Eps 1.0 Design Flow - Andrae SDR Stage Current State 9.12.25

Part of helping the design team understand the roles rules and responsibilities -we constructed a discussion of our experiences - 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

So we need to set the stage. Um, I guess we can go ahead and do that, right? So in a typical sales cycle, and again, chime in obviously, Kevin, but in a typical sales cycle, uh, the first stage of uh engaging with a customer, it comes through the SDR, whether it's by you know cold calling or emails or marketing or customer reached out through website, etc. So that that SDR is into indeed the first step or what we call intake, right? Uh a sales development resource, in this case, uh representative. Um, everybody calls them different things, but they're sales development. They're kind of the first they're, you know, and if you look at a career pathwise, this is clear to call out, right? Normally these are the people who are like just learning the kind of early days in sales. They're not, you know, very deep. They're not very, they're not technical generally at all. Um, they're just their only job literally is to vet and say, is there any chance that we can do something with this customer? Um, and normally that's a big challenge because that's a pretty big bucket and it's very vague, right? It's like, you know, some people are gonna say, like, you can look at it immediately and say, this is not even, this doesn't have a chance. Um, but because they are generally youthful uh and generally inexperienced, any little thing is a thing for them because they're also gold and compensated by at least getting this thing to the next level, to the next step, right? Um, and that is a big deal.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

And that's where some of the challenges come in is our compensation behavior is to drive meetings, but not necessarily drive qualified meetings, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Exactly. Yep. They don't they're not tied to the end cost.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

They are just their cost and their paycheck is coming just to get to the next level meeting, uh, which is normally a call or at least to the a challenges with SCRs I've seen up front are they like to give things away, knowing they they don't own those things to give away, like, oh, we'll set you up with a pre-sales person or we'll do a demo or blah, blah, blah, right? Yeah. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

100%. Yep. Uh, and again, they're just trying to get you to that first level. Uh, and a lot of that we're and as we're gonna see here as we keep walking through, those are the initial friction points, right? When we engage with an SDR and try to understand, well, what do we what do we know about the customer, etc.? What we generally don't get is what did you also promise them or tell them or speak to them about? Like what are those in those insightful details that you're not telling us? Because when we get on the call, it will absolutely come up from the customer. So now that we have the kind of the SDR you know clarified in terms of what the role is and what their their key mission is, the next thing that happens is they again we talked about how they engage with the customer. Um, a lot of times they don't have they have a script and they don't go off script very far, other than you know, overpromising and not necessarily having anything that they deliver. Uh, because frankly, the only mission for them is to get to the next level, and that's engage an AE. Uh, and the AE will then subsequently engage the SE if it gets far enough, right? Um, so at that SDR level, they're engaging with the customer, they're asking some, again, there's generally scripted questions uh to figure out if there's enough meat on the bone or is there enough here to engage and get to the next level. In other words, you know, what's the nature of your business? What are you doing? What's the problem that you have today? Um, again, the big challenge here is because they're inexperienced, all they can do is go off the script. They don't really have enough wherewithal to go beyond that and probe a little bit deeper, ask the why, you know, what, the how, uh, things of that sort, which gets to the you know, to the next level and gives us more qualified detail. Um, so initially, you know, essentially we get company names, company business, a couple of the roles, right? Like who am I talking? Who's the SDR talking to? Um, but we don't really necessarily necessarily get into org chart, things like that. Like we don't really get into any detailed level of insight in terms of is it truly a deal or not? They literally are just trying to get you to a point where it's engaging enough that an account executive, which is our first level of sales beyond the SDR, or second level rather, uh, the account executive can then probe and jump in and at least have something to go off of, right?