The ultimate SDR success guide

Adam Sockel (00:00.867)
You're listening to Bold Calling, an award-winning podcast presented by Orem where every episode we're bringing on the biggest and brightest minds in the tech and sales industries for discussion about their biggest challenges and the unique ways they're working to solve them. I'm your host, Adam Sokol, and today I am joined by Airelie Bratton, SDR manager here at Orem and John Carson, founder and CEO of Level Up Leads. Airelie, John, thank you both so much for joining me today.

John Karsant (00:27.834)
Yeah. Thanks for having me on. appreciate it.

Arely Brattin (00:29.786)
Thank you, Rada.

Adam Sockel (00:30.127)
Yeah, absolutely. So keeping with the theme of this season, I have brought on two subject matter experts. This particular episode will be all about SDR management and kind of how to get the most out of your SDRs that you're working with. I want to start, John, I'll just dive right in and ask you the first question. We're going to kind of go back and forth talking about talent acquisition and retention and AI and moving up market, all sorts of stuff. But the first question I want to ask you is,

What are the most effective strategies for onboarding and training new SDRs so they can ramp up quickly?

John Karsant (01:09.234)
Yeah, it's a good question.

I think one of the challenges I've found is actually judging SDR talent and it's very difficult to know until they start. So I'm talking specifically by interviews. I've found to be proven wrong many times in who I thought was a good fit, who I didn't think was a good fit. But I think once you start onboarding them and actually give them a chance to understand how your company works, expectations, but for us, we're really heavy on the phones with our SDRs. So the best thing to do is start getting

getting them on the phones. So you can actually start coaching them. What we typically do internally is have them call for the level up leads internally first for practice before they actually start calling on a client because we're an agency. So that allows us to coach and train them and get them up to speed.

Adam Sockel (01:58.647)
I imagine because you're an agency, are you guys bringing on STRs fairly frequently? So I'd imagine you probably have to have some pretty clean and comfortable training to make sure that they are wrapping up pretty succinctly.

John Karsant (02:12.359)
Yep. Yeah, it depends a little bit on client flow, but yeah, typically a few a month.

Adam Sockel (02:18.829)
Yeah, Airelie, we're not bringing on quite that many SDRs every single month here at ORHOM, but in your experience as a manager, how do you think about effective strategies for onboarding and getting them ramped up quickly?

Arely Brattin (02:22.636)
you

Arely Brattin (02:32.836)
Yeah, I think for me the biggest thing is always understanding what is their learning style. So do they like more hands-on? Do they like to shadow? they like classroom learning? You know, kind of what is their learning style? And from there, I have kind of a playbook that I've created for like onboarding and follow it, but we can adjust based off of what they need. So if they need more one-on-one time with me or like a fellow rep, I'm happy to schedule that. A lot of it is shadowing basically who's really great at something. So if somebody's good at LinkedIn social selling,

I'm probably gonna pair them with that person and say, hey, take this like social selling like.

course with one of our SDRs that does that or if somebody is really great at objection handling, hey, let's have you work with the team, but that also makes them feel like they're part of a team significantly quicker. And I really like doing that. I like my, we have an onboarding doc that they go through and it's like, hey, week one, here's what you're doing. Week two, follow this guideline, but we're very flexible. But the biggest thing is a lot of it is transparency and understanding how people learn. I'm a visual learner. I need to be one-on-one, like hands-on. And then that might not work for everybody and that's okay.

also found that kind of ripping off that band-aid is really important. So like the faster we get you on the phone, the faster you're to get comfortable and it's okay to make mistakes. So I kind of like that learning style too. It's like, hey, here's the script, kind of go make it your own if you need to. What did you learn from these calls? What do you want to do better? And I think people get more comfortable quickly because people get me very hesitant to hit the phone. It's kind of like what John said, we don't know what their experience is like. So how comfortable are they hitting the phones early and often and learning from those experiences too. So I do kind of accommodation with on-

recording.

