An SDR Life For Me
Why I think being an SDR is an invaluable step on the path to founding a company
After I started Virbar I knew that being a founder was what I was supposed to do. Finding a problem, cobbling together a team, building a crappy MVP, iterating non-stop until finally convincing someone to pay for our solution, the whole thing is addicting. As the Virbar saga began winding down, I started asking myself what I wanted to do next. I still had my full time job in finance, but I knew that there was an expiration date on that. So the question arose: do I go try to found something else or do I go and join an early stage company where I can test myself and learn the ins and outs of building a company. As I spoke to people in my network about my dilemma I was met with a variety of responses. Some people told me that to be a founder you have to BE a founder. Others said that going to an early stage company could be valuable, but that I had to be thoughtful because by choosing a company I was effectively choosing the domain that would most likely become my bread and butter. Still others told me to forget the idea altogether and to stay in finance. Ultimately, I decided to take the leap and join Rattle as their 2nd SDR and 17th overall hire. Before I go any further discussing this move, let me caveat everything by saying that my decision worked really well for ME. I was in a position where I had started a small company and built it to $3000MRR, but I never raised money, never hired a sales team, never invested in a CS person, nothing like that. I also didn’t have a new idea that I was super bulled up on, and I needed to be aware of my finances (NYC covid rates are a thing of the past), so just quitting and experimenting wasn’t the most realistic option. With that said, let me get into why joining an early stage company is proving to be one of the best decisions I have made to date.
An SDR Life For Me:
While I could touch on a number of subjects in this post I want to focus the conversation on sales, and specifically on being an SDR (sales development representative). For those who are not familiar, being an SDR means that my two teammates (shout out to Cole and Justin) and I are responsible for the top of our org’s sales funnel. We spend our days sending emails, making cold calls, and shooting out Linkedin DMs. On the surface, it sounds like a very basic job that most anyone could do. While that may technically be true, I have to say that after 5 months in the role, I think that pretty much anyone who wants to be a non-technical founder should spend time as an SDR. Here is why.
The Basics:
First off, being an SDR has taught me the basics of starting a business. Anyone who is a founder was once an SDR even if they didn’t technically have the title. That is because to get a business off the ground, there is one essential ingredient: customers. And to get customers, founders have to get out there and start finding people who line up with their ICP (ideal customer profile) and are open to a demo. If the last five months have taught me anything, it’s that there is a right way and a wrong way to go about finding these early adopters. Let me quickly illustrate the wrong way. When I was working on Virbar and I wanted to get in touch with a college administrator here is what I would do: Let’s say the person’s name was Chris Smith. I would go to the college’s directory, search for Chris Smith, and if I couldn’t find his email there, I would then go to www.guesser.email (this is a real website), get all of the possible permutations of Chris Smith (i.e chris.smith@university.com, csmith@university.com etc.), copy every single variety, paste them into the Bcc line, and then send my email. On the surface, I felt like I had found a creative hack to colleges keeping their employees emails a secret. However, in reality what I was doing was ensuring that any email sent from an @virbar.com email address would never see the light of day. As it turns out, Google is very smart, and they can tell fairly easily when a startup founder like myself has no idea what he is doing and is trying to send 1000 emails a day to people he has never met before. When they realize that this is going on, they simply forward the emails from that domain to spam. You may be reading this and thinking “no s**t”, but I honestly didn’t know this was a thing until I got to Rattle and Justin (our SDR leader and prospecting savant) warned me against domain burnout.
While there isn’t an exact science to prospecting, our general process entails using Linkedin Sales Navigator to find prospects, LeadIQ to get their contact information, and Salesloft to send emails and monitor activity. Other tools exist, and I’m not saying this is the only way to do it, but high level it’s important for early stage companies to focus on a lower quantity of highly personalized outreach as opposed to a large quantity of generic emails/DMs. I often ask myself “would I respond to this email if it landed in my inbox”, if the answer is no, chances are I need to go back to the drawing board.
Getting Over Fake Fears:
A big part of my job is cold calling prospects to pitch them on how Rattle can make using Salesforce and other enterprise applications far easier for their teams. Cold calling is nobody’s favorite thing, but it doesn’t really bother me that much. However, when I stumble across high level people on Linkedin, I start to get a little anxious. I feel out of place dialing CROs and heads of Sales at large orgs (especially on their personal cells). Twice in the last week alone I have found people that fit these descriptions and both times I started creating outs for myself. “He definitely won’t answer” I’d tell myself, “And even if he does answer he won’t want me wasting his time”. However, both times I’ve reminded myself that the worst case scenario is that I get yelled at and hung up on. Not awesome, but doesn’t really have any impact long term. Incredibly, in both of the instances above, not only did the individuals answer the phone, but they were willing to talk and, ultimately, open to setting up meetings. I was blown away. It was a fantastic reminder that risks are worth taking. Nobody would have known if I had decided not to make the dials, but I also wouldn’t have booked two meetings with two decision makers. Convenient excuses will always exist, it’s just a matter of whether or not I listen to them.
Taking Rejection and Kicking Ego to the Curb:
For anyone watching this season of the Bachelorette, you know just how difficult it can be to face rejection. Rejection never feels good. As human beings we want to be accepted by those around us, and when that doesn’t happen it sucks. However, being rejected is part of life, and the most important thing is recognizing that rejection is transient. The SDR role has taught me this better than any other experience in my life. I have had several occasions where I have had someone yell at me on the phone to never call again, only to book a meeting a few calls later. On a deeper level, rejection is also incredibly humbling. Candidly, I went to Harvard, I was a successful D1 athlete, and I worked at a top investment bank. While I don’t really think about these things often, I’d be lying if I said they didn’t cause me to develop at least a small ego. However, the thing that being an SDR has driven home for me is that nobody cares. When I cold call someone it doesn’t matter where I went to school, where I last worked, or what boat I was in. I can get shutdown just as hard as the next guy because all the prospect cares about is if I can help them. That has been an invaluable lesson. If I want to found another company, I need to kick any ego I may have to the curb because no matter how good I may think I am, if I can’t provide value to the customer then I won’t have a business.
What I’ve written above is only a snippet of what I have learned over the last few months. As always, I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity I have been given, and am excited to continue documenting and sharing what I learn. Until then have a great end of week + weekend!
-Andrew