leveraging tools to do that. And then we had one person and me who were doing the initial outreach, handling the appointments, and hopefully building the pipeline.
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