Snowflake's Lars Nilsson on Sales Development

00;00;02;06 - 00;00;21;29

Ben Hillman

We all want to get on the roller coaster. Sure. I guess if you were a particular type of person, you could skirt the rules and jump the queue. But then you're risking all sorts of ethical and practical troubles. It can be pretty unpleasant standing in the hot sun, sweat dripping off your brow, regretting your decision just to find amusement.

00;00;22;17 - 00;00;42;17

Ben Hillman

In the end, you get to go on a roller coaster, and for most folks, that's a fun time. But what if it isn't all that it's cracked up to be? What if you could have someone wait in line for you? Meet the sales development representative or business development representative? One of the unsung heroes of B2B SaaS in the sales cycle.

00;00;42;17 - 00;01;03;16

Ben Hillman

They're the ones waiting in line, trying to figure out which customers are best fits for account executives to close. It's sort of a rite of passage. Unfortunately, it's oftentimes a pretty thankless job. And while it's by no means a matter of life and death, it can at times be as unpleasant as that sweltering wait in the unshaded queue.

00;01;04;03 - 00;01;30;24

Ben Hillman

Today's guest, Lars Nilsen, knows a thing or two about what it takes to get the most out of your sales development team, especially the human element. That way, too many can gloss over. In this episode, Lars Nilsen gives us a crash course on sales training, onboarding and enablement, and an inside look on how he personally mentors sales teams and transforms them into sales sharks, Even those that come from zero sales backgrounds.

00;01;31;16 - 00;01;59;06

Ben Hillman

From Paddle, it's Protect the Hustle, where we explore the truth behind the strategy and tactics of B2B SaaS growth to make you an outstanding operator. On today's episode, Paddle Castle Patrick Campbell interviews Lars Nilsen about sales development. We talk about zeroing in on sales roles. Hiring someone with a fire in their belly, SDR Training Enablement and progression. Setting up sales opportunities for success and the value of compassionate leadership.

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Ben Hillman

Timestamps for each section are listed in the show notes, and after you finish the episode, check out the in-depth field guide that'll help you accomplish your sales development goals.

00;02;18;03 - 00;02;19;05

Patrick Campbell

Who are you and what do you do?

00;02;19;10 - 00;02;40;15

Lars Nilsson

Yeah, so it's interesting. I'm speaking here tomorrow and I'm actually a little bit nervous and nervous. I haven't been out in real life in front of each other for a years, and so getting up in front of a couple hundred people. But anyway, name is Lars Nilsen. I'm currently the EVP of Global Sales Development Snowflake. I am a career sales development leader.

00;02;41;12 - 00;03;07;21

Lars Nilsson

This is my fifth go around as an operator going into a company and building out sales development about four times previous. I love doing it really. Development and onboarding and training and mentorship and, you know, taking maybe earlier younger people in their career and teaching them something and have them create provider ship and, you know, results. I love doing it.

00;03;07;21 - 00;03;13;02

Lars Nilsson

So I've been doing it for 25 years here in start up venture backed B2B technology companies.

00;03;13;05 - 00;03;30;29

Patrick Campbell

And I would argue you're at the company. I'll say that the company, as we just found out, the only company Cramer still wants to invest in or talks about. It is a tech company. But before we get into like deep on that, because I think that'd be really interesting, not only like you, but also like you at Snowflake, which is, you know, as I'm saying, the company like, how do we get there?

00;03;30;29 - 00;03;40;07

Patrick Campbell

Right. You know, I know you kind of split time between California, split time between Europe growing up. But like, take us back like, what's the background of Lars here for those that don't know you?

00;03;40;08 - 00;04;12;01

Lars Nilsson

Yeah, so I did. I spent the first 18 years traveling back and forth, four months in Sweden, eight months in Southern California. Parents emigrated. Dad worked for Scandinavian Airlines, and so it was easy and free to go back and forth. And so it's a big part of my life, my culture. I carry two passports. I speak Swedish. I went to college in Santa Barbara and a gaucho, and I got my first job out of college with Xerox Corporation, and many have probably heard that name.

00;04;12;01 - 00;04;45;27

Lars Nilsson

But back in the seventies and eighties, there were two companies known for developing onboarding, training. They're kind of college aged new hires. And I had heard from mentors that, Listen, Lars, if you go out into the world, you start your career, get trained, get developed, learn something that you can put in your bag, because selling is something that regardless of what you wind up doing, you're going to end up being able to use it, you know, presenting, handling objections, negotiating, right, closing.

00;04;47;01 - 00;05;10;20

Lars Nilsson

So that makes sense. And I went through on campus interviews and just decided that I was going to get this job. And so I did. I, you know, started my career at Xerox Corporation as a 23 year old. And I went through an 11 month onboarding and training, and they sent me to different centers around the world, not not world around the United States, to learn all these skills.

00;05;11;11 - 00;05;38;11

Lars Nilsson

And so, you know, to teach someone how to sell, rinse and repeat all day long. And one of the things I've learned over the years in building my own teams is what you can't teach. And that's what I look for in candidates. They want to come work for me. And I caught fire in the belly and it's a self-starter or self motivator attitude, a mentality that I think you get from your family, your upbringing.

00;05;38;11 - 00;06;02;22

Lars Nilsson

And I also think you get it from your peer group as you're going through high school college, right. You've probably heard it said that you are the average of your five closest friends. Anyway, what I want to do is I want to take people that want to change their careers and go into sales or take them out of school at a young age when they graduate and teach them how to qualified, how to prospects, how to, how to sell.

00;06;03;01 - 00;06;07;14

Lars Nilsson

And those are the the people that I want on my team. So it's kind of fire in the belly.

