How to Build a High-Performing BD Engine in 2026 with Danyal Cremerious

2026 is more competitive than ever… and it’s not slowing down. Everyone keeps saying “personalize your outreach.”

But AI made that easy. Which ironically made most “personalization” feel even more generic.

So now the real questions are:

Is AI replacing SDRs and BDRs?

What’s actually working in outbound right now?

And how do you build a BD engine that actually performs?

These are the questions leaders are trying to figure out every day.

I’m sitting down with Danyal Cremerius. He’s led and scaled outbound teams across Europe and the US, managed multi-region SDR orgs, and is now building and ramping a BD team from zero to performance.

We’re breaking down:

→ How to build a BD team from zero

→ What top performers actually do differently

→ What’s working in outbound in 2026

→ How AI is really impacting BD (not the LinkedIn version)

→ The tech stack behind high-performing teams

→ Metrics that actually matter vs vanity

→ BD + AE alignment and where it usually breaks

→ Europe vs US selling differences

If you’re:

• A founder trying to build pipeline

• A sales leader scaling a team

• A BD or SDR trying to break into top performance

You’ll want to be in this one.

Elite Talent Recruiting helps B2B SaaS leaders hire high performing Pre Sales and Post Sales talent when speed and quality actually matter. 

We are on a mission to prove Pre Sales and Post Sales teams are just as crucial to revenue as offensive linemen are to quarterbacks. 

They accelerate sales, fuel growth, and help SaaS companies win bigger deals faster. 

We build SaaS GTM teams by headhunting top Pre Sales and Post Sales talent and delivering hires in 35 days or less, including Sales Engineers, Solutions Consultants, Solutions Architects, Customer Success, and Technical Account Managers. 

If your team is stretched thin, specialized roles are sitting open too long, or you are scaling fast and need reliable recruiting support that actually moves the needle, we help you hire the kind of talent that drives growth, innovation, and customer success without wasting months in interview chaos.

Check out our website: https://elitetalentrecruiting.io/

Connect with Arvi directly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arvi-carkanji/ 

All other resources: https://linktr.ee/elitetalentrecruiting

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

All right. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Presales Unplug, the Leadership Playbook. I'm Arvi. I'm the founder of Elite Talent. I work with SaaS companies to hire top-tier pre-sales and post-sales talent. But today really isn't about me. Today, the show is about the leaders behind the go-to-market teams and the strategies that actually work in today's market. And I actually have a really special guest today, which I'm so excited about because he is the first one I brought on for this topic. And before we get into the guest, if this is your first time joining us, one quick note before we jump in, these conversations are live intentionally and on purposely unedited so that what you hear here is exactly how it happened. We stream it live, but you can also catch our replay on our podcast across all major platforms from Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or whatever you listen to. And of course, my only ask for this is if you get value from what we talk about here today, the conversations or any of our past guests, make sure to follow, subscribe, leave a review, or comment. I personally personally read every one of them. And of course, if there's any questions for the guests, make sure to comment whether it's live or afterwards. And if there's something I can't answer personally, I'll make sure to tag them so that they can give their value back to you. With that being said, today I'm super excited. Today I have Daniel, head of business development at Effic, uh, someone with a really strong track record in the business development space. And I'm so excited because we're going to dive into all the crazy questions that everybody has about business development today in 2026 with all the AI happening and you know what's working, what's not, and all that good stuff. And thanks for being here, Daniel. I'm very excited to have you dive into your story and of course our topic today.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

Thank you for having me, Arvi. I'm glad and very excited to be here. Thank you for the invite.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Yeah, absolutely. I'd love if you're obviously open to it. I'd love to understand a little bit about your story. You know, how did you even end up in this crazy world of business development? And of course, you know, to the leadership aspect of it.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Yeah. So I'm now over 10 years in sales and over 10 years in sales leadership, and need to say that it's similar to a couple of people that I got to know. I kind of got accidentally into sales when I was 28. Before that, I had a wrong picture of sales as being just ringing doorbells and putting stuff on people that they don't want to buy. And then I learned during a job in Germany as a working student what sales actually is, and I fell in love with it. And the leadership part, I need to say, I kind of always burned for leadership. I was a football coach also here in Germany for 12 years, um, coaching kids from five to 15-year-olds, and uh this was always a passion to me, so it was very logical to combine those two.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

I love that. How do you accidentally end up in sales?

SPEAKER_00 3:04

So I have been a working student, and in this department, it was called um sales corporations in terms of collaborations, partnerships, right? And I didn't have a proper picture out of this, I just applied because I wanted to have a job which supports me uh during my studies, and then I got to know about the details of sales, of funnel management, about pipeline, about creating landing pages, because this was a German energy supplier, and we collaborated with other companies to get to new target groups. And I was also able to support with a couple of partnerships and landing pages and go through the funnel, etc. I think the actual point was then to get to a job which was off sales afterwards again, which was in fulfillment management and e-commerce. And then I noticed what I actually missed and how much fun it was. And this was the click event in my life where I said, no, sales is the place to be to me.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Yeah, I love that. Honestly, I had the same connotation about sales before, in a way, getting into it is if you're I feel like if you're not in the sales world, and I think one of the things that we relate sales the most to is like car salesmen, and they have such a bad connotation. So even for me in the beginning, it was always like I don't want to be a salesperson, like that just sounds horrible. I don't want to make people buy things from me that they don't want to. And of course, as you start getting into this world, it's no, it's not that. You just help them make a decision to where they were actually trying to go, and you just have a completely different mindset around it.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

