170: Charlie Locke On Building SDR Nation

What's poppin' everybody, it's your man James, Say What Sales Buckley, and thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Make It Happen Mondays with your host, John Barrows. This episode, as always, is brought to you by our partners, Sales Loft, Gong, Vanilla Soft, Vidyard, Proposify, Zoom Info, and Loom Cube. Today, we have a very special guest, Mr. Charlie Locke and our new partners over at SDR Nation are going to dive deep into what's changed from the SDR's perspective in 2020. How is the role viewed, and what's different about it that just wasn't the same just 10 short months ago? It's been a hell of a journey in 2020, and the SDR role is being viewed completely different than it once was.

Charlie and John are going to dive deep into this and answer a lot of questions. What's the mindset behind it? What does it take to be successful today as an SDR? And don't forget that you too can join us at ondemand.jbarrows.com to get world-class training and step up your game today. Let's take it away, John. Good afternoon, everybody. It's John Barrows. Make it up on Monday. Hopefully, you had a fantastic weekend. I am here with a very interesting guest because this gentleman scared the shit out of me a while ago, and now we're back partnering together. So, Charlie Locke, what's going on, my friend? How are you doing? I'm doing great. How are you doing, John? I'm doing well, man. So, you actually, I think you are now in every single slide deck that I train with your Shakespeare app.

So, for some context here for everybody who hasn't been listening, and I'll go, Charlie, you can go through your background here. But I, all of a sudden, you know, the why you, why you now email and the prospecting, all that other stuff. And actually, I'm going to have you tell this story, right? Because the whole idea, I built this whole training, or when I was at Basho, it was really all based on this one email called the why you, why you now email, right? Which was go do some research and, you know, find a trigger, whatever it is, and write a very personalized email to the, to the C-suite and whatever, and fire it off, right? And so, that's what I trained for years. I mean, I did a little dog and pony show around the rest of this stuff, but it was really showing how to send that email.

And then all of a sudden, I almost shit myself, because I thought I was out of business, because you came up with something, because you were working at Salesforce after, like, when I trained, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we learned the Basho technique from you, and, you know, it was pervasive and stuff all throughout Salesforce. And I left Salesforce and started another company, and we were, you know, just playing around with different product ideas, and one of them that landed on was Shakespeare.ai, and I still actually, to this day, get SDRs and AEs that take your training and reach out to me, and say, hey, what's this app that you built? Because it's kind of just sitting and collecting dust right now.

But yeah, the app itself is just a Chrome extension that would allow you to really easily personalize an email with, like, three or four clicks. You know, Basho, the technique works so well, but of course, it's a bit time-consuming, and, you know, personalization at scale is, you know, a big challenge for lots of folks out there. And so it was pretty cool to pull from various different data sources and pull in little snippets that you could use, and we'd create all the segues and the subject lines and things like that. Unfortunately, when we built it, I was on my way to having a second child and been doing a failing startup for about a year and a half. And so we started running out of money, but we did test it a few times with you guys, which was awesome.

And, you know, an interesting test that came out of it, actually, was that we ran, I think, a thousand emails through Shakespeare and, you know, personalized them all. And then we ran a thousand emails just canned, right? And at the end of the day, the core truth that we were trying to prove was that our emails generate more replies. And at the end of the day, we didn't. So that's something interesting for all the rest of you out there to think about, too, right? Well, and it, well, that's what, so, because at first it scared the shit out of me, because I'm like, oh my God, we're like, not only me for my training, but, and we're going to get to this SDRs, right? But like, SDRs are now out of business at this point, right?

Because now if AI can do that and be, I mean, the one that you sent me, I almost, I literally was like, I couldn't have written a better email than this. And, but, but what it really, I mean, that test that we did kind of also woke me up to the difference in, in the importance of not just personalization, but also relevance. Right. Right. The relevance factor. If you could, if you forced me to choose personalization over, you know, or relevance, I would choose relevance all day long because, and that's where I see like some of the other AI, I don't want to mention them, but you know, some of the other AI tools that are trying to do what you guys were doing is they're grabbing personalized stuff, but they're not making it relevant.

So I'm getting emails saying, Hey John, I see you went to university of Maryland, or I see you're from Boston, you know, go to, you know, go Terps or Boston, whatever. And then it hard cuts to some piece of shit elevator pitch. Right. Yeah. There's a cool pizza shop down the street called Joe's pizza. And by the way, I sell this tool. Yeah, exactly. So I was like, okay, so that's where I kind of, at first I was like, we're, we're all done. And then I'm like, okay, they haven't really figured this out yet because they can grab that. But in order for me, like, in my opinion, there's still some heavy lifting on the company side to create messaging about their offering. So it ties to triggers and then send AI out to say, go find the trigger, make the connection to the message and then send it out.

Right. So, and I don't think companies are there yet, but, but you've been busy since, right? So, so talk to me through now, you know, Salesforce and you, you know, jumped into the entrepreneur spot and we're going to come, we're going to lead up to, to SDR nation that you founded. But what, what was that journey after that? Yeah. So, I mean, I mean, my background about 20 years in sales, um, always, you know, started way back, you know, in 1999 cold calling from Excel lists. Um, when I was 19 years old, I got lucky to, to work for a guy who was the CEO of Macromedia. I was just like his doc boy basically up at his cottage and, uh, dating guy, but would be down in San Francisco. Um, so yeah, huge passion for sales, been in it for a long time, leadership for about 10 years.