00;06;07;19 - 00;06;23;29

Patrick Campbell

Yeah. Well let's yeah, let's get into that for a second. So maybe just take a little bit of a step back like self development. Like are we talking about across borders. What's the difference of that? Like is that the function like how, what do you define this as just so we can like define the scope here?

00;06;24;00 - 00;06;46;23

Lars Nilsson

Yeah. So I mean it's a prospect, it's a no, it's a non quota carrying these younger sales professionals are not retiring quota and generating revenue for the company. They're doing something in my opinion, way more important. And that is they are serving up the first connection and touch point that a sales rep is going to have with the prospects.

00;06;47;09 - 00;07;14;07

Lars Nilsson

And so the reps who carry the title, sales development rep, business development rep, account development rep, early development rep, they're all flavors of the same thing. We are both inbound and outbound prospectors. We have plans that are that drive us to set up that first meeting. Turns out that the hardest part of closing any deal is finding it when you don't have something to work on, you're not going to get to the finish line.

00;07;14;07 - 00;07;48;26

Lars Nilsson

And what's been proven in B2B SaaS, and I think it was proven out for short sales, Forbes.com, and they rotated very deliberately to the SDR BTR model. And it turns out that if you onboard enable and train an SDR the right way, they can fill the pipeline of up to three reps with the meetings. They and so they just the unit economics, the efficiency, the profitability of creating pipeline so that the sellers you want them selling, negotiating and closing, you don't want them prospecting that's downtime.

00;07;49;14 - 00;08;28;26

Lars Nilsson

It turns out that they're just not as good at it as an SDR because as soon as they get a bite and a deal that they think they can close, they start selling and they start prospecting. And you can never stop the motion. Once you start prospect, you can never stop it. And the role of the SDR is to make sure that they can throw 101,000 lines in the water and if there's a bite, they know how to attend to that pole and hand it off to a seller that is sitting there waiting and can't take it to the next level and progressing through the sales cycle.

00;08;28;26 - 00;08;47;17

Patrick Campbell

Interesting. So 3 to 1, that's what we're looking for, 3 to 1. So before we get to onboarding and finding them or, you know, identifying who's great and you kind of alluded to right there the fire in the belly, like how do you test that? Is it just the conversations you're having? Do you have a thick set of couple of questions you ask folks?

00;08;47;17 - 00;09;11;00

Lars Nilsson

Yeah, well, there's a few ways, but if I'm looking at a LinkedIn profile from, let's say, a university graduate, I'm looking for, what do they do during their summers? Right. You go into college, you're 18, you're an adult, you spend the next four years educating yourself, give or take. But are you going home and hanging out on the couch and mom and dad's house with nothing to show for it?

00;09;11;20 - 00;09;37;19

Lars Nilsson

Or did you have a job as a summer camp counselor? Did you have an internship at Salesforce.com? Were you taking care of an aging mother? What were you doing that summer? And if you have nothing to show for one, two or all four years, then odds are that at self motivator, that self-starter mentality isn't there. People with high GPAs and athletes, right?

00;09;37;19 - 00;10;03;05

Lars Nilsson

They've been competing against themselves and others most of their career. That's an easy one. But we've had a lot of success in hiring teachers and returning military veterans and other people that just never thought that sales could be for them. And one of the things I asked them there, you know, when Denise is not doing this, you know, what is she doing on the weekends?

00;10;03;05 - 00;10;34;22

Lars Nilsson

What is she doing outside of what is work? I want to see that there's active participation in life, in the economy and family in this day and age. There's a lot of things that can sideline you physically, emotionally, mentally. And so, you know, you're looking for strength of body, spirit and mind. And then, yeah, there are I mean, track record of, you know, a story that you can articulate that makes sense as to why there may be holes or not.

00;10;35;04 - 00;10;56;23

Lars Nilsson

I just want to hear your story. And I wanted to make sense and I want there to be a little bit of vulnerability and I want there to be definitely authenticity. But, you know, chemistry is something that happens when two people come together and start sharing. I will take someone and let them know that I will develop them, I will mentor them, I will give them the skills.

00;10;57;05 - 00;11;30;17

Lars Nilsson

But in return, I want that energy I want. Because, you know, when you go into sales, there is a performance space, culture and part of that, right when you're going into a venture backed startup like Snowflake, right. We have weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly numbers to hit and you have to come in understanding that that is the disposition of the company that, you know, we're only as good as the pipeline we're building so that we can take those deals and close them at a predictable rate and grow the company.

00;11;30;17 - 00;11;38;22

Lars Nilsson

And you have to be on board with the sacrifices you might have to make to make sure you show up every day, all day. Yeah.

00;11;39;04 - 00;11;55;20

Patrick Campbell

Well, I think what's interesting there, so like if I kind of summarize that fire in the belly so people are competitive or have been competitive or are taking initiative, right, either because it could be learning, It could be, oh, they got four internships. No, nothing to do with business or sales. But like they took those initiatives during the summer.

00;11;55;20 - 00;12;05;22

Patrick Campbell

Right. Or, you know, we're having a conversation in the interview process, like I had to pay myself for school. Therefore I was working construction, but I still was doing something right.

00;12;05;23 - 00;12;11;21

Lars Nilsson

There's a narrative, there's a story, and I'm feeling it. And that is I love those stories.

00;12;12;00 - 00;12;31;02

Patrick Campbell

Well, I think the teachers and the the military folks, there's there's an element of both initiative and like having your stuff together because you kind of have to on multiple levels or your order to in certain cases. And so I think that's a really good archetype to kind of find. And it sounds like a lot of us, we like fish for, you know, the kid out of school salesperson.