Exactly. And the big turning point that I noticed since well, a couple of years now is the movie Wolf of Wall Street. So so many young talents that I talked to were also how does it come that you want to work in sales, this movie? I mean, you I also clarify a couple of things, right? Because it's a lot of Hollywood, uh great movie entertaining. But this was a big turning point, I guess, for society as well.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Yeah, that is true. That is true. And uh, Daniel, if you're open to it, I I'm ready to just dive right into our questions and just get as much value as possible. Um, I want to start with where you're at right now, currently. You told me that you were building a BDR or an BDR and a uh SDR department from scratch. When you're doing something like that, what is like as you come in as a leader, what are like the top three things that you focus on to begin with?

SPEAKER_00 5:38

Yeah. It's first of all the talent part, it's the culture part, and then it's setting up the process to get the teams running in terms of being able to have the right tools, processes, to call out prospects, to have the call list. So that's the operational excellent part. But very important is in this case, for example, I came in as the first leader, and within a short period of time, we were 18 people that I worked with, SERs and BDRs initially. And it was a lot of coaching, coaching and building the culture, setting the right tone. And this was for me the most important and like the biggest part of all because most of the people that we hired didn't have any sales experience, and then you go from there, right, to ramp them and to bring quick success.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Yeah. So when you say they didn't have any sales experience, and are you evaluating them based on like personality communication skills, or what are your like top three things that you evaluate them in?

SPEAKER_00 6:39

Yeah. So I have a couple of traits, and I want to paint a picture here. You have a couple of traits and skills that you can evaluate. Is this person ambitious? Is this person how's the attitude, right? I want to have a positive attitude. Is this person coachable? And I want to put some emphasis on like the iceberg model that we know, right? Minzberg's iceberg model, where we say what's below the iceberg, below the surface at the iceberg, this is actually to me driving the long-term success. For instance, one question that I ask hereby is what makes you get up every morning early, out of bed, go to work, and earn money. Where do you want to go with this? And that's where I get a feeling also for culture fit and how is this person driven? The skills thing is the one thing. This is what you can teach, but to me, the attitude, the will, and the drive is very, very important.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Yeah, that is true. And it's, I mean, there's no way to sugarcoat it. Sales can be really hard, um, especially on the business development side. So I agree with you. I do think you need that hunger, that like really deep why um into you know where why they're doing what they're doing.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

I do believe you need to have a certain degree of hunger. I have seen people with mixed level of hunger, so especially similar, like you have it with athletes, right, throughout specific divisions.

SPEAKER_02 8:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:09

But well, basically, the hunger is the one very important deciding factor how far people will go, and will they stay a bit longer? Will they do some extra calls? Will they send some extra emails, put in some extra efforts to go the extra mile? This the typical slogan we say, typical quote, but there is really some truth behind that.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

Yeah, very true. Um, by the way, Daniel, what mistakes do you think most leaders make when they're trying to scale you know business development too early?

SPEAKER_00 8:39

It could be a couple of things. Well, let's assume here that the product side, the marketing side is set so far.

SPEAKER_02 8:46

Right.

SPEAKER_00 8:47

Very important is when you scale and you depend on quick results, you should always hire people with experience or at least a certain amount of people with experience who can also be role models because otherwise you end up in having slow motions at the end. That's very important. You should also have the right tools set and the right coaching, right? We come from, let's say, five people to say we scale up to 15 people or even to 35. You need to be capable of coaching and ramping everyone and setting those processes and playbooks up because otherwise this can lead to very quick frustration, and that's what you want to avoid. You want to avoid this on the people side, you want to avoid this on the stakeholder side, but also on potential board investor side. That's very that's very crucial.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

Yeah. I love that. And honestly, I feel like as uh especially in early stage startups, founders can be very impatient because they're trying to drive results and totally understandable. Do you feel like there's a timeline of like, of course, you know, if everything is done right from the get-go, of like when you're building from scratch, at what point do you expect results or you know, or building up to that?

SPEAKER_00 10:02

Yeah. Let's assume we hire the right people. We can have when we talk about the typical ramping time of approximately three to four months in outbound, we can say that we get the first kind of solid results within these three, four months. We still have to tweak and coach. To have this machine very well oiled working, it can take up to a year, right? We want to have consistency on the market. Maybe we need to tweak with the ICP. There's again the marketing side, the product side, but when it comes to focusing on coaching the people, ramping them, to have someone very solid ramping calculate with up to a year and be conservative here.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

Yeah, okay, very true. Um, now I want to ask the favorite topic that I think is everybody uh on the edge of their seat overall is the, you know, is AI gonna replace SDRs? Do they work together? You know, what when does AI help versus not? And Maybe, honestly, you can probably define for us really quickly like, what does a BDR do or an SDR do, right? So that people can understand the difference of what can AI take versus not.

