- There's stages in that process
where the ratios are abnormal,
that if they fix 3% here, 5% there, 10% there,
you can get a result where most of my clients I work with,
we're growing at least a hundred percent
in a 12 month period.
(upbeat music)
Hey there, I'm Dan Martell.
Serial entrepreneur, investor and creator of SaaS Academy.
In this episode, I'm gonna share with you
what is the difference?
Let's define these things around an SDR, a BDR, an AE
or a CSM, so that you can get clear
on what the pipeline flow should look like
so you can increase what's called your sales velocity.
And be sure to stay till the end where I'm gonna tell you
how to get access to an exclusive resource
called the Rocket Demo Builder,
where you can close deals twice as fast, twice as big.
I know it's a big promise, but we're gonna get into it.
Let's do this.
So if your new into my stuff,
I have been in the SaaS space for almost 25 years, okay?
Building technology companies, scaling organisation,
raising venture capital, exiting companies.
And one of my favourite things is to
build the revenue engine, right?
I always look at business through two different funnels,
the revenue engine and the people engine.
But the revenue engine's the funnest because
that's where a lot of the velocity and throughput
to build a really exciting company comes from, right?
And if you've never done that, I mean, there's challenges
like comp plans and managing sales coaching
and making sure that people are saying the right thing
to potential buyers.
And, you know, that marketing sends over leads that are,
that the sales people like, and there's always a conflict
between marketing and sales and then customer success
because sometimes you sell stuff to people
you shouldn't have sold to
and then the onboarding team is dealing
with all the down downfall of that
and it just becomes crazy.
But here's what I've discovered.
I was recently working with one of my clients
and part of my private coaching that I do,
is we map out the whole, almost buyer journey, okay?
All the way from awareness to consideration to purchase,
to activation, engagement and upsell, right?
It's the whole bow tie funnel.
And what you discover when you map it all out,
is there is so much waste typically amongst organisation
because they don't see the opportunities just dropping.
They just look at their revenue numbers and they're like,
oh, well we added an extra 15K
of monthly reoccurring revenue this month.
Or a lot of my clients are in the kind of the hundreds
of thousand dollars of new revenue every month.
And they don't see that there's stages in that process
where the ratios are abnormal,
that if they fix, 3% here, 5% there, 10% there,
and 10% of the current number,
if you stack all those things together,
you can get a result where most of my clients I work with,
were growing at least a hundred percent
and in a 12 month period, because it's math,
we just focus on the right things, right?
To two extra pipeline,
by understanding what is the audit process?
What's the mapping out, what I call the flow process?
The reports that you need to be able to manage this
and then tweak the different stages
of that funnel to get your results.
But to do that, you need to understand these four roles.
I'm gonna define them because they often get mixed up.
People don't understand them.
And we're gonna make sure we get some clarity today.
First one is sales development rep, SDR.
Sometimes you hear this called an MDR, a qualifier,
a setter, there's all these different terminologies.
But I wanna normalise it and just say,
a sales development rep is responsible
for finding opportunity and usually it's inbound
or it's in your CRM or it's, you know,
you can get super nerdy on this stuff,
but it's really just qualifying the potential buyer.
And to me, I just think that
that's the way to think about it.
You have prospects that are potential buyers.
And the job of a sales development rep
is to develop this sales opportunity.
They wake up every day
and they should be chatting with customers
that come through the online forums,
they should be chatting with customers that are chatting.
They should be following up on email.
They should be, you know, somebody downloads a lead magnet,
they should reach out to them.
They should call them,
they should see if there's opportunities
to upsell within organisations like there's,
the sales development rep's job is to execute the playbook,
to identify and qualify opportunities.
And then, so once they qualify them,
then they move them up to the next stage.
But that is what a sales development rep is.
So, you know, setters and a bunch of other things
people are like, well, we call them this,
you can call them whatever you want.
I'm just saying in the software world,
in my world, it's an SDR.
And that's what they do.
Number two, business development rep.
So a BDR, a business development rep,
in my language, it's outbound.
Outbound means cold.
So I don't even consider
if you have somebody that's engaging in chat,
that's not even outbound.
Outbound is they have ideally targeted accounts
using what we call an account based marketing process.
And they're reaching out to the market
and they're trying to find opportunities to create pipeline.
So they're talking to the market.
They're opening up chats, they're offering assessments,
but a BDR is somebody that's dialling for dollars.
They're emailing for dollars.
They're literally sending out messages,
obviously, value add, personalised,
all these things have to be true to get people to respond,
to then qualify them and then kick them back up
to your sales team to the next stage.
But that is, when people are like, what does a BDR do?
A BDR is not an SDR.