00;12;31;02 - 00;12;43;27

Patrick Campbell

But it sounds like you've gone too. That's great. But we also need to fish For people who haven't really thought of sales as a role because of preconceived notions or lack of confidence. And that's something that you can like bring in mentorship. Is that like a good summary you think of?

00;12;44;01 - 00;13;03;14

Lars Nilsson

It would be. And I think what you're hitting on is instead of looking for a track record of success and exactly the position that I'm looking to look for potential. Sure. And there are lots of people that based on whatever is happening in their life, you know, and they may find their calling later. They may have had something that happen.

00;13;03;14 - 00;13;25;26

Lars Nilsson

But again, if you hire for what you truly believe, that potential that resides within that person and you can get it out. And again, that's why I do think mentorship and leadership and active management, because when people are coming into this role, I mean, there's a lot of technology that comes to bear, There's a lot of processes and a lot of procedure.

00;13;25;26 - 00;13;52;08

Lars Nilsson

And, you know, at the end of the day, you're rippin dials, you're sending out emails, right? Hundreds of dollars a day, thousands of emails may be sent out a day through sales engagement. And that energy, I mean, that it's one of the hardest jobs in sales. You ask anyone when you're sitting on an SDR VR role at a quick paced, high growth SaaS company, you got to show up every day.

00;13;53;01 - 00;14;04;22

Lars Nilsson

And what I do is if you're not feeling it, I'd rather have you stay home, opt out that day. You're not feeling it. And again, you're going through something. You take the time you need to get right.

00;14;05;09 - 00;14;06;12

Patrick Campbell

Because because we need you know.

00;14;07;03 - 00;14;13;23

Lars Nilsson

I need you. I need you. Yeah.

00;14;13;23 - 00;14;31;19

Patrick Campbell

It's a really subtle thing that you just said there, too, that I don't think you might not because you're you're in it. You said hundreds of dials a day, thousands of emails through enablement and stuff like that. You naturally just set a number I bet is probably can what the expectation of other teams are at least when I've heard of people like talking about things.

00;14;31;20 - 00;14;53;12

Patrick Campbell

That's also an interesting thing where you're talking about all this support, but your numbers are probably also higher in terms of expectation, which is kind of cool. And so with that we found a group, maybe we're hiring them in mass, whatever it ends up being for our goals. Onboarding, I imagine Snowflake's ramp is not 11 to 12 months for an SDR, you know, maybe like in and Xerox.

00;14;53;12 - 00;15;09;09

Patrick Campbell

It wasn't your ramp necessarily, but it was kind of your your journey. Like, what does that look like to get someone up to date? You set the expectation that you're here for mentorship, you're here to help them, all this other stuff. They've now taken the role day one through how many days and what's what's involved in those days.

00;15;09;25 - 00;15;34;14

Lars Nilsson

The timing of the question is incredible because that just a month or two ago we announced the Snowflake Sales Development Academy and what we've done is we've branded the onboarding experience. I absolutely want the world to know that if you decide to take a chance on us and want to start your career or change your career and become an SDR for Snowflake, that I am going to develop you.

00;15;34;23 - 00;16;03;20

Lars Nilsson

If you look at your average technology, companies certainly start out when you get onboarded, you typically get thrown into a class of eight years. These customer success marketing, God knows who they'll put you in, but there will be some product training, some company culture training, and then a lot of the specific role onboarding enablement is done by the the manager, hiring manager, and again, more and more gets dumped on the front line.

00;16;03;20 - 00;16;48;15

Lars Nilsson

SDR Leader You know, not only do they have to find them and screen them and interview them and hire them, but then they have to coach them and enable them and teach them how to do all these things and, you know, performance management and, you know, all manner of emotional. So what we've done is we have taken operations enablement and training off of the shoulders of the frontline SDR leaders, and we've purpose built an organization called SDR Ops and Enablement, and they are responsible for selection of all the tools and technologies that we put in the hands of the SDR, all the best practices, training, all the playbooks that we have created that will guide

00;16;48;15 - 00;17;41;27

Lars Nilsson

them to account based marketing and sales development principles, retraining The first 30 days when you become a snowflake SDR, you are put through an onboarding experience that is again is for four weeks. You don't have a quarter to do anything other than sit there, read, listen, learn a lot of challenges. We have external professionals, cold call trainers, people that help them understand how to write a really well executed and personalized email touch pattern campaign that might include, you know, 13 calls, seven emails, a send does so send and maybe a LinkedIn touch or like or outreach so that they're branding not just themselves, but our messaging, our content and our brand to the persona that

00;17;41;27 - 00;18;02;05

Lars Nilsson

they're, you know, trying to get to say yes to a 25 minute meeting one, two, three days down the road. So again, it's a 30 day purpose built program. When they're done with that, they become an SDR. They go into their patch, so to speak. They carry 3 to 4 year account executives.

00;18;02;05 - 00;18;03;02

Patrick Campbell

After that, four weeks.

00;18;03;02 - 00;18;25;16

Lars Nilsson

After that, four weeks. And they really. Yeah. And they are setting up one on ones with them. They're getting to know the list of accounts that their eyes care about. And for the next 15 to 18 months, they are now executing on their role. And as they go through that next 12, 15 to 18 months, they're picking up experience.

00;18;25;16 - 00;18;59;14

Lars Nilsson

They're either performance or not, and they're learning the role and they're interacting with not just one, but up to four years. And oftentimes in their tenure, they'll have exposure to anywhere from 5 to 10 account executives and they'll begin to understand what it takes. And then the last three months of the onboarding experience and Snowflake SDR Land is a program we call Snow Snowbound, and it's jointly delivered but executed by our corporate account executive team or for the carrying inside sales team.

