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The Twenty Minute VCAshley Kelly: The Playbook to Start and Scale Your SDR Team | E1162
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Building Elite SDR Teams: Hiring, Onboarding, Metrics, and Motivation Playbook
- Ashley Kelly, a veteran sales development leader, breaks down how to build, structure, and scale high-performing SDR organizations from first hire to a 350-person global team.
- She argues SDR is a third, standalone go-to-market pillar that bridges marketing and sales, with distinct strategies for inbound vs. outbound, compensation, and reporting lines.
- The conversation covers who to hire, how to interview and onboard them, how to set quotas and comp, and how to maintain morale and performance over time.
- Ashley also explores how AI, layoffs, international expansion, and evolving buyer behavior are changing SDR hiring profiles, processes, and expectations.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasTreat SDR as its own strategic function, not just support.
Ashley believes sales development should be a standalone GTM pillar that bridges marketing and sales, with its own leadership, strategy, and autonomy instead of being viewed as mere ‘order takers’.
Hire for traits and adjacent experience, not just pure sales backgrounds.
Her best SDRs often come from recruiting and call centers because they’re organized, used to high-volume outreach, and comfortable on the phone; she screens heavily for coachability, motivation, and organization rather than quota history.
Design a rigorous, skills-focused interview process with live testing.
Use structured phone screens, panel interviews, a cold-call/elevator-pitch role play (run twice to test coachability), and an email-writing test to assess real communication skills and responsiveness to feedback.
Onboard fast and get SDRs on the phone by week two.
Ashley front-loads company and product training in week one, then tools and workflow training in week two, gives them real books of business early, and ramps quotas over four months to encourage learning through doing.
Set comp and quotas using conversion data, not guesswork or dogma.
Her SDRs are typically on a 70/30 base-variable OTE tied to stage 2 opportunities (qualified demos), with quota and S2 targets calibrated by geography, ACV, win rates, and CAC payback; she’s cautious about tying SDR comp directly to revenue except in very transactional models.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesI actually am very bullish on sales development. I think it's the third pillar within the go-to-market function and I think that it can stand alone.
— Ashley Kelly
If you're still doing the same thing that you were six months ago, you're not going to be successful.
— Ashley Kelly
Sales is very unpredictable. It can really test your patience and your sanity… what you can control are your attitude and effort.
— Ashley Kelly
The hardest part about being an SDR is the little details you have to pay attention to all day every day.
— Ashley Kelly
There’s no asterisk in sales when you hit your quota because you mimicked a top performer.
— Ashley Kelly
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