Um, on my way over to Salesforce about five years ago, had a great run there, but then, yeah, I really wanted to step out and do my own thing. Um, and left and started my own company called Sassly and then started Shakespeare at AI. And then, like I said, you know, learn my, took my lumps and most entrepreneurs do. It's funny when, whenever I, uh, we went to, you know, talk to potential investors and things like that. Um, one of the first questions was, is this your first startup? And, and I would say, yes. And you could see the look of disappointment. I feel like, oh shit, it's going to fail. Every first time, first time founder usually fails. So, um, but, uh, uh, but through that learned a ton, just learned a ton about product and marketing and, and just grind and the struggle.

Like I thought missing my number at Salesforce was the worst day of my life, but not being able to pay my mortgage got pretty scary when I was, yeah, a little bit, a little bit higher level stress. So, uh, anyways, went back to work and, uh, since then I've been a, you know, VP second line and third line at a, uh, some smaller and bigger organizations right now working at a great company called Hi Mama. Um, really loving it here. We're, uh, uh, you know, in the education space as well. So, you know, my passion personally is around sales and teaching. Um, I come from a family of teachers. My mom was a teacher. My grandmother is a teacher. My sister's a principal. And for all those reasons that, you know, I, I just really, um, you know, everything I'm doing is around that.

And so I love that side of sales as well from a leadership perspective. And so, um, you know, moving on to, um, you know, still enjoying my time at Hi Mama, but with SDR nation, I think I've always just had a passion for, uh, along that sales and teaching sides, salespeople's careers and, um, and making sure that they have the experience that I had in sales, which is that sales can be a really fruitful and rewarding and challenging and exciting career if they're just given the chance. Um, and, you know, we'll get into all the things that SDR nations is set out to do, but it's really around that is, is making sure that salespeople have a chance. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's funny, you brought it up one before, which is, you know, I was speaking with Dr.

Uh, Howard Dover, right. From UT Dallas and they got their sales program there. And I've always like it ever since I re cause I got into sales, just like everybody else. I fell into it. It was my default profession. Cause I didn't want to do what I went to school for. Right. And it was a school of hard knocks. Right. I was like, okay, let me figure this out. And, you know, as I started to really, um, get into this industry or that this field, if you will, it really started to annoy me and bother me that this isn't a, like it is the, I always say it's the number one profession on the planet, but yet none of us are actually formally taught how to do it. And so you, you wonder why it has such a bad reputation because you give a kid who's a pretty normal kid who has, you know, who usually wouldn't cheat, lie or steal or anything like that.

You then now give them a quota and a territory and say, go. And by the way, if you don't hit your quota, you're probably going to get fired and you definitely won't be able to pay your bills. Like you have seemingly normal kids that will do some abnormal things. You know what I mean? They'll, they'll, they'll cut some corners. They'll say some things that they probably shouldn't say, which gives the bad perception of sales, which just is a compounding effect. So, so with that, with kind of how sales has evolved here with the whole segmentation of roles, right? I mean, when predictable revenue, when Salesforce really nailed it, you know, it, it became less of, okay, here, sales rep go. And you have to do everything to, okay, let's segment these roles.

And what's happened is I personally think that, you know, in some cases that has stunted the growth of sales professionals because they, they now are kind of specialized. I think it helps them be more experts in those areas. So longer term, I think there, but I think it stunts their growth in the short term. On the benefit side, it gives an organization a better chance to scale and grow so that they have some time, right? And less people bail out because they can't do it. So the SDR role though, by segmenting that out, it's the, I always say SDR role is the, is the hardest job in sales period to get 99 nose to me, to get one, maybe to then, right. And then to get the shit kicked out of you by your AE because you didn't qualify it well enough to get yelled at by marketing.

Cause you didn't follow up on those fucking leads and all that other shit. And now even worse, what made that job somewhat tolerable pre COVID was that we were all at least in a bullpen with a bunch of other SDRs getting our asses handed to us. And now we're all sitting at home by ourselves. And so you, you said earlier that you didn't think that SDRs were really set up to succeed in general. Talk to me about that. Like why aren't, what are you seeing out there as far as the, the, the respect level of SDRs, the setup for success level, like what's, what's wrong right now with, from an SDR introduction standpoint? Yeah. Well, if I'm going to backtrack a little bit, I think this is actually, you know, look, if we look back at the last 20, 25 years, I think there's been a big shift in the market really, you know, with the, with the introduction of cloud software you know, all of a sudden, I think what happened was our margins became a lot bigger, you know, back in the early nineties or eighties, even, you know, there was just not as much margin to play with when it came to sales and marketing.

Right. Then all of a sudden, you know, you, you're selling software where you don't even have to ship CDs out the door. Right. And, and so, you know, organizations like, like Salesforce smartened up to that and said, you know, we can put a lot more money into sales and marketing and sales in general, and just actually start to really understand this practice and take this art, you know, that that's, it was formerly known as, you know, this sort of like, Oh, the guy's a good talker. Yeah, exactly. He's got the gift of gab or whatever, and he's good at it. And, and, and, and, you know, I think, you know, in doing so, what it, what it's, what it's done is actually made the, the opportunity for salespeople in that, you know, in a sales capacity to be a job where you can actually make 300, $400,000 as you get to these like later stages in life.

