Building a World-Class Sales Development Team

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We are joined today by Justin Ottley, VP of Global Sales Development at TalkDesk. Justin built his career by starting as a sales development rep at Software AG, where over the course of 10 years, he worked his way up into several different leadership roles. Justin, thanks for being with us here today to share your experience in building world class sales development teams.

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[00:00:42] Lucas Price: Yeah. So we got that we got the very quick overview of your career in your bio there. Can you tell us what else our customers should know about your about your, resume and your career experience?

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Majority of my posts are geared towards one thing. It's not followers, it's attracting talent for our org. So whether that's trying to build the brand of my existing team and calling out top performers, first of all it's good for their brand and network. But at the same time, it attracts more talent, right?

So if we're having openings if we're doing a big hiring spree, right? I like to have fun with that. Venturing out there a little bit, sharing more nuggets here and there, jumping on with people like yourself. So. That's what brings me here today.

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[00:01:53] Justin Otley: Yeah, it definitely runs in the blood. So I would definitely say it's in the DNA on, on, on probably both sides [00:02:00] of the family to an extent. But yeah, it just kind of happened. I think right out of college, I was doing a lot of like restaurant work, working for like moving companies, doing construction, like two or three different jobs.

And then I stumbled across this opportunity as an SDR at Software AG. Got the interview. And then, the rest was history. It was a five month interview process, so that was fun. But

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[00:02:23] Justin Otley: you know, it took off and I just had a blast with the role. And I'd say after about a year, I had a sit down with my manager and he was like, Hey.

Do you want to pursue the path of an AE, right? Like there's some leaders that are willing to take you under their wing as like a junior AE. And at the time I saw the size of our SDR team compared to our competitors. And we, you know, we were a fraction of the size, especially, you know, where we were going and growing.

switch, When I, if I were to [: 00:03:00

And there was a number of years where I came close to making the switch, but I was just having too much fun doing what I was doing, building the teams, growing the function. And now we're here at TalkDesk and it's a hell of a team. It's a hell of a place to be at the right time. And lo and behold, we are growing out an inside sales team as well that I'm going to help lead.

And uh, so that's exciting to see, you know, full circle where it's come from, right. Starting as a, as an SDR to where we are today.

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[00:03:48] Justin Otley: I would say that I didn't have much of a resume and I was a very different type of, DNA from what they had been hiring. And then like two months into the process. You know, I [00:04:00] had a few calls. It was going, it seemed like it was going really well.

And then there was a hiring freeze. And so then the hiring manager went quiet for about two months and over that series of two months, I'd sent them 17, I reached out 17 times. And I I don't know what the full breakdown was, but roughly like eight or nine emails, all the rest were calls there might've been like a LinkedIn message.

then I ended up getting pretty down in the dumps because I was like, all right, I blew it. I blew it. And then lo and behold, he reached out like, Hey, thanks for your patience. Thanks for the persistency. Thank you for the tenacity. Like we had a hiring freeze. I was also curious to see how you would handle it.

I'm like, dude, you just put me through the most stressful two months of my life, but it worked out after that.

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You you lead a team that does outbound. [00:05:00] So I think it's not dead for your team. Can you tell me a little bit about you know, is outbound dead and what does it take to make it work?

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But we changed their mind pretty quickly over here. I would say,

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So, you know, it's that I think this theme has been going on for a while now, but it is, it does continue to get more [00:06:00] difficult.

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You used to be able to, I mean, I was an SDR in 2012 through 2014. Used to be able to get away with a lot more back then than you could today. And I know for myself, like a lot of the tactics I did back then would not yield nearly the same results as they would today. However, the mindset behind those tactics would right.

Like the work you're willing to put in, right. The creativity, the hours you're willing to put in through that, like, that certainly will pay off.

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Is that personalization is actually less important than relevance. If you can hit the right person at the right time, and like, look for signals on the internet that this is the right time, that's probably more than, you know, saying, Hey, I noticed what college you went to or something like that.

So, you know, how have the tactics changed? And what are you seeing that works well these days?

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And I think for most companies. Before you even go that route, like you have to nail your own internal messaging first, right? Like you, and it starts with mastering your personas, not mastering your product. So a lot [00:08:00] of I would say a lot of enablement, sales enablement starts off a little bit backwards, especially for customer, for companies that want to call themselves customer centric.

Right. It's usually the elevator pitch approach. It's product feature fit functionality. And it's not nearly enough time on mastering your core three, five, however many personas, being able to essentially build out a buyer's matrix, the Joe Conrath buyer's matrix. Per persona. And so that's one thing that we've started to incorporate more and more into our SDR onboarding.