Adam Sockel (04:09.848)
Go ahead,

John Karsant (04:10.506)
I was going to say that's so important what you mentioned, Aelius.

Sometimes people will be a little hesitant to talk directly with the person that hired them or their training manager. But if you can get them shadowing, kind of get you out of the picture, they can maybe ask more questions and shadow SDRs. And one thing that we've done internally since we have roughly 25 is we have SDR team leads. And so they automatically get added to a team with other SDRs and SDR team leads. So they can start training under them in a sense, and start feeling like they can talk to their peers easier. Cause sometimes we found that they're a little shy or nervous.

talking to their boss.

Arely Brattin (04:48.964)
Yeah, a lot of like news about, maybe I should know this, but I don't know this and I don't want to tell my manager that I don't understand this. Like somebody come help me. So it's so good to have a team leader calling that can really help with that too.

Adam Sockel (04:49.346)
I love that.

John Karsant (04:55.132)
Yeah, exactly.

Adam Sockel (05:03.535)
It's so funny because we all, every single one of us in every single role always says like, there's no dumb questions. But if you are talking to your manager, you're like, no, this feels like a dumb question. I got to find someone else to ask this to. Yeah. I want to ask you both about measuring performance. In the fall of 2024, we released our state of sales development report. And one of the questions we asked was, as managers, leaders, how are you measuring?

Is it activity-based? it, you know, close one? And so I'm curious and John, we'll start with you. How do you measure performance, like actual success for your team?

John Karsant (05:45.642)
So we're we have we're definitely faced with challenges on this front because all our clients are so different from small startups to publicly traded companies and expectations even by the client is drastically different. So it's a little challenging. So we had if the client can give us some type of expectations or like they've done some of that work outreach before it's easier to set those expectations internally. But if they haven't it's kind of like

Adam Sockel (05:53.486)
Mm.

John Karsant (06:14.602)
you're doing a little bit of guesswork until you start and you start getting some traction. But to answer your question directly, it's a combination of actually activity, like how many calls are being made, meeting set, good conversations. Like even if it doesn't lead to a meeting, are they interested? Do they want some information for later? And then are they doing the basic things like are they going off script or are they?

It's not sounding like too much like a robot like some other things just like are they able to do some basic things like data entry but the most important things are the dials, the meetings and the conversations.

Adam Sockel (06:51.649)
Aariele, what do you think?

Arely Brattin (06:52.944)
Yeah, I definitely agree with John. And you know, I think before when I started my Asteroid career, like 2021, it was like just volume, volume, volume. How many people can we talk to? How many conversations can we have? How many readings can we set? And I think now we're moving more towards a revenue model where it's more important about the quality of these meetings that we're setting and who we're talking to and how we're building relationships with, you know, prospective clients. And I think that that has drastically changed where people were maybe making 300, 400 dials a day where

Whereas now we're making closer to maybe 150 or 100, but account selection is a lot different. So for me, a lot of it is basing it off of account selection. Are we picking good accounts? Are we picking good contacts? What do these conversations look like? And are you effectively getting better every time you face an objection? Like I measure success based off of that too. So if I noticed that Sally maybe was having a hard time overcoming this objection last week and her conversion was low on that. And then I see the following week that after we had one-on-ones and did role plays, her

conversion changed a little bit. Like that's a win in my book too and like I measure that as a ball because they're effectively getting better. know sales is so up and down you're gonna have a good week you're gonna have a bad week but I do think activity is really important and it does measure like how successful you are as an SDR too.

John Karsant (08:11.87)
Yeah, actually, sorry, Adam. One thing I forgot to add that is also very important is no show rate. That's another thing that we track. So one more thing I forgot to mention.

Adam Sockel (08:11.983)
Wanna? Go ahead, Jan.

