I’ve been getting hit up from several of our alumni in regards to the Death of the SDR by Townsend Wardlaw and Drift's comments on why The BDR Role is in Jeopardy and here are my thoughts to our community and beyond:

They are both right.

The SDR/BDR role is evolving as we know it. We are experiencing it first-hand through the work of helping companies build, grow, and scale their SDR and BDR Teams.

We also hear from SDRs themselves about how hard it is to get through to leads and prospects. What we find is that companies have to rapidly keep up with new technology, and training and developing their SDRs. We talk about how to do this in our podcast, The Death of the SDR (SoundCloud version included above!), but I've summarized a few takeaways here:

How the SDR role is changing:

1. The burn and churn model of and SDR team is unsustainable because of diminishing margin of return of the role.
2. SDR's will have to be more targeted with their approach to prospecting to compete with the increasing amount of  messaging "noise" in the b2b world.
3. Companies need to invest in developing their SDRs at the earliest stage.

How to create a plan for development and retention for your SDRs from the beginning.

• Start training & development from the interview process. If you are screening through candidates, provide them with information so that you can assess their ability to retain information.
• Stay in tune with tools and technology that support the SDR in their role.
• Training & Development is not only an approach to empower your SDRs to be more consultative, but also a retention tool since your newest generation of employees are looking for this within your organization.

The SDR/BDR role, as with most roles in the workplace, is evolving given the rate of technology development and adoption in business. This is a really exciting time for sales organizations and will challenge us to think differently about the role!

Listen to the Podcast to get a better understanding of how the SDR role with change in the next 3 years and what you need to do as an organization to be ready for it!

‍