Three weeks ago, the Department of Labor published its final rule updating the overtime regulations under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Whether to classify inside sales reps as exempt or non-exempt remains a very messy issue. For those unfamiliar, non-exempt employees are:

Subject to overtime pay
Entitled to rest and meal breaks
Required to keep time records

By a stroke of luck brilliant strategic planning, I happened to be running research on how companies classify their SDRs and AEs for the purposes of overtime pay.

One hundred fifty-nine companies were kind enough to participate. Let’s first turn to what the new rule means.

What’s in the final rule

What has changed: The salary and compensation levels needed for the Executive, Administrative and Professional exemption will be raised to $47,476 on December 1^st, 2016.  The total annual compensation requirement for highly compensated employees (HCE) will be raised to $134,004.

Read More

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.

Read More

It’s safe to say that the sales development function is here to stay. Companies, conferences, and careers are being built around the SDR movement. If your average sales price is $100K+, sales development is a no brainer. At $50K, it’s most definitely a yes. But what about $16K? Or $8K? $4K?

There are dozens of threads on Quora about sales development, but none directly answer the question:

What is the minimum ASP where “doing sales development” makes sense?

Even in our Inside Sales AE research and SDR research, we’ve never tackled this specific question. But by combining the two data sets, I think I’ve come up with a pretty good answer. You can follow my math below or skip to the end number here. (Note: I’m not commenting on growth versus profitability. See Mark Suster, David Skok, and Danielle Morrill for that.) I’m trying to answer a more straightforward question. If I spend $250K on sales development, by how much should revenues increase?

To get there, we need to step through four questions.

Read More

For New Englanders like me, Spring means three things - golf, despair over the Red Sox’s starting rotation, and college graduation season.

A new crop of sales talent is readying to enter the market and nearly all of my clients have open headcount for Sales Development Reps. And, I can assure you, most are facing a very competitive hiring market. If you’re looking to attract the class of 2016, you have to be creative. It should come as no surprise that 90% of those under the age of 30 use social media. What you may not know is that Instagram’s usage has surpassed Twitter’s – registering 400M monthly active users.

A new channel for recruiting

If you are looking to drive candidates to your positions, you need to fish where your potential candidates swim.

Read More