Adam Sockel (08:20.846)
Yeah, I want to ask Airelie before we move on. I didn't really kind of like prep you either on this. So please off the cuff. If it doesn't feel comfortable, we can remove it. But you talked to both of you talked about kind of like, yes, we're still measuring activity, but we're shifting away to like a revenue model. Why do why do we think that is like, obviously, everyone likes to talk about spray and pray is bad. And like, I agree it is. But like, why do you think we've moved away from measuring

Arely Brattin (08:27.28)
you

Adam Sockel (08:50.816)
activity as much and focusing more on performance and Airelie, we'll start with you.

Arely Brattin (08:55.428)
Yeah, I think, you know, when things are not going well at a company and revenue isn't there, let's say something goes wrong. The first team that typically gets cut is the SDR team if they're not providing enough value, right? If the SDR team is not sourcing enough revenue, then we're not doing our part. There's so much that we can control as an SDR team, then we pass it off to the executive team. We can't close the deal essentially, right? But if we're not sourcing the right things, and to John's point, what is the no-show rate? What is the qualification versus disqualification of meetings that we're setting if we're not effectively

doing a good job as you know kind of the entry level of sales and the sales process that we could be the first to go as well so I do think that tying revenue to anything is really important because you can book all of these meetings but if they don't show up they don't turn into deals we're not effectively doing our job and we might need to shift our strategy as well.

Adam Sockel (09:46.553)
John, I imagine it probably, like you said before, I'm sure you do have clients who are like, just get me 500 dials a day or whatever it is. Maybe the question doesn't apply as directly to you guys as well, but I'm curious your thoughts. Have you seen a shift working with a breadth of clients in them saying, if it takes 100 dials, if it takes 200 dials, I don't care, I need X amount of revenue in the pipeline?

John Karsant (10:13.841)
Yeah, for us, since we're an agency at the end of the day, companies are hiring us to get more sales opportunities and make sales and on a return on investment on our service. So that's the end goal. The question is how do you get there? Right now for us, we unfortunately in our deliverables, we have to have certain number of metrics because otherwise they're like, what the hell are you guys doing? So we do have those, but we are having more and more clients that are like, actually really don't care. You can lower that. What's more important is the quality or maybe lower the number of parallel dials.

like let's make sure we focus on quality and not just going out to the market and making sure you hit the deliverable you quoted us. So we're finding that more more.

Adam Sockel (10:52.751)
Mm-hmm. One more question around like, know, we talked about bringing on and finding new talent, but I want to ask you both, and we'll start with you, Don, because this is something I imagine turnover is a bit more frequent on your side of things and maybe is internally here at ORM just because of the nature of the business, but how do you focus on retaining talent, like SDRs specifically who are coming into your organization so that you can minimize the amount of investment you need to do in...

Finding new people or is it just the nature of the beast that you know? They're gonna last a certain amount of time and that is what it is

John Karsant (11:29.381)
We can't quite pin it down, but we've been surprisingly lucky in a sense. We haven't had too much turnover in terms of reps leaving us. Now it certainly has happened, but in most cases we're, we're letting them go for whatever reason.

Adam Sockel (11:36.718)
Mm-hmm.

John Karsant (11:46.601)
goes back to the whole thing of like, think someone's really good, they interview really well, they're well educated, have good resume, but they're not, they just don't have it on the phone. here, one example is we recently hired someone who's a professional drummer. He's crushing it. He has no sales experience, but he, he just like sounds good on the phone and he's doing a good job.

Adam Sockel (11:55.8)
Mm-hmm.

John Karsant (12:08.403)
But I think one thing that we do is we try to make it as easy as possible for the SDRs so they can just make their dials. So we're pulling all the lists. We're having the majority of the client conversations so we can feed that to them and they can focus on the script and their tone and actually getting the dials in. So we're trying to make it as easy and flexible as possible for them and set a decent.

work culture where they can work remotely. I think you guys are fully remote too, right Oram? Yeah, so, okay. So they can be flexible, take their kids to school, walk their dog when they want, things like that. So that's helping us retain our SDRs.

Adam Sockel (12:37.538)
We are, yes.

