- Matthew Haller
Having Issues with SDRs? You’re Not Motivating Them Properly
I was attending a conference in Salt Lake City where I had the opportunity to chat with some sales leaders from LucidChart, the performance visualization platform, about some of the challenges companies have when scaling their sales organizations. Throughout the conversation, one comment really stuck out to me:
“Our SDR’s don’t feel valued - they say they want to be “real” sales reps.”
That comment got me thinking about the way that we prioritize and value SDR’s - after all, the reason sales reps can be so productive is if there is someone out in front of them, clearing the path of bad leads and unqualified opportunities so the rep can have access to the right buyers with a legitimate budget.
Yet, when we look at the way we both talk about SDRs (“your team just needs to deliver more sales qualified leads to the reps”) and pay them (in the Bay Area, SDR comp starts at around $65k base with perhaps another $10k-$12k bonus), it’s clear that we’re sending them a strong message:
"Your job is to serve the sales reps, and your work isn’t worth as much as theirs."