Jimmy and Cory dig deep into actionable tactics to develop and manage sales development managers, a topic that so many companies get wrong. If you have SDR/BDR managers in your org or if you aspire to be one day, dig into this episode for some takeaways you can put into place today!
Jimmy and Cory dig deep into actionable tactics to develop and manage sales development managers, a topic that so many companies get wrong. If you have SDR/BDR managers in your org or if you aspire to be one day, dig into this episode for some takeaways you can put into place today!
Welcome to the sales management podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, coach, crm co-founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. Got a special show for you today. We're going to talk about senior leadership inside the sales development function and I've got Jimmy Chen, director of sales development, over on boy with me today and you should see his background. It holds a special place in my heart growing up. I just watched King of the Hill. You've got the alley there, boom hour, and the boys are standing out there drinking some beers in the alley. They're not there, but your heads right in front of where they'd be.
Speaker 2:Yep, that's what they would say.
Speaker 1:Yep, I love you. Jimmy. How are you?
Speaker 2:Hey, I'm doing well, Corey. Thanks for having me here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so yeah, I think there's not a lot of content out there about managing managers inside the sales development function, so I think there's a few different lenses to look at this through. So if somebody is a chief revenue officer, somebody in senior leadership, how can they take away some things from our conversation data gut check where they're at in their war? Or if somebody is an aspiring second line manager, or even somebody that's still an individual contributor wants to get their Sunday, it'd be great to just learn some lessons from you. So I think, as we kick it off, I'll leave it a little bit open-ended. What are some of the biggest takeaways that you've learned from managing managers?
Speaker 2:Yeah, first and foremost it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:You have the opportunity to develop the next generation of leaders in an organization and I think the pace of growth within the sales development leadership realm, particularly over the last couple of years, have just been absolutely fantastic to see.
Speaker 2:I've seen so many new SDR leaders at a director level and higher be appointed, which I didn't see maybe four or five years ago when I was first starting this thing. But managing managers is really interesting because a lot of it is about building cadences. It's about setting the right vision for the organization and then subsequently identifying the specific areas that each manager needs in order to be successful. I wish there was a simple playbook to say hey, if you do this, all of your SDR managers are going to be totally successful. And then, of course, from a higher level, from the perspective of a VP of sales or a CRO, it's understanding that the experience that each manager brings and the enablement around that manager so the structure of the organization, the go-to-market motion, how well it's defined is going to be a huge driver of whether or not they're successful. And naturally they're immediate manager of helping them build a lot of those skill sets out to support their BDRs.
Speaker 1:So it sounds like there's a big piece here where you're diagnosing and prioritizing what each individual manager can work on to have the biggest impact on their team.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I think the challenge that a lot of new managers run into is they think, oh, I'm going to do a quick managerial training and thus everything is going to be taught to me and at least I have a lay of the land in terms of what it is that I'm going to be able to do in order to be successful. And while there are a lot of curriculums out there, there's always the basic how to have great one-on-ones, driving feedback, leading with a vision and the like. I think what's really interesting, and one part of this that people need to pay a little bit more attention to, is understanding the individual and helping that person develop, because just because you tell them, for instance, you need to run effective one-on-ones here is how you do it doesn't necessarily mean that once they're live in practice, they're actually going to be able to do it Right. So the coaching element here, over time, the reinforcement and everything is going to be super, super important for them to be successful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so they're coming in here, and a lot of these folks didn't study management in college, right? Let me ask that question directly how many managers have you managed, and how many of them studied management in college?
Speaker 2:I don't think any.
Speaker 2:I think it's a really interesting ballpark when the number is probably zero. I wish that they did and I don't know how much of a carryover there would be directly. But of course, being familiar with the concepts, we look for comparables like leadership activities in school or other parts of the business right. Just their general leadership nature, I think, is a really strong way to start right. And then of course it's building a skill set, but yeah, none officially. I wish they had, I wish I had. Honestly, I would have loved to have seen what that would have been like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I was fortunate to have done that, and I think the interesting thing is there's just you've just got more tools in your toolbox that you don't have to learn, and everybody can learn them. They're all there, they all exist. The fascinating thing, though, is there's no two day business school out there. There's lots of two day boot camps, yes, but nobody's giving you degree programs and management in two days, and there's a reason for that, and it's because they would no longer be accredited institutions if they started doing that. Yeah, you just can't. There's no shortcuts, man. You just can't do it immediately.
Speaker 2:That's right. I mean, again, it's a lot of practice and reinforcement, right. And I think the challenge I mentioned earlier is that everyone thinks that there's a big list of skills that they can just take a look at and work on asynchronously. But you know, at the end of the day you need the guidance and mentorship of someone that's experienced to diagnose that and better understand, whether it's communication styles, whether it's your ability to work cross functionally, whether it's your ability to you know influence without authority, which I think is a big one.
Speaker 1:That's huge, especially when you're in sales development, because you've got the sales team and you've got the marketing team and you don't have authority over any of them, right?
Speaker 2:Neither, yeah, and if anything, you know, I hate to say this, but the perception of a lot of senior leaders is that sales development is not yet at the place where it has that influence right. I mean, I think it is unfortunately, and I don't think just undeservedly so, sort of seen as a little brother, little sister function to one of the two, and I think over time we're probably going to see a, you know, self led sales development program. But I think that's far and few in between.