A business development rep does outbound.
They make sure that the person has a need.
They qualify them,
they try to add value through that process
and once they feel like there's an opportunity there,
then they move it out.
Number three is account exec.
So I call it an account exec inside my company,
but these are the salespeople.
These are people that are trained on how to,
what we call it in our company is,
we teach our customers how to buy.
These are not, some people call them closers
and I get it because it's a cool word in closers, you know,
like get paid and all these things.
There's all these chance in the sales mantra but I mean,
call it what you want, I honestly don't care.
Sales rep, person who does demo, closer
but they are an account exec.
Most of my clients that I coach,
I tell them to call them product specialist,
'cause somebody wants to get on a call
with a product specialist,
they don't want to get on a call with a closer.
So it's funny how like, language you use
sometimes through the organisation gets propagated
out to the customer.
So you might call them setters and closers.
And then somebody in support's like,
hey, let me get you on a call with John
he's one of our closers.
Well, the buyer does not wanna get on a call with John
who's gonna sell them.
Like nobody's ever like,
hey, get me on a call with a salesperson.
I wanna be sold, no, they wanna be informed.
So you wanna give your demo process a cool name
and you want to give the title of your account executives,
which account executive is a good term, obviously.
And you want to teach them
that your job is to teach them how to buy.
It's to help them understand how to
evaluate the opportunities in their business
and how they should evaluate other vendors and solutions
so that they can get the problem solved
in a complete manner.
But that is what an account executive is,
that is a salesperson that is responsible
for doing the sales call,
the follow up call in an enterprise format,
it's a complex sale, they're usually doing solution selling.
They've gotta get all the different parties involved.
But they're responsible from, you know, once it's qualified,
they're taking the conversation all the way to paperwork,
credit card, cheque, like money in the bank.
And that's the responsibility of the account exec.
Number four is customer success manager.
CSM, it's a big word, it's kind of a new industry.
Back in the day we used to call it customer retention.
Then we call it revenue retention, then revenue expansion.
But you know, some people call it onboarding
but I like to call it customer success,
'cause it just like it's the right language, right?
'Cause the job of a CSM, a customer success manager,
is once the the account exec has understood the pain,
talked about the solution
and showed them how the product can solve their problems.
They take that buyer and they bring them into the world
of becoming a consumer of your product or service.
And their skillset is no longer selling,
their skillset is really understanding
how to connect your product to their pain and activate them.
So a lot of companies don't think about it
but there's different phases to this.
If you actually want a great book on this,
Joey Coleman wrote a book called, "Never Lose a Customer".
I think there's seven different phases of customer journey.
But the idea of mapping out the onboarding
and getting everybody from this, you know,
what's the entry criteria
and what's the exit criteria for that stage?
And then moving them to the next stage
which might be the first three months of engagement
and then ongoing and then renewals.
That's usually the area the customer success manager
spends time on and it depends on the volume of your business
but you might have, you know, like a high touch
or a high volume, low touch model.
Or you can have a low volume, high touch model
depending on the price point,
you can have dedicated CSMs per each account
or you might have a kind of a rotating per function
or one group of customer success managers
just do activation or onboarding.
But that is what CSM stands for.
It is a relatively new skillset,
a new area for a lot of companies,
it's been around in SaaS for a while,
software as a service, but new in other industries,
but it's catching on because it just makes sense.
They are a revenue generating department,
usually monitor their churn and their ability to activate
and get people retained in upsell,
that's another opportunity.
But that is what CSM stands for.
So quick recap.
Sales development rep does inbound qualifying.
Business development rep does outbound pipeline generation
or opportunity generation.
Number three, account exec, these are the "closers".
And number four, customer success manager.
These are the people who are responsible for
onboarding and managing the customer experience.
So as I mentioned in the beginning of this episode,
I wanna share with you an exclusive resource,
below click the link it's called the Rocket Demo Builder.
It will help you double your win rates
or increase your win rates in half the time.
So click the link below to learn my nine box model
for following a prospect or a buyer through sales process
that's allowed me to generate
tens of millions of dollars in revenue.
Personally, as a salesperson,
it's what I still use all the time.
If I'm doing any call that kinda looks like a sales call,
I pull out my Rocket Demo Builder
and I follow the exact same model
that I'm gonna give to you guys.
So click the link below to download your copy.
And if you like this video,
please click the like button, subscribe to my channel
and please, please let me know below in the comments
what is the number one thing you took away?
What did you like the most?
What is gonna have the biggest impact on your life?
That would be a real treat for you.
Leave that below and as for usual,
I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life,
go even bigger and a bigger business,
dream big, build an empire and I'll see you next Monday.
(upbeat music)