Eps 3.0 Design Flow - Andrae Account Exec Levels and SDR Engagement Current State 9.12.25

Andrae and I helping our Dev team understand the process and people - 3R's 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

When we talk about account executives, there's really three different levels of the account executive based on you know companies typically have a um mid-market, they have commercial, mid-market, and enterprise. And you'll hear those three terms. So typically the commercial and the mid-market will have a lot more SDR activity because there's a lot more to you know smaller organizations. These are a commercial company would be employee bases, what about 5,000 and less, or maybe even less than that, maybe a thousand and less. Yeah. And then mid-market is from a thousand one to maybe maybe seven or eight thousand, and then enterprise or eight thousand and above, right? You got it. And why that's important is because, you know, especially when we start talking about the agent, a lot of the qualification failures actually happen at that commercial and mid-market phase. Um, the enterprise SEs, A's, and SDRs, to throw all these acronyms at you. They're they're pretty well in their career. They've graduated to working with the enterprise. There's not a lot of SDR activity at the enterprise. There's a lot of relationship and uh sort of calls that happen naturally and organically through time and relationship with people. So I think the target zone here is that commercial mid-market, STR very young, dial in for dollars. And then the account executive also is equally young. In fact, that commercial account executive might have been an SDR only less than a year prior.

SPEAKER_00 1:27

Absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, and uh a good and a good way to put that, Kevin, is as far as the commercial is they're very transactional, right? They are they're not to your point. Like when you get the difference, if you're looking at kind of the teeter totter of the pendulum from one side to the other, on commercial, on the commercial side, things move faster because they're very transactional. In other words, the deals, the deals are smaller, the sales cycle is shorter because there's not as much to play for, right? The business still matters, but because of the price point, what the investment is, right? The the cost and the return on investment is normally such a smaller scale. It's a pretty it's it's pretty quick to get to a yes or no. They're either a fit or they're not, and you're they're in your pay, pay scale or not in terms of what you're selling and what you're providing for services and product.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

And typically on the customer side, as you mentioned, they're smaller, more, more nimble. A lot of times that one person they're talking to might be holding or wearing three different hats. They might have decision maker, the janitor, and the guy that washes the floor. I mean, like they're they're covering it all.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Absolutely, which make the which expedites, and at the end of the day, what all this gets to is that expedites the sales cycle, which is why they be they tend to be more transactional, right? They say, okay, we if we need to do an approval process in commercial or mid-market, normally that's a pretty quick approval. You're talking about a couple weeks at at you know, worst case. On enterprise, this could be months, right? Sales cycle could be 10 months, could be longer. Sometimes it's Kevin Coon is known to say, it's had a birthday, it's been over 12 months, right? And so, you know, on the enterprise side of this pendulum, like it's different, right? You have to have relationships. You have to be, you know, what we call multi multi-threaded across the you know the environment, right? Your SE may have sales engineer, we'll get to that in a minute. They may have relationships, the account executive may have relationships. Uh, and sometimes even uh even though the SDR is not in there, you have CSMs and other parts of our business, our business being the account executive, sales engineer, we may have specialists in there, and we're all multi-threaded, right? In other words, we have relationships across executive all the way down to the end engineer, right? Uh in sometimes even the customer side. And so we're having to pull all those things together, have a lot of sync meetings to level set and all of these things to pull together in addition to budget meetings and all of these things, just to get to a yes, or in sometimes case, a no, right? So the sales cycles tend to be much longer. Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

That's that's a really good point you mentioned. Getting to know and walking to the door is very critical. Count count executives, the ones that struggle are the ones that say yes to everything. The ones that are successful are the ones that get to know. Qualifying out an opportunity is so much better than qualifying in a bad authority.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Absolutely. And that goes back to what we talked about when we first talked about when these SDRs bring things to the AE table and they're supposed to be prioritizing. It's a lot easier to prioritize your opportunities and deals when you have key ones that actually make sense and not a lot of fluff in there, where all of a sudden now every day and every week, when you're going through your list, you got 35 different opportunities to kind of farm through. And the reality is only six of them may even matter. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:37

And you and you're wasting all that energy and resources. And by the way, the keep in mind the account executives is and the SDR are not penalized. In other words, there's no accountability for wasting other resources. So understand. And which which in my opinion should be something included in the compensations plan. But that's for another conversation.

SPEAKER_00 5:01

A good point.