But the real question is, is like, why does no one want to be in sales when they were a kid? You know? And, and I think you raised this question to everyone when you do trainings with, right? Yep. I wrote a book on it, man. I don't want to be in sales when I grow up. Yeah. Mentally, it comes down to like, what, why do you go to school? What, what do you take when you go to school? And for the most part, it's probably, yeah, there you go. It's probably because that's what your parents told you to do, right? Your parents told you to be a doctor, told you to be an engineer, told you to get into finance, something professional, right? And when they grew up, sales wasn't a professional job. That was where the dumbos went.

Like, you know, that's where like, Oh, we, you know, Tony, you know, he, you know, he, he went over and he did that job. And so for them, that was never a professional career, but became professional, became scientific, became process driven over the last 20 years and nothing's caught up. Yeah. And I think for those reasons, when you look at post-secondary education, like colleges and things like that, like they're starting to get there. Like Dr. Dover was talking about, uh, which I think is great. But at the end of the day, they're customers, parents. And until like our generation, like I've got two young kids until like, I'm going to be obviously talking to my kids about writing, coding, selling, those are the three things that are going to be so important in the next 30 years.

Um, but we're still going through that switch where universities don't take it seriously. So inherently what you get is this huge demand of sales roles, right. Um, on, you know, coming out of school and, um, and a huge shortage of people that have any education whatsoever about that. So they land at a company, you know, most of us didn't really think we were going to land there and we landed a company and, you know, unless we're working at a big organization where there's huge enablement teams and boot camps and universities and all that kind of stuff, you're probably working with a first time manager who's 25 years old, who's never managed people before, never trained people before, did your job for maybe a year.

When I was my first job out of school, my manager, like back in the early 2000s, managers were like 35 years old. You couldn't be a manager without 10 years experience. And that's why we've seen this huge advent of this new role, which is enablement, right. Companies are growing so fast because, um, you know, and, and because of that, the managers don't have the chops to train the reps. And so you have these enablement roles now opening up all the way to the place, which I think is great. Um, but for all those reasons, you have this big gap where people land in these jobs, the companies aren't set up to make the SDR successful. Um, they treat it kind of like part of the hiring process where it's like, Hey, we'll hire four and see if to make it.

And for those, for those reasons, I think that's the part though, that keeps me up at night is that, you know, I see all these fantastic, smart, young, creative, energetic kids that want to do it. Well, um, that, you know, burn out or fail, you know, because they don't have the right enablement in the first six, eight months. And then, you know, at the end of the day, that's, they, they say, that's it for me in sales. Like they'll probably get fired and then they're done with sales. And that, that's what keeps me up at night. Yeah. I think that's the challenge, right. Is that given the right opportunity, I mean, I think you said it like the right opportunities, right. I mean, I, I feel fortunate that I've, I've been able to have the experience that I have in my career, but unfortunate in the sense that I never really had a good manager.

I never really had somebody to show me what it was like to be successful. Right. I kind of figured it out on my own. Um, but I did start with some large organizations like DeWalt, right. So I got trained there and then, uh, Xerox, that's where I got my actual formal sales education there. And then I jumped into startups and started kind of applying that knowledge to everything else. Right. So, so with that for SDRs right now, I mean, I kind of, the euphoric state is you get into an organization, like you said, that has an enablement that walks you through a program that understands and has a real strong structure to this. So how do we like, well, actually I want to take a step, like, where is the SDR role right now in your opinion?

Right. And the context on this question is, is, you know, pre COVID to your point, growth economy, uh, SAS, there's a, there's, there's a lot more margin there. And when things are going well, it's like, okay, cool. Let's just keep throwing money at this to keep this engine going. Cause who gives a shit? We're not really tracking a lot of stuff, you know, MQLs, SQLs, who cares? Right. We're, we're making money here. Right. Down economy. What I saw, and I got Trish Bertuzzi to come on like around, I think March or April, uh, to be like, Trish, I'm a little nervous right now. Cause I'm watching organizations slash and burn SDRs because I think they had a lazy way of measuring them. And it was, it was purely as SQLs with, with, you know, band qualified stuff of senior level executives who are ready to fucking buy basically.

Right. And if you didn't get those, then whatever. So they didn't look at all the other benefits, but the reason that they allowed that to happen was because they saw it as a growth engine of them developing their own sales team. So the additional benefit of getting meetings great, but we're also building our own sales org right now so that these are going to be eventually our sellers. But the challenge with that now down economy is the margins aren't there, you know, numbers are down. And now I'm like, these SDRs are slamming their head up against the wall, trying to get meetings with executives who don't want to talk to them, period. Right. And so it's like, okay, well shit, screw off. See you later.

SDRs, AEs, you got a prospect, be more strategic, ABM. We're going to dump more money into that. And I think there's a different way of looking at SDRs right now. So the question here is, is SDR still the feeder system for sales or is it marketing and ops and what does it look like? And what is the value outside of getting meetings with direct executives who are looking to buy? How else should we be looking at SDRs right now? Yeah. I mean, fundamentally, I think the, until, and we've seen some organizations take this leap where they look at the SDR like a long-term role, where they look at developing more long-term skills, like understanding your, you know, really, really reaching up the funnel and working much tighter with marketing and really starting to work with marketing automation systems and use that data and start to build out more skill sets around how they can become more marketers and be a part of that organization.