Speaker 1:I've heard arguments that marketing should be on your sales development. I don't support those arguments. I don't not support those arguments. I'm just stating that I've heard that marketing on your sales development.
Speaker 2:So are you saying that the marketing team reports up to sales development?
Speaker 1:Well, so here's the argument, and I think this is a. This is a fun one. Again, marketing people don't come at me. I mean you can. That'd be kind of fun. Actually, maybe we could debate this. It would that be. This would be a fun debate with some some marketing systems skills. So here's the. Here's the argument. I think it's.
Speaker 1:Chris Biel and Ryan Reiser always say that the list is the strategy. And if the list is the strategy, meaning that and this, this doesn't necessarily hold if you're super transactional and super SMB, but if you're selling mid-market, if you're selling enterprise, you should be able to get a list of the companies that should buy your product. Your ideal target market, like the target target market. If we're, if we're talking darts, we're talking the red circle and maybe the green circle, the bull's eye, sure, sure. And if you know what that is, then the question becomes how do you get in front of those folks?
Speaker 1:And obviously there's lots of things you can do. You can run digital campaigns, you can do events, you can do cold calls, you can run email campaigns, you can do all these different things. But in a world where you've got marketing teams using marketing automation tools and sales development teams using sales engagement tools, which are often used in similar ways. And then you've got digital ads being run. Are they run against the same people we're calling, are they not? What about the same people we're emailing? It seems like there's not as much coordination there as there could be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that's the big challenge, right, when you think about a sort of a high level issue that always comes up between sales and marketing.
Speaker 2:It's exactly the coordination of efforts, right? There's this perspective on the sales development side that marketing is doing whatever marketing is doing and marketing is saying that the sales development team isn't doing what they should be doing at times, which is why, you know, abm, abx has been so popular over the last couple of years. And the question becomes who owns that motion? Right, and you know whether or not there's like a singular person to coordinate all the plays and activities. There's a perspective that it could be owned by marketing. There's also a perspective where it should be a truly joint, cross functional effort, right, to coordinate those activities. So I don't know if there necessarily needs to be like a. You know, simple, if you do this, this, everything is going to be successful, because we're talking about the nature of alignment, which kind of goes back to one of the many managerial skills that one needs to have at a senior level right, which is the ability to influence without authority or well cross functionally with their peers right.
Speaker 1:Give me a couple of examples there. So influence without authority. Tell me about a time where you've seen it go right and tell me about a time where you've seen it go wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think influence without authority is really interesting because there's a really great book called influence without authority by Dr Richard Cohen, who's a professor at.
Speaker 2:Babson and he talks about the mutual alignment of strategies and interests, right? So a good example of this could be something as simple as getting from a BDR example, getting AEs to put down close loss reasons after they close out an opportunity. Right, from the perspective of the BDR leader it's one they're probably being paid for it and they wanted to better understand why they potentially aren't being paid for it. But a higher level understanding here is perhaps getting alignment with the account executive leaders saying that, hey, like, by putting in this information, we're able to get feedback and understand what's happening or not, so that we're continually recalibrating around this.
Speaker 2:Right, and the influence without authority there is helping that AE leader see that in doing what you're suggesting actually is beneficial to their interests as well, right, so that both teams can get what they want. And on the BDR management side, it's getting that feedback that's critical to better understanding what's happening in the field, because sometimes they don't have that line of sight. And then for the AE leadership it's an opportunity and invitation really for them to participate in sort of the BDR go to market motion as well as maybe more selfishly, potentially get better qualified opportunities, right, so it's really helping people see the win right, rather than trying to convince or manipulate people to do something that they don't want to do. And I think that's the really big difference, because when I say that out loud, without qualifying, sometimes that's what it comes off as.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you got it. What's in it for them? And then, in this example, I mean, the product team wants to see that too. Hey, you built this product, we introduced it to somebody and they didn't want it.
Speaker 2:Yep exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1:It seems like a useful thing to know. That's interesting, yeah. And the other thing that's hanging with me, based on something you said earlier, which is getting the managers ready to become great managers how do you start that earlier, before you even promote someone into management? See, I've got somebody. They seem high potential, they come to work every day, they've got a good attitude, they're good to work with, they do their job, they're accountable and they're in an individual contributor role. You see them as having management potential. What are some things that you can get them doing now to develop that skill set, so they're not starting from scratch when they get the nod to go, get in the motion?
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. This is probably a much longer topic, but I have sort of this maturity model I think about of SDR, leadership development, and it starts off with the IAC transitioning to some sort of team, lead as role, team lead to manager, manager to senior manager, whatever that means that your company and so forth, and I can go through it later. But to answer your question directly about first identifying the person that would be really good at management typically, you would think about what is the perception of this person among their team. Are they dependable? Are they bought in to helping other people succeed? Can they have some sort of demonstrable record of success? Because naturally we can't promote someone to be a leader if they haven't demonstrated that they can do the job.
Speaker 2:And the second part of your question is how do you actually help this person prepare? I think, first and foremost, it's the recognition and the confirmation that that's actually what they want to do. So recognition on the part of the rep of understanding okay, well, I am doing these things now as a rep, as an IC, and this is the impact that I'm having on other people, and I like having that impact on other people. I want to help them generally and that I understand that this is something that's really different from becoming an account executive, carrying a quota and the like. So they have to know what the role actually is. And then the management side how a person would help them kind of better develop these skills is really doing a diagnosis of what it is that they're good at from their current role, that they can start taking manager elements, so owning perhaps a process of some sort. So in the example of a potential BDR, let's say that they're really good at cold calling, like they're a cold calling feed, right.
