Building an SDR process is the easy part. Getting reps to follow it after onboarding ends and the manager stops watching is where most programs fall apart.
Will Aitken sat down with David Wilkins, founder of SDR Leaders Global, and Ahmed Abdel-Raouf, head of sales development at Quantcast, to work through the outbound side specifically. Most teams have a methodology for discovery and demos. Almost nobody has documented what happens before a prospect enters the funnel.
Map the process before you buy another tool
David asks the same question at SDR Leaders meetups worldwide: has anyone mapped lead to closed revenue end to end? Very few hands go up. Meanwhile teams keep bolting tech onto processes that were never mapped. Map it first and you may need fewer tools, not more.
Where to start when there is no process at all
Ahmed built the Quantcast function from nothing 18 months ago. His first 30 days were observation: shadowing AE calls, auditing which tools actually had adoption, logging the objections that kept recurring. Then ICP clarity, messaging architecture, operational infrastructure with ops, the playbook, and measurement. In that order.
How prescriptive a playbook should be
Ahmed's runs about 70 slides and is deliberately mixed. Prescriptive where it helps, with a worked email broken into personalization, value, and CTA. It also teaches reps where to find personalization worth using: what someone follows or engages with, not tenure or a new role, which he says have been done to death since COVID. David's caveat is that playbooks go stale. Treat it as a living document with real versions.
Give reps the lane, not the script
David's framing is bowling bumpers. Reps get the lane, leaders are the rails. He pointed to a team running an "F-up page" where reps document what went wrong so everyone can learn from it. Ahmed's split is 20 percent learning, 80 percent falling on your face. His first cohort worked a conference booth on day three.
Coach the behavior, not the outcome
Ninety minutes every Thursday, with the content set by the numbers instead of a curriculum. Reply rate dips and it becomes a messaging workshop. Talk time drops and it becomes an objection gauntlet. Ahmed watches talk time over connect rate and reply rate over open rate, because high open with low reply means the subject lines work and the message does not. He enforces a call minimum for a statistical reason: ten calls and ten connects is an outlier, not a 100 percent connect rate.
He also makes the case for reading what a dashboard cannot show. A top performer's numbers slid for weeks and formal check-ins got nowhere, so he took her for a walk instead. Her grandmother had been in hospital for a month. He gave her the rest of the week off and she finished the quarter around 110 percent.
On hiring
Ahmed screens for curiosity over experience and treats three years as an SDR as a flag worth asking about. His best hires have come out of retail and hospitality. His current top performer came from the Apple Store with no sales background and moves into an AE seat in July. David's rule from his Snowflake days: if there's doubt, there's no doubt.
Resources mentioned
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