Kevin Dorsey is a fantastic sales leader. As Head of Sales for SnackNation, he leads a team of 12 Sales Development Reps and 30 Account Executives. SnackNation offers office delivery of healthy snacks that create happier and more productive teams.

In just one year, Kevin grew the teams from a handful of reps to over 40. Along the way, he decided that the best avenue for reinforcing and scaling critical sales competencies was to build a Sales Playbook.

And over the next 3.5 months, he did just that.

Lesson #1: He immersed himself in his SDRs' process

"I knew that if I wrote the Playbook from behind my desk exclusively, it probably wouldn't be very good."

Kevin got his hands dirty, getting in the seat with the SDRs and really seeing what that day-to-day felt and sounded like. He was looking to combine emergent best practices (identified by his team) with industry and thought leaders learnings.

 The playbook is broken into three sections:

Recently, I had a conversation with the CRO of an exciting SaaS startup. He had just built a sales development team and was frustrated with the results to date. Prior to his current role, he was Director of Sales for a well-established, big name company. Now at a startup, he faced no name recognition and next-to-no inbound marketing support.

I asked him about the specifics of his SDR strategy and he replied, “I replicated what we had in place at BigCo. It worked extremely well there, so why not here?”

And therein lies the problem.

Sales development is not one size fits all. That conversation is far from unique—I have them all too frequently. So much so, that I created a framework to help companies think through their implementations. Let me set the stage a bit.

"The corporate SDR is accountable for booking sales demos across all verticals for the closing representative. They will be responsible for proactive calling and lead activity management owning the prospecting stage from . . ." Zzzzzzzzz.

Sorry. Nodded off there.

After a scan of more sales development job descriptions than I can count, I can tell you that’s how the vast majority sound. In a word: dreary. They are about as captivating and inspiring as the operating manual for my toaster. Most of us were taught that a job description should, well, describe the job. But that’s totally backwards.

A job description should sell the job. If you can’t capture attention and interest, who the hell cares about the fine print.

Your job descriptions are content assets that should be attracting top talent. If done well, you’ll be selling the sizzle, while every other hiring manager will be documenting the chemical makeup of the steak.

Last month, I spent an afternoon at SalesLoft in Atlanta. SalesLoft has done an outstanding job hiring a gender diverse team and, having met a few “#LadyLofters” at various events, I asked CEO Kyle Porter if I could spend some time with the women in his organization.

First, the numbers:

• 81 employees
• 23 women (28%)
• 13 managers/department heads
• 5 women managers/department heads (38%)
• 30% of all employees report to women managers

I know that many companies struggle to hire women in sales/tech and I wanted to know SalesLoft’s secret.