SPEAKER_00 11:09

Good point. So when I speak about SDR, I speak about an inbound motion, talking about inbound leads and then converting them into meetings for the account executives. BDR is the specific outbound motion, right? Doing code approach, even warmed up, but still we're talking about per definition code calling, right? Cold outreach, that's very important. The role of AI, from my point of view, is that AI nowadays is a very good co-pilot, assistant, and also challenger. I see a lot of LinkedIn posts the last weeks, especially due to the motion from Anthropic, right? Um, do we just have AI SDRs? I also received cold emails, cold messages about AI SDRs. Seeing at the same time, Anthropic is hiring a lot of SDRs, right? And I see right now, especially where it has increased a lot, we have a very good go-to-market engineer um doing great work. It's very very good when it comes to selecting the right tools. We have a lot of tools like Claude implemented, which can already help for drafting messages. We're also using AI role plays. So that means what I can do is let's assume as a BDR, I have rarely long good conversations. So let's say from 100 dials per day, I have 12 valid or 10 valid conversations. So that means I use this AI role play always to coach the people, and you can also send them every morning to a gym to prepare them, right? Focus on objection handling or entire calls. So I'm a preacher and teacher of spin methodology, and this is for instance what I used. And this brings me especially one advantage. My people can do this whenever they have time a day, so they're very individual in their structure. And I don't need to do these things one-on-one in 30 minutes, but I can just listen to these calls, which, for instance, have a length of nine to ten minutes, and then be very efficient also with AI feedback on that. And this is very time efficient, right? And I can be more effective and drive greater impact.

SPEAKER_01 13:19

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think it's um, and maybe at some point we might get there where AI is so good that it could technically replace somebody, but I I'm of the same point of view with you in the sense that they can be a great co-pilot. Um, maybe they will help the current team. Like maybe it might have taken you 10 people, now it takes you seven to do the same amount of job or outreach. Um, but I do obviously think that we're not there yet. And yeah, I've seen the same post of like AI SDRs, you know, will replace your team, and then those same companies are hiring, you know, people SDRs.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

I also I also agree to your point with the efficiency that it may come to the point that you say instead of next level scaling, 20 people, 15 is totally fine and sufficient. This could definitely be.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:08

Currently, I strongly believe in people buy from people, and what people can do is they can read to the room, right? And what's like happening here, and they have this feeling what AI maybe still does not have fully developed.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

Yeah, yeah, that is true. You know, one thing about AI is we always talk about like personalization when outreaching. And I feel like AI has made that so easy now that it's like everybody's doing it, so it's not even personal anymore, right? So, what in your opinion, or what you're doing right now, you know, what what is personalization like? What's work working versus what's overplayed, and how do you actually be personable with somebody nowadays?

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Yeah. I want to say that the majority of call the majority of meetings that we book, they come through calls still. And I've also read something. I've also read something this morning um about other statistics. What messages do from my point of view is they warm up and they open the door, they create attention. When we believe in this AI model, this is where they support. And they also, when we speak about even drafted by AI, voice messages, video messages, we're people, we don't know each other. The worst thing that could happen is we fear that somebody wants to scam us, right? So if we use like these channels and drive personalization, this kind of lowers the barrier of uncertainty and risk. And AI can help in so far. I want to mention one example, which is pretty good and pretty effective from my experience. Voice messages that can also now be generated by AI. So you just send crisp nine second, 15-second voice messages, for instance, and you can use AI support to then again as an as a rep focus more on the calling part and conduct the meetings, etc. Right. You do have, of course, at the end, you do have to put a lot into it and to get this motion rolling, etc., and check things how they're going. We can also with reply rates. Once you get it rolling and you found like a motion that is working pretty well, you then luckily are able to harvest everything.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

Yeah, I love that. But that that kind of leads me to my next question. What uh what channels are driving the best results for you right now? I know you mentioned call calling and AI. Um, and when you say AI messages, is do you mean like voice notes or do you mean voicemails? Can you explain that a little bit more as well?

SPEAKER_00 16:41

Yeah, so AI helps us to sequence and also to draft messages. We also want to personalize. That means the strongest hook is something personally where I say it refers to you as a personal RV, not only to your company, right? So that you say, okay, it's relevant for me. I open and I reply. AI voice messages are these simple you gave them also another name, you said voice messages and I don't remember, but it's simple voice messages that you can send. And still the biggest channel, the most successful channel is the calling. So 99% of our meetings get booked through the call. We warm them up by email and even get them through the call. And for instance, I want to mention that 60% of our meetings get booked before lunch. So it's also very, very important to the only thing that we can do with AI and what we look at is still something where we pull data, is to see how is the reply rate. So we want to look out for messages and emails where we have a good open rate, but finally reply rate. And I have a very good, strong team currently with very creative people. And we found something, I give you a benchmark here. You're good at 5% reply rate here in Europe, and we found something where we are at eight, nine percent reply rate. So this was done by someone in the team. Uh, shout out to Ivan here at this uh at this stage. And this is how we then tweak and test out based on AI that we also get the numbers and draft again. So it's a very good mix currently of what can technology do for us and what can we do as humans then how to interpret and go to the next step.

SPEAKER_01 18:29

Yeah, okay, I love that. Um, so right now, at least from what I heard, kind of what's working for you guys is warming up through emails first, then following up with a call. Do you book the call through the emails or is it just done simultaneously?