Speaker 1:Machine, exactly Machine.
Speaker 2:They just are super good. And super good not just in the fact that they probably make a lot of calls, but that they're very strategic with their calls.
Speaker 1:They can have conversations with adults about business problems.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, exactly Right. Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Helping elevate their standing in some ways, right, has two pieces of impact. The first is it gives them credibility to their peers, right, that this person is on this track. That's trying to help them in the event that they actually transition to a team leader or manager. And then the second is they actually get practice doing it to again confirm or deny that they actually wanna do both and over the course of I don't know what is often six to nine months, they go through this journey of first living the motion a little bit. So maybe we start running team meetings and seeing what that's like.
Speaker 1:And this is as a team lead. As an IC slash team lead, I can talk about the team lead thing in a sec. Oh, so this is still as an IC, so you're having someone even run the team meetings, as they're still in the IC role.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah. I mean, it's like an hour a week, or not like 30 minutes a week, like two hours a month? It's not that big of a time. But what you're really looking for is are they just showing up and doing it, or are they putting in the time to be very thoughtfully? Very considerate about what they're doing right.
Speaker 2:It's like your role as a manager. Before you even bestow upon them something different, you wanna see whether or not they're putting skin in the game here. Skin in the game here means that they're volunteering their time to help other people, that they've thought about what it is that they're doing, whether they're pulling a report and sharing sharing what they did with their peers whether it's running a team meeting and being thoughtful about how messages are being communicated, et cetera. It's not just show up in play, right.
Speaker 1:So what you're really doing is de-risking the interview process, because if you interviewed someone off the street, you'd ask them a question or two and you'd have to gauge their ability to do this based on their responses. But in this case, you're actually observing it over an extended period of time.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's right, that's right. And then at some point, if a team lead position is available and every organization is quite different with what team lead actually means for me, I typically like to have people that have like a half quota, like a reduced quota, and ownership of some sort of formal managerial practice, so that could be running a role play of sorts. Maybe they do call coaching for a few hours, right, because we're very good about blocking our time. So how do you just change some of those blocks for something else, right? And then after I don't know what is six months of doing, six to nine months of doing this, naturally we time that with an official sort of promotion interview for a managerial role, and over those course of those six to nine months, I'll have all the notes to better understand what are they good at, what are they not good at? Right, and from a developmental perspective, which is your original question, right, of how do you actually help them form One, it's getting them to do part of the work so that they can kind of kind of live in and feel it. But then there's also a curriculum in place, right, thinking about how do they actually develop that wider scope of what they need to do in order to be a leader, not necessarily just a manager. So I expect over that six to nine months, that they would be taught how to effectively use all of our technology stack.
Speaker 2:Right, because not everyone knows everything intuitively, things like reporting, things like working cross-functionally with people. Right, it's about showing up as a manager and the credibility around that, because they have to overcome a big hurdle. And then, on the personal development side, it's how they manage themselves and their time. It's understanding their why in taking this role, helping them start to define their managerial style, helping them understand their communication style. Right over that period of time. And from that point, as they're a team lead, they're doing all this development, they're owning some processes. It should feel very natural that they move on to a full managerial role and naturally they still need to interview for it and then they make that transition to be a full-time manager.
Speaker 1:So you obviously know this stuff, insider. Now you just gave a very concise, detailed explanation of it. Do you have a formal I think he said curriculum? Do you have a formal curriculum that you use, that you have these folks follow?
Speaker 2:So I actually stole this curriculum from this guy named Chris Pham and he wrote a book way back in the day when he was working at MuleSoft called like oh my gosh, it's like revenue growth 10x your pipeline.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know, chris, it's the one with the unicorn on the front of it.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's the one, and I bought the book. When I first started, I reached out to Chris and Chris actually shared with me his curriculum. He called it the Pham BA because his last name is Pham and it's an MBA. I thought it was frickin' brilliant.
Speaker 1:That's cool.
Speaker 2:And part of it, the way that he structured it and I really liked this is like it's drawing inspiration from outside leadership, so like getting people to read books about, like Wooden and like the Sir Alex Ferguson one, like team of teams, et cetera. And then there's also this piece where it's guided development based on HBR articles, so like managing yourself, managing others, et cetera. And I've actually taken quite a lot of that into how I coach my managers and give them basic curriculum, because the philosophy is the same Before you manage other people, you need to manage yourself and have a very strong sense of self, who you are, your rationale for doing all these things and then subsequently understanding what is the change or what is the thing that you're actually trying to do as a manager. Right, and it can't just be I don't wanna be a rep anymore, I don't wanna hold a quota Like good luck with that, because you still have a quota.
Speaker 2:It's just a multiple times bigger than your current quota All right things like that and it's harder?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's definitely harder.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I always tell people I say I know this isn't what you all wanna hear, but SDR jobs is not the hardest job in sales. There's a lot of jobs harder. It's just the job that you've had that's been the hardest job that you've had so far. Yeah, managing the if you believe it's the hardest job in sales, and managing the person that's doing the hardest job in sales and being pulled aside and up and down, that's hard. So here's the next thing I wanna dig into so who owns the development of this person? So you're talking about all these things that you're doing. Yeah, who owns that?