00;19;00;18 - 00;19;16;25

Lars Nilsson

And this is an organization that's 150 plus in Snowflake, and this is the career path that an SDR will take SDR for 18 months, and then they get an opportunity to interview for a corporate account executive. And that's the career path.

00;19;17;12 - 00;19;21;29

Patrick Campbell

Interesting. Can they stay on beyond the 18 months as an SDR or is it kind of like an up and out now?

00;19;22;08 - 00;19;24;04

Lars Nilsson

They absolutely and we app we.

00;19;24;04 - 00;19;25;23

Patrick Campbell

Often emotional want to yeah.

00;19;25;23 - 00;19;55;08

Lars Nilsson

Yeah and we've also in order to create not stickiness per se but loyalty we have a role called the senior SDR there are some areas of the world and in some teams where we're a scale where getting that next job is competitive and they may not get it in the first go around, but they can ascend to senior SDR, get a bump in title, get a bump in comp, maybe get an equity, a grant and continue that road to finding their skills.

00;19;55;25 - 00;20;10;23

Lars Nilsson

But I would say 80% of our SDR so we graduate anywhere from 20 to 30 SDR as a quarter got into other roles, 80% of them into this corporate account executive. But we have SDR is that are cross-pollinating into partner account management roles.

00;20;10;23 - 00;20;13;06

Patrick Campbell

Because they know the product and you're the customer.

00;20;13;06 - 00;20;35;21

Lars Nilsson

They're going into sales engineering. We have a sales engineering, onboarding, ABM and, and training for people that are more technically minded, that are falling in love with the product. We have them going into field marketing account, base marketing roles. And you know, when you spend 18 months on Snowflake and you're enamored and fall in love with our culture, we have an executive team that is just.

00;20;36;07 - 00;20;38;21

Patrick Campbell

You know, bonkers is the right word. We are glad.

00;20;39;24 - 00;21;06;19

Lars Nilsson

And, you know, there's a lot of people that have been mentored, coached and told look for the executive leadership team. What are they made up of? Do you think they can take you to the next level? And we both know that, you know, Frank and Mike and Chris and Denise and Snowflake have combined to create this trajectory that no one has ever seen before.

00;21;06;19 - 00;21;21;01

Patrick Campbell

I love to ask about that actually in a second. But let's go back to onboarding for a second. There's a lot that was our gold those four weeks. I imagine it's not Here's how to do a cold call, right? Because I'm sure there's other people listening. You were like, Yeah, we have a cold call training or something like that.

00;21;21;19 - 00;21;42;00

Patrick Campbell

It sounds like there's training of the functions, product, etc. Do you do testing? Do you do like you had to do ten reps with your peers, you know, before the end of the day, like how do you, how do you ensure this isn't just like a little bit of death by PowerPoint in those four weeks, get kind of get wasted and then the fifth week is when they really learn because they're finally actually doing it.

00;21;42;00 - 00;21;57;10

Lars Nilsson

Yeah, we have instructors in-house, but we also have contracted and you talked about cold calling. So Josh Brian is one of the best cold, cold trainers in the world. He is leading that part of our onboarding training. So every month it's really cool.

00;21;57;10 - 00;22;01;25

Patrick Campbell

You guys went out and you're like, We don't need to be the number one. We can find the number one that I'm trained.

00;22;01;25 - 00;22;37;25

Lars Nilsson

So we have contracted with external professionals that do this for a living. And so Josh Brian is our cold call expert. And the reason he's onboard is because I went he did one six months ago and he was calling people to task and putting them on the on live calls. And we were going through together. And again, it's one of the most scariest things to do is to, you know, you hear the ring going and then and then you get to connect and you have so we get through all that together and they have to do tons of mock calls and some in real life co calls with prospects.

00;22;37;25 - 00;23;01;27

Lars Nilsson

And, you know, the technological aspect of this. We're so lucky to have services and data providers like Zoom Info and Lucia and Lincoln Sales Navigator. So finding the targets has never been easier. And then we have providers like Marmora and Sixth Sense that are providing intent and giving us signals where people might be clicking and reading about the data cloud and cloud data storage.

00;23;01;27 - 00;23;28;01

Lars Nilsson

And so we get these inputs and these help us direct our energy effort and we absolutely have an account based revenue strategy that focuses not just marketing, not just sales, but the BTR 80 and everyone on accounts that are surging that are in our target addressable market. We have solved this data cloud problem for a lot of very big companies.

00;23;28;01 - 00;23;48;07

Lars Nilsson

We know we have done deals, we know who the personas are that bubble up in the beginning of a sales cycle, the ones that come in towards the middle and those personas that we deal with towards the end of a sales cycle. And so we orient much of our outreach to the people that would care about listening to the snowflake story in the beginning.

00;23;48;07 - 00;24;07;27

Lars Nilsson

So we're not necessarily now we'll brand our content and our messaging to those people in our account based marketing approach so that when it's time and they get flagged by someone, an internal champion to talk about Snowflake, they know who we are and they've heard, maybe seen and they're not they're warmed up.

00;24;07;27 - 00;24;12;17

Patrick Campbell

If you are as cold so day for weeks in a day. I have a quote that sounds like.

00;24;12;17 - 00;24;16;19

Lars Nilsson

They're so fired up to get they want it They say they want to start ripping dials and getting.

00;24;16;23 - 00;24;17;04

Patrick Campbell

So my.

00;24;17;20 - 00;24;18;09

Lars Nilsson

Emails, this is.