Or how they're just like a longer term path in that role where it's a role where you're going to want to be in it for a long time. But I still think fundamentally the core value for most organizations with the SDR is building that bench, is building a team where you can de-risk your hiring process. And, you know, because at the end of the day, if you're going to be bringing on an AE, there's a ton of red flags that are coming with that, right? I don't really know the work ethic, you know, and I don't really know if they're going to pick up my product really well. I don't really know if their culture fit. Like I can do all these things in an interview cycle, but those red flags go away when you're hiring from your SDR pool, right?

At the end of the day, you're going to be typically working with folks that, you know, check a lot of the boxes that are intangible things that you can't typically measure during the hiring process. So I think for that reason, there's always going to be a lot of value in bringing on SDRs to build your new bench, you know, for AEs. But as far as like the challenges of the role itself, it's a tough, tough job to your point. And I think, I mean, the part that to your point earlier around how it, a lot of people just get through the job from being in a bullpen with flags and, you know, energy and making fun of yourself and all that sort of stuff. Like that's the part that I see when we talk to SDRs today and SDR Nation, we have one-on-ones.

We're just lonely, you know, like this is a lonely job now. Cause it's like, before it was like, Hey, I'm, sometimes it feels like you're just doing a factory job. You're just on a cog on a conveyor belt, basically putting arms in a doll or something. And like, that's what you do all day long. You just do the same thing over and over and over. It's a pretty shitty job sometimes and pretty tough. You learn a lot from it, but you know, the amount of like non-learning that you get through your day sometimes is really hard. And so, you know, without that support network, without the, um, the people around you right now, I think it's, it's really, um, you know, hurting SDRs out there, um, just in the state that we're in right now.

And so I think that's, that's the part that I'm, I'm most worried about. So I'm less worried about like the efficacy of them and cause they're arguably probably more productive organizations are probably getting smarter at looking at how they run their day through, through data now because they can't just watch them. Um, but I'm more worried about the SDRs themselves on if they can handle this type of, working from a closet apartment in, in downtown Manhattan and barely paying your rent and doing it, you know? Yeah, I agree. I mean, there's, there's two things, right? There's a huge opportunity, but also a massive challenge, right? The opportunity is I can now become a sniper SDR. That's good as shit at what I do.

You know what I mean? And I can live a pretty good life by being somewhat autonomous, you know what I mean? Like as long as I'm cranking, but that takes a certain personality to do. Whereas most of us are pretty social beings, you know what I mean? I think that, that being around other people like us, especially early in our career, right? Not like I was saying earlier, for me, this is a, like, I couldn't be fucking happier. You know what I mean? Like for me to be at home by myself in my room with my wife and daughter, I can put my daughter to bed every single night. I personally do not need people around me to, to, to get motivated or to do any of that stuff because, but I'm 45 years old. You know what I mean?

I look at this, if I, in that, and I also have a house, I have a backyard, you know what I mean? Like I have all these different things. I do think of those 23, 24 year old kids who are sitting in that, you know, 800 square foot apartment with three other people trying to do this job, you know what I mean? And going batshit crazy around it. So let's talk two things. Let's talk managers. Well, three things managers and what managers need to be doing right now to, to make sure that their SDRs are staying somewhat motivated, um, and, and making the job fun in some way, shape or form. Let's talk about what you do as a rep to keep yourself in the right mindset. And then let's talk about additional resources like SDR nation that we should be, you know, working to, to help build this community.

So let's talk managers first. What do managers need to be doing right now to keep their reps now that they don't, aren't in the bullpen, they're not watching them day to day, you know, zoom fatigue is a real thing, uh, hearing from the same person's fricking brutal all the time. Right. And they're, and they're getting their asses kicked. So what do I need to do as a frontline manager is probably 25 years old and freaking the fuck out because now I'm supposed to not only do I not know how to manage, I now have to manage in a virtual world. Any tips or ideas on what they need to be doing right now to keep those SDRs motivated? Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, most of it always comes back to that, the one-on-one, right?

And I think where, what we lose in this type of environment, virtual environment in a one-on-one is that it's easy to not be personal. It's easy to not, you know, have to dive down into the emotional and the personal side of things for whatever reason. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's looking at yourself the whole time. Um, you know, but for, I think that's where managers need to continually keep working on the mental health and, and actually just, you know, I used to call it turn, you know, push down the computer, which we can't do now. Um, and, and, you know, so I would say for managers start doing walking one-on-ones, right? Stop doing the zoom one-on-ones, just a walking one-on-ones.

There's a huge difference when you're actually not looking at each other sometimes to have a really personal conversation with your rep. Start talking to them about when most people don't want to be an SDR, the whole point of being an SDR is to not be an SDR for a lot of folks. And so really focusing on the career paths and building enablement and building training, um, so that, you know, they actually have a real career path because all those little things that used to help them, um, create the career path for themselves were being able to like, look over at the AE row and go talk to them and build those relationships and be like, Hey, can I sit down with you and, and, you know, just pick a brain on a few things.