Adam Sockel (12:48.034)
Yeah. Airelie, how do you think about this? know that obviously like career pathing is one suggestion. like what, when you find people who are incredibly talented, we want to hold on them. How do you as a manager think about making sure that they're here for the long haul?

Arely Brattin (13:04.846)
Yeah, I think the SDR role can be very thankless sometimes. so just a little like, hey, I appreciate you. Thank you so much for that. hey, I saw this really great thing that you did is so important. And validation, I think, goes a long way. And being able to listen to your SDRs because they do face kind of a lot of issues sometimes, whether it's like a tech thing or a hard conversation or somebody, you know, cursed them out on the phones. Like these poor kids like sometimes have these things happen to them. And then you're like, man, how is this going to affect them? Like being able to listen to

them is really important. Get feedback. think feedback goes both ways and if you don't have a culture where feedback can't be given to you as a leader, you can't make things better. Also money. I will say money definitely moves the needle. So what compensation structure do you have for your SDRs? What SPFs are you putting in front of them to get excited? And also are you having a collaborative but competitive environment for your SDR where we build each other up, but I am going to be you this week. And I think that that's really important to have.

John Karsant (14:03.574)
You

Arely Brattin (14:04.578)
And to John's point, he hired a drummer. Our top SDR was a former teacher. I feel like former teachers do really well because they don't have to be in a classroom with 30 children screaming their heads off. And they're like, this is better. I call people all day and I get to be at home. So I think that there used to be this stigma of like, you have to have all this sales experience. But the people that don't have sales experience are almost like really grateful to be here. And they're like, man, I get to do this all day instead of X, Y, and Z. Heck yeah, like hire them. I just hired somebody from Bay.

And the first thing he told me was like, I'm ready to shake up the leaderboards. He's already competitive by nature. So how do you find those kinds of people that not only interview well, but you see coachability too? So I think it's just, like I said, creating collaborative but competitive environment, making sure you're compensating your SDRs and having two way feedback communication as well.

Adam Sockel (14:56.75)
Yeah, two things there. One, I always joking tell people I'm very blunt about it as people are like, what would it take for you to look at another roles? I'm like, way more money. Absolutely way more money. I'm not that you know, that's one thing I would I will be fully transparent about that. The other thing is having taken a Barry's class with my boss, Ting Ting, when I was in San Francisco, that feels like the exact type of person I would want on the phone, honestly, like a Barry's boot camp coach. Yeah, I would take that cold call. I love that. That's really good.

John Karsant (15:06.85)
You

Arely Brattin (15:19.792)
You

Adam Sockel (15:26.72)
I want to shift gears a little bit to sales enablement. As a marketer, I were always thinking on our side of things, how can we provide our SDRs and AERLY and our AEs, all of the things that they need to succeed. But I would love to hear from you both. And John, we'll start with you on this. You mentioned looking at your reps and how they approach talk tracks. Do they sound robotic and all these different things?

I'm curious, and this is super interesting to me because of the breadth of the types of conversations your reps are having. What are the different tools you're using to help them improve their performance, whether it's talk tracks or customer stories? I guess just like walk me through how you empower your team to be as successful as possible.

John Karsant (16:15.154)
I think a lot goes into that. Strictly from a tool standpoint, we're using Aurum, awesome tool, and we have from the beginning. So that's number one. I think you guys are one of the top dialers in this space.

Number two, we recently got a AI bot that actually integrates with Aurum called Atterio. And it not only helps with role playing, but it also coaches the calls that actually happened. And for our SDR manager to be able to...

manage and actually accurately coach 25 SDRs is just close to impossible. So this allows him to kind of know where to dive in and where, who needs coaching or is there any common threads that's happening with a particular person or a particular account so they know where they can jump in and actually coach. The other side of it is like the human aspect or like the team. So we have, there's plenty of people on our team in terms of the fulfillment. So we have a customer success manager.

Adam Sockel (16:57.068)
Mm-hmm.