Speaker 2:the ideal situation or like what actually happens here today.
Speaker 1:Let's walk me through both because if nobody, owns it. It's not going to happen and it's going to get delayed. If people are getting frustrated, they're going to say you promised me the world and all I got was Venus.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's still pretty good, but hey.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but nobody lives on Venus. Elon doesn't even want to go to Venus. He owns going to Mars.
Speaker 2:So I think it depends. I'm glad that you clarified what you were alluding to when you said owning this. I think there's a part of this, of like running the curriculum that I think should be owned by sales enablement, revenue enablement. The challenge is that managerial development from sales enablement is just something that doesn't really happen until you're a much farther along organization.
Speaker 1:It rarely ever happens.
Speaker 2:Yeah, possibly I haven't actually worked at a public tech company, so I wouldn't know. I imagine I hope that they have it, but oftentimes it's like part of a corporate LND program, which is really really big but still helpful of all the basics.
Speaker 1:That's what happens. Is that it's because I've worked with tons of these companies and what ends up happening is, if they have a manager program, it gets diluted down to. We need something for all managers.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's exactly it. It's terrible. I'm glad that they have something rather than nothing, but it's nothing there.
Speaker 1:But if you're managing 8 MIT back in engineers, then they're all really really good at coding, because the funny thing about engineering teams is like, okay, so you have a bunch of people that are 30. They've got 20 years of experience. Sure, if you've got BDRs that are well, most BDRs aren't 30, whatever, we're not going to get an age, because I know that from school. Whatever You're going to have BDRs have like one or two years of experience and they haven't been BDRs since they're 10. And so the management structure and the folks that are getting moved into those roles, it's just, it's so different. And if you don't have role specialized management training for your companies, you're going to be in toast. And, by the way, if you want sale specific coaching training for your team, I've got a free course for you on coaching, Email, free stuff at coachcrmcom, free stuff at coachcrmcom, and I'll give that course over to you, all right. So back to yeah, that was my ad my all free stuff.
Speaker 2:Was it free stuff at coachcrmcom?
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's go.
Speaker 2:I sent you an email after this.
Speaker 1:I said no long ads. I didn't say no ads, that's the trick, no plans. Here's the, here's the question then. So enablement should own it what actually happens. Well, yeah, so enablement should own it.
Speaker 2:What actually happens is like nothing, nothing ever really happens, right? I think what happens day to day is like they just say figure it out, and then they, you know, interview. And actually it's really interesting that most people interviewing SDR managers don't really know what to interview for SDR managers. So they interview for all the general stuff, right? So the SDR manager? You know, I don't know if it's because a lot of CROs VPs don't have the tactical experience to determine whether or not they're good at these things, and I don't know how, how people think about it, but I find it to be very different because, you know, I've spoken to a lot of sales leaders in the past and the way that they think about it is like well, is this person like basically a junior SMB, a manager? And the answers no it's.
Speaker 1:It's kind of a different role Because of way different.
Speaker 2:But you know the the question you asked about. You know who should own it. I mean, what will end up happening is, if you happen to have like a second line leader that cares about this topic whether it's a second line SDR leader or a sales development oriented sales leader then they'll put focus on this. I don't know how structured that's going to be, unfortunately, and a lot of that is, you know, not drawn from experience. I don't think which I think is is a bit of a is a bit of a shame.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, because the less experience someone has, they can still do it. They just need a stronger curriculum, and a stronger curriculum takes a lot of time from someone with experience.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's, that's exactly it, and I think part of it is like it's the nuance of how this actually works. So, like when you asked me earlier, give me a very specific example about influence without authority. That's a. The example I gave you about getting AE leaders to get their AE supporting close loss reasons right, is a very specific SDR leadership issue. Any SDR leader on the call will probably know exactly what I'm talking about. What they've ran into right.
Speaker 2:It's like working with marketing, for instance. If you don't work on the marketing team on, you know, like MQL criteria right, that's always a big one. Or promotion eligibility for BDRs to AEs, for instance, like things like that, there's always topics that will always come up and how you handle that. So it's yeah, it's kind of hodgepodge. I think there's a market for this.
Speaker 2:So I don't know if you ever want to expand into this, but coaching SDR leadership like that's a high point of leverage. I just don't think it's heavily invested. I think coaching sales leaders as a whole, like you know, managers, frontline managers, et cetera I think there's a lot of work that just needs to be done, because a lot of people are giving the keys to the castle, so to speak, and they are told to figure it out and a lot of it is learned by doing and some people will do that fantastically right, like they just learn, but not everyone does that and there's obviously tradeoffs when you have the learn by doing, types that are successful, but all of the ones that need careful considerations not actually getting that same level.
Speaker 1:Well, it's funny because you look at all the other high paid professions out there accounting law, medicine, finance none of those people learn by doing. They learn by rigorous study and then careful application, along with ongoing professional development. Yes, maybe not finance. Well, I guess, if you've been regulated, all these people have continuing education requirements.
Speaker 2:Generally. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1:Hests, classes, conferences, and it's not the sales conferences that we go to, where it's vendors talking about their products and then we drink. So I think that there's there's a room for a lot of rigor. And if you want that free coaching course, everybody has free stuff at coachsdramcom. So you've got somebody. Now we've, we've developed them as a team lead. They're ready to become a manager. Now what's the thing that happens differently once they've been anointed a manager? How do you make that? That specific shift?