Those types of things aren't happening anymore. So how do you recreate those experiences where they're getting those little micro learning moments, um, that, you know, are outside of big training sessions or outside of the dashboard or outside of like what you're doing in your, your role-playing and things like that. And trying to create those, those paths to getting them to the next step in their career. That's, that's primarily what most SDRs want. What's going on everybody. This episode is flame. I want to give a special shout out to Dakota Harding of Woven, an on-demand user that jumped in a couple months ago and has seen incredible results from what he learned from on-demand. Dakota, say hi to everybody.

Hello, internet people. Yes. So if you're listening to this podcast episode, know this Dakota was brand new to the SDR role, jumped into on-demand. And what was the number one thing you took away from it? Number one thing I took away was that I could do this job. Um, I'd hit a point where I was doubting my ability to do the basic SDR work and jumping in to the program. I, I found my footing, turned the corner and have been able to build from that. Yeah. The structure, I think that we provide in on-demand gives SDRs direction. So how did that structure change your results? I mean, structure in anything you're doing makes it you better, like you're getting the reps. And for me, it worked to change it so that I was able to book more meetings, uh, digging in, following the structure, doing the activity, working towards the outcomes, had a string where the outcomes you can't always control, but I can control the input and the input worked for, you know, so far booked 11 meetings in a two week window where before I would only dream about something like that.

I'll take that. Yeah. 11 meetings in a two week window seems like a great accomplishment. If you're coming from somewhere where every month you're lucky to bit book, like five qualified meetings. What do you think the takeaway was that led to this epiphany for you? Honestly, it was just getting comfortable in the cold call. Um, I believe 10 of those 11 meetings all came from cold call books and it was going into it, being personal, communicating and having your voice and not just sounding like a robot, reading off a script, not caring about the person that I'm talking with, but instead intentionally working to solve a problem, learn and gain that information to be able to determine if it, if the prospect is worth that next step, if it even makes sense for them and their pains.

Well, we appreciate you coming out today. Thanks a lot for everybody tuning in. We hope this episode has been impactful for you. Reach out to Dakota Harding at Woven. You won't be disappointed in a conversation with them. We'll talk to you guys soon. Enjoy the rest of the episode. I think with SDR nation, for example, you know, that's what we're seeing is a lot of folks who are, who are now taking control of their own career, right. Who are saying I'm going to pay, right. Cause I think a lot of folks before, you know, as salespeople, we never really paid for our own training. We would never really, you know, I mean, you know, John, I mean, organizations would pay for you to come in and train my reps.

And so as salespeople, we were always just kind of like, well, either our manager is supposed to teach me something or we bring in a trainer. And I think we're seeing a lot of SDRs now taking control of their own, their own enablement in a lot of ways. And so, um, I think that's, that's a key piece to this whole puzzle is people taking control of their own careers and managers, um, actually we're seeing a lot of managers with the folks that we have in SDR nation being really supportive of them doing that. And so, um, it's just learning. It's all learning the whole, like what keeps people happy and motivated is if you're learning shit, um, the money is the money, whatever people are. I always say like, you know, any, any rep up my company, I'm like, if you, I would never ask you to be loyal to this company, right?

Like if you are learning and you're making money, you're going to stay. That's it. Like full stop. There's no real other reason why I think people stay at companies. If they're learning and they're making enough money, they're probably going to stay. If those things start to falter, then you should go. Like there's no such thing in loyalty. No, no. And there shouldn't be. Right. I mean, I think it's, there's, there's loyalty to a degree. Um, and you know, but if I'm not, it's not a one-sided equation here anymore, right? It's not, oh, I have a job. I think a lot of people, unfortunately right now are in that mindset of, oh my God, I need to get a job. Right. And I'll take almost anything and I'll do almost anything to pay my bills.

So companies can take advantage of that. But very, like when this shifts around the companies that are not taking care of those people, right. And, and make, helping them learn and helping them develop and all that other stuff are going to, there's going to be massive churn from a, from a rep standpoint because, you know, uh, because people needed it right now. And I think when you said that, you know, we as sales professionals, you know, kind of waited for training. I've always known the best sales professionals never wait for shit. You know what I mean? Like they think whatever the, the company's going to give me is whatever, but I'm going to go, it's just like AE is like, I can't stand AEs who rely on their SDRs for meetings.

I, you know, I'm like, why wouldn't you prospect? Right. I mean, I, I say all the time as a VP of sales, the first time of AE on my team would come to me if they missed their quota. And if they started, the reason they missed their quota for that quarter was my SDR didn't get me enough meetings before that even came out of their fucking mouth. I would fire them. Right. And it's the same thing with, with education. Like, oh, well, I didn't get any training. Are you shitting me right now? There is so much free stuff out there right now or paid. If you want to be a little bit more specific that if you are not taking your own development into your own hands, you should be ashamed of yourself. Right.

And this goes for people who have jobs and people who don't have jobs. I mean, I know, you know, I'm sure there's plenty of SDRs in there that don't have jobs right now. The first question I would ask you, if you were, if you were interviewing on, for my company as an SDR, I would say, what you been doing? Yeah. All right. You got laid off. I'm going to give you whatever. I'm not going to hold that against you because shit happens right now. So what have you been doing between now and then? And if you're like, oh, well, you know, I've been catching up on Netflix and shit like that. Like done. See you later. But if you're like, oh, I signed up for SDR nation. I actually took money out of my own pocket and paid for XYZ programs.

