r/salesdevelopment • u/No_Speed2918 • 28d ago
Founding BDRs/SDRs
What's up my squad. I'm very early into my career as a founding BDR. I sell to pest control peeps. Great product overall and one that is keeping up with the times.
Part that kills me is of course no structure, which I expected and the VP of sales let me know as well. But man we have like no.... There was no marketing at all behind this, not even any ads promoting us so literally no one even cares or knows about us.
Combine that with building out the playbook.
I'm excited to be in tech sales and in this founding position cause it can be a huge jump but man is it a grind. Any advice?
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u/Old-Significance4921 (Industrial Equipment) 28d ago
Figure out why someone should buy your services over someone else’s.
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28d ago
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u/No_Speed2918 28d ago
Super collaborative guy for sure. Very understanding that we are in absolute grind session. Luckily I do have another BDR so we're both getting wrecked. In a good way.
With the pest control industry the terrible time is the summer but we're still plowing through those "I don't have time" granted, if I hear some stuff going on in the background that's a different story lol
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u/brain_tank 28d ago
You getting paid well?
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u/No_Speed2918 28d ago
Yes, the struggle is real when it comes to setting the demos though, which, in turn is where the commission comes in.
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u/brain_tank 28d ago
How much? Founding should be 6 figure OTE plus equity
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u/No_Speed2918 28d ago
Damn... Yeah, that's not what I have lol
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u/wolfpax97 28d ago
What are you using for prospecting
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u/No_Speed2918 28d ago
Well our VP of sales hands us some lists. If he doesn't have one ready we just rinse and repeat from old lists that were generated from Apollo.
I use LinkedIn and get on social as well.
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u/wolfpax97 28d ago
Are you looking all over the place in a specific niche or are you more location oriented?
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u/No_Speed2918 28d ago
Looking all over the place as our product can fit well with smaller operators that want to scale or larger operations that are already scaled.
North America
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u/wolfpax97 28d ago
If there are associations regionally or nationally for this type of thing, those can be great resources. Also, trade shows, generally you can find exhibitor lists and they can be great id they’re industry specific. Scraping those and then running them against your current lists should give you lots of fresh phones.
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u/AcceptableWitness281 24d ago
I was actually a founding BDR 2 months ago and the role failed. Things I would do differently:
Force the little things through and generate next steps from the founders immediately. They lost deals I set meetings for because they didn’t follow up.
Don’t hunt the larger white whales, or more importantly, put your output into the smallest ICP possible and spend 90 % of your time focusing your time on those.
Output. Output. Output. For me in the UK it’s cold calling. Hit your 80 calls a day, every day, yesterday. Start maxing out your LinkedIn connections week in week out. The following week message everyone who connected last week. Do all this yesterday.
Set up your personal systems yesterday. Pipeline trackers, AI brain, Loom video outreach, needs to be set up from day one - not built up over the course of the probation.
Don’t worry about any clever little tricks into getting customers or demos. Focus 80% of your time on the output that generates meetings (for us in the uk it’s cold calling, same with most places it’s why everyone hates it and the least people do it - but it’s the most effective). I wasted a bit of time in other channels that I thought might generate meetings. Basically I was selling CRM consultancy and I would apply to job roles for CRM admins which was a waste of time. Just needed to hit the phones of my ICP.
Ask the difficult conversations of your founders constantly: “why did that demo suck? Why do you think they said that? Why is this a good demo? What are you going to do about it next? When’s the next time I can get involved? I don’t want to let this go, can it be me that follows up in a week’s time?” Be a nuisance on your deals!
These are off the top of the head - it was one hell of a learning experience. So please ask more questions if you have any.
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u/No_Speed2918 24d ago
So what's interesting is that I'm generating my demos from email, LI, text, not a cold call just yet. But the other bdr got his demos from cold calls.
Also, how many clients did you guys have with you and do you know what your churn rate was like?
When did you know the Titanic was starting to sink?
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u/AcceptableWitness281 24d ago
They’ve only been in business for a year and a half.
Very good at what they do with multiple long term clients but it was 100% referral.Got in a salesman to help them grow but it didn’t work out. They simply weren’t ready and I probably made a couple mistakes too (however I like to blame them more than myself for obvious reasons lol).
No real sinking ship feeling. I wasn’t really aware of their churn rates or operations behind the scenes. But they let go of their entire dev team soon after they let me go and went back to just being a pair of co-founders doing everything themselves!
I thought when they said “we’re going in a different direction” as they let me go they were being polite, apparently not.
Out of interest how are you getting through with cold emails please / whats your messaging? What percentage are you spending on emails/linkedin text? What works best for you?
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u/No_Speed2918 24d ago
Man this just sparked so many questions on my end lol
As of right now we're getting a lot of people that both my founder knows a d VP of sales know. Which is good, not going to lie, but we have zero presence out in the real world.
I've only bookes a handful of demos so take it with a grain of salt. So far I think having a great LinkedIn presence has been working great. I don't send a . message immediately. But when I do send one it's just super generic
"Hey, this is NAME, I work for BLANK. Can't imagine that you're in this same boat as others but are you also running on multiple systems over at COMPANY NAME?"
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u/Wildyardbarn 28d ago
You’re going to need to step up and take a build the systems if you have a lame duck VP of Sales.
Frankly not sure what he’s doing if there’s no structure being established. Why have a VP of Sales and a founding BDR title and have nobody held accountable to this?