John Karsant (17:19.706)
Like sometimes even myself, I'll help out with certain things, but the SDR manager, and so they're all supportive because we all have the same goal in mind to help them, whether it be around, hey, did you try this? Or hey, the client's saying we could change that. And then also, Ailey, as you were mentioning, like, give them some kudos from time to time, like build them up.

make them feel good or also set expectations like, it's one thing I like about Orem by the way, they have the industry standards around connect rates. so like, can kind of be like, but look, you're like right in where the industry standards are. Like you shouldn't feel so bad about yourself. Like this is kind of as expected. And so they're like, okay, yeah, guess it's okay that I only had a few conversations out of X amount of calls. So I think just making them feel good and realize like, is, cold calling is hard. That's why a lot of people.

either outsourced this to us or as you were saying earlier, it's like a thankless job. So making them feel heard and that they're actually making a difference.

Adam Sockel (18:21.985)
Ailey, do you think? What are you providing to your reps to make sure they are ready to have as high quality conversation as possible when prospects do pick up?

Arely Brattin (18:33.026)
Yeah, I think a really great thing for us is we have ORAM. for us, seeing what objections we're running into, maybe what we're not overcoming, building enablement upon that. Or if we're hearing a of, you know, a lot of similar cases on the phones, seeing if we have any case studies to add value that we can speak to on those conversations. Hey, like, so glad you actually brought that up. We had this happen with XYZ Company. If we have a case study for it, here were some of the results that they had. And so I think of it as having kind of a bucket of ammunition that they

that they can have conversations based off of whatever they're running into and having that in a file for them to control F based off of maybe what scenario they're running into and seeing what enablement we built for that. Creating a sales development playbook is really important covering every scenario and as something comes up because sales is always changing, adding it to that playbook to make sure we have a play for it, we have a talk track, whatever it is that we need, we have it covered.

because every day is so different for an SDR that we might encounter a situation that we've never ran into. And so maybe we fall under a sword and say, hey, we actually haven't ran into that before, but let me see what I can find you. Like be very human in that aspect. So I think that's more so important as enablement for your SDRs and having a hub where they have access to any resources, material, and content that they need.

Adam Sockel (19:51.663)
How frequently, and that's for the end of the spot, do you have a recommendation on how frequently reps and managers should be looking at that hub? I'm just thinking about how quickly things change and if I don't mark on my own calendar to go back and look at our brand pad or things like that, I will absolutely forget. Do you have a recommendation on how frequently people should be looking into that stuff?

Arely Brattin (20:08.165)
Yeah.

Arely Brattin (20:13.498)
think like a monthly basis is really great and weekly based off of maybe scenarios that happen and that's where we can, you know, reach out to you Adam or somebody else on the team and say, hey, we ran into this situation. Have you seen this before? So that's great. But even a quarterly basis refresher going back through that development playbook, I think is really great because often we see shifts at the quarter. And that's when I really like to do a rehaul of everything if I need to.

Adam Sockel (20:38.971)
I can just say as the content person here, if you are a sales manager listening to this and you want better materials, as the sales manager, go to your marketing person and say, we need a thing for this. When Airelie asks me for stuff, it's like, these are real life examples of things that they have come across. So I don't have to just imagine what might be happening in the field or go find calls to listen to myself. If you go directly to your marketer and say, give me these things, the marketer will say, thank you, I will do that for you.

Big recommendation there. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about AI. feels like every conversation we have about sales development and leading sales development representatives have to have at least a little bit of AI peppered in there. So John, I'll start with you on this. You mentioned a little bit about the AI coaching bot that you guys have access to and how that helps facilitate a more streamlined coaching experience. But how are you balancing?

kind of the expansion of AI with the need for human touch through the sales development experience.

John Karsant (21:42.675)
Here's my take on it is AI is being used in so many ways. And I think that you even see now there's like AI SDRs and I think for the most part, they're, doing stuff on email, maybe LinkedIn. I don't think as much on the phones. actually think it isn't illegal to do AI SDR. Okay.

