Podcast 138: How SDRs Crush Quota Using Marketing Tactics With Gaetano Di Nardi

SDRs have arguably the hardest jobs in business.

JOHN BARROWS
how sdrs can use marketing tactics with gaetano di nardi

SDRs have arguably the hardest jobs in business. Gaetano Di Nardi joins us on the podcast this week to talk about how SDRs can use marketing tactics and strategies to set themselves aside from the rest of the field, and crush quota. Gaetano leads Demand Generation at Nextiva, a cloud communications company that helps businesses communicate with their internal teams and customers from anywhere. Outside of marketing, Gaetano is an accomplished music and producer and songwriter who loves making music to stay turbocharged. We love mixing things up on this podcast, and Gaetano has always worked closely with sales teams and reps while being a marketer which gives him a unique point of view on how SDRs are doing well today. This was a fun one…

In This Podcast You’ll Learn:

  • Personalization, relevance, and timing
  • Building Your SDRs’ Business Acumen
  • Being Omnipresent & Building A Personal Brand

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Personalization, relevance, and timing

John: How do you balance personalization, relevance, and timing in a way that can be scalable?

Gaetano: The company that was hitting me up didn’t do the pre-work of understanding what my pain already was, they didn’t really assess my current state. Their whole thing was like, “Hey, we made this rap video. We deserve a meeting”. Yeah, no, you don’t. Props, but all you did was not suck like everyone else. So I can’t give participation trophies for not sucking, you know, you’re not supposed to suck.

To the point of timeliness and relevance. What I tell my sales team is to look like you’re a buyer. I’m someone that gets targeted all the time. Never do I wake up on any given day and just randomly say, “Hey, I need a better marketing automation solution” or “Hey, I need to switch from Pardot to HubSpot”. It just doesn’t happen. The takeaway on that is almost 97% of the time that you’re reaching out to someone, there’s no interest. There’s no timeliness factor at all. It’s interrupted. It’s outbound. What you should look to do is hit on the personalization and on the relevance. But keep in mind that the timeliness is probably not going to be there.

What your goal should be is to establish a connection, establish a relationship, and be as top of mind as possible. Become friends with as many prospects as you can. Don’t look at them as a prospect, look at them as I have to become this person’s friend. What you’re doing is implanting yourself in the minds of the buyers, you’re getting in front of those relevant audiences so that when that time does come where, Oh sh*t, Wistia crashed, I’m going to remember Nextiva now and I need a business phone system. I remember that rep that befriended me. That’s how I think aside from buying intent data or doing any trickery with data, that’s how you do it.

Building Your SDRs’ Business Acumen

John: I talk about this a lot but I think there’s a big thing around how SDRs especially, as they’re often the entry role into sales, can build their business acumen. It makes you immeasurably more successful.

Gaetano: Yeah, man, I think you nailed it. One thing that correlates with having strong business acumen is knowing when to shut up. Cause, we don’t use Gong or anything like that yet. But a big data point that always comes out of those studies is SDRs who talk too much tend to lose the deal. It’s just innate human nature, especially sales, we like to talk about ourselves. We don’t just want to talk, we want to talk about us. We want to talk about the thing that we are most comfortable talking about and like talking about the most, which is us. So that’s where you may be failing with the business acumen on a call, you may be jumping the gun, getting a little bit too excited, too ahead of yourself. You might go off rambling and before you know it, this person’s annoyed.

Being Omnipresent & Building A Personal Brand

John: I think it’s so important to be omnipresent on those channels. But how do you do that in a way that doesn’t get in a way of you driving results?

Gaetano: These sales managers have got to figure out what the motivation is for this person. Why are your SDRs actually SDRs? Are they there because they really want to be in marketing someday and that’s their stepstool? You got to figure these things out because that intrinsic motivation is going to be how you guide this person and it’s going to kind of dictate whether or not they willfully decide to build their own personal brand. If they don’t want to be in sales for the long run, they’re probably not going to do it. I think that is kinda step one. If you don’t tap into somebody’s intrinsic motivations, you can’t get him to do anything.

And if they do want to be in sales longterm, that’s an even bigger reason to start building your personal brand now. Yeah, you’re taking a beating, doing your outbound motions and following up with leads and stuff like that. But if you eventually want to be a sales ops leader, you’ve got to really know how to navigate those waters the right way. You look at Morgan with the series he built – the SDR Chronicles. He took something that was seemingly “blah” and made it cool. He made it cool to be an SDR. I think he did a lot for just the community in the sales profession. Just like you. I mean, you guys together are making sales cool again, done the right way.

That’s a wrap. Join us next time

If you made it this far, you’re the best. Thanks for reading and listening to this podcast. We hope you gained a ton from it and will listen in next week too. Don’t forget to check out our recent podcast episode highlights too.

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