Speaker 2:Such a good question because, you know, we're we're taking the example of a person that's in-house being promoted from a rep to a manager and there's a huge hill to climb right. So, from the perspective of them, of the leader that promoted this manager, there's a lot of diligence that this person needs to have, like the the, the, the, the, the, the let's call them director, right, the director, for now. The first is really helping them control their optics because now that they're a manager, is this oh, you're a manager now. Hey, you know it's, it's not that right. Like the data, they're a manager. They need to be treated as a manager by all their equal peers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Cause they used to be. They used to be sitting next to this person. That's right. I was on their team, that's. That's just interesting spots. Now, bigger companies can deal with that, they can move them around, and so it's shuffle. But if you're smaller, you're you're taking on the team that used to be it's size as well.
Speaker 2:The way that and I'm not saying this is the best way to do it, but the way that I've helped people overcome this is I visibly defer to them on things and I, as the director, tell all my cross functional partners, all the AE leaderships that they work with, et cetera, that hey, like this person is now a manager and this is in their scope and they should deal with, deal with it, and that I direct, redirect people to them.
Speaker 1:So you don't let people go over their head. No, no, no.
Speaker 2:Cause here's, here's this is the.
Speaker 1:I remember this phrase from when I was younger, cause my friends would say stuff like you know, when I was in my early twenties, people like oh yeah, tom's my boss, but Greg's my real boss, yeah, no. You've heard phrases like this where they're like oh yeah, that technically. And then all of a sudden you end with this person that's, that's basically Tom Smykowski, who's just the guy from office space that talks to the engineer, so the customers don't have to. And then they realized that what would you say you do here? He doesn't do anything Exactly.
Speaker 2:And you don't want to be that person cause.
Speaker 1:That's a dead end career.
Speaker 2:Yup.
Speaker 1:It's legitimizing the role. Yeah, so you're pushing people back. So people come to you and they're like hey, jimmy, big boss man. You know, that's what they used to call me at this one company. It was pretty funny. Like, hey, big boss man, what a I'm also gigantic. So that's part of it. I'm six, six. I used to be two, 65, recently two, 15. Oh wow.
Speaker 2:Don't do ozympic.
Speaker 1:Just eat less and do intermittent fasting.
Speaker 2:That's my no idea what that is, but I am intermittent fasting and I am trying to eat right, so maybe yeah. Maybe you can add that into the email and the free stuff at coach CRMcom.
Speaker 1:It was a big, big drug that people are taking. It's diabetes drug and I think it's great for people that need it.
Speaker 2:But like if you just want to lose weight, like just eat less and do intermittent fasting.
Speaker 1:Don't need medicine, yeah. So move more. The okay. So you got the person that is coming to you around, the manner you push him back down. Now you're you're reinforcing that managers authority, which is awesome.
Speaker 2:That's right. So important, so important.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So what I also do is like I you know, at least for the first couple of months Also not just redirect people, but also defer to this person, Right? So, for instance, someone you know, the CRO, asked me so what's happening here in this team? I'm like, oh, let me go to so and so and get you an answer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're getting some face time with the CRO right, cause that's important too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, cause nobody likes the boss that's always blocking them from power.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I like I don't. I don't care, you can talk to my boss, I don't need to talk to my boss. The less I talk to my boss, sometimes honestly, the better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's confidence.
Speaker 2:So so that that's number one, right. It's like legitimizing this person and their authority. The second is helping them feel like they're now the manager, and that means things like helping them understand communication with their peers, former peers, understanding equal level communication, upward communication, et cetera. Things like how they come off, as it's super important because a lot of people, because management is kind of a soft skill, I mean, it's a hard skill but also a soft skill, right and it's a lot about people relationship community and it's more of a soft skill than an individual contributor.
Speaker 1:Like it's like flipped. It was in ICs like 80% hard, 20% soft and then it flips. And by the way, I mean heart. Jimmy and I are not talking about hard as difficult. We're talking about hard skills and soft skills, hard skills being things that you do, soft skills being more how you're perceived and how you navigate organizations.
Speaker 2:I mean, the hardest skill a manager can do is like build a dashboard or something. Yeah, pull some data.
Speaker 1:Like you don't even do that Well. So the funny thing with that is that and that turns into a soft skill, because it's how good are you negotiating with sales ops?
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, exactly, exactly exactly, and the influence without authority thing right Kind of comes out differently, it's like how do?
Speaker 2:you get people to do stuff for you right and reprioritize, et cetera. But the one thing actually that I wanna share here for anyone that's listening, that's a rep becoming a manager for the first time at least as a manager for the first time is this phenomenon I call the super rep. Like when people are uncomfortable, they tend to do what they're really, really comfortable with. It's like this self-protectionist, you know mechanism, and super rep is like why don't I just call with the reps for the next six hours or something right? And that's probably the most counterproductive thing that a manager can do in my opinion, and I think there's room for it.
Speaker 2:when it's a morale thing, it's hard of a spiff or whatever, but, like, as a manager, you can't do their job for them, right? I think that's the biggest thing about this you can't do their job for them and it's not like hey, look at me, everyone, this is how I do it and that's how you should do it. I think that's really counterproductive for the culture. Your role as a manager formally is to support, enable, empower these people so that they can do their best job. The moment that you do something for them or you show them how it's done and whatnot, without very clear parameters, is failing.
