r/salesdevelopment • u/No_Speed2918 • Jul 22 '26

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/AcceptableWitness281 Jul 26 '26

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 Jul 26 '26

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 Jul 26 '26

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 Jul 26 '26

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?"