Sales Development in SaaS - Question and Answer Session with David Dulany - Tenbound

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming today's session based upon the pandemic impact on sales development. It'll be a question and answer session, and I am pleased to be joined today by David Dulany, who is the CEO and founder of Tenbound. And I'm Ray Reich, and I'm the founder and CEO of RevUp Squared. David, please introduce yourself to the community today.

**David Dulany** (0:21)
Hey, Ray, thanks for having me on. David Dulany here, Tenbound, and we're a research and advisory firm that focuses on the sales development space, so the SDR, BDR world, and teamed up with Ray to help promote and conduct a study that we'll be talking about today. And we release a number of studies each quarter on the sales development space over at tenbound.com.

**Ray Rike** (0:46)
David, thank you so much for joining me today. And I'm Ray Reich, and RevOps is the founder of the SaaS Industries KPI benchmarking index. We are an advisory and consulting firm that helps SaaS companies use KPIs and metrics to make better data-driven and metrics-informed decisions. What percentage of companies out there have dedicated inbound SCR teams versus outbound SCR teams? And the survey came back and said 32% of organizations today have dedicated inbound SCR teams. Does that surprise you at all?

**David Dulany** (1:22)
Yeah, it does. I mean, it's kind of a surprising stat on the report, Ray, because usually when companies get to a certain size, they'll segment those two parts of the SCR team to really focus them, because they are such different jobs, and they have such different, you know, not only the motions of the job itself, but the mentality of inbound versus outbound. So an example is usually a company, when they're starting out the sales development program, they'll have a hybrid SDR who's doing a little bit of the inbound qualification and doing some outbound when they have time. But after they reach a certain point and they can separate those two job functions, they usually go ahead and do that. So I was surprised based on the fact that we had a lot of respondents from the enterprise and the mid-market range that only 32 percent actually dedicated inbound teams.

**Ray Rike** (2:29)
Would you expect to be more into 40 to 50 percent range, David?

**David Dulany** (2:32)
I would. I mean, I would expect that to be, you know, anywhere over a certain number of leads coming in, and a number of reps that need to be supported by the SDR team, that it would be, there would be a dedicated inbound and outbound SDR program. But, you know, so yeah, I'd expect at least 60 percent, you know, from the findings. So that was a little surprising.

**Ray Rike** (3:01)
It was since the pandemic starting to impact business operations as normal, almost 23 percent had seen their organizations change inbound leads from going to an SDR group versus going now directly to the account executor. So I think that was an interesting trend that we should watch very carefully over the next three to six months.

**David Dulany** (3:22)
Yeah. I mean, that's interesting to kind of tug out what's going on there. I mean, there's always the tendency to want to pass leads directly from the marketing funnel over to the AEs and cut any friction and not have to go through the SDR qualification. But if you think about it, the inbound SDRs job is to track down all the inbound leads that are worth qualifying, make sure that they get enough touches and get them into the pipeline as an opportunity for the salesperson. And so if you have a dedicated team, to me it would make a lot of sense to get the inbound leads over to the inbound team and have them focused on qualifying those and creating appointments versus just passing directly to the AEs. And the leads might fall through the cracks because the AEs want to be running demos and closing deals and not necessarily qualifying every lead that comes in.

**Ray Rike** (4:29)
And that is 23% of companies have seen SDR organization be reduced. So the number of SDR is being reduced. And more concerning maybe is that 61% of the SDRs are still in the role or concerned there will be additional impact in the future. So what do you forecast? Do you think we're going to see significant increase in layoffs of the cell development function?

**David Dulany** (4:55)
Yeah, I mean, I think that this stat to me says that we're still in sort of the deer in the headlight stage of the crisis. And we haven't seen, you know, anywhere close to the reductions that we're going to see in the next three to six months as the reality of the economic situation comes into focus. And I think that, you know, programs have used this time to really pair down anybody who was on a performance plan, for example, or anybody who was sort of shaky, you know, to be able to pair the team down. But you're going to start to see, you know, anyone who's not directly tied to revenue. So the AEs that are doing really well are going to be potentially, you know, on the chopping block. And that's, if the SDR program is not performing up to the standards that the senior executives are looking for, I would be very nervous right now. So I think we're just starting to see what that stat will increase in the next three to six months, unfortunately.