SPEAKER_00 18:45

It happens on both sides. It happens on both sides, just a majority happen through phone. And again, I want to emphasize on LinkedIn because you have a face to the voice, very important on LinkedIn. You have a real person. This I'm afraid I get scammed barrier gets very lowered. So multi-threading is very important. And maybe even still some some old school channels work. I've seen also posts on LinkedIn, so it's very interesting to see what people do is typical letters, postcards to also get attention rights and to put some that way. So let's not forget that there's also an old school way. I just don't have current conversion rates, so I've not tried it yet the last time.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

Yeah, to try that. Yeah, that's true. I've definitely talked to leaders where they're trying more of the old school ways now because to stand out, right? Like AI has made it so simple to personalize an outreach. And now it's like, okay, how do we stand out? So it's been like some sort of postcards, or there's companies now that will send out gifts. Um, and then even in-person meetings. I'm not saying that door knocking is like coming back necessarily, but set trying to set up, you know, a call with a meeting in person. So having that sales meeting in person versus over the phone. So um, is that something that you guys think you're probably gonna start exploring at some point, or just because you're not there yet, you know, you haven't thought that far.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

The situation is that we sit in our hub and call into the country, so we have the prospects there. Yeah, I do believe it is worth a try. It's just about then efficiency, it's worth a try to also knock doors. The problem here I have seen in the past is this person might be in a meeting, right? So it's again, you're standing in front of the beehive, you're looking for the queen, but it's too big, you can't even enter. And that's why I say at least try and error might be might be worried.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

Yeah, yeah, very true. Or you can keep that for the warmest prospects or your top 10 accounts or something along those lines.

SPEAKER_00 20:43

Exactly. And I want to add here, also due to the sentiment that I perceive is due to this upcoming AI approach, I believe a lot of people also fear that they're not even receiving personal interaction. And maybe this might be in future some step which leads more back to the old school way in personalization, right? This is just a hypothesis, but it's a very interesting topic that you also brought up.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

Yeah, yeah, very true. Um, and is there any like tech stack or anything that you guys are obviously willing to share that works for you now, or maybe some tools that are overrated?

SPEAKER_00 21:21

Overrated, I thought about this point. Overrated, I don't know. I think it depends on where your org is currently standing. I can at least tell you that we're currently using a power and parallel data. So we're working working with Nooks here, which helps us to gain some speed, especially in the SMB sector, right? Where you have potentially like a higher rate, it's very, very good. In the higher segments with market enterprise, you would potentially be slower because of personalization and more strategic outreach. Then we're using Nooks, by the way, also has this. AI roleplay, which is very good, where you can modify your personas. We're also working with second body. So second body is also a tool that we can also use for AI roleplays and send externally to candidates and then also let them test, give them a first taste, a flavor of what that is. Claude is implemented by us. It's a couple of weeks now, and it's huge because also connected with internal data, so we can create hooks combined between prospects and then our company. That's a very valuable tool. And there's some other tools that we're testing, right? Especially when it comes to Salesoft has an add-on where it also comes to the AI voice messaging, like uh drafting, sending them out, sequencing automation. So a couple of things that we're trying that's in the pipeline, and that's where I say I'm very happy to be in an environment where we're very open to test things out. We love that, see how it goes, because it's about driving impact and also making it more fun for everybody.

SPEAKER_01 23:00

Yeah, yeah. How that's actually a really good point that you brought up because I I've definitely heard from other leaders where sometimes the environment is not there to test, and it's like, how how else do you do it? I mean, especially in sales, like I feel like there's no one way that necessarily brings brings results. I feel like in sales you have like a framework and you try to follow it by testing different things versus more like you know, here's a script, follow exactly this precisely. Yeah, so that's that's pretty cool. Um, I'd love to kind of shift uh the conversation a little bit to just the BD rep structure overall and like organizations and metrics. First of all, just how do you think that a BD rep should really structure their day to be productive?

SPEAKER_00 23:48

Yeah, on a high level, I believe to a certain degree on individual structure. Because what I've also seen and tried in the past is to find one structure within teams.

SPEAKER_02 23:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

The question is okay, in how far does it work? Because you have people who enter the job with a different experience, different point of time, they have different markets. So Europe is a very good example, but even the US, West Coast, East Coast, right? So it does not necessarily necessarily make sense to set the team on the exact same structure hour by hour. But I believe in coming in, checking very classic, checking your emails, checking your replies, right? See what I have here. And I also believe in a book of business where you collect all the information. This can also be done by AI also automatically, but having this in a collected place to know what your next move is in this game. Having preparing what's to prepare, and then having call hours, and you can also see where you have the best pickup rates. So where's the highest chance of getting someone to the phone? Yeah, right. Especially BDR work is a lot of outreach. And what you can do is just automate things. So the email writing, email sequencing, this can be in the background that you again can focus on other things, training, calling prospects, but also coming back and trying out manual tweakings. And we have that's what I want to say. We also have a very good collaboration when it comes to our go-to-market engineer. So we talk a lot, we exchange a lot when it comes to best practices information, we talk to the AEs, we collaborate a lot. So this should never be forgotten because we're sometimes wear our own glasses and we're on a little microcosmos, and then it makes sense to also look left and right, what's happening there.