Adam Sockel (22:02.634)
It is, yeah, on the phone, yeah, the phones is very illegal still,

John Karsant (22:07.34)
For outbound that is. We actually have a client that does inbound SDR handling. So I think that email has kind of been overused in the sense. And what that does, it's kind of opened up the door for the phones. And so we've seen the phones convert better actually over time. And we've doubled down on that channel because I don't think as many people are calling. You don't have the AI noise there, not as much.

Adam Sockel (22:09.048)
Correct.

John Karsant (22:36.867)
And so that's where we're seeing, seeing most of the conversations in work success. Now you could still use AI to help with scripts and targeting and things like that. mean, a lot of it, like even the dialer.

user myself but the SDRs I know they like they get certain information when they connect and there's AI they're transcribing the calls or summarizing correct me if I'm wrong guys I'm not having used it myself but and so

Adam Sockel (23:03.374)
Yeah, no, you nailed it, yeah.

John Karsant (23:10.135)
But the point is that when you're on the call, that you need to be human with them, right? Have a conversation. You can use AI to your advantage, but don't follow a script so closely that you're not actually listening to what the person says and having a conversation. And so that's where I think a human touch comes in and you can have a legitimate conversation. And if they're not the right fit or whatever, you can ask them why and learn and start, you know, adjust your strategy from that.

Adam Sockel (23:35.052)
Airelie, what do you think? are you guys using, beyond obviously using ORM to automate the manual processes of a phone call? We know that the ORM team is doing that. Are there other ways that your team is using AI and how are we balancing it with keeping it human?

Arely Brattin (23:50.576)
Yeah, I think one thing we do is sometimes when we face an objection, we'll put it into like a chat, JPT and be like, what would you respond to this? Or, you know, and kind of get, just get a little bit of framework and then make it your own. I think that's important. Or maybe for like research on a person, you say, Hey, I found X, Y, and Z things about this person. Craft me an email just to, when you feel stuck, it's okay to use that, but you wouldn't just send whatever chat, JPT would do. You know, we, if I see a rocket ship in my inbox, it's probably AI. didn't do the

actually do the research. And so I think that's really important, but the phones have been just so successful for our team and it's going back to being human, right? And we jokingly, we make fun of whatever our CRS because she misspelled a prospect's name in an email. And then I said, send it back and be like, hey, at least you know, it's not AI. Like it's a real person to do this. And I think that the human approach is so important and just sprinkling in a little bit of AI help. I don't think it's bad. But when you just solely lean on AI for everything, makes it so robust.

you're not a real person and people are buying from people nowadays. More deals are being done at dinner tables, at happy hours and so what does that human approach look like? And I say that's the most important thing right now and being on the phones, conversions are a lot higher on the phones than emails. think people are more important to help by that. So just be human and use AI for little things here and there when you feel stuck.

Adam Sockel (25:13.135)
Yeah, we did a report in the summer of 2024 about AI and I talked to a tech buyer and he told me he was like, listen, I understand AI is important and it does help for a lot of instances. He's like, but I will tell you, he's like, if an AI email, if I know it's AI emailing with me or a chat bot, it's like, I am more inclined to blow them off. It's like, if somebody calls me and books a meeting with me, it's human nature for me to feel guilty about not.

meeting with them. So I'm going to meet with them. And it was just like one of those small things where like, get people reaching out to me all the time where I can tell it's a bot. I'm like, not answering this. But if I know like, if John takes a minute to send me a LinkedIn video, and my DMs, I've said this in a previous episode, like I will respond to those because I see him, it's a real person. And so I, I agree that keeping it

Keeping it human. And I do think I want to ask you guys both this like, have you seen the market responding to the fact that there's so much AI out there? Like you mentioned both of you mentioned the phone being so impactful and more deals being done kind of person to person. like, John, do you see are your reps like seeing when you have conversations with people that there's an expectation that you should know more about them because of all the automation available? Or is it just they're genuinely happy to talk to a human being at that point?