00;24;18;09 - 00;24;22;25

Patrick Campbell

It. Am I right? A full quarter. So I get a quarter of like half quota. Like, how are you guys doing?

00;24;22;25 - 00;24;28;02

Lars Nilsson

We ramp, you just get a month or, you know, a month, one month to our ramp, month three.

00;24;28;03 - 00;24;31;08

Patrick Campbell

Now you cutting pipeline ops sales.

00;24;32;13 - 00;24;58;17

Lars Nilsson

And it's a very highly emotionally discussed topic in stone are you. I just want to know what you do. Yeah. Yeah. Again, I think you always want to quote a commission, someone someone on what they can control. And I've been doing this for a long time and the only thing that I can I can control quality and quantity of dials and emails.

00;24;58;17 - 00;25;21;09

Lars Nilsson

But the only thing that shows up that an account executives is going to accept is the meeting that gets set up and that it executes. So I pay for a meeting schedule that executes and that's how they get paid. A lot of other companies will say, Well, we want to see that opportunity progress and go into the pipeline and have money attached to it.

00;25;21;21 - 00;25;40;22

Lars Nilsson

I can tell you that nine times out of ten, when you call, call someone. All you're trying to do, we're trying to brand who we are, what we do, and understand some pain so that we can hook and trigger a conversation and carry it forward. And that's and that's the easy job.

00;25;40;22 - 00;25;46;21

Patrick Campbell

When you're selling time to you're selling 25 minutes. You're not selling by Snowflake as a SDR.

00;25;46;28 - 00;25;47;28

Lars Nilsson

I'm going to use that.

00;25;47;28 - 00;25;48;06

Patrick Campbell

Yeah.

00;25;48;06 - 00;26;04;17

Lars Nilsson

You and and so but again, some of the best meetings are we get a hold of the right person at the right company this is the wrong time. We just installed us and so we're we're done we're small company but you know what?

00;26;04;18 - 00;26;08;10

Patrick Campbell

We'll talk in nine months. Yeah. And then they come back and another SDR gets the credit.

00;26;08;11 - 00;26;33;01

Lars Nilsson

Well, but now we can update systems and process and now we don't have to email them to death. But did you hear about snow? You know, can I just ask you for more questions? Why did you go with and so, you know, the CEOs are trying to extract as much information as they can. There's value there. And in fact, there's sometimes more value in a call that didn't become a $20,000 opportunity the next day.

00;26;33;22 - 00;26;38;00

Lars Nilsson

And so pay your SDR for the work. It might have taken them three months to get that call.

00;26;38;01 - 00;26;59;20

Patrick Campbell

Well, you can also up like this thing I've always struggled with, right? Like, so we have a concept of an app, right? And an app is like the only thing different than the call is like it's executed and there's a motion forward, right? The falloff rate is 10% because we do the qualification upfront and it's like, but that 10% probably cost us a lot of enthusiasm because the person did the work.

00;26;59;29 - 00;27;07;18

Patrick Campbell

We could just up the calls by 10% for a quota and kind of get the same thing. Like you still need a quality metric. But yeah, it's interesting you say that.

00;27;07;18 - 00;27;30;14

Lars Nilsson

But you bring so this handoff like that is probably one of the trickiest procedural. And I don't care what company you're at. If you have an SDR motion that requires your SDR to come up with a meeting and you hand it off right when that meeting executes, we want a feedback mechanism. You did not put it into the next stage and into your forecast.

00;27;30;14 - 00;27;51;05

Lars Nilsson

Okay, that's fine. But why not give your SDR the the respect and the benefit of helping them understand the why and and giving some give some coaching. As you would imagine, some reps are like, I'm just not ready to put it in. I don't know that I want to show this and they'll just hold on to it and they'll leave it in that stage.

00;27;51;05 - 00;28;11;28

Lars Nilsson

And so for the audience that is is is understanding this part of it, you have got to put in closed loop measures and mechanisms to make sure that there are triggers and alerts and reporting so that a meeting that gets served up as an opportunity to either has to move forward or move back. It can't stay in the queue.

00;28;12;00 - 00;28;37;07

Lars Nilsson

Well, if that's what you've branded that stage, it's either got to go back to remarket, which is what we use in Snowflake, or it's got to go into a sales qualified opportunity within three days of the meeting executing. So anyway, we're getting way into the weeds here, but this is this is one of the probably one of the areas where if you don't get this right, either sales reps will say that, yeah, I don't get much good from them.

00;28;37;07 - 00;28;50;13

Lars Nilsson

Well, you know what? We've been providing all this and we've not we've not gotten any feedback from you. So if you do this part right, you upper level, both sides of the organization and sellers get better, A's get better and we don't waste time.

00;28;50;22 - 00;28;54;27

Patrick Campbell

So I'm comped off of essentially calls the little modify meetings.

00;28;55;00 - 00;28;58;09

Lars Nilsson

These meetings at an eight six.

00;28;59;12 - 00;29;19;27

Patrick Campbell

Day to day I'm an SDR are you tracking activity levels are you? I guess I got two questions. One, like what are you tracking me on a daily basis, if anything? Right? Or is it just how many calls you got? And then to a little bit divergent question, but I think they're all related. You give me a bunch of data sources and I go find the right companies.

00;29;20;09 - 00;29;41;00

Patrick Campbell

You plop 100 accounts in front of me and that's that's I got blinders on. I can only work those accounts. And then the flip side of that is once I have those accounts. A third question, do you have a central cadence that I follow? Do I set up my own cadences? Is it that? And then once it's out of that cadence, I can do whatever I want, Like tell me and tell me the motions.

