Ashley Kelly: The Playbook to Start and Scale Your SDR Team | E1162

I would say you wanna look for anyone that has about six months of experience. Does not have to be in sales development. My favorite hires that I've ever made are people that actually come from recruiting. They're super organized. On an inbound side, if you found someone that's ever worked in a call center, again, that's, that's another really good profile. I 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. The SDR is kind of the bridge between marketing and sales.

Ready to go? Ashley, I am so excited for this. So first, thank you so much for joining me today.

Yeah. Thank you for having me. Um, I've been following along for, for a little while now, and just feel very honored to be on, uh, the 20 Sales Podcast.

That is very, very kind of you. I, I always love to start with kind of Ashley, the love of sales. I think it's often a moment. When did you realize that you loved sales and that this was what you wanted to do as a career and for life?

I actually started my career working for NASCAR, which is probably, um, a topic for, for a whole nother day. But, uh, world of sales, I started as an SDR at Zenefits. Um, I, very truth be told, I did not know what an SDR was. I thought I was going to be doing demos, uh, in person with, with customers. I was clearly very wrong about that. Um, but I, I ended up falling in love with the top of funnel. Um, SDR to me is just such a special, um, role that is, you know, both pipeline building but also career development at the same time. And so I stayed on the side of, of the sales funnel, and, uh, within three years of Zenefits, I left as a director. And then, uh, since then, I've built out sales development orgs at different tech companies out of the Bay Area, so, um, Lever, Brex, and now Ripley. So, I guess you could say I'm a lifer for, for sales development.

SDRs, traditionally is thought of as like, uh, respectfully, a grind and fricking hard. Career development? Like, talk to me about that element.

I would say the top AEs and best leaders that I've ever worked with have started their, their careers as sales development reps. So, we do a lot of, uh, I've always done this at all the, uh, all the companies I've been at, um, but we do a lot of promotion from within. So we promote, uh, SDRs into the account executive role, um, account management, um, into implementation. In fact, if you look at my org today, about a third of my SDR managers have actually come from the SDR role internally. So it's definitely a, uh, you know, career trajectory for, um, for salespeople.