Hands 600497 1920

Part 10: Life at 1,000 Dials a Day — Who Calls Whom?

I generally try to avoid subtle questions with the kind of “it depends” answers consultants are so fond of. But then I went ahead and asked one in this blog series’ introductory article, “Going Fast: Adapting to Life at 1,000 Dials a Day.”

Question #10: Does this change how we assign territories?

The short answer is, very sadly, “It depends.”

If…

  • you are using a two-tier model (let’s call the top tier “SDRs”), and…
  • you are going to amp up your SDR by 4x to 200 dials a day, and…
  • their territories are right-sized for their current outreach rate, and…
  • you have 100% market coverage (defined as 65% conversation coverage of each territory once per 90 days),

then you should…

  • promote or otherwise reassign 3 out of 4 SDRs, and…
  • either increase each SDR’s territory by 4x (by count of accounts), or…
  • pool all accounts/leads to maximize outreach liquidity and then turn your SDRs loose on said pools;

then you could…

  • re-balance your AEs’ territories and possibly make a final adjustment to the size of your AE team to match the output capacity of the SDR team.

I warned you: “very sadly” indeed. Reads like a computer program or worse. But it handles a somewhat complicated situation. And the results are worth it: more opportunities per AE spread across a smaller territory size with a reliable flow of either discovery or ready-to-buy prospects from your SDR team.

Add a bit of pipeline safety-buffer with 1 hour a day of AEs (at our assumed 1,000-Dials-a-Day pace) self-sourcing opportunities — about 8–12 conversations each, adding 250 to 500 discovery meetings per year (isn’t that 50 to 100 fresh new deals?!) — and you have a stable, high-performing, low-total-cost, two-tier sales machine! Each territory is worked more intensively, mathematically reducing the likelihood of regrettable losses to faster competitors.

But what if you are using a one-tier model, with hunter/closers doing their own prospecting?

In a way, this one is easier: no adjustment to territories is needed.

But it still depends — mostly on whether there is any slack in the budget. Conceptually, it’s easy: just arrange for each AE to spend 1 hour per week at the 1,000-Dials-a-Day pace. This will add 50 discovery meetings a year for each AE. At common close-ratios of 20%, that’s 10 additional deals a year per AE.

I don’t know what your current goals are, but let’s pretend quota is $750K of net new ARR with a $10K ARR average deal size. By investing something like $2,500 of new expense per AE annually, you get $100K of additional ARR. I’ll leave calculation of the ROI as an exercise for the reader.

Perhaps more importantly, instead of 65% of your AEs making quota, something more like 85% do so. Failure to produce results becomes the exception rather than the rule; and exceptions are far easier to deal with, one way or another.

Of course, there is the situation where you don’t have a nickel to invest, no matter how attractive the return. I’ve been there and know your pain. Un-sadly, it turns out that if you are bigger than a breadbox (5–7 reps), you can actually execute either of the above plans at negative cost. It requires doing something you probably don’t want to do — shrinking the sales team by one person — and I really don’t want to write any more about it, because too many sales leaders have made it clear to me that heads are sacred. But, for completeness, I felt I needed to mention it and to offer my good offices for a private conversation on the topic (408-203-4321, chris.beall@connectandsell.com).

So, in the three major cases (two-tier, one-tier and flat broke), it turns out that Life at 1,000 Dials a Day does have some territory design, sizing, and allocation wrinkles. But they can all be ironed out with minimal disruption and often with enough upside to be worth considering.

Links to Intro, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 11, and Part 12 of this blog series.