And there's still a lot more work to be done there. Essentially It starts with enablement and where we're having our folks spend their time. Right. And so if we can have them more obsessed over understanding our prospects and our personas inside and out. Then our messaging to those prospects and personas is going to be highly relevant for them because we know what they care about.

heir metrics of success are. [: 00:09:00

And then how many personalization emails have you seen where someone like calls out the college you went to, or maybe did a good job talking about a post, but then their transition to their value prop was just kind of weird and awkward and it didn't flow and their value prop really had nothing to do with like what you care about or what you're interested in.

Right. I think that is the key is nailing down your own internal messaging. Per persona per industry. First too many folks put that extra emphasis on personalization. So once you master that piece. Then sure you can start to personalize and have a bit more fun.

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Like that in a lot of ways is more important than under, even than understanding the product that you're selling.

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I can tell you an order where we're having the most success goes. Phones, social, then email. We have a lot of work to do with email as I think a lot of companies do. It's where you can spend the most amount of time and have the least. Return. So, there is a big emphasis happening there with like, we've created a content committee.

sonas, but also relevant for [: 00:11:00

And then the better that messaging gets. The more armed we're also going to be over the phones and through social.

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[00:11:23] Justin Otley: Yeah, I think it's a good point. So I have been prospecting in heavily into it and like the CIOs or for essentially my entire career, it is extremely difficult and highly competitive. So that's not all that we pursue here at talk desk. There's also a lot of like. Contact center folks customer success, customer experience, going after more of like the business managers, business like the business owners of different units and departments and things like that.

be a lot harder to get them [: 00:12:00

Who are helping us increase our connect rates and they're very good at it. They too, as they have been looking at our lists, I've said like, all right, since a heavy portion of your list is it focus, like that's the hardest area for us to help you, we're still going to help you. But just know that, right.

So it's been valid to validated to me from a number of folks. There's plenty of peers in the industry. And then obviously, you know, 10 and a half years at software EGS saw the same thing, but what I love about calling is the consistency and the reliancy on it and how, in my opinion, it's much easier to build like that math funnel that, and reverse engineering through calling than it is anything else, right.

then maybe social and email [: 00:13:00

And then for these meetings that are scheduled, what is my show rate? What percentage of them are actually occurring? And then for those that occur, what percentage of those are going into pipeline? And then once I understand that math. Right? Now I can look at how many calls I need to make on a daily, weekly basis.

So we can work with our SDRs, work backwards. And instead of saying like, Hey, everyone does 50 calls a day. A lot of SDRs have different call metrics. Why? Well, because they all have different, they all have different data. They've got different connect rates, different conversion rates, different show rates.

re's a coaching opportunity. [: 00:14:00

And ideally you get to that, you spot that trend or pattern as close to real time as possible. I can tell you right now for stuff like that, it's taking us probably a couple of weeks to notice.

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Are you seeing that as well? And then where does that, how does that go back and forth between the AE? Do your sales development people, would they run the meeting with the people below the line in [00:15:00] order to gather that information? Or would that go to the AE?

Curious about if you can kind of paint us a picture, if you're doing any of that and how it all comes together. If you do

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We're doing ourselves a disservice only going after essentially like director and above or VP and above. And so we started changing up our coaching and our approach, our plays. To, to not only be below the line, but how to include them. But the big, bigger reason is why to include them and what that message is.

h SDRs, I often, I'm hearing [: 00:16:00

And I'm not even that far removed from my team. It's not like I'm three, four levels removed. Right. I'm just two or three levels removed from them right now. So we have to think about that for like our VPs and up that we're reaching out to, if we can start to have a lot of the conversations with the lower level folks in their org, and we can start to gather this information.

Right. We can start to get our story straight, our facts straight, understand what's really challenging the people in the org, then we can surface these insights up to the VPs up to them. And it's a completely different story. And a lot of times, you know, we're finding that prospects really appreciate it.

e SDRs get paid, right. Like [: 00:17:00

As an SDR or, but even with the AEs, like we've got a level set our expectations, like, Hey, we might not be going into this, talking to a decision maker, or even, you know, a really reliable champion for that matter. We're going in because this is a strategic account. And we need to understand more. We need to start having more conversations, build credibility.

We can start to name drop who we're talking to, and then we're going to get to the right place.

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[00:18:00] Justin Otley: So ideally it's both. And we've got pockets of where we've got some really powerful SDR, AE partnerships. That are doing this in tandem together, like live calling together. You know, they're, the S the AE will be copying the SDR on all their outbound emails, the SDR is doing the same with the AE they're following up on each other's notes.