John Karsant (26:39.334)
no, I mean, we're not experts on our clients. like we try to understand enough to talk through them, but that we're not there to sell. I'm talking about our use case specifically, but we're not there to sell for our clients. We're there to generate interest and set the meeting so they can do the selling. So we, we sometimes will like even to our advantage, we'll say like, actually I'm pretty new to the job. don't, I don't know.

Adam Sockel (26:52.504)
course.

John Karsant (27:06.216)
answers to that. What would be best is if I set you up with a call with my manager Jack and he'll be able to answer all those questions. So like sometimes it's okay to not know everything about your client and like also if you're using Orman it's not like you can pick and choose who if you're parallel dine it's not like you can pick and choose who's gonna pick up. So you do kind of need to think on the fly and have that conversation.

Adam Sockel (27:16.726)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Sockel (27:28.663)
Yeah, Airelie, we, know, saying we because I'm part of this team. I don't make cold calls all that often though. Has your team noticed, like do people, especially as more and more people know who the Oram brand is, like when they answer the phone, do you think there's a greater expectation to understand more about that company because of all the automation or do you think it's still pretty early days in the AI aspect where someone answers the phone, it's still just a cold call kind of like it's always been?

Arely Brattin (27:58.99)
I feel like it's a little bit different actually. think people, when they say, what CRM are you using? Or are you still using this? We've heard like, don't you have that information? Or shouldn't you know them already if you did your research? And it's like, hey, we don't have the answers to everything, okay?

But I think from a personality aspect, it goes more than just like, hey, I saw you attended this college. It's like, hey, I saw that you're on this podcast and this resonated with me or whatever else may be on there. I think that we have that at our fingertips. We can go in and dive into that. I think that some people maybe do have a little bit of that expectation. I think it depends on who you're talking to, like from a sales manager to a director or VP or CEO, it's going to be a little bit different, right? That's my take on it.

Adam Sockel (28:46.262)
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, I want to ask you both something that every organization seemingly is thinking about is moving up market, finding bigger accounts that you can interact with because of the bigger deals. it's something that, know, SDRs have to take a slightly different approach. And I'm curious and early, we'll start with you because we do have some SDRs and some AEs that are calling into larger accounts.

You know, how does that shift to why any move up market? How does it adjust how STRs need to approach their work?

Arely Brattin (29:24.652)
Yeah, you would not just call the VP of sales right away. You want to start with a groundswell approach and reaching out fellow SDR to SDR, targeting this account together with your account executive and telling your AE, hey, I'm going to call the team lead and the most like tenured SDR that I can find on their LinkedIn. Give them a call and see what they're struggling with or what insights they can give me. Great. You go do the same thing with the account executive team. And then we go to different departments and see who's involved with what aspect. So then when we're talking to this VP of sales, it's like we almost

understand their umbrella and what each component of their business needs and maybe where things are falling short and how we can help, but making it about them and their company rather than one, just like one part of their business. I think that's really important. So a groundswell approach is going to be your best avenue and networking, seeing like maybe who do you have connections with on LinkedIn or who are your company as a connection with them there. I think that's really huge. And then if we see them at maybe an event that we're at, making sure that we

introduce ourselves in person and say hey like we're from the Oren team you know not sure if heard of us so it's a little bit of different approach there I don't think you should just immediately go for that VP of sales definitely do your research and understand their business a little bit so it's a little bit different than like an SMB or mid-market team for sure.

Adam Sockel (30:42.572)
John, is this something that your team is experiencing? Are you guys trying to move up market for some of your accounts as well?

John Karsant (30:50.088)
It depends on the client, but we certainly have clients that are targeting enterprise. And yeah, it's more complex. That's for sure.

I think it's about, I agree with Airelie, most of the success is gonna come from starting lower and moving up. A lot of our clients will come in and they'll be like, all right, we wanna target the C-suite and it's like Bank of America. I'm like, hey, that's just not gonna happen, sorry. Gotta kinda like, let's start a little bit lower, but that's the decision maker. And it's like, okay, well then that's probably not gonna happen.