SPEAKER_01 25:35

Yeah, that is very true. Um, do you what what metrics are you actually tracking that matter versus like the ones that are vanity for for your team?

unknown 25:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:46

Here it also depends on the stage where you are. Let's say at the beginning, you want to measure a lot of activity, right? Do I put in the right activity? We're talking about the scale. The lower the output, the higher the activity, the higher the output, of course, longer conversations, you have a lower activity. And at the beginning, you want to touch multiple accounts, multiple people, and you want to tweak your reply rate. And what I look at, for instance, and that's a very valuable thing. I also at the beginning check a lot how long is the average conversation time. And in average, when someone is new, I observe it between 25 and 35 seconds, and then I can get into this and coach and coach an extension with the right questions and the right objection handling to have it also here. Later on, my perfect, my perfect world, I'm very output-oriented. As long as someone hitting target, hitting quota, having a good conversion, I can just look back on this conversion chain and can see, okay, where can we tweak? Where can we make you better? Where do we have like little pain points in conversations? At the beginning, you want to have the output, and at the end, in the perfect world, you have someone who delivers the output, and then we can backtrack and see, okay, where can we tweak?

SPEAKER_01 27:05

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I agree with you. I think there's definitely you have to look at it from two different lenses, like if you're just in the beginning or there's a new person to the team versus like you're at a different stage. Um, and then in terms of that specifically, how are you ensuring that like BD is creating real opportunities and not just meetings to say that they hit their quota? Do you look at any conversion metrics?

SPEAKER_00 27:30

Primarily, I understand the situation when I speak through the opportunities once they book the meeting. When especially when people are new in the job, when they start the job very new, I sit down with them, check the opportunities. And what I said initially is I'm a preacher and teacher of spin. So that means we always want to walk through and want to see what questions have we asked, what worked well, and what are we missing out. I saw historically the biggest conversion rate to sales accepted opportunities is when we have a pain point of the current situation identified, plus an impact. And you're saying it this one quote where I believe it's very true is pain without impact just feels uncomfortable, right? And we want to have the impact, and that's where I say this is the main points where I focus on, and then know where I can coach. And of course, when it comes to the conversion rate, from how many of those demos have been flipped, not being flipped, then I can also get deeper and understand okay, where is additional challenge? Does it have to do with maybe the vertical, whatever, right? But initially, the first thing control the controllables is how are we qualifying?

SPEAKER_01 28:46

Yeah, yeah, I love that. And then um, how does the B D and the A relationship work within your guys' organization, or maybe where do you see it break down that you know we can help make that better?

SPEAKER_00 29:00

It's two points, and the most important thing and the easiest thing is a good relationship, and a good relationship is sitting together, drinking coffee, and when it comes to handing over opportunities, doing a warm handover, right? To understand this is our baby, our common baby, and I want to hand it over to you very gently and give you some context about what's happening. Where do I see red flags? Is this a talkative person, or rather not? And where do I see advantages? And I see the best conversion rates within alignments that have a very good relationship. A last thing that I see in organizations, and this is where it can get challenging BDRs get mostly measured by sales accepted opportunities that get flipped over, right, after the demo. Then we have AEs who also get measured as a kind of soft factor when it comes to their conversion rate about sales accepted opportunities to close won to close lost. And I've seen some friction there in the past where it's very important to have the right criteria in place. When is an opportunity an SAO and when not, but also to set the right targets and the right tone within the organization to not have these counteracting targets that kind of destroy the motion in that moment.

SPEAKER_01 30:29

Yeah, yeah. And I I think it's definitely underrated the just getting to know your teammates in a personal level. Because usually when you have that personal relationship, it's I feel like personally, if I think about it myself, it's easier for me to come to you and say, like, hey, I didn't think you know this went well, or this is where we could get better, um, you know, or is this how you can hand it off to me better, or you know, all those things. So once you have that personal relationship, I feel like it's easier versus when it's just like a work relationship and I come to you with some sort of constructive criticism. I feel like you're gonna take it personally no matter what. And then you're now you start getting friction between the teammates.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

Exactly. And even the BDR after the demo asking, checking in how did it go? What could I do better? What worked well, right? So this creates a lot of trust and relationship.

SPEAKER_01 31:19

Yeah, love that. And then I want to talk about something that we slightly touched on earlier. We talked about like the European market and the American market, like the US market. What are some differences that you see on the BD side, like first of all, culturally more than anything else?

SPEAKER_00 31:37

I do want to say that the prototype salesperson in the US, an American continent, European continent is very similar. We talk about ambitious people, we talk about people who want to achieve something, who want to earn money. There's not too big of a difference, uh, luckily. And this is probably also a culture thing when we want to believe in every department in a company has a certain culture. This is a typical culture of salespeople always full on action, energy, and yeah, talking about the prototype.

SPEAKER_01 32:11

Okay, awesome. And is would you say if you had to choose this outbound harder in Europe versus the US and why that's a very good one?

SPEAKER_00 32:24

And it depends, it really depends. My experience is in the US people are more receptive for emails and replying on emails. So the email game went very well. Now there's Europe coming in where I see good results on the phone. But right, we have a bunch of countries in Europe, and I can bring this one example France, UK, and the dark market. These are the most conservative markets where let me exaggerate this where we believe once you call me, I don't you know, you don't hear your number, I don't know your voice and your name and your company, I believe you want to scam me. So that means trust, trust is very important. While in other countries like the Netherlands, you would easily be able to call someone out on the phone. So that's not a problem. But the DAC market, French market, UK market is different. So trust is a very important thing. So it could be that you need more touches on those markets, and I see this always, you need a strong brand awareness. People know you, reference customers. So this is where the marketing part is even more important compared to potential other markets.