00;29;41;00 - 00;30;08;14

Lars Nilsson

Yeah. So the most important thing is to get the connection between the SDR and the account executive. That's super important. And we do a lot to make sure that the SDR, the newly onboarded SDR, gets connected and the three SDR. Let's say that the overlay to right, we have this notion of green, yellow, red tails. So there might be an account executive that says, Listen, these are my out of my toe accounts.

00;30;08;14 - 00;30;30;05

Lars Nilsson

I have three customers. If you get any inbound leads from any of those, I don't want you to follow up. I have the relationship. So you don't have to do any outbound or do any in any inbound in these three accounts, these nine accounts that are active in Flight three of them, I'm all over and I don't need your involvement.

00;30;30;16 - 00;30;44;00

Lars Nilsson

But these other six, I'm right at the beginning and I need to multiple threads so let's you and I work on a plan to have you call into these divisions or these subsidiaries so that we can, you know.

00;30;44;08 - 00;30;45;20

Patrick Campbell

Command and conquer. Yeah.

00;30;45;20 - 00;31;03;10

Lars Nilsson

Command and then these eight other accounts. GREENFIELD I've never touched them. Go crazy, go outbound, do all the things that you do that I know you're good at, which is sequencing account based sales, development outreach. So now we get to the part about the writing of emails.

00;31;03;10 - 00;31;08;06

Patrick Campbell

And so those that's my account scope. We're talking single digits in each of those categories.

00;31;08;06 - 00;31;36;10

Lars Nilsson

Well, again, we have three segments. We have enterprise, we have corporate account executives. I'd say those is managed territories of 100 or more, probably 100 or 200 accounts are enterprise account executives, I would say handle anywhere from 10 to 35 accounts. And then we have vertical sized strategic account reps that manage anywhere from one to maybe five with an average of two or three accounts, and that's it.

00;31;36;19 - 00;31;59;12

Patrick Campbell

So I'm in the CRM supporting 3 to 4 days to answer part of my question. It's like I'm being as an SDR essentially assigned accounts that are labeled by my A's. Correct. So that's three A's, let's say in 100 or 200 situation. I might have I don't know, given your proportions 300 accounts that I'm technically going after up top, I might be going after ten.

00;31;59;20 - 00;32;00;04

Patrick Campbell

Right.

00;32;00;11 - 00;32;22;24

Lars Nilsson

I would say that in the average SDR operation, having hundreds of accounts as an SDR to manage and simply was very normal. I've done it. The more you can do as a manager to narrow that focus and like, let's focus on 100 this month and then let's cycle out those 100 and work a new hundred. If it's pure cold, outbound against Snowflake.

00;32;22;24 - 00;32;23;28

Lars Nilsson

We've been around for ten years.

00;32;23;28 - 00;32;24;23

Patrick Campbell

I see a lot of inbound.

00;32;24;23 - 00;32;51;27

Lars Nilsson

Yeah, well, we also have a lot of familiarity. These accounts have been covered by reps for years and in SD I can go into, for instance, the Salesforce and see, wow, look at all the activity. People have been calling into this account for six years now. If you post up at a Series B company that you know has 17 customers and 100 active prospects, but their TAM is another 3000 accounts you got.

00;32;51;27 - 00;33;01;13

Lars Nilsson

You know, SDR is are you're kind of using all the technology to account base your way to try to get people to raise their hands and say, yeah, I'll take that meeting.

00;33;01;13 - 00;33;11;21

Patrick Campbell

So just to show understand, can I go as an ACR like I saw this company in a newscast, Can I go after that person or it's like I'm I'm scoped or whatever. My team has it.

00;33;11;22 - 00;33;31;22

Lars Nilsson

Yeah, you, you have an account execs that are assigned to you. They have their accounts. Now, if you see an ad or you're you go home and you tell your parents you just got a job in Snowflake and you're at a family gathering and uncle and June is VP or whatever. And then they're going to get and June to take me and they're going to hand that up to one of their.

00;33;31;23 - 00;33;32;08

Patrick Campbell

Whoever.

00;33;32;08 - 00;33;33;08

Lars Nilsson

SDR counterparts.

00;33;33;08 - 00;33;41;26

Patrick Campbell

Is part of the game, part of the game team. Okay. So I have and does the ops and enablement team filter and assign those accounts or is that like another rev up stadium or something?

00;33;41;28 - 00;34;06;04

Lars Nilsson

We have a completely separate global revenue operations team that is segmenting and aligning and creating territories. And, you know, I think we have over 12, we probably have close to 1500 quota carrying account executives of the three different varieties. I'm over a thousand for sure. And then, you know, you know, sales engineers and solution architects. So there's a lot of orchestration.

00;34;06;21 - 00;34;31;15

Lars Nilsson

The one thing that we're very, very careful about is as an SDR, if you're in a group, you know, Patch, just make sure that your AP and marketing knows. So we all have to be aware of when we're doing cold outreach that someone else hasn't done that. And so understanding how to go into systems and understand what has happened before because that informs on the context.

00;34;31;15 - 00;34;50;23

Lars Nilsson

So that when you do get someone to pick up that SDR and say, Hey, you know, Johnny, I know that six months ago my former colleague Jason had a meeting with you, and it looks like he's two others. I'm not exactly sure what happened, but I'm here. You know, there's context because that is an icebreaker himself.

00;34;50;25 - 00;35;02;05

Patrick Campbell

Sure, sure, sure. So going to like cadences and such, Who's setting those up? They've obviously had a ton of training, so they have to create their own cadences. So they start taking from a central batch and then start versioning that for themselves.

