The (4) Simple Metrics to Track the Health of Your SDR Org
Jake Dunlap
“Make sure that you’re not just measuring overall activity. The number of emails, the number of phone calls, those are vanity metrics.”
This episode of the modern leader live is 30-minutes of jam-packed value covering four simple SDR metrics every organization should be narrowing in on.
We’re talking about the numbers behind the org, but the reality is that the impact this can have on your business is substantial.
For SDRs/BDRs/XDRs, we have to start being more thoughtful about the activity types we ask and require of them. If you think about it, this role really evolved from a call center mindset, and we’ve asked our teams just to do more calls to hit their numbers, and then eventually, we added on emails. Which was fine, but it’s an evolution.
This discussion covers the next evolution.
I’m joined by Skaled’s SDR & Go-to-Market Strategy Consultant Andrew Kappel who, like many, started as an SDR, then moved on to an enterprise account executive, and then started to build out and manage his own global SDR team. This was about the time he started tinkering with dashboards and reports and trying to figure out how to connect the input activities to the output outcomes – specifically, the outcomes that leaders actually care about.
We’re going to walk through this next evolution today that will really harp on the ultimate sophistication being simplicity. If you can show input and output, the activities that lead to qualified meetings, and then qualified meetings leading to pipeline and revenue, this is what your leaders and investors want to see over complicated spreadsheets.
Andrew and I will cover:
- Where predictable revenue falls short today
- The 4 Metrics: Effort, Effectiveness, Outbound, Outcomes
- Why organizations struggle with tracking Effectiveness (Quality Connects)
- Parting comments
Recap: The (4) Simple Metrics to Track the Health of Your SDR Org
The important bits:
- 4:00 – I was always tinkering with dashboards and reports and trying to figure out how to connect the input activities to the output outcomes (Andrew)
- 6:28 – Were predictable revenue falls down: an overfocus on effort (Jake)
- 7:49 – Start with the end in mind. How to work these four metrics backward: Effort, Effectiveness, Output, Outcomes (Andrew)
- 9:58 – Different teams compensate differently, and we’ve seen two camps for SDRs, which are either qualified meetings or pipeline generated (Andrew)
- 13:22 – I think it’s a good idea to have a portion of SDR comps tied to outcomes. The main reason is I don’t think it’s a bad thing to get SDRs comfortable with the fact that the goal is dollars, not just to book a meeting (Jake)
- 14:45 – Why organizations struggle with tracking Effectiveness aka Quality Connects instead of Effort aka Activities (Andrew)
- 17:33 – You can’t skip the align and define part and get buy-in from leadership (Andrew)
- 18:48 – Key metric model and instructions
- 20:20 – Early predictable revenue mindset and the data the book is based on (Jake)
- 22:10 – Why are we managing everyone to the mean? (Jake)
- 23:38 – Parting comments on top actions to take today (Andrew)
Where predictable revenue falls short today
The concept of predictable revenue really just focuses on “effort,” and where many teams fall short is this overfocus on effort-type metrics.
We’ll cover the three other essential metrics in conjunction with Effort that SRD teams should be tracking. This idea of activity metrics as the North Star and still following the 2010 predictable revenue model is outdated.
As a quick history lesson to understand why activity tracking used to work very well, is the book Predictable Revenue came out around 2010, but the data that the book was based on was a system that was run in the early 2000s and the early days of Salesforce. Which meant sellers weren’t using LinkedIn strategy or any other social selling platform. They also may have been sending emails but not tracking them closely, so all we had as indicators were phone calls. And this made sense at the time.
This SDR metric tracking method was based on a time when every activity was a one-to-one book meeting. There was no nurturing, sending additional content, or building rapport. It was all smile and dial.
Fast forward to today, we are nearing 20 years later, and we’re still looking at activities the same way in a digital age that’s changed everything. So what Andrew has put together is very simple yet powerful, and candidly, how other forward-thinking and logical SDR leaders have started to track their SDR org metrics.
The 4 Metrics: Effort, Effectiveness, Output, Outcomes
How Andrew talks about these four SDR metrics is working it backward with the end in mind.
How is your SDR team doing on the Outcomes? What kind of pipeline or revenue have they generated? If that’s there, amazing, keep doing what you’re doing.
But let’s say the pipeline isn’t where you want it to be during a specific patch of time or the area the SDR is representing. Then you want to look at qualified meetings. Do you have a lot of meetings?
If so, maybe you want to increase or optimize the qualification criteria, multi-thread the accounts, look for ways to find mobilizers or potential champions, etc.
If the meetings aren’t there, think of it this way: It’s our job as SDRs to start conversations and put ideas out there to buyers saying, “This is your current state. Here’s the potential future state we could help you get to.” It’s really important to have these types of conversations, which we define as quality connects – a two-way dialogue where an SDR uncovers qualifying (or disqualifying) info about the account.
This information is valuable, and it keeps SDRs focused on getting conversations and not just measuring the overall activity: the number of emails or the number of phone calls because those are vanity metrics. You want to look at the two-way dialogue, whether it’s happening on LinkedIn, Vidyard, phone calls, or email, allowing the SDR to be creative and achieve what we’re looking to achieve as the leading indicators to metrics three and four.
Make a copy of this Key SDR Metrics Template to get started.
Why organizations struggle with tracking Effectiveness (Quality Connects)
Out of the four metrics above, tracking Effectiveness is probably where organizations struggle most. It’s also the metric that matters most in predicting meetings and revenue.
I asked Andrew why he thought organizations struggle so much with this metric. He highlighted that if you’re simplifying your business, you’re not going to run into much resistance. Especially if you’re talking to the CFO or CEO, but you do have to define and align with them on key stakeholders and then benchmark your current state and track it month over month.
The other area organizations struggle with is tools like Outreach or Salesloft don’t have an easy way to track quality connects unless it’s an answered phone call. But what’s interesting is it’s not actually that hard to track or capture say a LinkedIn activity as a quality connect.
For instance, if the objective per rep is 20 quality connects a week, that’s just four connects a day that an SDR needs to log manually and can be done in minutes at the end of their day or the next morning.
Parting comments
A through line during this conversation was over-focusing on activity, and the evolution of tracking quality connects.
In parting remarks, Andrew talks about how even as an SDR, you can track these metrics yourself and meet with your leader and AEs and get coaching on it.
If you’re an SDR leader, review the team’s quality connects on every single team call, call out some positives, call out some objections, and help everyone get better because you want these connections to be leading indicators of Outputs and Outcomes.
Instead of just smiling and dialing, this will give you the flexibility to experiment and test new channels because the goal is connections, no matter how you get them.
These connections will also convert into pipeline and revenue and get you out of the quantity rat race. Leadership and investors just want to see that you have an input and output process. This process we covered in the live session will lead to the outcomes that everyone’s looking for.