SPEAKER_01 33:46

Yeah, I can totally see that. How obviously in the US, you don't necessarily have that big cultural difference from like state to state, versus in Europe, it's they're its own country. I mean, they have their own cultural values and sets, and I can totally see what you say. And then you might call into like a Spain account and they'll they'll talk your ear off for like days. And they'll treat you like your best friend, and you're like, wow, I should be calling into Spain more often.

SPEAKER_00 34:14

Exactly. I had the I had the point, I'm happy to share this this uh fun fact here, where I even called an existing customer at a time where I was account manager, and I asked, Hey, how are you doing? Good to finally talk to you. And the question was, why are you asking me this? Are you my therapist? I was like, Okay, it's fine. But this is also very important, and let me say this to have the acceptance and the understanding that we're humans and I go first, right? I also want to mirror you because I want to have a good outcome, we want to make business together, to then not judge, to then understand, okay, this is the culture, this is the tone and the personality that I'm working with. But you see how it could suddenly completely change into a different direction, what I didn't expect.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

Yeah, yeah, very true. And I think like that is what probably, at least in my eyes, makes the role in the department itself a little bit harder in the Europe side because you have to be willing to be like a chameleon for the most part, you know, shift to everybody's cultural aspect and understand each country and know how to pivot that conversation and just match their personality. If they're loud, you want to be allowed, you know. If they're soft, you don't want to be allowed.

SPEAKER_00 35:30

Exactly, exactly. And I love this difference on the floors always. Yeah, listening to the Spanish people that you could hear everywhere, the Italian people, then the Dach area was a bit different. And it's it's great fun to also, yeah, on the surface to experience this uh cultural difference.

SPEAKER_01 35:49

Yeah, very cool, very cool to hear on that end. Um, and honestly, very important too as a leader that you understand those aspects, especially if you're a leader, for example, that's coming from the US market and looking to expand into Europe. If you don't have this sort of understanding or background, you know, it's you're gonna face a wall and you're gonna hit that wall, and then you're gonna try and you know repair damage from there. But no, very true.

SPEAKER_00 36:14

Exactly. And I want to give this hint about we're talking about the pest analysis or the pastel, right? Which kind of gives the first hint about what to uncover. I would definitely add the point of business culture to it. Yeah, and the most important thing, as we have a lot of yeah, um listeners from from the American continent, it even starts with the phone number. So if you call into the German market, make sure you have a German phone number slash German mobile phone number. Yeah, because I remember from the past, even getting in Germany, getting calls from the Netherlands, Sweden, UK, we had this kind of sentiment because it's all about pattern. Okay, this is a sales slash uh scam call, and we're not gonna pick up.

SPEAKER_01 37:02

Yeah, very true. Yeah, it's like I don't know anybody from there, so I'm not gonna pick up exactly. Yeah, no, very, very good point as well. Um, I would love to shift the conversation a little bit to just a hiring aspect and skill set aspect. I know we touched a little bit on that in the beginning, but what do you think separates like a top 1% VD talent from like just a good rep?

SPEAKER_00 37:27

I believe it's the drive. When we speak about drive, what is drive? It's the ambition. Yeah, it's it's also about the resilience because I've seen good salespeople who did a great job, who struggled with rejection. But at the end, if you ask me about one thing, like the tip of the iceberg, it would probably be the ambition, the drive to just do this extra call. I've seen those people the most successful with this hunger. Like with athletes, where you see people training after hours on the pitch, whether it's for the Olympics, whether it's football or or European football, whatever. It's always this hunger drive to extra, put in some extra work.

SPEAKER_01 38:13

Yeah. Do you feel like there's anything like I can do as an individual to drive hunger, or do you feel like it's more you have it or you don't?

SPEAKER_00 38:25

Let me give you the spiritual answer and say it depends on your motivation. You can have it, it depends on what motivates you, what drives you. Yeah, I believe if I just join a discipline that I don't like, I can put a lot of work in, but I don't feel this motivation and hunger, maybe, which then leads to potential burnout or just drop the ball. And if I say, hey, I'm interested, I want to learn dancing style style now. I have this internal motivation, and then this drive comes. So I believe you should find out what you love, you should find out and maybe do the first touches in sales to see if it suits you.

SPEAKER_02 39:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:07

But this is the one point you need is intrinsic motivation, and then everything comes.

SPEAKER_01 39:13

Yeah, very true. And a funny note, I was speaking to a CRO last week, and he was telling me how he believes that salespeople need to have like a vice. Like you need to be able to not only just want to achieve your quota or have that hunger, but it's like, what is also externally motivating you to achieve that quota, right? So he was joking around about like, and I kind of agreed with him because my fiance is also in sales, so I see it in him too, where it's a vice and not necessarily in a bad way, right? But it could be like, oh, I love spending money on this, or I have a tuition I need to pay, or you know, I want to get to this level. So I thought that was kind of funny when he said it that way and kind of related that.