So there's a lot of that going on, but to answer your question directly. Usually we are not taking those calls ourself. Especially within like our enterprise and up accounts for commercial that's happening more frequent where we will feel to call ourself whether it's inbound or outbound, that's happening more frequent, what, especially with our enterprise and up, and especially when it's outbound related.

hat have been here for a few [: 00:19:00

We can't afford for that right now, right? Like we're on a sprint to go public. We need as many conversations and at bats as possible.

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But also. You know, are there things that you're doing prior to, you know, the account going to an SDR to kind of prioritize, look at online footprints or anything else in terms of, Hey this is when it, you know, we might be particularly relevant. And so, so you can prioritize which accounts you send to the SDRs to start the sequences and the phone calls.

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Like account development reps, they're interns, but our sole focus initially with them is exactly what you're talking about. It's all those, you know, very essential admin tasks, that need to be done, but we need the interns help doing them so that we can buy back the SDRs time. So that was one of my biggest mottos coming into this year is.

How are we going to buy back our time? Right? Like when, if we take that audit on where we're spending our time each day and each week and every SDR team knows it's true, right? If you break that time and like all of what you do into two different buckets, you've got like your green light buckets and you've got your red light buckets.

The green [: 00:21:00

So how can we take as much of that? How can we automate as much of that? And how can we delegate as much of that as possible with the interns? We're going to have them heavily focused on our prospecting lists, helping us get the most accurate contact information possible, making sure that the titles are as accurate as possible.

ry day. Oh my God. Right. So [: 00:22:00

And so we're really excited about that. We'll also have the interns doing quite a bit of prospecting as well. And then hopefully those that crush it and those that graduate sooner rather than later we can bring them on full time and just continue that talent engine here at TalkDesk.

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[00:22:39] Justin Otley: So one thing we started doing was we started doing I would say at the end of last year, We started doing mock cold calls on our panel interview process. So our panel interview is usually the last step in our interview process. So they'll have two or three interviews. If all those go well, we go to a panel.

The panel is me, [: 00:23:00

Do your research on talk desk, pick an account, pick a prospect, like an actual real person that you think could leverage talk desk solutions. And then basically come prepared on on like what your pitch would be. Your talk to us pitch would be to this person. And so usually one of the SDR managers will we'll do the role play will be whichever person they, they chose.

s into it. But then when you [: 00:24:00

The most important thing for me is what happens after we end that mock call. We as a team, we provide feedback and then we do it again. And so then it's like, okay, how quickly, like how coachable is this person? And like, how willing are they to apply things that quickly? How caught up in their head are they going to get?

Right. And so you can start to learn a lot about that individual. It's okay that they get nervous. It's okay. If they're stumbling, some folks ask if they can start over. Totally cool. That's all natural. And none of that bothers us, right? It's the energy they're bringing into it, the willingness behind it.

been there for a year or two [: 00:25:00

That basically, right. Like maybe they were sold a dream. The career path doesn't work there. They're stuck. They need an out. So having conversations with those folks, you gotta be a little extra careful with those type of candidates, even though like they have that experience and there can be a lot of good there, there can also be a lot of bad habits that are way harder to coach than someone, for instance, like we hired a professional volleyball player.

Right. Never made a cold call in his life. The dude is a stud over the phones and is willing to do anything it takes to be successful. Right. Still a lot to learn, but highly coachable probably asks more questions than anyone else on the team. And so with these really experienced SDRs, right. Like that, the level of detail that we go into with them, with our questioning, as far as like what they were doing on a day to day basis, what their call metrics were, how they approached that.

u can tell the ones that are [: 00:26:00

[00:26:05] Lucas Price: yeah, that's actually, that's a great segue for the thing I wanted to ask you about next is, and and it's also related to, you know, you, you mentioned your reason for being on social media and doing podcasts like this is because. You want to kind of broaden the candidates who are interested in working for you.

And so I'd love to have you share, what are the things that you do that make it great to work in the sales development program at TalkDesk?

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There were so many existing SDRs that saw that, that were very close to probably leaving. And I think that bought us some time with them because then people started to see the light. Right. [00:27:00] And and then after that, it was like a domino effect. We went, it was like seven promotions in seven months.

Then we had a bit of a cool off period because we did a lot of hiring a lot of a lot of training and enablement and lo and behold, now we've got a few folks that are due to get promoted within the next month again. So I think what's key there is there's a very real opportunity. To not just be an AE, we're building out career tracks all over.