00;35;02;05 - 00;35;22;16

Lars Nilsson

So we have a content committee and when we're going after, let's say we kept going after a new vertical, we want to write the copy that is using language for that vertical, right? There's nomenklatura. If we're going for a senior level versus a mid-level versus a low level, you change it up. So we have people from product marketing.

00;35;22;27 - 00;35;50;17

Lars Nilsson

We have we might pull in sales engineers, we have people on marketing and sales that are scripting these. And we have what's called a Hall of Fame at Snowflake. So if you want to see what a four email sequence into a sea level executive in the health care vertical that had a 30% open rate touch rate reply rate, then go here and they can see and go, Oh my gosh, this is like killer.

00;35;50;27 - 00;36;11;17

Lars Nilsson

And they're going to take that and then customize it for their scenario so they have a place to go to see what really good looks like with numbers. Yeah, absolutely. So because you let someone who's onboarded and newly trained just write their own sequences, I mean, sentence error structure, you know, there's all manner of things. This is too.

00;36;11;17 - 00;36;18;19

Patrick Campbell

Formal. I'll be more conversational. Yeah. And I'm sure there's a feedback loop with their ease of like because their A's were in that position at some point in their health.

00;36;18;24 - 00;36;39;27

Lars Nilsson

An instance of outreach and instance and sales engagement. And we have over 200 ushers as we were letting them do all their own sequences, we would it would become unmanageable. And so I absolutely when you when your team gets any sort of scale and you've had success in a split test in your sequences and the biggest thing is the subject line.

00;36;39;27 - 00;37;03;10

Lars Nilsson

And that's that's the one thing that everyone wants to know, because if they don't open your email, they don't even read the first sentence or the hook. And so we do a lot of tough AB testing on subject lines, try to personalize those and grab the attention, and then you just have to be relevant. You and I both get these emails single day as you personalized to to their career.

00;37;04;01 - 00;37;37;00

Lars Nilsson

You know, the days of Hey Lars go gauchos because they know I have 16 gaucho marks because I've been sent them in, you know in order to get me like that's been done. Yeah, take your time. And if you're going for a high value target, I once got a complete life size Louisville Slugger baseball bat sent to me, and I didn't know who it came from, but the next day I got a video of an which I opened and I'm like, Hey, Lars, did you get the baseball bat I sent yesterday?

00;37;37;02 - 00;38;00;07

Lars Nilsson

And it was orchestrated. And then what they said was, Listen, I looked at the speech you delivered for the True Ventures, something that I did three years earlier, where I talked about throwing batting practice for my daughter's Little League team in Alameda. And, you know, three years earlier. And what they said was, hey, Lars, I'm you know, John from and it was a wrap tech company.

00;38;00;16 - 00;38;24;09

Lars Nilsson

I was legitimate target and I was blown away and I called him back. I called them back and said, I really appreciate the time and attention you took. I'm going to give you that call because I'm curious now. And so you can use. Right, innovative, creative. And it's not just rip in 100 hours a day and sending email after email, right.

00;38;24;09 - 00;38;53;22

Lars Nilsson

Sending platforms have become a legitimate channel going into and researching on LinkedIn and other places where you can find out about what they care about and tie that into your value proposition is something that's the art of the With all the science we have, there is an art, and I think it's personalization and kind of getting to the human element of why I'm reaching out and that comes through and copy.

00;38;53;29 - 00;39;03;12

Lars Nilsson

Yeah, and it comes through in voice messages. You leave that you can, you know, brand based on the, you know, tied back to the email. You just laughed.

00;39;03;16 - 00;39;32;00

Patrick Campbell

That's cool. I want to tell you something we do. I want you to tell me if it's terrible or not so and I'll say profit. Well, just in case, you know, because panels of the current entity, what we figured out was it was hard and we didn't have a program, obviously, like you guys have, but it was hard to kind of teach a kid out of school, which was, you know, a lot of the folks we were hiring to like talk to a VP of whatever at a tech company, right?

00;39;32;14 - 00;39;57;01

Patrick Campbell

And so we put together these centralized cadences kind of like our Hall of Fame based on vertical and then persona essentially. And persona was mostly segment like lower segment, less actual people roles. And what we did is it was kind of like version control at GitHub. We basically said we called it the Beat the VIX system because Vic was the growth marketer who was like managing all the like copy and stuff.

00;39;57;05 - 00;40;14;03

Patrick Campbell

It was basically like, use the cadence, you know, fill it if you feel like you can, you know, beat, beat the VIX system, we'll branch it off. You'll run your tests in kind of like a structured way. And if you win, you get a spare full merge it into the system for everybody else. And this was this was kind of like the central.

00;40;14;03 - 00;40;23;08

Patrick Campbell

So they were allowed to like, you know, you've been talking to someone close like this one, get creative, send a baseball bat, etc. Like if they could do all that around it. But what do you think of that concept?

00;40;23;08 - 00;40;47;27

Lars Nilsson

So again, providing structure for newly onboarded SDR out of the gate is important, but as they begin to come into their own, we want them to try new things and we have this thing called You're cleared for take off, and it's usually takes, you know, like a quarter. And what they'll do is their manager will say, okay, write your own cadence, write your sequence and show us in the touch pattern how many there are.

00;40;47;27 - 00;41;14;21

Lars Nilsson

Because again, depending on if you're using sending platform, email, phone and maybe you're deliberately doing a social touchpoint, Twitter or LinkedIn, show us your maturity and show us the copy and show us the script of email. The voicemail you can think is, you know, 19 out of 20 times. And then if it's just legit sentence structure, no Misspellings.

00;41;14;21 - 00;41;15;26

Lars Nilsson

It's like you clear the take off.