SPEAKER_00 39:57

And here's the fun fact that again connects the dots. When I speak to people during hiring interviews and ask them what is the goal, what's the purpose for getting up every morning and going to work with their money, they always have something. Something which starts from, hey, I want to support my family, to I want to afford in house, to I want to go on holidays three times per year. So there's already something, maybe it's somehow given, but there is always something, and it's very important. Sales is very rejection-heavy. It's a lot of, especially in outbound, what I said, it's like gold digging. You never know what's out there, you never know how much you find while you're in the gold mine, but you need to be active and have this drive, and therefore, good external motivation is very important also to reward the people right.

SPEAKER_01 40:47

Yeah, yeah, very true. Um, I wanted to ask Daniel on term in terms of just superficially, right? Like you don't you haven't spoken to this person yet, but you just see their resume. And what makes you feel like they could have that hunger, or maybe what are the things that you look for that you're like, yeah, I'll have a conversation with that person.

SPEAKER_00 41:10

I want to say here that I rather listen to someone and then have the perception that this is not a fit, instead of just rejecting someone due to the CV, because I've seen so many lateral moves from people in hospitality who are salespeople. That's very important. If talents have the opportunity, emphasize in your CV things that are related to the job. When you see the job ad and you see specific requirements or specific job tasks that wait for you, point them out in your CV that you showcase them, that you show a certain connection, because it's everything about understanding. And I give again one example. I spoke to one talent in the past, and it turned out during the conversation that there was a four-month or three-month sales experience and then call center where I said, put this into your CV, be proud of it, like especially for sales job.

unknown 42:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:14

The feedback again was from this talent that someone else said, Don't put it in because it's too short. I say there's no right or wrong, but why not do something that increases your chances?

SPEAKER_01 42:24

Yeah, very true. Yeah, there's um unfortunately, at least just also me being on the hiring side and working with different personalities on hiring managers. Sometimes it's just that you can't win. Like one manager, you know, will want this and the other one will say absolutely no to that. So unfortunately, the the resume aspect of things is you can try to be as as best as you can, and you just have to figure out a different way to stand out, right? Not just through resume, because it is unfortunately a very like person by person thing. So I I get where you're coming from. Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:03

What is, as you're also in the recruiting industry, what is your take or what what is your recommendation in turn?

SPEAKER_01 43:10

Yeah, um, a little bit tough to answer because again, it's very personal. Um, like for example, you're the type of person that would hire somebody without an SDR experience or any sales experience. Now there's hiring managers that are like, I need them to have hire or sales experience before they get into it. So for those that do have the sales experience, I mean any resume should have this, but numbers related is like the top priority, right? Like whatever that looked like, 30% close rate. What did you do to stand out? How much did you drive in pipeline revenue or at least influenced revenue? And when you don't have that experience, um, I would go personality based, like, hey, I'm outgoing, I'm this, or how did you in the jobs that you had, although they weren't sales related, how can you showcase your sales personality? Within those that you did maybe outside, right? So I would assume those are probably some of the things that you look at as well. And of course, the competitive aspect, anything that you've done competitively related, athletics, um, I don't know, there's so many types of sports you can do. Um, anything that showcases that hunger as well, that also helps a lot.

SPEAKER_00 44:20

Yeah, totally agree. That's exactly the little hooks that can help me better understand the person end of it.

SPEAKER_01 44:27

Yeah. Um, and then in terms of like actually in the interview process, I know we talked a little bit about it in the beginning, just wanted to dive a little bit deeper. What are some things that you test for, or things that you ask maybe that kind of tells you like, I'll know what this person you know is like based on how they answer to me.

SPEAKER_00 44:48

Yeah. So, question-wise, talking about the internal motivation, where do you want to go? Where do you see yourself? The answer is very often always hard to say, I don't know what's going to happen in five years, but to get a rough idea how the drive is. Again, if this person says, I see myself as an accounting executive, I want to be a VP of sales one day, I know there is this hidden factor for long-term success.

unknown 45:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:14

Or at least I can assume there is, right? But it's also about asking for examples. That's very important because we can easily say, hey, I'm ambitious, but as I do not know you as a person, examples happen, right? So showcase me, you just mentioned this for the city, showcase me an example. How do you explain that you're ambitious? And also check in with how do people deal, especially in outreach. So, how do you deal with frustration? Tell me about the last time you were frustrated.

SPEAKER_02 45:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:45

Resilience is a very important thing. Again, examples are very important. And there's one factor I don't want to take out of the equation. It's this curiosity and chattiness. So what helps is also to see by their answers in how far do I get just crisp answers or maybe long answers, questions back. And even with AI roleplays or personal role plays, what you can do is you can not only see on which kind of level they are with their experience and have an idea where you need to start the coaching. You also see we talked about people try this discipline out due to, for instance, now the Wolf of Wall Street. You can also see is there really a fit? Because I also have seen, which is natural, people have that applied for the SDR role. What you saw, it's like they felt uncomfortable, right? In asking questions in rejection, etc. At the end, very important to me, it's always a thing about the big picture of this person. It's not that this one thing didn't fit, throw you out of the process, it's about I want to have a big picture of you. And also the hiring process always consists of minimum two people. So we always accept the feedback, compare it, talk about it to not take a biased decision at the end.