So even though we've been promoting a lot to AE, one of our upcoming promotions is someone going to our partner channel team, which is really exciting. We've got a lot of SDRs raising their hands for customer success, so we're getting them introduced to our customer success team. They're building like a mentor mentee relationship.

ve an absolute just a a star [: 00:28:00

They're phenomenal. So why are they so phenomenal? They're first and foremost, they're very good SDRs themselves, like exceptionally well over the phones, exceptionally well at crafting messaging at structuring their days at making shit happen, but then they are even better coaches. Right. Phenomenal listeners.

They know how to listen and to dissect really hungry to grow to learn and earn and all that rubs off onto their teams. So those are just a few things other than that. Like it's, we hire great people at the end of the day. Like we can talk about what it is we're looking for in every individual, but at the end of the day, like.

career, but move fast at at [: 00:29:00

The right thing's going to pay off for your career long, short term and long term.

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This may or may not be true for TalkDesk, but in some cases people are telling me You know our S, our SDRs that are getting promoted to AEs are failing because even though they have the drive, they don't have the organization and planning, the business acumen to have these conversations. What I'm leading into with this is, you know, you mentioned that you have SDRs being.

es. How do you identify what [: 00:30:00

[00:30:18] Justin Otley: So one big piece of that for me is when I start to get them introduced to the right people. So like we, I can give you an example. We had some folks that started in March in February. And as early as the beginning of April, I, you know, I was introducing them to different departments. Of future roles that they're looking to pursue only two months into the job, we were starting that process.

that they give the SDRs like [: 00:31:00

As far as like, Hey, here's what it sounds like. I think you need to work on if you want to be a part of this type of team. Here's and also we prep the SDRs ahead of time, right? Like these are valuable, like highly paid, valuable assets to the company. You're not just going to pick their brain, right?

Like you need to come prepared to talk about yourself. Right. Like you need to come prepared, make it very clear, like who you are, why you're here, what you're interested in. And then you can earn that right to ask those questions. So that's a big one is making, it's not all on you. You can partner with other people.

ferent traits and skills and [: 00:32:00

If it's an AE path, they want to take the skills and traits that they don't have. Are those coachable? Can we coach those? If so, like how easily can we coach those with this person and how quickly can we do that?

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[00:32:35] Justin Otley: I think building a world class SDR team it starts with alignment with your leadership team. And I'm not just talking like SDR leader to SDR leader. It's SDR. It's your SDR leadership with your sales leadership. It's your SDR leadership with your marketing leadership. It's your SDR leadership with your ops leaders.

now, but it's very true that [: 00:33:00

I have a twofold objective at any given time it's drive a revenue pipeline and a talent pipeline. But there's a lot of moving pieces and parts to each of that. So, I think another piece too would be. Making sure you understand the value and what a real career path does. Not just for the people, but what that does for the results for while those people are in the role, right?

If they don't have, if they don't, if they're not bought into the vision, they don't see the career path. They don't see the light. They don't know what it is they're working towards, why they're working towards it and how to get there. Like you're going to see that impact the results. But then when you start to remove those obstacles and they start to become motivated, they start to get bought in.

e impact of those results as [: 00:34:00

I think that's a big piece as well. And obviously, like we talked about earlier, outbound. Is far from dead. Old mindless outbound is dead. Obviously we all have heard like spray and pray model it's dead. And even if it's, even if it's somewhat working for you, it's a really quick way to, to flood your market, to really damage your domain, to damage the reputation and image of your company.

Do yourself. Your team, your company and your customers, don't do that kind of disservice. Do yourselves a favor and focus on mastering your personas from day one. And even if you're, you have a rep that has never spent that kind of time mastering your personas, it's never too late.

us is initially mastering my [: 00:35:00

[00:35:11] Lucas Price: Yeah. Justin, lots of great stuff today. Can you just tell us where our audience can find you online?

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But with LinkedIn, look, I'm getting blown up in there. So like, if you're trying to get my attention. Right. I can tell you that I probably receive one LinkedIn video per quarter. I receive maybe hundreds of messages. Per week, close to that, but one video per quarter, I love watching the videos when they're sent.

f time and you make it a fun [: 00:36:00

So don't just hit me up on LinkedIn once make yourself known.

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You need to really find the places that you can get efficiencies so that the SDRs can stay focused on what's really important to them. And then you have to have a real talent engine where you're bringing people in, but you're also developing them and you're showing them what career opportunities to keep them focused on.

ngs for our audience to hear [: 00:37:00

team. And if you have any feedback for us, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. Thank you for joining us today.