00;41;16;08 - 00;41;33;28

Patrick Campbell

Well, that's what we would always say, like, hey, listen, you're your Compton ops. So like, however you want to up the mountain, like you have sole responsibility. These have been proven to work. That was for the early folks. I think the more senior reps would start to like, you know, because they know the system, they kind of go the path of least not in a bad way.

00;41;33;28 - 00;41;49;21

Patrick Campbell

But they're like, I'm gonna go after this close loss. I'm going to do this. We didn't have a structure like you did. We did more round robin in that in those days. But it's cool. And I guess the kind of maybe round this out So we've onboarded, we've got the moving, we've got a bunch of resources like all the tools stack, that type of thing.

00;41;50;03 - 00;42;13;09

Patrick Campbell

We have a progression, career progression, you know, they aren't asking if they can be promoted every month because they know the career progression, right? I guess like what are some of the other parts were missing? Like, I know there's probably an entire hour we can talk about the ops and enablement team, but like, what are maybe some of the bullets that we didn't talk about the like people mess or even if they don't mess like you're like this was really helpful to like, make sure our teams are running.

00;42;13;12 - 00;42;39;13

Lars Nilsson

Yeah well there's the the mental health aspect. The are you good with yourself? Can you show up and be productive Like what's happened in the last three years has thrown everyone off and a lot of the people that I'm hiring right, a lot of them had their university careers just upended. Right. And again, we didn't circle on how do I manage?

00;42;39;13 - 00;43;00;19

Lars Nilsson

And with metrics you can tell pretty quickly when someone has fallen off, whether it's the quality of work, it's the amount of work, it's the like. If someone's ripping a couple of hundred hours a day and they've been doing that for months and they've been bouncing from 110 to 130 to 115, all of a sudden they're now at 40.

00;43;00;19 - 00;43;01;20

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, Sums up.

00;43;01;25 - 00;43;20;06

Lars Nilsson

Sums up and just, you know, as a manager to be on the lookout, make sure they understand the resources that are available. And again, it's not like we're a public company. We have unbelievable resources for people to go and talk and sort through things if they need, you know, additional.

00;43;20;19 - 00;43;43;22

Patrick Campbell

I think this is a is a really important point, though, because we glossed over it in the beginning because we were like building up to this. But basically when SDR managers are focused on people that that's where you're going to get the best out of them. And a lot of senior managers, if they have to be focused on like the people are really good at ops enablement from an SDR management perspective, they may not be that great at the management side of it anyways because it's two very different skill sets.

00;43;43;22 - 00;43;45;02

Patrick Campbell

And I was just Do you agree? Yeah.

00;43;45;12 - 00;44;06;06

Lars Nilsson

I do. And again, I just had I just brought my managers in last week, all of them, to do a training, not only put leaders in front of them so they can see what that looks like, but we brought in health professionals from Lira and we brought in people from our h.r. Team to talk about performance management and how to deliver feedback.

00;44;07;00 - 00;44;41;28

Lars Nilsson

All of the kind of software iq type skills that younger in their career managers slash leaders don't have as much experience work. And i do believe that taking as much off of the shoulders of a frontline SDR leader and again, the onboarding enablement and training is a very big piece. So right now I have a 19 frontline SDR managers that have been given resources and reading the bone up on how to performance managers, on how to deliver feedback, know kind of the radical candor type thing.

00;44;42;13 - 00;45;05;12

Lars Nilsson

And, you know, delivering critical feedback is I still struggle with that. It's one of the hardest things in the world to do. And again, you know, what do you do when you realize you made a bad hire? Yeah, they might be an unbelievable performer, but that toxicity around the water cooler talk is getting everyone. And there's a lot of soft IQ type things that really come with time.

00;45;05;28 - 00;45;30;19

Lars Nilsson

But we're at two the size and the scale where I can bring in my leadership team and and educate them and inspire them and teach them these kinds of skills. But, you know, we're here at Foster the land of many young startups. And so but you can't forget about this piece and my eyebrows have been raised quite a bit.

00;45;30;19 - 00;45;51;17

Lars Nilsson

We've had people that, you know, just couldn't take being on in in a new city, and they needed to go back home. And they, you know, with the family. And that's, you know, good for them for understanding that whether it was a level of anxiety or they're just, you know, not comfortable and confident and it's just not their time to go off.

00;45;51;29 - 00;46;05;09

Lars Nilsson

So, you know, and that's also very difficult. We hire a lot of people that will move from where they graduated from to one of the four cities that we have in the United States. We have returned back to the office. It's not like we are not all of them out.

00;46;05;15 - 00;46;08;28

Patrick Campbell

Feels like a good frank move right there. That's a classic. Frank, It seems like.

00;46;09;08 - 00;46;14;05

Lars Nilsson

You know, we have I walked here from our office. Our office is actually one and a half walk down that way.

00;46;14;07 - 00;46;24;07

Patrick Campbell

That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, This is great, man. I learned a ton. We're way over. So that's why I want to be respectful that this is. This is awesome. I learned a ton.

00;46;24;07 - 00;46;45;28

Ben Hillman

It's a huge shout out to Lars for doing the podcast. Now, you know all about sales development. Today. We talked about zeroing in on sales roles, hiring someone with a fire in their belly as they are training enablement and progression, setting up sales opportunities for success and the value of compassionate leadership. If you want to support and the show, we really appreciate it.

00;46;45;28 - 00;46;58;28

Ben Hillman

If you are the five star review of this podcast or the equivalent rating wherever you listen or watch. Thanks for listening. Make sure you subscribe to and tell your friends about Protect the Hustle, A podcast from Panel.