And I learned this and I read Jim Keenan's book on gap selling. It was fantastic. Like that's the kid. I'm like, yup, that's the one I want. Yeah. Yeah. I call it locus of control. Well, it is called locus of control. It's a standard term, but it's one of the things that I've learned in like hiring reps for like 10 years now. It's like the most important thing. And, and I usually test for it in talking about, you know, where did you stack rank on the last team you're in? And they'll say like, oh, it's number two or number three or whatever. I'm saying, okay, cool. What was number one doing different to you? And you'll, you'll hear probably about 70% of the folks will say, uh, number one was, you know, better territory or the manager liked them better and more leads.

And they've been there longer, all this shit. I can't control. I can't control. I can't control. I can't control the great reps. The other 25% are the ones that say like that they were doing this better than me. I learned this from them. I could have done that better. I didn't do that. I made this mistake. And, you know, that, that mindset is, is so hard to, to, um, to find it. It's so hard to build to something you have to hire for. And, you know, fundamentally, I think, uh, you know, that's, you know, what, what you're going to see a lot of people starting to try to train themselves to become more of, I'd hope, um, is, is to start taking more control of their own outcomes, um, rather than living in a world where fate decides, you know, what's ever going to happen to you, which is a pretty tough way to live.

Well, and it's also interesting when you choose to learn something, you actually learn it versus going through something that everybody, that somebody else chose you to learn. You know what I mean? Like I look at that as like college versus your, your master's degree. I think college is a joke personally. I think it's, it's a good social education, but it's not an education. You're there to fuck around. I mean, unless you go in saying, no, I want to be a doctor. Like if you are crystal clear with what you want to be with your career, fine. But for the most part, it's a social education. Then you get out into the real world. You're like, holy shit, what's this all about? And then you're like, no, no, no, no.

I now know. I, I now want to go learn that. Then you go for your master's. That to me is now you're learning. It's the same thing in this scenario. If you've been sitting at a company that has been feeding you training, I'm, you know, most people will probably kind of go through the motions with it. Whatever. Got to go to training today. That type of thing. Hopefully they get some good training that engages them in that, but they just, all right. Yeah, whatever. Whereas if, you know, I'm guessing the ones who sign up for SDR nation, because they're putting it out of their own pocket here are saying, I, I want to learn about this role. I want to join a community. And so therefore what you get out of it is always what you put into it.

Right. But when you choose, it's a much more open-ended learning than when it's given to you in any way, shape or form. 100%. And, you know, and I think they're also recognized how they learn and how they will invest. And I think, you know, the mediums of learning have been changing dramatically, you know, over the last 10 years, even. Right. So, you know, and we asked this question in our questionnaire when people sign up for SDR nation, because that's exactly what we're looking for. We're looking for people that talk about their failures openly, you know, and like in our, relish in those opportunities and, and have some way learned about them. And we, we, we asked people how we're learning today.

And we'll, you know, you'll see, and we only bring in people that are talking about the things that you're talking about, like I'm reading books, or I paid for this other service, or I'm taking, you know, I'm taking this training or what have you, where there's a lot of folks that are just learning through blog posts, you know, or, or, you know, just, I just go on LinkedIn and I just look for snippets and things like that. So I think there's, there's a happy medium in those two things though, because, you know, there needs to be structured curriculum, right? There needs to be some sort of structure to the learning. And that structure is, is how most of this generation has actually grown up inside.

And they, they relish when they have structure, but they also, but the types of content that you provide them need to be in, in consumable chunks that, that they're actually going to be able to digest. And I think what SDR nation is sort of, I think the allure for a lot of folks is that not only am I getting expert coaching and like expertise and some sort of structure, but I can also be in an environment where I can learn from my peers because that's how I like to learn. I can learn on my own pace, you know, when, with looking at the content and however much I want to engage in it. And it's, it's an snackable content. You know, there's, there's a lot, there's ways for it to come to them where they can actually easily digest and implement it.

And so I think that the medium of it, and we don't know what this is going to look like when we, when we sought out on this mission of solving this problem, where basically SDRs are set up to fail. And, you know, we looked at what's out there, right. And for the old education there, and there's great, great bootcamps up there, like companies like pre-hired and things like that, you know, that are doing really, really great things for, for bringing people from, you know, a role or, you know, some background where they would never be able to, you know, get into sales and getting them ready for sales and getting them promoted and things like that. But, you know, at the end of the day, you know, once they're in the role, there isn't a lot of options anymore and you're relying on your manager or your enablement team.

And I think for that reason, people are looking for different ways to learn. And we don't know what this community is going to be, you know, but the vision is that it's a different, better medium than the mediums that are currently out there right now for learning. Yeah. So, so talk to us a little, what do you get with, with SDR Nation? Cause I, you know, we talked about our part in this cause we partnered together on this, but what, what, what is SDR Nation for those SDRs listening to this saying, Hey, this sounds kind of interesting. What, what, what is the community? What do they get? Yeah. Um, I mean, purely pure and simple, we're just a Slack community. Um, but the way we've designed it is so that we have four skill coaches and two career coaches.

