How to Keep SDRs Engaged

Lessons from Basis Theory's Pipeline Club

DEAR STAGE 2: We have a growing team of SDRs and are looking for creative ways to both keep them engaged and showcase the work they are doing to the rest of the company. Our goal is to create promotion paths into the sales org over time, but we know that’s at least a few quarters away. What are companies doing to keep top performers engaged and motivated? ~Motivating SDRs

DEAR MOTIVATING SDRS: I love this question! Once upon a time I built a large BDR org at NetSuite and have had the pleasure of working with many companies to set up (and step up!) this function over the last few years. 

First, let’s just acknowledge that this job continues to get harder. The rise of automation and AI has flooded buyer’s inboxes – the role of an outbound BDR is more difficult than ever. But for those companies doubling down and making the investments in data and systems to thoughtful approach their target accounts, it is still working. 

Yes, OUTBOUND STILL WORKS. 

I’ve worked closely with Val Teverovska, the Head of Sales Development at Basis Theory over the last year as she has set up and scaled an impressive outbound function. She recently rolled out an interesting program that I think other companies can learn from. 

A few considerations:

• Val wanted to shift the focus of the BDR team from “just settings meetings” to true business outcomes and encourage finding large(r) opportunities

• Basis Theory sells to MM and Enterprise customers and there is not an obvious external proxy for deal size (i.e.. # of employees does not correlate to size of deal)

• Basis Theory is an early high-growth startup and expects to have opportunities to promote their BDRs into closing roles in the near future

• Basis Theory is a fully distributed/remote team 

The recipe for a pipeline club

First, pick a stage in your own sales process that has enough inspection that you generally trust the forecasted deal sizes. Yes, they can change until the contract is signed, but at some point you start to narrow in on where a deal will land. With more transactional sales cycles, this might be at the first meeting or you might not even have the option to discount so it’s standardized. For enterprise sales it’s likely 1-2 steps into your sales cycle where you start talking about the opps in forecast meetings. Once you’ve set the threshold for what will “count” towards pipeline club, you can then set bands based on your ACV. For example, you might have:

• $250K Pipeline Club

• $500K Pipeline Club

• $750K Pipeline Club

• $1M Pipeline Club

• $1.5M Pipeline Club

• $2M Pipeline Club

How to become a member?

To become a club member SDRs need more than $X in open/active pipeline, which does not include closed lost deals. For example, when SDRs have 500K in open pipeline at the threshold stage or above they become members of the 500K Pipeline Club. 

If a deal is lost, you can be bumped back down to a lower club at any time creating yet another incentive for consistency in building top-of-funnel pipeline. 

BUT, if a deal is won, that dollar value holds and the SDR becomes a “lifetime” member of the 500K, 750K, 1M, etc…Pipeline Club. 

What about the perks!?

This is where I got really excited about what Val was building. There are endless possibilities of what to include at various levels and you need to know your team and what motivates them, but here are a few examples to get you started. 

Membership in each club should bring new perks to its members. When SDRs just enter a club they might get:

• Stickers for Slack avatars to show club membership

• Priority for event attendance

• Higher travel budget for the higher clubs

• A half day / full day of PTO

• Opportunity to participate in a prospect/customer meeting

• A LinkedIn recommendation from the CEO

Finally, when SDRs become lifetime members of the higher clubs they also get an exclusive personalized gift!

• A dinner out at his/her favorite restaurant

• A weekend away with a friend/spouse

• Something that uniquely excited the individual! 

It’s early days of rolling this out, but I love the momentum that Val is creating. There are plenty of iterations you could make to fit your own business, but what a creative way to align incentives and keep SDRs engaged.

Until next week!