Speaker 2:And a lot of new men, every single new manager that I've ever coached or worked with or whatnot they all run into fall into this trap. They're like well, they don't see me as a credible leader unless I can do their job better than they can. Well, guess what? They don't care, it's a fun thing. But that's not the culture that you wanna create, that my boss is better than me, than everything, right? It's that you wanna create a culture where my boss is gonna help me get to my own level of personal success that's higher than what it is before right. And doing things like that to just show off or make yourself feel comfortable, is completely counter generally to the culture that I like to create with people. And I don't actually don't know if you know that's the best use of time. Like, if you're spending a couple of hours a call, why don't you spend a couple of hours listening to them calling and giving them feedback?
Speaker 1:The coach yeah, exactly, well, you nailed it. It's about people do other people's jobs for them to make themselves feel more comfortable. Yes, yeah, it's a self-esteem building exercise for somebody and you can't do that, that's right. It's not, and it's not gonna impress him because you're okay. So here's what's gonna happen. So let's yeah. Since we're talking about sales development, let's take cold calls, for example. So if I'm the newly appointed sales development manager and I go and I make cold calls, one of a few things is gonna happen, maybe one. I won't do a great job and they'll be like Core is not even good at this. Why is he my boss? Or I do an amazing job and they're like well, of course, he's way better than me. He's the boss. I could never do that good. How is either one of those things productive? I think that's what you're saying, yeah.
Speaker 2:And also like why are you well like, why are you doing that at all?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly Cause I'm sitting here with Jimmy. If I'm sitting here with Jimmy making cold calls in a conference room somewhere and Lisa's sitting out there struggling to figure out how to get a cadence billet, then Lisa's sitting there like why is Corey doing someone else's job for them instead of coaching me on this thing?
Speaker 2:Or burning a list down, that couldn't you know. And what happens if the manager actually books a meeting, then there's like a whole conflict of interest or not conflict of interest, but there's like a ethical thing here of like, well, who does this meeting go to?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I just take something away from someone else. Right? Do I need to do this for everyone?
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, yeah, like it's Harry.
Speaker 2:Why? You know.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah, man. And I think the other piece along these lines is that managers end up doing more work, and every time I see someone like I'm so busy I don't have time to coach, it's like cool, I'll tell you. If anybody out here has worked with me, you know what I'm about to say Show me your calendar. Oh yeah, my number one coaching move, when I'm ever coaching any managers, is I say show me your calendar. And if they're complaining about somebody on their team, it's like show me their calendar. And I look at their calendar and I'd say 10% of the time I'm super impressed I've done this. Was it Tuesday? So it's been last week I did five or six times last week probably saw 15 calendars. I saw one that I liked. The rest of them were disgusting. Yeah, like how is this person busy? Oh my God, doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 2:Oh, preaching to the choir here, so kind of an aside, but I do the same thing, right? I talked about time.
Speaker 1:It's the sales management podcast. We do asides all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Run with it.
Speaker 2:It's crazy because the first thing I think a new manager does is fill up their calendars with completely random shit, and a lot of it has no business value and it's just them thinking about what the managerial role actually means, which is code for sitting at meetings and stuff.
Speaker 2:And I felt victim for this for a very long time, candidly. I mean different organizations, different situations, et cetera. But if you don't have, at least I wanna say, an average of 10 to 15 hours a week direct as an frontline manager, interfacing with your reps, managing or doing something related to coaching, so, for instance, you have like, of those 15 hours, you have like three or four hours where you're reading their emails or reviewing their calls not live in it, because that's a lot right, then there's something that needs to be reassessed there.
Speaker 2:Because, you have 40 hours a week and you're spending 25% of the time less than 25% of the time actually coaching. What's the point of you being in the role you know?
Speaker 1:Like how many?
Speaker 2:alignment meanings do you truly need and I think the caveat here, of course, right is this is applicable to a team Maybe there's a few more managers, more than just one manager. You're not a single manager shop right, where you have more defined responsibilities. I do want to be very clear that there's a slight difference here, because you know, when you're an early stage, startup, for instance, or where situations where you're the only SDR manager or one of two and there's a lot of other things going on, you end up unfortunately having to take on a lot more.
Speaker 1:But if you're the only SDR manager and you work 40 hours a week, you're going to get smoked.
Speaker 2:It's just not going to work. Yeah, unfortunately, that's also the reality. So you have a choice.
Speaker 1:You can go work at a bigger company and work 40 hours a week and have tons of support and structure and process around you. Or if you want to be the person that influences, that builds it and gets more executive level of space time, then you work at a smaller company and bang out 60 and build your career, your choice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, I think, regardless of the number of hours that people are quoting, I'd still think at least 25% of that, or at least 10 to 15 hours a week, should be directly interfacing with your team and driving your team forward in terms of development, in terms of attainment and like right, because, like your team is the nature of BDR teams right, they are learning the job, learning how to work for the first time, if that's that right. So there is an element here where you're expecting incremental progress over time, and that's something that's very unique about the BDR leadership role because of the types of people that you work with.