Um, and you know, the main thing, main reason for that is that I think what a lot of SDRs want is one-on-one. They want on-demand and one-on-ones with people that are experts in their own domain, experts on how to get to the next step in their career. Um, and so we're basically just, we, so it's really eight of us, myself and Michael, who are the two co-founders and six coaches, um, in the four career coaches are Sarah Brazier, who is our social selling coach. Um, you know, grew a following from 2,000, 18,000 followers on LinkedIn in like eight months. Um, just, you know, what most people don't know about her is that she's obviously just an expert copywriter. Um, and, and that art is something that you can train and, um, you know, where a lot of people, I think, think of social selling is, you know, just a step in your cadence.

She's takes it to that next level of building, you know, building your own brand, but building in a way that's actually compelling and engaging and all that kind of stuff. And so she's, she's our social selling coach. So we have Jake Harry, who's our cold calling coach. Um, obviously just like really focusing on the fundamentals of just cold calling. It's a lot of things that you trained John that worked so well year over year that the phone does not go away. And it's such a key piece of the whole puzzle that, um, you know, organizations lose track of, um, Jen Spencer, who's our persona, uh, coach. And I think that's a huge gap, you know, that, um, most organizations don't train their SDRs on.

It's just like, do you really understand the buyer? Do you really understand who they are, what they care about, what, where they go for information, how they're, what, what they're, what they do in their job, but you know what this job means. Um, and, and understanding how to interact with marketing to get that buyer persona information. And, um, because that, that is like the fundamental piece really, once you understand your buyer, then everything else starts to make sense. Your messaging can make sense. You can start to like all flow into place and leverage all these different channels like social and email or whatever, what have you. But until you know how to speak to that person and what they care about, nothing else really matters.

Yeah. And lastly, we have Ella Pelosi from Tessian who, um, was actually recommended to us for Morgan Ingram because Morgan learned everything he knew about, um, sales automation and leveraging data from sales automation tools like sales loft and outreach, uh, to make yourself better. And we're even just using Salesforce and I'll say like when I was at Salesforce, there was like this huge swath of SDRs obviously, but there's always this like really small, like subsection of like four or 5% of them that were the best. And like, and I would always be like, who, why are they, you know, they just knew Salesforce reporting inside out. They knew their data. They, they were just like wizards with the CRM.

Right. And, um, so we, we thought it was really important to bring in that skillset, um, essentially like how to actually use these systems properly, not just to get your job done, but to create fantastic data that you can then use to, um, to teach yourself where you, where you're failing, where you need to get better. Um, and so I think, uh, those are the four skill coaches. So they each run their own channel and basically what they're bringing to their channels every day is webinars, content, guest speakers, um, interesting, you know, and also just a place for SDRs is to ask questions, you know, and just say like, Hey, I'm struggling with this. I tried this and this isn't working for me or Hey, here's a recording of my cold call.

Let me know what you think of that. Jake will respond and get back to the stuff. So it's really, really cool. It's like on demand, um, really fast turnaround and just the kind of coaching and then peers are coming in. You know, other SDRs are saying, Hey, I've tried this. I'm actually maybe a couple of levels ahead of you right now, as far as how to get data out of sales off. I'm doing this right now. I'm testing you're down here. And so I think that's it. And then the other side of it is career coaching. And this is where myself and Michael and Tyler Cole from Sendoso, who's an AE, it's just, we thought it was really important to have an AE there. Someone who like just knows about that role and how to get, you know, out of an SDR into that role.

And then Megan Suckling, who, um, who I personally worked with at Shutterstock, who is the head of sales development at Shutterstock and one of the best SDR leaders ever in my life. And, um, and, and that's all about personal one-on-ones and really building a plan for you to take control of whatever's in front of you right now. Calm down, just like really focusing on here, the things that you need to focus on, um, and give you a plan to start working with your manager or give you a plan to start navigating your organization. A lot of these folks, they've never worked anywhere else before in their life. So how the hell are they supposed to know how to actually get promoted and figure out this whole thing?

Like, I thought you were just going to tell me how to get promoted. Like, I didn't know I was supposed to be doing a bunch of shit for the last six months. Like, how do I know? And so, you know, really teaching them how to, you know, essentially work that whole process, but also just give them that one-on-one time to, um, to just be more effective in the day to day. I love it. And then I know we're partnered up and they get access to our online content so they can go through the programs. And then I think James is offering up like 30 minute calls with each one of them too. It's awesome. We had, uh, we had Morgan yesterday come in for a Q and A. Um, we had like, you know, so we've only got 50 members right now.

We're going to 200. Um, we're keeping it small. You know, we don't want to just have this big thing blow up and want to know what's going on and that sort of thing. So we're kind of keeping it small and grow slowly. But yeah, this partnership with you guys has been, um, like so far been unbelievably amazing and they're in the main reason that, um, again, we're giving them another option for learning. So they get free access to your filling funnel course. They get certification around that. Um, then they also have one-on-ones with James Buckley where he's providing his time. Um, and then Morgan's Q and A's we're doing those, which are just obviously amazing. It's like our own little muffins with, uh, basis.

Um, but again, it's just, it's, it's another potential medium for them to learn. And we don't know, you know, we'll, we'll see what things they get more value out of what things they don't at the end of the day, uh, we just want them to be successful and want them to get promoted. Um, and if those things, you know, as we work with them and figure out what content matters and what training matters and what partners matter and what peer relationships matter, um, you know, this thing can only get better and better. Yeah. I'm looking forward to seeing how this thing evolves. And I think the, the, the, it's the right approach, right? It's, it's, I keep telling everybody that, you know, agility right now is the number one competitive differentiator, right?

