In This Newsletter

• “The SDR role is dead.”

• Download the NDR Playbook

• Or watch the video version!

Want to skip the email and just download the NDR playbook right away? Grab your copy here.

“The SDR role is dead.”

If you’ve been on LinkedIn in the past 6 months, you’ve probably seen some version of this line.

And while I’m not a fan of calling things dead…

We do have to accept that the predictable revenue model on which the SDR was built has been deteriorating for some time now.

Don’t believe me? Consider some numbers:

Jeremey Donovan, EVP of RevOps & Strategy at Insight Partners benchmarked a 500% increase in the number of touches per opportunity sourced for cold outbound in the last five years.

Pavilion and Ebsta discovered that less than 40% of sales reps hit quota in Q1 2024.

I could honestly fill the rest of this email with stats like those.

The way buyers buy has changed drastically in the last 5 years.

Instead of saying the SDR is dead, I’m proposing an evolution. What if you turned your SDRs into Network Development Representatives (NDRs)?

But first, let me back up a bit.

I’ve been building communities for about 10 years now, and Commsor didn’t actually start out building software for revenue teams. We started helping community teams be an intentional part of the Go-to-Market process.

To make a long story short, after nearly 3 years of building this, we hit a wall and didn’t see a path forward for the product we created.

However, amid all this, we began noticing a trend in the industry and our own company: the most reliable and high-value deals consistently stemmed from relationships within communities and networks.

But why?

Trust is the most crucial element of making an expensive B2B purchase. And buyer trust in vendors is low when compared to trust in peers, communities, and colleagues.

And thus, Go-to-Network was born: a modern strategy that focuses on creating a network of people around your business (advisors, champions, influencers, customers, users, etc.), who become your wedge into the market.

Alright, back to the NDR.

Where an SDR is purely focused on booking meetings at all costs, the NDR takes a smarter, more nuanced approach. Think short term versus long term.

The NDR grows the network around your business. They pull the market into your sphere of influence rather than pushing out into the market and hunting.

This type of work creates lasting impact, unlike traditional SDR efforts that stop after daily outbound activity ends.

SDRs are focused purely on transactional, short-term actions.

When the seller discovers the buyer isn’t purchasing, they’re hauled off to the pile of closed-lost leads, where a prospect’s value to the business is determined by the money they can (or can’t) spend on software.

It’s a shortsighted approach not only to business, but to how we view people as well.

Because we’ve been trained in this binary approach of either closed-lost or closed-won, we rarely treat people as the open-ended relationships they should be treated as.

If your prospect, Ben, doesn’t buy now, maybe his company is a great fit for a partnership? Maybe you can co-create some content together? Ben might even be a great future hire!

Yet, even if Ben is none of these things, keep building the relationship. You never know when someone might return to buy.

It’s clear that buyers’ buying habits have changed, and therefore, you need to adapt your sales development team and process to match.

To be the change we want to see in the world, we created the NDR Playbook with contributions from some fantastic sellers and leaders.

It’s not meant to be the final word, but rather a starting point for you whether you’re an SDR, sales leader, or even an early-stage founder.

Grab it for free below!

Until next time,

Mac 🦕

El Rey del Dinos | LinkedIn

Download the NDR Playbook

23 pages of insights outlining the evolution from SDR to NDR in detail, including:

• Why this change is needed

• What an NDR should actually be doing

• How to enable an NDR to be successful

• How to hire your first NDR (including sample JD and comp plan)

and so much more!

(Button not working? Try this link instead)

Or watch the video version

No time to read the playbook? We’ve got you covered: grab some 🍿 and enjoy the video version created by Rayna. 👇️