Arely Brattin (31:15.375)
Yes.

John Karsant (31:25.025)
But I know I'm serious, like people actually do that. They come in as clients expecting to get in touch with like C-level execs of these massive companies. so typically we'll start off with like a manager or sometimes director and feel it out from there. But we've seen the most success enterprise starting with manager level and then working our way up from there. Or like who's the end user that has the pain point.

Adam Sockel (31:48.51)
Okay, one more question for you both and we've kind of been talking about a lot of this so you may say like The answer is everything we've been discussing But I'm curious like as to people that are leading teams in the trenches that are doing kind of the hard work every single day What else have you seen that has changed for the SDR? Experience and John I'll start with you on this just like just in general what over the last, you know 12 18 24 months what's changed that you have noticed for the

the SDRs.

John Karsant (32:20.652)
I remember...

This is maybe a little bit going back further than 18 months, but it wasn't that long ago. It felt like that you could almost just rely on email and it worked and just the results and the response rates were just so much higher. And I think things have shifted probably, you know, touching on some of the points we mentioned with AI and it seems like every tool now has an email aspect to it and it's a crowded market. And I don't want to say that doesn't work because it certainly still does, but it's significantly shifted to the phones for us. And

There was a time at our company where we didn't even offer cold calling, and now it's the number one service by far, and it's where 80 % of our results come from. So that's the shift we've seen.

Adam Sockel (33:04.568)
Yeah. Hailey, what have you seen? You've been here, you were at ZoomInfo before, Orem, you've kind of done a ton of this work. What have you seen that has changed?

Arely Brattin (33:16.398)
I feel like social selling is a huge thing. I am like very anti-social media. So LinkedIn and things like that are really hard for me. I will admit it. It's on my action item to be better at that. But just to see the amount of SDRs that are like, man, I'm a social seller. I'm on LinkedIn and messaging people. And I'm like, my gosh, that's significantly shifted. And that's even brand new for me. Also why I'm trying to work on that as well. So that's news to me, but I will still say like the phones are obviously the most important channel, just as John mentioned.

But I also think that the space is very overcrowded. It almost seems like every day there's a new competitor that's hitting the market or there's a new shiny tool or a lot of companies are going wide with product and offering multiple product services. And so that's a little bit different from when we were, know, SDRs. feel like there was these five companies that offered this service and now we're seeing a little bit of a different market shift in that. So being more competitive is really difficult. And how do you set yourself

aside from these competitors and brand and people I think is really important but I also think that people are buying more from people nowadays like it's not a need because they have five other companies that they can go to you're not the only company that that offers a solution so how are you winning not just based off what shiny tools you have but the way that you treat people and their experience from the first time an SDR reaches out to so that's my my hot take on that

Adam Sockel (34:42.382)
Yeah, I can confirm by the way, it's not just talk for the podcast. The day we recorded this, and I literally have a meeting later to talk about LinkedIn. She is taking it very seriously. I really appreciate both of your times. Obviously, Aarie works here at Orem. I will put a link to her LinkedIn in the show notes. But John, before we go, tell people a little bit about Level Up Leads and how they can learn more about your company and if they're interested in getting some outbound help, the best way to get in contact with you all.

Arely Brattin (34:51.856)
you

John Karsant (34:53.114)
Yeah.

John Karsant (35:11.204)
Yeah, the best way is go to the website, levelubleeds.io, or you can check me out on LinkedIn at John Carson. I don't think there's any others out there. What we do is we're a sales development agency from start to finish, basically setting up appointments in your calendar so you have more selling opportunities.

Adam Sockel (35:29.011)
And I will make sure all that is in the show notes as well. Airelie, John, thank you both so much for joining me today.

John Karsant (35:35.909)
Thanks Adam.

Arely Brattin (35:36.58)
Thank you.