If you can be more, if you can be agile as a sales rep or as an organization, if you can help other organizations become agile, you're listening, right? Because if you're stuck in the, oh man, I, I, I can't wait till it gets back to quote unquote normal. You're going to get smoked. Like you gotta be able to look forward and adjust. And it sounds like you guys are kind of have a strong start, but then evolve and adjust and adapt based on learning, based on what the community says they want and what they need. And I think that's the same message we got to give to SDRs. It's like, look, adapt, right? Sales in general, you need to adapt. You need to be agile. And as an, and, and you have to take, focus on what you can control.

You know, I, I mean, I mean the, you know, I, I have this little saying with my daughter, you know, EAT, focus on what you can control, effort, attitude, and how you treat people, right? Those are the things you can control. You can't control your boss. You can't control the market. You can't control the customer. You can control your own development. You know what I mean? You can control effort, right? You can, how much effort do you put into this? Your attitude, do you come with a defeating attitude or a proactive attitude of, I can get this, I'm going to figure this shit out. And then how you treat people and how you spread that, that, you know, what you learned so that maybe, like you said, there's two, three people, you know, in that community that might be a step ahead of somebody else, right?

So help that kid get to that next level. And pay it forward, right? So I love what you guys are doing. I'm psyched to be partnered with you. How do people find out more information about, well, two things. Let's talk about how they found SDR Nation and then what do you want them to know about what you're doing right now? So go to SDR Nation.com, you know, and if you want to sign up, you can apply there and, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll consider your application. And I would say, you know, this is, this is a place for people that want to build something. Um, I think what, you know, I've never built a community before. Right. And what I've learned, learning about building a community is that I don't build the community.

My partner, Michael, and I don't build the community. This thing is being built by everything. Everyone. That's part of it. Um, you know, we, we have a members council now we have, we have three members that, you know, basically they're the ones calling the shots. So we have, uh, channels being popped up every day, the healthy, happy SDR about mental health awareness. Um, it's like a place for people to go talk about the shit that's going on in their life and the stress that they're facing and, and to have like 10 other people surround them and DM them and have one-on-one conversations and all that sort of stuff. So it's a place for, I think people that want to learn people that want to connect.

With other humans right now when we can't, um, and, you know, a place for people who want to build something, um, that, you know, may make sales a, a real career path for others, but for themselves. And cause I think that's the thing that fundamentally we want to fix is that 50 to 60% of first time reps don't actually end up in sales because their first experience was so shitty. I want to catch those people in that first experience, give them a better shot, but also then make them part of a community where they can help others, um, have a better opportunity. And so SDR nation.com, you can find myself and Michael Galliano on LinkedIn, if you want to connect with us there. Um, but, um, at the end of the day, um, we're just building something.

We don't know what it's going to be, but so far people are learning, people are getting promoted, people are getting hired, um, and people are winning and that's really care about it, man. Well, love what you're doing. And I, I do recommend any SDR out there that, you know, that gives a shit, right? Take a look at SDR nation. If you're one of the ones I'm going through the motions, good luck. Uh, you know, um, but if, but if you actually give a shit and you have that itch, uh, to get better, uh, there, there's a place for you. So yeah, appreciate it, Charlie. Thanks a lot. I mean, couldn't, couldn't say more about what, uh, you, James and Morgan and Chris done for us, uh, just to, you know, be partnered with you, uh, in the content you're providing and obviously the opportunity for all our SDRs.

Um, appreciate it, man. Thanks a lot. Absolutely, man. Help it out. Happy to help. So cool. All right, everybody. Well, hopefully you got some value out of this conversation and, and, and learn something and got you to think a little bit, right? Cause, cause that's the goal here is just get a little bit better every day. And that's a way, by the way, as a, as my kind of final tip here, the, the thing with SDRs, I tell them right now is look, you're going to get your ass kicked. It's lonely in your house, that type of stuff. But if you learn something every day, and I don't care how small it might be, you learned that you learned a new intro, you learned a new way to do some research, you found a new to whatever it is.

If you learn something that day, you can stay motivated. You can, because if you're getting better, it's like a snowball effect, right? But if you're just going through the motions and you're just pushing those buttons and you're just trying to hit your KPIs that your boss is telling you, you're going to burn out faster than you could possibly imagine. So join the community, ask for help, try to get better every day. And as I say on all my podcasts here, if you do nothing else, go make somebody smile today. Cause even if you had a shitty ass day, you made somebody else smile, you had a decent day and this world needs a fuckload more of that right now. All right. So thanks Charlie for coming on board, man.

I appreciate it. All right. Take care. Cool. Later, everybody. What an insightful episode today with John and Charlie. We appreciate you guys joining us. There is no way that you didn't come away from that conversation with a different perspective. Charlie hit some real high notes on how the SDR role is evolving and changing its function and purpose in business today. We'd love to hear your story. Did you start out as an SDR or an AE? What was your sales journey like? We would love to hear from you. So reach out today at jamesatjbarrows.com and send me your story. I want to hear it. Don't forget to subscribe at JB Sales On Demand by visiting us at ondemand.jbarrows.com to invest in yourself today.

We'll see you there. Keep making it happen.