Speaker 1:Right, often new to sales as a whole, new to tech, new to you know SaaS and stuff in the case of a SaaS business, so walk me through how that differentiates remote versus in the office, because I know you guys are Envoy, you're into office tech, so someone's in the office, someone's remote. What are some considerations to have here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think your cadence may look a little bit different depending on the structure of your business. So, if you have a hybrid sort of business, right, there's more in-person time where you'll have, you know, live coaching sessions, whether that's formal or informal. Maybe you do like call blocks and across the team and it's not, you know, distributed. It's distributed more broadly across the team versus just one person Just having specific weekly one-on-ones. That is more of like a pipeline review and then subsequently a developmental one where it's a you know the way that I recommend it is like bi-weekly, so like one it's. You switch week over week, so one week is like career development and then the next week is like specific coaching, case study, focus time, and then there's the ad hoc coaching that happens throughout the course of the week through your interactions, right. So that's in-person hybrid right.
Speaker 2:If it's remote, I think you can facilitate a lot of the same movements. But it's having more documentation around stuff. So it's like more structure around what you're doing versus what you're not doing. So things like you know an email account review, for instance, where you go through with the rep and you walk through their specific account and you know figure out how to really get in there. If you're going for a more account-based motion, maybe it's a territory review over time, maybe it's specific calls, maybe it's objections that you're running into, maybe it's email writing, maybe it's brainstorming new strategies, right? So you know, I mean, ai is a big topic here and I don't want to get into AI at all today, but thinking about how to best use that, for instance.
Speaker 1:AI safe space.
Speaker 2:Oh God, I mean, I love AI. I think I just need to really wrap my hands around it. But maybe another time.
Speaker 1:What is it? Yeah, we don't have enough time for that. The best I got to tell you this. It was funny. My buddy, this guy I'm really good friends with now. I met him years ago and he was on a panel at this event and like 400 people in the audience. The moderator says and I hadn't met him, I want to talk to him afterwards. Like we go on vacations together. Now, like this moment became made us friends. And the guy goes what is AI? Oh gosh. He looks at the panelist and he says oh, that's easy. It's a two character domain extension that doubles your valuation with VCs.
Speaker 2:Not anymore.
Speaker 1:I lost it. That was the funniest thing ever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're getting rid of it. The AIs, the IOs, like what was an IO?
Speaker 1:Well, I wrote a song about this.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, oh God, old McDonald had a startup Dot AI, dot LY, dot IO and on that startup he had some employees Dot AI, dot LY, dot IO. I always say if my mom thinks the domain extension is a virus, then it shouldn't be a company name Dot IO, like. Are they trying to like take my credit card information? Oh man, that's clear. All right, we got me and Tom's flying today. All right, we got 12 minutes, 10, 12 minutes left. I want to talk about the final step, which is when we go from manager to second line manager, which could be a director, it could be vice president, depending on how big your company is. And I think the big thing for me here is that when you're a front line manager, there's the temptation and a lot of people do go down and do the person's job for them, and I know that's not what should happen, but it can happen. You can't do that if you're two levels above the person. So how do we take this manager and get them ready to be a director of UP?
Speaker 2:So it's a very good question and actually a topic of conversation I've been having with so many PR managers over the last couple of years, because there's no clearly defined path. So here are some of the ways that you know it could happen for people and then I can talk about, you know, exit criteria from a manager to a director or director like more formally.
Speaker 1:I love that you say exit criteria, Like it's you've got. You have such a formal process mind around this. This is awesome, Thanks.
Speaker 2:Well, my microphone just went out, I hope you can still hear me. Oh, this is great. So I think the way that it works right now for BDR managers and move to directors, there's a couple of pathways. One is at your current company, you demonstrate business level, thinking. So where you're able to do that is think bigger than just a BDR management team, but thinking about what does it mean, the implications of whatever it is you do, how you are driven to make decisions by the overall business.
Speaker 2:So what does this mean in terms of actual clothes on revenue? And I think every BDR manager is smart enough to say that out loud, but I don't get the sense that they actually know what this actually means, right? And because I hear this a lot, oh well, it drives clothes on revenue I'm like okay, how, what is this? Why, how did you come to this decision? How this driving more clothes on revenue actually impact the decisions that you're making and how are you optimizing for that? And a big part of it is sometimes these decisions maybe counter to your personal interests. So, for instance, that might mean holding your BDR team to a higher qualification standard, right? This is also another big topic for SDR managers, right? Self policing. How do you make sure that the stuff that you're sending over the fence for lack of better words is actually qualified opportunities? Maybe you don't have a definition you got to find a definition for it but holding that greater standard is a key indicator to say that this person is thinking about this the right way.
Speaker 1:Is that can become political somewhere. Right, you got two days left in a month Like, hey, how is this? I want to get this thing over.
Speaker 2:But see, that's the thing Like when the moment that someone thinks it's political or anything, any sort of self-interest, means that they're not thinking in the best interest for the business, right. If you were a CEO, how would you tell yourself to act? And that's always really guided me, right. It's like, well, my CEO or myself I see a wouldn't want me to bicker about these things. I'll voice the. You know the concern. But understanding where the business is and find out where we're going, these are the things that have to be, and it's helped me overcome a lot of periods of friction with internal stakeholders, et cetera. But it's thinking number one, most importantly, thinking about the business, thinking and acting in the best interest in the business, right, yeah.