SPEAKER_01 47:12

Yeah. Is there anything I know you talked about coachability earlier? And I also agree that it's a very important aspect of sales. Um, you can be really good, but at the end of the day, at least what something I see as a red flag when I'm, you know, working with hiring managers and look for salespeople is if they have too much of an ego. Like I think ego in sales is good, but too much can be, you know, kind of drives me to think, okay, this person might not be coachable. Is there anything that kind of pushes you into like a red flag that you see that you can tell that they're not coachable?

SPEAKER_00 47:48

Therefore, it's important to have good conversations, reflective conversations.

SPEAKER_02 47:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:56

For instance, my conversations are mostly around 45 to 60 minutes because I also want to give this person the chance to get to know better me and also answer other questions, right? Because it's also culture fit and they should know what to expect from me as a hiring manager. I ask questions about when it's about past jobs, about learnings, about things people didn't do well, about development areas, to see really what are their development areas and to see how they react on things. So by understanding and challenging the situation, I have in fact seen very interesting reactions at the first level. And I want to emphasize I don't poke people because eye level is important. But I have seen people who immediately felt like stung by a bee, and this was to me like okay, not sure what reaction we have here and where this comes from.

SPEAKER_01 48:53

Yeah, yeah, very true. No, I I love that it's um it's such a like we talked about, like for sales is such a there's no like right or wrong recipe. It's a framework that you just have to see if people fit within their framework. Can they come out of it, then come back in? So it is a very hard role to not necessarily just hire for, but also succeed in, you know, everybody has a different method to their success, and just because it worked this way for one person doesn't mean this other person following those exact steps will succeed. So very much, you know, different personality. So um, I love that. Any last tips or any words when it comes to the hiring process or anything that you might want people to know on that end, or how they can even stand out to you if you're hiring right now?

SPEAKER_00 49:44

I think when it comes to how can they stand out, we especially you touched on some very important topics when it comes to the CV. Also, make it clear. It's not about showing too much, it's about showing clearly to understand and make me understand how it matches into the hiring process. I can just say consistency. So this is also a part where you need to have the resilience because yes, we have a lot of open roles, but we also have a lot of good people, and we have a lot of people with different levels of experience. Just don't give up, just don't give up. I know it's hard also when you receive the standardized emails, but just don't give up. There will be this one moment where you just find the needle in the hay.

SPEAKER_01 50:35

Yeah, yeah, I love that. Thank you for sharing that because I I think it's definitely a tough market right now for a lot of people, and it's impossible as human beings to not take things personally. Um, but I I agree that every company just because they rejected you maybe from this specific position doesn't mean that you're not good, or like you said, maybe you just had that personality already in your team and you were looking for something else. So yeah, it's definitely important to at least just be consistent and repetitive. And you're gonna take it personally, but at least try not to take it as personal as possible.

SPEAKER_00 51:12

Exactly. And we actually never know what the uh really would really the reason is for being rejected, right? This is also some mental game to play, to always try to get this blank page and say, okay, I don't even know it's about me personally, about my experience. And then to come back to the resilience. It's this is this is already exact the typical day of an outbound SDR or outbound B.

unknown 51:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:36

Yeah. And I'll I'll say this as well, kind of at the end, is the relationship you build relationships as you're interviewing. Like, you know, maybe you did not hire somebody this time around, but that person might stay in your brain, and you're like, hey, if I had this position available, like you would come in. So I don't have it happen often, but I do have people sometimes either get mad or you know, hurt from the rejection and they leave a bad impression. Like I would just recommend you never do that. I know it hurts and it's hard, but you know, the you the way you get rejected is like if you do that to me as a recruiter, the chances of me introducing it to other companies are gonna be very low because I don't want that on my reputation. And you know, you having a bad experience as a company. And I would assume with you too, right? Like if you move to a different position or even a different company at some point in your life, you're gonna say, Oh, I remember this person if they left a good enough impression. But if they didn't, then you'd never want to even interview them again.

SPEAKER_00 52:37

Exactly. We're talking about private economy, it's a tough sector, it's high competition, and stress will always be there. You just mentioned this, especially in today's market, competition is high, and we need good people because I believe besides the skills, you want to have people that you trust, and you trust especially people that left with a smile and with a good feeling.

SPEAKER_01 53:00

Yeah, absolutely. And uh thank you so much, Daniel, for just coming on, being so transparent and just sharing a ton of value. I love talking about sales, it's a very hard um just like we talked about, you know, like there's no right answer in that. And it's always interesting to hear people's perspective on like, you know, what works for you versus what doesn't, etc. And there's so much notes to take from from this episode overall. If you listen to us live, make sure to listen to it back with either your note taker or if you like, you know, good old uh old school notes on your on your notebook. Um, and then for those of you watching live or catching the replay, feel free to connect with Daniel on LinkedIn. Do you want to share your full name and then we'll also put on our show notes as well.

SPEAKER_00 53:45

Yes, pronouncing it Daniel Camerios doesn't make it better because it's pretty complex. But feel free when you see my name, uh just copy paste it and connect with me.

SPEAKER_01 53:55

I love that. Thank you so much. Uh, and then I'll see you everybody on the next one.

SPEAKER_00 54:00

Thank you very much for having me.