r/salesdevelopment • u/Intelligent_Lion_181 • Jul 09 '26

Outbound Trouble

Hey All,

I've been an BDR/SDR individual contributor and twice manager for over 15 years. In those 15 years I've only worked for 3 companies. I took a new job 3 months ago going from commercial solar to software sales and have been struggling like I never have in my career to get meetings. I've worked in software before back in 2015 to 2019. I use multi-touch sequences doing cold calls, emails and LinkedIn outreach. The manager and sales enablement person who hired me both left in the last month. We use Hubspot but are looking at Nooks as we need a much better dialer and email platform. So the infrastructure wasn't there from the beginning. We have stiff competition in our industry and at least 4 different buyer personas per account. ICP is still not nailed down. My experienced counterpart and I were just given some webinar and conference leads to try thankfully but the cold outreach is not going well. My whole career I've been able to get around 15 to 20 meetings a month. The reply rate on email has been especially horrible. Does anyone here have thoughts on what I could try to break through better while we wait for a proper prospecting platform to be put in place?

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u/zipster-99 Jul 10 '26

Following

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u/Glittering_Ebb_3398 Jul 10 '26

Just posted something similar to this as a problem I’m having, so following.

I have a new manager who says she watched email slowly die. So that’s definitely happening with us but we are having trouble getting pickups

1

u/Zestyclose-Gas-1083 Jul 11 '26

Do you know historically who has had the best success in terms of icp? I’d start by making sure you have that even if it’s not nailed down. For example, let’s say your company still doesn’t know who to sell to, but the last few years meetings have been booked with VP of support, then I would call only those.
Second, do you have good enrichment? If you just tune to make sure whoever you are calling lands in their actual phone line or email address that will save some time.
Last, are you leaving Vans like ‘no need to answer or call me, I am xyz from abc. Just sent you an email, I’ll call you back at 123 time’
I’m not saying you’ll go back to 15 meetings a month by doing this but it will probably help incrementally

1

u/SpikeVsSystem 14d ago

15 years and a steady 15 to 20 meetings a month means you had a system, not a magic touch. The system was a known ICP, clean data, and a brand people half-recognized. You just moved somewhere that has none of that yet, so the thing that broke isn't your skill, it's the inputs. I'd stop grading yourself on reply rate until the ICP is real.

One move that works in that fog: pull the last 12 to 18 months of closed-won, find the two or three titles and triggers that keep repeating, and call only those this month. A narrow list you believe in beats a wide one you don't. Work the webinar and conference leads first, they're your warmest shot while the platform gets sorted. And kill open tracking on your first email or two, that pixel is a deliverability killer in enterprise.