Sales Models, Metrics, and Motions Blog

SDR, AE, and CSM analysis

Sales Models, Metrics, and Motions Blog

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A Strategy for Dealing with Open Territories

Posted by Trish Bertuzzi on Wed, Jun 04, 2014

What happens when your top rep gives notice? Or an A-player goes on maternity leave? Or that amazing candidate takes another offer?

Turnover and open territories are a sales reality. They also take a big bite out of your revenue.

The other day, I was talking to a SaaS VP of Sales with a team of 34 closing reps. Internally, she was facing 28% attrition (both voluntary and not). Externally, a tough hiring market made positions harder and harder to fill.

She told me filling open spots was like a never ending game of whack-a-mole and put her ability to make the number at risk.

I offered this: Ranger Reps to the rescue

A Ranger Rep is a seasoned, organized, and team-oriented rep who thrives on change and challenge. 

Their mission is to help the team hit the group number by flattening the dips that come from losing reps. Ranger Reps are there to cover (and sell!) in your open territories.

E.G., your Boston Rep goes on maternity leave for 12 weeks – move your Ranger Rep to that territory.  Or your Rocky Mountain Rep quits – assign your Ranger Rep.  Your Higher-Ed Rep takes an internal position outside your team -- Ranger Rep to the rescue.

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Topics: inside sales hiring

5 SDR Metrics You Should Know

Posted by Trish Bertuzzi on Thu, May 22, 2014

At long last, we are publishing our  SDR Metrics & Compensation Report. I want to thank the 222 technology companies that participated. In this report, we compiled 37 pages of data, insight & trends.

For those of you who don’t have the time or energy to read the full report (and I hope you find both at some point), I thought I’d share a few snippets with you.

1. SDR specialization hits 40% adoption! Companies are splitting inbound & outbound roles.

We expect role specialization to continue along the adoption lifecycle following an earlier shift on the ‘closing’ side of the house – specialization into hunters and farmers. (Page 9)
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2. For SDRs, Sales experience prior to hire has dropped to 1.8 yrs. An all-time low.

Three times as many companies require ‘Less than 1 year’s sales experience’ in 2014 as did in 2010. (Page 13)
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Only 9% of Job Posts Attract Top Sales Talent

Posted by Matt Bertuzzi on Thu, May 08, 2014

For the last few months, I've been running a little experiment.

A pool of Inside Sales Rep volunteers & I have been sending sales job posts to one another. Each person would rate the posts with a simple thumbs up or thumbs down against this question, "Do you find this position and company interesting?"

The team reviewed posts for sales positions at 97 different companies.

And the results weren't pretty.

Less than 22% were deemed 'interesting' by at least one rep. Only 9% received two or more thumbs up.

Said another way, 91% of the job descriptions were so buzzword, boilerplate, and boring as not to warrant a second look. I've pulled together some of the highlights with comments from the reps themselves. Take a look below:

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Motivate and Retain Your Sales Reps

Posted by Trish Bertuzzi on Thu, Apr 17, 2014

Late last year, Steve Richard and I had an idea for new research. This would be the third collaboration between The Bridge Group and VorsightBP (after Sales Speaks and Mythbusting Millennials).

Our intent was to survey sales reps, front-line managers, and directors to understand the current state of sales management. By asking similar questions and capturing the variations between their perspectives, we knew there was a story to be told.

As a measuring stick, we decided to include a Net Promoter Score question in the individual sales rep variant.

What we found shocked us.

Finding #1: Our sales reps are not happy.

In terms of favorability, the NPS for our profession is somewhere between the Airlines and the Credit Card companies. (Details within the ebook.)

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