Speaker 2:Number two is, you know ownership of your current role today, right, so being a really good manager. And if you can't be a good manager, it's hard to be a good director, because your role is to develop good managers, right, so you need to understand how to actually do that. It doesn't need to be perfect, but you need to be at least good at the role, because if you're not, you're going to struggle and your team is going to fail. Right, your managers that under you will fail. Because you need to think about how do you set them up for success, how do you be creating the vision for them to kind of cling onto as a, you know, continue to invest your careers and do their work Right? And then number three, really importantly, is cross functional relationships, right. So the unique role being an SDR leader you have to really know marketing and sales pretty well and ops Right. You can't just be an AE leader that's really good at you know getting your team to hit the number, which is really important, and I don't want to downplay that at all.
Speaker 2:But moving from a manager to a director, you don't necessarily need to know marketing it to a really finite level, right. So like if you were to ask me, like Jimmy, why don't you just do some? You know if they, if marketing needs help, I can step in and be dead Just by the level of exposure I've had at a very granular level to all the ops, to all the demand gen. All that right. And then on the sales side, I can at the very least manage leaders right. How do you replicate some of that and develop those skill sets right?
Speaker 2:So those are three big things, the pitfalls of this right, and actually how it also happens is like sometimes the business might not be ready to have a director level SDR leader. They just need someone to own the role. And that's a really difficult conversation to be had with BDR leaders, more so either in these smaller organizations, where they just are not at that scale yet, or really really big organizations where you don't actually get to do enough of the things beyond just managing people, right. So you need to find a happy medium somewhere in order to find those positions and develop that skill set right, or figure out a way to do it across your own organization. As a second line leader right. The role is quite different. You do even less, which sucks, because I'm a doer like a lot of other people that you know.
Speaker 2:Take on a sales role, manager role, etc. Right, and a lot of it is understanding. How do you, how do you allocate resources from the perspective of people and time right To drive a significant outcome and thinking more strategically, and strategically meaning not just doing what's in front of you, but looking at unconventional ways or other options and assessing, you know, how you're going to able to drive a specific outcome. To do that, whether that's you know, I'll give you an example. Whether it's changing your structure, for instance, like you know, reorging your team, maybe it's changing your emotion a little bit, maybe it's about leaflet, maybe it's all of these different considerations that you wouldn't necessarily be thinking about. That is understanding where the sales development sit in the greater go to market system, and having that perspective is very important right, yeah, and the perspective.
Speaker 1:I think there's. There's three things that I would want someone to really master, and above your thoughts on this is there's one just the qualitative piece around. How does it work to? Maybe a little more detailed than that is the process of specific, and I talk about this a lot in the podcast.
Speaker 1:I think four out of my last six guests have really got into right down your process specifically understand all the steps, all the tools, all the people, how everything interacts with each other, because if it's not written down, nobody actually knows it. And then the third piece is the financial model, which you alluded to a couple of times around knowing you know what, how much AR is this, you know? And then the activities to outcomes, sales math, as you, as you do all of that, and then what impact has on the business what your cost structure is, what actually cost of a team, what you get out of the team and things like this. So you've got the the high level qualitative piece, the process piece, and then the financial model quantitative piece. What are your thoughts on mastery around those three topics and what are of importance, or they're all important?
Speaker 2:I mean, I think it depends on what level of second line leader you are, so at the higher end of director, like, as you approach sort of the VP level. The third, which is like the financial model, is going to be much more important, right, because the assumption is that the first two have already been sort of figured out, but if you're a new director, you're probably going to lean on building that process and understanding what's going on and doing the job really well, right, and what the first one was around us. I'm sorry, I've forgotten.
Speaker 1:Just qualitative understanding. I know how, I know who's who in the zoo.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean that's also very important, right, but that I think that will come over time, just as you continue to ramp in the role yeah, we're seeing now as a trend, though, is that the third is probably the most important, given our macroeconomic situation and the market for BDR leadership today.
Speaker 1:The quantitative piece is important If anybody feels like you were passed by, if you didn't learn this in college, if you didn't get any formal education around financial model development or spreadsheet mastery. Email free stuff at coachcrmcom. I've got spreadsheets for salespeople just for you. You work with real CRM data to learn things like the lookups and pivot tables and all of the other types of functions that you'll need to manipulate sales data. Hit me up. Yeah Well, jimmy. No, we're running out of time. Any parting words or anything you want to plug today?
Speaker 2:No, nothing to plug. I'll reserve this space for another time. Maybe in the future I'll hit you up, but other than free stuff at coachcrmcom, which I'm now a big fan of, I don't have anything to plug, but I guess parting words for new leaders like you're not alone. I know it's a really tough time out there in 2023. The macroeconomic situation is definitely not helped, but part of it is. It forces us, as a function, to be better about all of the things that we talked about. How do you better understand your role in the business? How do you understand the system? How do you play a big part in that and thinking as an overall business? Those things will never change and those things will separate the best leaders from people that are not quite as good.
Speaker 1:That's what my high school basketball coach used to always say. Every day he'd say boys, we're here to get better today, and if you get better every single day, then you end up in this position. It's an amazing way to think about life. Here's I'll give you one one. Why is stage wisdom, advice, peace, content thing that I heard a long time ago is that if that's your mindset, then today is the best that you've ever been and it's the worst that you'll ever be If you continue to get better, jimmy. Thank you so much, jimmy Chen. Director of sales development envoy. I'm Corey Bray, host of the coach. Host of the sales management podcast. Co -founder of coach CRM. Check out free version coach CRM, coach CRMcom. We got a lot of things over there for you and like subscribe Apple Spotify sales management podcast. We'll see you next time.