The SDR of tomorrow: Will we need them?

Predictable Revenue is a required reading for every new employee and client at Skaled. It’s surprising how much of what Aaron and Marylou wrote is still applicable, but some pieces will inevitably require updates and modifications as new technology disrupts the role of the SDR.

When you think about SDRs, certain traits come to mind. Regardless of whether they’re reporting to marketing or sales, these individuals are hustlers, grinders, and regimented in their day-to-day. But the role is changing and needs to adapt faster to take off new sales technologies.

In the near future, cold calling will be less than 10-30%, possibly 0%, instead calls will be reserved for prospects with very specific behaviors and hyper-targeted demographics. Instead SDRs will spend most of their time engaging in high quality email and social selling campaigns that create superior results in less time than cold calling. So what does the future hold for the typical SDR?

1. If the role still exists, the modern SDR (like marketers) will be more quant than hustle and grit.

2. We will multiply SDR’s efficiency by 3 to 5 times as they can manipulate lists and customize emails/social outreach dynamically to create high quality touch points, in bulk, in real time. Kyle Porter and the team at SalesLoft as well as Manny and the guys at Outreach.io are both making this happen in different ways. For more of these tools check out an amazing read from Max Altshuler in his new book Hacking Sales.

3. SDRs will never source leads. Crawling tech will continue to evolve and lost serves will start to consolidate.

4. We will have to adapt predictable revenue’s seeds, nets and spears to include a fourth category: the hybrid of nets and spears. This hybrid of nets and spears must account for leads generated by reaching out to more people, like nets, but also engaging in 1-1 customized outreach, like an automated spear.

We can think of the modern SDR like a drone. Partially operated by humans and partially run by automated technology, drones can attack a precise target or fly a set path to efficiently and discreetly collect information or make a delivery. Many companies are advancing technology to help drones become more autonomous and aware. At the R/GA accelerator demoday, SkySpecs displayed a their Guardian technology that enables drones to fly without fear of collisions thanks to a sensor.

So how is the SDR prospecting like a drone? With one click SDR’s can send highly customized and targeted emails to hundreds of people that they already have information on thanks to technology that allows them to research and precisely target specific segments. Because tech has evolved to allow SDRs to better understand their prospects, they can write templates that are extremely personalized, allowing them to fly under the radar in the sense that they aren’t triggering negative responses with spammy emails.

This new drones segment is going to become more and more automated as we move into the future. We’re not saying that the SDR role will be eliminated, but that SDRs are going to have to adopt and quickly learn how to operate new technologies.

Similar to how we saw marketing automation change the game for Inbound, sales automation will do the same for outbound and it will probably happen sooner than you think.